Lip and Love : subversive repetition in the pastiche films of Tracey Moffatt

Moving image art since the 1990s has often expressed a fascination with classical Hollywood cinema, employing strategies that range from allusion to direct quotation in its attempts to revise Hollywood imagery, forms and conventions, and the values that these enshrine. Such promiscuous practices of regurgitation are often characterized as parasitical and purely derivative, expressive of a late capitalist cynicism that permeates every aspect of culture; a characterization, in fact, largely attributable to the influential theories of Fredric Jameson. This diagnosis of appropriation practices in contemporary culture as relatively impotent and indicating the impossibility of innovation has proved hugely influential, overshadowing discussions of their capacity to critique the forms and images they invoke. The cinematic text is resituated in a variety of ways in contemporary art, but rather than viewing this as a simple gesture of imitation for its own sake or for nostalgic purposes, I shall suggest that cinema is hereby subjected to what theorist Linda Hutcheon terms a ‘complicitous critique’. For, while parodic reframings do carry with them many of the conventions and values of the original text, they do so only as a prerequisite for critique. I shall explore this claim by focusing on two short films by the Australian artist Tracey Moffatt – Lip (1999, 11 mins) and Love (2003, 21 mins) – and propose that they demonstrate a productive intersection between parodic repetition, described by Judith Butler as a key strategy for queering (disrupting) normative categories of identity, and composite pastiche which, contrary to its many theorizations, is particularly well placed to produce a critical transformation of the texts it cites. 1 Contemporary art’s fetishization of Hollywood cinema has been highlighted by a number of influential exhibitions in recent years: Scream and Scream Again: Film in Art at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1996; Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1996; Spellbound: Art and Film at the Hayward Gallery in 1996; Notorious at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1999; Cinéma Cinéma: Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1999; Cut: Film as Found Object in Contemporary Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2004. 2 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and consumer society’, in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 7. 3 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 106, 151.