Narcissister, Voyage Into Infinity, 2024. Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works.
text by Emma Grimes
Over the weekend, NYU Skirball hosted Narcissister’s show Voyage Into Infinity. The one-hour performance, which originally debuted at Pioneer Works in 2024, is a “contemporary, feminist revisioning” of The Way Things Go—the 1987 video by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, who made an elaborate chain reaction course that appears to be filmed in one take, though it was actually stitched together in the editing room. Where Fischli and Weiss concealed the real, imperfect process behind their labor, Narcissister does just the opposite, laying bare every seam.
The performance begins with a woman crawling out of a wooden structure that looks like a treehouse; her face hidden behind one of Narcissister’s signature masks—glossy, artificial, and an exaggerated distortion of beauty standards. She wears a hyper-feminine dress, as though it were torn right off from a plastic doll, and begins wandering the stage in search of something. The stage is crowded with a haphazard array of objects—half look like they’re from a junkyard, half from an estate sale. There’s ladders, a marble sculpture of a muscular athlete playing discus, a see-saw, and much more. It’s a Rube Goldberg apparatus, waiting to be propelled into motion.
A few minutes later, a second masked woman emerges from the structure, wearing the same dress in another color. Then a third. The characters are figuring out how to shove the Rube Goldberg machine into motion, and the experience is like watching a movie that didn’t cut out its dead time. Most of the performance consists of in-between moments—pauses, trial and error—that editing usually seeks to throw away. If The Way Things Go is partly about the process of things as opposed to their finished products, Narcissister pushes this logic even further.
At one point, one of the performers stacks empty Home Depot-style paint buckets into a pyramid, only to have it knocked over later. Later, those buckets are hung from the handlebars of a bicycle, which another character rides across the stage. In Narcissister’s world, objects are removed from their original context and then slightly misused in a new environment.
To speculate too earnestly about the objects’ meanings and the characters’ random feats would feel mistaken. Putting Voyage Into Infinity under a scalpel almost feels harmful, as if closer analysis would strip away from the ambiguity and nonsense that carries the work. And there are so many possibilities of where one could go, so that the performance itself seems to actively resist its own interpretation.
The most unforgettable image arrives at the end of the show, following a wonderful musical interruption by Holland Andrews and a live band. The three characters line up near the edge of the stage, wearing their dresses again, and hold an absurdly long string with a bundle of colorful balloons attached. They pull the string down and begin popping every balloon with their bodies. At times, their actions look like convulsions, bursts of energy wholly committed to wrecking. Why inflate balloons only to obliterate them? Why stack a pyramid of buckets only to push it over? Unsurprisingly, these questions go unanswered. In Narcissister’s refusal to provide meaning, she ends up rattling your faith in it. Why do we do anything at all?
Narcissister, Voyage Into Infinity, 2024. Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works.