Abstract
At the 2003 Venice Biennale, the African American installation artist Fred Wilson made an extraordinary appeal to Shakespeare’s Othello.1 The exhibition title proclaims the connection by quoting from Othello’s long final speech: “Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate/Nor set down aught in malice” (5.2.351–52). But the speech culminates in the “bloody period” (365) of suicide. Othello’s implosion collapses the potential space between extenuation and malice where an alternative definition of “I am” might hypothetically have been possible. This cancellation is Wilson’s starting point, and my term “respeaking,” ambiguously poised between repeating and revising, addresses the prospect of a new start. The issue turns on what it means to say Othello’s words and on how we define “I.”
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Notes
Reproductions of the Pesaro tomb are available in Giuseppe Cristinelli, Baldassare Longhena, Architetto del’ 600 a Venezia (Padua: Marsilio, 1972), 139
Christian Theuerkauff, “Anmerkungen zu Melchior Barthel,” in Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 41, no. 1/4 (1987): 71–117
Fred Wilson, Fred Wilson: A Conversation with K. Anthony Appiah (New York: PaceWildenstein, 2006), 14
Dympna Callaghan, “‘Othello Was a White Man’: Properties of Race on Shakespeare’s Stage,” in Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 2000), 73–96
Virginia Mason Vaughan, “Teaching Richard Burbage’s Othello,” in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (New York: Modern Language Association, 2005), 148–55.
Maurice Berger and Fred Wilson, “Collaboration, Museums, and the Politics of Display: A Conversation with Fred Wilson,” in Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000, ed. Maurice Berger (Baltimore, MD: Center for Art and Visual Culture, 2001), 32–39
Elizabeth Alexander, “‘I am; I’m a black man;/I am:’ Michael Harper’s ‘Black Aesthetic,’” in The Black Interior (Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2004), 59–89
Fred Wilson, “When Europe Slept, It Dreamt of the World,” in Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, ed. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001), 426–31
Glen Helfand, “Six New Etchings by Fred Wilson,” Art on Paper 8, no. 6 (July/August 2004): 24.
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© 2007 Peter Erickson
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Erickson, P. (2007). Respeaking Othello in Fred Wilson’s Speak of Me as I Am. In: Citing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06009-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06009-9_8
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