Robert Caplin for The New York Times  The Narcissister, a lithe, 41-year-old performance artist.  Under bright lights, they sipped vodka tonics and tried to get in a few words with the roving woman in a Barbie-like mask and black velvet cape and hat. She was the same woman whose demented image stared at them from several large color photographs mounted on the walls.  She is known as Narcissister, a lithe 41-year-old performance artist who has intrigued the cultural cognoscenti the past few years with clever performances (contorting her body to look like a four-faced doll) and avant-porn (performing a “reverse striptease” by pulling her clothes out of her private parts). Amid it all, she wears a creepy plastic mask.  The one thing she won’t do is divulge her real name. “That wouldn’t be allowing Narcissister to claim who she is on her own terms,” said the woman behind the mask, which was cut to reveal her mouth and a squeaky little-girl voice. “I’m actually a very private and shy person, and Narcissister is separate from me.”  This night, she was reveling in her first solo gallery show, called “Narcissister Is You,” which runs through Feb. 10. The photos — self-portraits — show her in a variety of masks, wigs and prosthetic breasts, often badly mangled.  Downstairs in a dim basement, a crowd watched a video triptych depicting strangers, many naked, preening for the camera in a Narcissister mask. Among them were the restaurateur Serge Becker, the performance artist Soigné Deluxe and Barbara Browning, a performance-studies professor at New York University.  “In the last year she’s started to get more serious attention in performance art and visual culture circles,” Ms. Browning said. “It’s banal to call her work feminist, but it’s about loving your own body.”  Make that extreme self-love. “She’s unabashedly playful and bold, far more than I’m able to be,” Narcissister said in the third person. “A lot of what she’s doing is porn in an art context.”  Raised in La Jolla, Calif., the daughter of an African-American father and a Moroccan Jewish mother who were academics, Narcissister grew up performing — as a gymnast. After majoring in Afro-American studies at Brown University, she moved to New York, where she trained with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. But she found professional dance too cutthroat and became a window-dresser for stores like ABC Home & Carpet. In that role, she became enchanted with the frozen allure of mannequins.  In the early 2000s, she fell in with the growing downtown burlesque scene, ruled over by playful vamps like Julie Atlas Muz. But she found the scene monochrome. “They still all basically wanted to be Marilyn Monroe,” she said. “I thought I could bring a fresh edge.”  Aiming to be both extremely exhibitionist but also slyly anonymous, Narcissister made her debut at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn in 2007 with a routine in which she stripped, item by item, first herself, then an identical mannequin, which she then sexually mounted. She wore the same immobile glamour-gal mask for which she’s become known.  Soon she was performing at the Box on the Lower East Side before stars like Madonna and Justin Timberlake. “She did an act where she transformed from Charlie Chaplin to Quasimodo to Venus de Milo to a pearl in a shell,” said Raven O, an M.C. at the Box. “As soon as I saw her, I said, ‘This is a home run.’ ”  Broader fame soon followed. In 2011, she accompanied the androgyne rock star Marilyn Manson to the premiere of his short film, “Born Villain.” She was photographed wearing not only her mask but also a pink slip cut to expose a fake vagina, which she called “my merkin,” over her real one.  She had more weirdness in store for the American public. Also in 2011, aiming to bring the avant-garde to mass culture, she auditioned for the TV show “America’s Got Talent,” twisting in and out of large petticoats to become an eerie four-faced doll. She advanced to the next stage in Las Vegas, where she silenced the house with a routine that involved her squirting mustard out of giant fake breasts onto a suggestively large hot dog.  “No one said anything to me as I left,” she said. “I was really devastated.”  Narcissister forged on. Back at her solo opening, she seemed happy to be in the sweet spot where stagecraft and high art meet. She stood by as Alberto Cortes, a performance artist, stared at her photos perplexedly. “It’s like there’s a joke she’s keeping from us,” he mused. “But I get it. I wore a mask once at a party, and people feared me and found me mysterious.”  Behind his shoulder, just beneath her unblinking plastic eyes, Narcissister’s mouth curled into a wicked, knowing smile.
While not using her body as a public art piece, the performance artist Narcissister is, in fact, private and shy.