Blackface in contemporary art covers issues from stage make-up used to make non-black performers appear black (the traditional meaning of blackface), to non-black creators using black personas. Blackface is generally considered an anachronistically racist performance practice, despite or because of which it has been widely used in contemporary art. Contemporary art in this context is understood as art produced from the second half of the 20th century until today. In recent years some black artists and artists of color have engaged in blackface as a form of deconstruction and critique.
Physical blackface
Lynn Hershman Leeson's 1966 "Self Portrait as Another Person" consists of a wax mold of the artist's face in blackface, flattened and distorted, paired with motion-activated recordings of her voice. The label stated "As a political gesture, Hershman Leeson partly painted the masks black to express her solidarity with the civil rights movement." "Self Portrait As Another Person" was created in solidarity with the Civil Rights era. The artwork integrated prerecorded sound of the artist's voice on a tape recorder, which was added to the installation in 1968. Since the recorder was positioned at the height of the figure's chest, the work acquired an anthropomorphic appearance. As the voice of the artist is activated by the audience when they approach the work, it creates an illusion as if the sculpture is alive and breathing, of a technologically derived vitalism. The work is completed by the interaction with the audiences, not only including their physical movements that trigger the voice, but also their answer to the artist's questions. In 1967-68 artist Bruce Nauman made two videos (among many performance-based videos) in which he presents the idea of the contemporary artist as a somewhat businesslike but degraded clown/actor. In Art Make-Up (1967–68) Nauman videotapes himself applying successive layers of white, pink, green and black makeup to his entire face, arms, and torso. In Flesh to White to Black to Flesh (1968) he videotapes himself applying white make-up to his face and body, then black make-up, then wiping the make-up away to re-expose his skin. Artist Cindy Sherman used blackface as stagecraft in several studio photographs made in 1976, with herself as the character/subject of a bus passenger. These rarely seen photographs came to light as part of a survey exhibition at the Eli Broad Museum in Los Angeles in 2015, about which Margo Jefferson wrote "the blacks are all exactly the same color, the color of traditional blackface makeup. They all have nearly the same features, too, while Ms. Sherman is able to give the white characters she impersonates a real range of skin tones and facial features. This didn't look like irony to me. It looked like a stale visual myth that was still in good working order." In experimental theater collective The Wooster Group's "Route 1 and 9" (1981), several actors including Willem Dafoe don blackface. The performance stirred controversy and resulted in some rescinded funding from the New York State Council on the Arts. In 1995, the group again used blackface in their version of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. A 2009 Chicago performance of The Emperor Jones was protested by Third World Press. Kendell Geers, a white Afrikaner from Johannesburg, dons a Nelson Mandela "mask" in Portrait of the artist as a young man (1993). His 2007 work Fuckface is a photograph of Geers's face painted black and white with the word 'fuck' in bold letters, reading forward and backward. Vanessa Beecroft has used white models painted black on several occasions. In the 2007 work VB61, and again in the Le Membre Fantôme in 2015. On collaborating with Kanye West, Beecroft has stated "I am protected by Kanye's talent. I become Black. I am no longer Vanessa Beecroft and I am free to do whatever I want because Kanye allows it." In 2010 The Public Theatre/Public LAB in New York premiered a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins titled Neighbors in which the stage design presented two interior spaces divided by a shared wall. On one side the play is portrayed by actors, on the other side it is portrayed by actors wearing blackface. Neighbors was presented later that year by the Matrix Theatre Company, and in 2011 by Mixed Blood Theater, Minneapolis, and Company One theater in Boston. Eleanor Antin has a recurring character "Eleanora Antinova", an "African-American ballerina" that she frequently performed in blackface. Antin says on Antinova "I've had as previous personas a king, a nurse and a movie star. But the ballerina is ideal, because as an artist she's an outsider, like women and blacks in our society. And a black ballerina is a condition contrary to fact, even today.