Dancing at the Museum: Parataxis and the Politics of Proximity in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “APESHIT”

Abstract

The curatorial turn, with its shift of attention from the individual (autonomous) artwork toward the exhibition and the role of the curator in its creation,[1] has brought about a renewed focus on the museum as a political space; a space for experimentation and for transformation, for knowledge creation, and for social regeneration. In this article, the rhetorical figure of parataxis will be developed as a concept to inquire into what happens when performers dance at the museum, and how such dancing can be an agent of social change. For this, I focus on the music video “APESHIT” (2018) and bring rhetorical theory in dialogue with recent theory on proximity, to build on Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the contact zone as a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”[2] Filmed at the Musée du Louvre and released to promote the new album of R&B singer Beyoncé and her husband, rapper Jay-Z, the music video produces the art museum as a contact zone by bringing black dancers and singers into its space and staging relations between the performers and some of its iconic pieces. Exploring the ways in which the politics of proximity, contiguity, and access in “APESHIT” interface with those of representation to challenge the white colonialist narrative of the museum, this article seeks to understand how dancing affects the social space of the museum and what kind of knowledge dancing at the museum produces.