Author Archives: Mary-Grace Reeder

Rotimi Fani-Kayode

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Kobena Mercer’s assertions that Rotimi Fani-Kayode “created a photographic world in which the body is the focal site for an exploration of the relationship between erotic fantasy and ancestral spiritual values”(283) and that in his work it is “hard to tell where sexuality begins and spirituality ends”(283) served as guides to me when looking at the work of Fani-Kayode. Fani-Kayode was not interested in finding or expressing one simplified identity but instead created a complex and multifaceted view representative of his gay, African, multi-national, spiritual identity. Thus it is important to consider all of these biographical and personal elements as one when viewing Kayode’s work and stop trying to fragment and dissect the images in terms of their influences. To try to identify any divides or boundaries between the sexual and the spiritual would rob the images of much of their weight and power. Fani-Kayode’s multi-faceted explorations are all located in the image of the black male body. The body “becomes a site for translation and metaphor”(Mercer 284) bridging the divide between differences in race, culture, and sexuality. One way that Fani-Kayode situates the body as the intersection of material and spiritual worlds is through the use of African masks. In his 1987 photograph Ebo Orisa the unclothed artist bends over towards the viewer obstructing his face so that only the back of his head shows as he holds a wooden African mask upside down below his head. Firstly, I find this photograph to be very striking in its formal elements. The posture of the subject and the inversion of the mask transform the figure into an otherworldly creature. Mercer argues that Fani-Kayode’s images like Ebo Orisa are the result of the play of condensation and displacement (288).

Rotimi Fani-Kayode The Golden Phallus, 1989

Rotimi Fani-Kayode The Golden Phallus, 1989

I feel that Fani-Kayode’s 1989 image The Golden Phallus is a wonderful example of the artist’s intertwining of the spiritual and the sexual through the use of the body and elements from his native culture. The image approaches the idea of the fetishized and mythologized black phallus using Yoruba mythology. The artist wears a bird-like mask that recalls the ororo bird of thought an inspiration present in Yoruba myths but the image also invokes the Yoruba god of indeterminacy. Fani-Kayode describes Esu as “The Trickster” and “Lord of the Crossroads” and underscores his importance in Yoruba carnival. The image is both theatrical and supernatural which foregrounds the bridging of man and spirit. The image also foregrounds the subject’s sexuality while critiquing fetishization instead of fetishizing.

Senzeni Marasela

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In Barbara Thompson’s chapter “Decolonizing Black Bodies: Personal Journeys in the Contemporary Voice” my attention was drawn to the work of South African artist Senzeni Marasela.  Marasela uses a variety of media to explore her painful relationship with her mentally ill mother who was absent most of Marasela’s childhood.  She also explores collective memory and colonial perceptions of the black female body in her series of embroidered scenes from the life of Sarah Baartman, a former South African slave who toured Europe as “The Hottentot Venus.”  Sarah Baartman’s body was exoticised and fetishised as embodying the form of a black Venus.  Her body became a site of Western attraction and repulsion and became a representation of racist western imaginations of the back female body.  After she died, her body was dismembered by Napoleon’s physician and her gentiles and brain were put on display at the Musée de l’Homme until Nelson Mandela requested that her remains be returned to South Africa and respectfully buried in 2002.  Thompson discusses the dismantling of the black Venus image and stereotype but doesn’t mention Marasela’s Baartman series (she talks about Marasela’s work in relation to motherhood) which is why I thought I’d highlight it here.  This series both in subject and in medium connects the stereotype of the black Venus and the story of Sarah Baartman with the artist’s relationship with her mother.  The images evoke the ideas of collective consciousness and collective memory by making these connections.  She uses a technique traditionally labeled as “women’s work” and associated with female relationships and tradition.  I think that because of needlework’s history and cultural associations it has the ability to transmit elements of the female experience in a much more intimate and personal way than other mediums are able to.  Additionally, the associations of needlework being a skill passed down through generations of women makes visible the artist’s connection to her mother and to the subject of the series Sarah Baartman as well as to all women who came before her.  In this series Marasela relates the dismembering and scrutiny of Baartman’s body to her own experience as a black woman in a Western urban environment.

 

 

 

Insider art?

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After reading the transcript of Andrea Fraser’s performance Welcome to the Wadsworth at the Wadsworth Atheneum and her letter to the museum’s curator, I searched the Internet to find a recording of her performance.  The first video I found was was a brief and poorly-shot tape of someone watching a recording of Fraser’s performance on a television.  The people watching the performance, whom one can hear chatting and laughing behind the camera, seem to be watching the performance with no context or prior knowledge of it’s aims. They didn’t know it was a satire and carefully staged critique.  My immediate reaction was to dismiss these viewers as missing the point of Fraser’s work but I realized that their exposure to the performance was very close to that of the original audience and so their reaction shouldn’t be shrugged off . They hadn’t been prepped with Fraser’s writings and commentary on the work before seeing it as I had which brought me back to a question that had been floating around in my head while reading the performance script.  Does the performance lose power if the audience never catches on that it’s a critique?  Is this kind of commentary intended only for insiders?  If it falls on deaf ears in the original audience does that make the recordings and transcripts even more important?

Avoiding “the feminist’s first reaction”

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One thing that struck me was Linda Nochlin’s insistence that we who view art history through a feminist lens must suppress our initial urge to make a case for talented but overlooked women artists when confronted with the question “Why are there no Great women artists?” Before reading Nochlin’s essay I can well see myself thinking “But wait! What about Artemisia Gentileschi?! What about Mary Cassat, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kalho, or Judy Chicago??” Surely these women were great artists who produced great work but they were not Great and by making a case for their work and existence in this context we distract ourselves from the reality that, though these women made wonderful and important art and contributions they have never been considered on the same level as Michelangelo, Renoir, Picasso, or Andy Warhol. We must accept that there have been no great women artists instead of denying it so that we can begin to examine the underlying structures that made this so. We must critically question the myth of the Great Artist and his magical Genius that propelled him to greatness so we can see the educational and institutional privileges that permitted him to be Great.

Representations and Experiences of Japanese American Internment

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Howard argues that interment camp living arrangements reshaped gendered labor divisions and provided women with greater non-domestic employment opportunities as well as provided a space for more interactions among queer internees.

Kozol examines how the gaze of the US Government in WRA photos of internment obstructs the viewer’s access to “real” experiences of internment and erases the discrimination, hard conditions, and true realities of the camps.
Creef’s chapter explores how the Japanese American body was Orientalized and feared and how photographers Lang, Adams, and Miyatake all attempted to represent the double identities and alienation of the prisoners.

Photography of Japanese American internment in the 1940’s was mostly state-sponsored as prisoners were not allowed to bring their own cameras into the camps. With this in mind, it should not be a surprise that most of the photographs of camp life were meant for the white American or governmental gaze and thus struggle in representing the dual identities and alienation of the Japanese American internees.  Most of the photos, whether state-sponsored (Lang) or not (Adams) follow conventions of 1930’s FSA photographs and provide little context for their subjects. The decontextualized images erase the injustices of internment and present their subjects as loyal citizens following the social guidelines of white America. The photographs, which often present domestic scenes of nuclear families, also actively erase the restructuring of gender roles taking place in the camps.

 

In response to:

Elena Tajima Creef. “The Representation of the Japanese American Body in the Photographs of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Toyo Miyatake.”
Wendy Kozol.”Relocating Citizenship in Photographs of Japanese Americans in World War II”
John Howard. “Camp Life” in “Concentration Camps on the Home Front”