Performance, Subjectivity, and the Afterlife of Live Art: A Conversation

In May 2024, e-flux Screening Room screened Blue Baby (1996/1997) and Heaven, Earth & Hell (1993) — two works by Thomas Allen Harris guest curated by Daniella Brito. The screening was followed by a conversation between the artist, the curator, and the audience. The transcript of this conversation was edited for the present publication.

Question: Blue Baby and Heaven, Earth & Hell are two very different entry points into your work. Can you give us a sense of what your practice looked like when you made these works in the early 1990s?

Thomas Allen Harris (TAH): They’re both very different. Blue Baby was a live performance, while Heaven, Earth & Hell was performed for the camera. I hadn’t seen Blue Baby in years until I digitized my archives recently. In the 1990s, I was doing a lot of live performances on the West Coast, while my work on the East Coast focused more on performance for the camera. Moving back east, I shifted towards creating commissioned work for television while also maintaining my independent practice. Those were different times.

Q: Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, you often pushed the boundaries of documentary filmmaking by interweaving personal biographical material into larger conversations regarding gender, race, and diasporic belonging. This was about a decade after members of the Combahee River Collective published their 1977 statement1 in which they named that racial, sexual, and class oppression are interlocking and established the foundation for contemporary identity politics. How did these preliminary dialogues about identity politics manifest in your early work?

TAH: In the 1980s, my references were rooted in a spiritual journey, as one can see in Heaven, Earth & Hell. I was trying to compose my own cosmology. After graduating from college in 1984, I was on my way to medical school and spent a summer in Europe. But when I came back, I decided not to pursue medicine; instead, I became a filmmaker and an artist. My first rigorous engagement with research and theory was at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I worked with Ellis Haizlip, who was programming events connected to the Black Arts Movement. This was my introduction to the possibilities of being an African American in the world from the perspective of a creative person. Towards the end of the 1980s, I discovered the work of Marlon Riggs, bell hooks, and Essex Hemphill who profoundly impacted me. All of whom were influenced by the work of the Combahee River Collective. I left my work in public television around the same time which allowed me to explore race, gender, and identity more creatively. It was around this time that I shot my first film, Splash.

Q: Could you talk more about Splash?

TAH: Splash exemplified an awareness of race and gender during the time of pre-adolescence — before I had the theoretical language to articulate it. I shot the film in 1990 or 1991 in a friend’s apartment. It reflected this moment when theorists like Stuart Hall discussed untangling modes of oppression,2 opening up more room to claim diverse identities. In this period, bell hooks also wrote about decentering dominant narratives,3 encouraging us to subvert the ways that Black identities are presented across the media. That inspired me to create work that embraced both personal and broader cosmological explorations.

Q: In Heaven, Earth & Hell, you center the Trickster, which is a recurrent figure across African diasporic cultures. It’s seen in Haitian Vodou and across Black American vernacular traditions through characters like Br’er Rabbit and Anansi the Spider. Can you describe how you were positioning yourself as the Trickster in this work? How does the figure appear in your personal life?

TAH: Yes, the Trickster is one of the archetypes that Robert Farris Thompson talks about in Flash of the Spirit,4, and I was thinking about how these archetypes resonate with various parts of our personalities. I was also thinking about Carnival and possession and how the Trickster invites people to adopt provocative positionalities that can be both destructive and liberating.

Growing up, I didn’t fit neatly into boxes. In Western society we don’t have figures like Ogun, the strong and powerful deity of iron, or Oya, the goddess of the wind, who holds both creative and potentially destructive powers. The Trickster archetype provided me with a way to explore the nuances of my own identity. It helped me investigate what it means to step outside rigid structures—beyond black-and-white binaries and Western frameworks of identity.

Living partly in East Africa as an adolescent exposed me to other spiritual practices. I lived in Dar es Salaam for two years, where I saw how spiritual practices from indigenous African cosmologies, Islam, Buddhism, Hindu and Anglican Christianity intersected. That blend of influences shaped my understanding of the Trickster; I see the Trickster as someone who traverses those different spaces, connecting and disrupting them at the same time. In Heaven, Earth & Hell, the Trickster allowed me to adopt a role that was both playful and challenging, questioning societal norms while embracing transformation and possibility. And today, I am still thinking a lot about the way suppressed narratives are fighting to be seen. I’ve been so moved by the struggle for Palestinian liberation. It reminds me of how all of these postcolonial struggles are interconnected. The narratives we’ve been taught to forget are being elevated, and it’s affecting everything — even the students in my classes. They’re engaging with these marginalized histories and thinking critically about the aesthetics of coloniality.

Q: In Heaven, Earth & Hell, I see you confront the repertoire of coloniality head on: you poke holes in the artifice of ethnographic documentary filmmaking. As a documentarian, can you speak to your relationship to ethnographic filmmaking?

TAH: When I was younger I felt assaulted by films like Birth of a Nation. Although it is not an ethnographic work, it veers in that direction — Woodrow Wilson declared it “History written in lightning!?!” — I watched it during my time at Bronx High School of Science. Being one of the few African Americans in the class, I was faced with the violence of that narrative. Later, I endured similar experiences in experimental film courses and in art venues. These uncomfortable moments made me acutely aware of the violent assumptions that strip away agency from people of color. Humor and performance became vital tools for me to confront these challenges — I felt compelled to embody my critiques. It became my way to remain sane in America. I had an opportunity to move back to Europe with a lover, but I chose to stay in the United States. It was not an easy decision. It wasn’t just about navigating the racial dynamics of Black and white, it was also about the broader cultural aspects. For example, Audre Lorde discusses the erotic as something often demonized in puritanical environments like the United States, particularly when it involves bodies of color, women’s bodies, or gendered bodies.5 Choosing to stay here meant grappling with these challenges but also committing to carving out a space for my immediate community’s stories.

And because of this, part of my work is motivated by community storytelling initiatives. I often circulate a camera within my communities, collage the material, and create something rooted in that process. Blue Baby was deeply collaborative in this way. Pat Payne, a former MFA student of mine, helped with makeup. Walter Cameron, who filmed me, was part of my close-knit community in San Diego, where I worked at the University of California as an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at the time. There was an intimacy to these projects; they were deeply tied to my relationships and the environments I was a part of.

Q: While watching Heaven, Earth & Hell and Blue Baby together I was moved by their haptic visuality—how they engage touch. I was transfixed by this tactile exchange in Blue Baby within the makeup room. Similarly, in Heaven, Earth, & Hell, I was mesmerized by the intimate moments of touch between the two women. Could you speak about the sensorial aspects of your work?

TAH: I am interested in exploring sensuality rather than eroticism. Hollywood often reduces sensuality to climactic moments, bordering on pornography, but true sensuality is about trust, vulnerability, and connection. For me, these elements are essential, especially in queer relationships. The intimacy in my work reflects that, whether it’s in collaborative moments on screen like in Blue Baby or in personal relationships in my life.

Q: When you first showed me the Blue Baby footage, I was struck by your decision to document yourself as you were preparing to perform. For me, the behind-the-scenes footage brings up interesting questions about linear time within durational performance and the afterlife of live performance via documentation. Why did you choose to start filming backstage? When does the performance begin?

TAH: Or when does it end? That’s a great question. I was part of the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego at the time, which was founded by Allan Kaprow, known for Happenings,6 and Eleanor Antin, a performance art pioneer. Teaching performance there was significant, especially in a place like San Diego, which borders Tijuana. At the time, San Diego felt highly militarized and conservative, while Tijuana felt chaotic and free—a stark contrast. This influenced my work, especially in thinking about how my body was policed in these spaces. I would cross into Mexican spaces as a Black queer body, then be policed in San Diego—these encounters shaped how I thought about identity, space, and performance. As one of only two African American faculty members — the other being the wonderful Faith Ringgold who was a mentor and an ally to me — I faced significant racial and sexual onslaughts. It was a toxic environment, but I prayed for a position where I could continue creating, and this teaching job found me. Despite its challenges, it allowed me to produce a lot of work.

Q: How were you imagining the audience’s role in Blue Baby? In what ways, if any, was their engagement with the work informing your actions on stage?

TAH: Blue Baby came about when I was invited to a queer celebration in June. I didn’t feel celebratory, so I decided to let the audience feel that. Many were performing spoken word, but I wanted to do something embodied—spoken sound and movement. The ambivalence of the “baby” character was crucial. Babies can express ambivalence unapologetically, and I channeled that. At the time, I was thinking about my own emotions and how to embody them, rather than tailoring my work to audience expectations. With single-channel TV work, I’m constantly thinking about the audience—imagining a mainstream viewer or targeting a specific group. But with projects like Blue Baby, I could be free to focus on my own experience.

Q: Can you describe how spectatorship informs your work more broadly? Both as a performer and as a documentarian?

TAH: I never really saw myself as a documentary maker, even though it’s something I do professionally to sustain my company and employ others. As an artist, I prioritize the transformative process of making each work. For me, each project is an opportunity to challenge myself and build an archive.

In my early performances, I often performed behind or around the audience while projecting an image on screen. This duality invited audiences to engage with both the screen and the live action, deconstructing the cinematic process itself. These explorations were about destabilizing notions of Blackness and queerness while challenging Western frameworks of identity.

Q: What do you think is lost or gained in the translation of live action performance to recorded documentation?

TAH: We’re living in the age of YouTube, where authenticity and content are in constant tension. There’s a pushback against corporate narratives, even within documentary filmmaking. This context raises questions about how work screens, where it plays, and what it means in its afterlife. What I find interesting is using the archive creatively—not necessarily re-editing, though I did consider making Heaven, Earth & Hell faster and more digestible for television. But watching it on a big screen convinced me it’s perfect as is.

I’ve recently started working on a new project using my video archive from the 1980s. It’s in its early stages and it might not find a large audience, but I’m doing it for myself. Teaching gives me the freedom to work on personal projects without relying solely on commissioned work. The material I’ve digitized—350 tapes—is full of unexpected gems, like the Blue Baby footage. I’d forgotten about some of it entirely. It’s been transformative to revisit this material, especially with someone like you, Dani, who helps me see it in new ways. I think this archival work is essential. So much of our history—especially Black cinematic history—isn’t in textbooks. Reflections in Black,7 the first comprehensive history of black photographers by Deborah Willis is one example, but the audiovisual discourse is still missing. The younger generations are hungry for this work.