Causing uproar in Guinea 25 years ago, Dakan has been hailed as the first West African film to tackle homosexuality. Yet its director would never make another movie, and its legacy has been a warning for other filmmakers.
TEN YEARS AGO, I got thrown through a wall in a shopping cart at an artist-run space in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a histrionic (and injurious) opener to a half-hour set wherein I restaged stunts from Jackass the slapstick media franchise that debuted in 2000 as a television series on MTV alongside visually similar works of early performance art by Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, Marina Abramović, and Vito Acconci. Between such actions as permitting alarmingly zealous attendees to wax my chest and getting shot with a toy gun, I quoted from Julia Kristeva’s foundational 1980 treatise on grossness,