UCLA

Just as technology corporations in the San Francisco Bay Area use the rhetoric of progress and diversity in their hiring practices and mission statement, so have the global art museums who are a part of a history of development that displaces communities of color. Hiring practices, community involvement, and the culture of work show that these initiatives affirm particular gendered racialized subjects in order to continue accruing power and capital. The artists Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. show the relationship between the creation of a culture of work and the sanitization of community by neoliberal corporations in the Bay Area. Their mixed- media performance series Manananggoogle uses the visual devices of camp and the grotesque to simultaneously recuperate female sexuality and transgress neoliberal capitalist structures. I focus on “Divide//Conquer,” a performance event of the series. By using the manananggal, the Filipino folkloric witch, M.O.B. shows that the true monstrosities of these corporations are the structures of oppression. As a result, M.O.B. shows that representation of artists of color in museums affirms the neoliberal structure. As a performance that utilizes visitor participation, M.O.B. calls upon the audience/participants to enact the inverted gendered lines of corporations. In doing so, the visitors perform the possibilities of a visual complex not implicated in these past and current violences.