Something happened to American visual culture when Barack Obama was elected president of the United States: The dominant (and domineering) gaze of history was interrupted. Instead of being unrepresented or misrepresented, a black man, woman, and children became representatives for all. It's a move that blew the circuits on the system. Whatever happens next, for now we're all here in the invigorating dark, awaiting the startup whir on a new engine of representation, one with the potential to be truly postcolonial—to correct the exaggerations, rationalizations, and distortions that come from governing and being governed at a literal and metaphorical distance. The Obamas don't signal that we all see each other clearly now, just that the mutual view is bound to be less blurry if one race isn't monopolizing the power position.
The current exhibitions at the Frye Art Museum could not be more relevant to this transformation. They are about looking across the colonial divide—looking at exotic others from a ruling perch, looking back at the faceless entity of a distant government. The oldest artworks, in a show called Napoleon on the Nile, were commissioned by Napoleon and brought back by droves of "savants" he sent to Egypt; he sought to slide Egyptian culture under a French microscope for the purpose of one day dominating it. The newest artworks, in a simultaneous separate show called Empire, are by contemporary artists driven by an awareness of the political history of optics: the history of who has looked at whom, and how. (There is also a show of works from the Frye's collection, called Gaze, but it is both dim-witted and overbearing, a fatal combination if ever there was one.)
The center of Empire, its power seat, is in a dark room at the back of the museum (rather appropriately separated from the rest of the uneven show). This room is normally enterable from the other galleries, but for the first time in the building's history, the room has been mostly sealed off. The artwork in this dark room, Funk Staden (2007), needs its own space.
It's a video installation with two walls of screens and mirrors, emanating a loud, irresistible beat. The walls curve toward each other like two eyelids. What you see in the mirrors depends on who you are; what you see in the videos is young people partying on a rooftop at dusk intercut with woodcut prints, the partyers performing a parodic reenactment of what's seen in the interstitial images. The woodcuts are from the first European bestseller: Hans Staden's 1557 True History, an account of his capture and release by the Tupinambá Indians in Brazil, whom he portrayed as lusty cannibals. Europeans ate up his account the way he said the Brazilian natives consumed their captives; True History became the portrait of the tropics. Still today, Brazilian schoolchildren learn about Staden's colonial fantasia.
Mauricio Dias was one of those Brazilian schoolchildren. Today, he and his collaborator Walter Riedweg (originally from German Switzerland) are headlining contemporary artists, but they position themselves as art outsiders in many ways. They make art by identifying people who are unrepresented in the art world—Others—and making videos along with them. (In the past, this has included sex workers, janitors, and prisoners around the world.)
In Funk Staden (expanded from its appearance at 2007's Documenta), there's Staden and there's Funk, referring to contemporary Rio de Janeiro's funk scene. Drug dealers in the poor sections of Rio set up elaborate funk balls the way kings once presided over courts—and, being drug dealers, their underworld celebrations are to the "civilized world" as mysterious and frightening as the doings of Staden's cannibals. The people who come to funk balls are not trackable in the global economy: They do not have credit cards or anything like mortgages. Dias and Riedweg, who live part-time in Rio (Dias's hometown), befriended some funk scenesters. They couldn't shoot video in the funk balls because cameras aren't allowed (for security reasons!). Instead, they found a rooftop where they could stage their video. They selected participants according to physical appearance: each one notable in some way (tall, gender-indeterminate, spectacular dancer). Having known Staden's book already, the participants pretty much improvised the rest.
On the most obvious level, the actor- participants are making fun of the idea that the caricatures in Staden's book could represent them. They throw a white blowup doll around as if they plan to cook and eat her. Their dancing is hypersexualized. But they also become objects for our delectation. We see ourselves reflected in the mirrors, uncomfortably watching them, as they're reenacting scenes that were doubly translated: described first by Staden and then drawn by the woodcut artist, who had not traveled to Brazil at all. We're consuming them again, but now we're consuming something triply digested already. In the parlance of cannibalism, what do we take in when we visually eat this new-old stew? How does it change our own constitution?
There's another type of footage—funk-party footage that is spinning, as if to capture the viewer's roiling state of mind. It comes from a set of cameras attached to the top of a pole created to look like the one seen in the woodcuts, which Staden described the cannibals using to spear their enemies. This spinning panopticon is not used in the typical way, to make others feel watched. Here the artists give the panopticon—a symbol of institutionalized, all-surveilling power—to the watched, and by turning it so furiously they exaggerate its omniscience and confound its ability to see. The screens show just a blur. That old circuit is shorted.
For years, these artists have been proposing an aggressive rubbing of the collective eyes, a restart of the feast of visual consumption across social lines. Though they made Funk Staden in 2007, they feel newly encouraged about its themes. Visiting Seattle recently, their plane touched down just as Obama was elected president. Two mornings later, sitting at the museum, Dias was still moved. "We've come to a new moment in colonial history," he announced. The table is set for a new feast. 
