Former slave Jean-Baptiste Belley strikes a royal pose.
Edwin Long’s Babylonian Marriage Market (1875), a cornucopia of stereotypes.
A twist on Victorian ball-gowns by Nigeria’s Yinka Shonibare.
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Unlike
ugliness, beauty cannot really be explained:
it is stated, affirmed and repeated in every part of the body, but can never be described.
Roland
Barthes, French semiologist (1915-1980)
|
Throughout the 20th century, films like Tarzan of the Apes presented Africans as
primitive savages. |
Do
artists uphold prejudice or offer a novel way of looking at ourselves? A few hints
culled from the colonial era and beyond give a sense of how art goes about telling
the body’s history
When visual artists
represent the body, whose body is being talked about, and can that body stand for
others or only for itself? It would be comforting to tell a story in which people
from the past misused the body, only for more enlightened figures from our own time
to set the record straight. Like most stories with a happy ending, this would be
just a story. History is more complicated and less reassuring. In trying to think
about a history of bodies, it is necessary to highlight certain themes because the
body is in a sense everything: medicine, war, sexuality, “race,” gender, performance,
dance and so on. On the other hand, the body can be treated as nothing, or as a commodity,
that is to say, something that is bought and sold in slavery.
Slavery has been defined as “social death.” If humans are, in Aristotle’s phrase,
“social animals,” then to be a slave is to be defined by others as simply a body,
a dead person who works. By looking at the changing depictions of the body in and
out of slavery, we get a measure of how our own bodies have been evaluated over time.
Some might think that this is a “politically correct” topic, detracting from the
impact of art. The reverse can also be argued: a failure to understand the social
and historical context in which artworks were made reduces them to mere decorations.
It is precisely because art is so powerful that we need to understand more about
how it works. To take an example, the brand-new Sainsbury gallery for African art
in the British Museum, London, places the entire continent in three galleries divided
only by medium–sculpture, fabrics, pottery. Here self-confident and highly realistic
16th-century bronze sculptures from the powerful kingdom of Benin stand alongside
the tormented abstract minkisi power figures from the Belgian Congo, as if both expressed
something about an eternal Africa. In fact the Benin bronzes show so powerfully what
Africa was capable of before slavery and colonization that 19th-century Europeans
assumed that they could not have been made by Africans and theorized that perhaps
refugees from the lost city of Atlantis had been responsible.
The
Cartesian heritage
The
minkisi figures were made at the height of the colonial terror in the Belgian Congo
and were used by a nganga, or operator, to call on the spirits of the ancestors in
the struggle against colonization. If this seems to be evidence of a supposed African
“primitivism,” it should be noted that the Belgian colonizers believed that the power
figures worked and did everything they could to capture them, with the result that
many American and European museums have fine examples. By trying to place these figures
into grand, abstract categories like art, or even Africa, the curators missed the
chance to show how art tells the history of the body as one of conflict and change.
The modern Western history of the body usually begins with the separation by French
philosopher René Descartes of mind and body. Writing in the mid-17th century,
Descartes argued that the body was only connected to the mind at the pineal gland–which
in fact produces hormones in response to light–that became a point of interface between
two radically separate entities. In his view, the body simply responded to the environment
and to sense perceptions, whereas the mind reflected on those perceptions and took
decisions that might or might not agree with them. For example, the eye sees a perspective
drawing as “real,” while the mind knows it is an illusion. By introducing doubt,
Descartes broke the traditional continuum between mind and body that saw both as
natural and asserted a higher status for the mind. Perhaps the body was something
that the European elite wished to distance itself from, now that the trade in human
beings across the Atlantic was in full swing.
The French port of Nantes sent out 108 slavers to the Guinea coast as early as 1666,
taking on board 37,340 Africans. Slavery in the French colonies was controlled by
the infamous Code Noir decreed by Louis XIV. This separate legal code for the enslaved
gave the slave owner the same kind of power on his plantation that the king enjoyed
nationally–that is to say, the power of life and death. The king’s body was uniquely
powerful, especially as depicted in art. For the king was held to have two bodies,
one physical and one spiritual. The spiritual body was the essence of the monarchy
that never died, slept or became ill. That body was shown in portraits and statues
around the nation and the French colonies. By the same token, the bodies of the king’s
subjects were mere objects, whether that of a French peasant or a colonial slave.
So the philosophical division of the person into body and soul was complicated by
the political doubling of the royal body and haunted by the ghosts of the enslaved.
Race
takes the stage
During
the French Revolution of 1789, these tensions burst into the open. At that time Santo
Domingo (now Haiti), the jewel in the French colonial crown, received 1,587 ships,
more than France’s largest port, Marseilles. But beginning in 1791, Haiti’s enslaved
Africans joined the revolution and overthrew the colonial regime. As the revolution
thought through the consequences of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) and
the abolition of the monarchy (1792), it became clear that slavery would have to
go. On February 3, 1794, a group of Haitian delegates to the Convention, the revolutionary
parliament, successfully proposed the abolition of slavery. One of these men was
Jean-Baptiste Belley, a former slave who had been born in West Africa. In 1797, the
artist Anne-Louis Girodet painted Belley’s portrait. It is a remarkable evocation
of the tensions of the period expressed through one person’s body.
Belley stands against a tropical landscape, wearing the uniform of a Convention member.
His face is rendered in the traditional three-quarter style used for nobles and monarchs.
At the same time, his body has an unusual twist to the hips, giving it a somewhat
feminine feel. His masculinity is nonetheless asserted by a prominent bulge in his
trousers.
Belley rests on a bust of the abbé Raynal, who had called for the abolition
of slavery. The marble whiteness of the bust and its classical straight forehead
contrast with Belley’s dark skin and a prominently sloped forehead. In the period,
this cranial angle, as it was called, was taken as a mark of low intelligence. How
should this portrait be understood? The simple fact that an African was painted in
the royal style by a European artist marks a remarkable shift, while the various
markers placed on his body by the artist tried to assert a new form of superiority:
that of race.
Revisiting
The Jungle Book
Ironically
the very success of the movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade engendered a
new form of distinguishing between human bodies as belonging to different races.
Under slavery people were legally different. Now a new means of classifying human
bodies was devised. An extraordinary volume of scientific and artistic work was produced
in the effort to define and make visible the supposed eternal differences of race.
Everything from skin colour to the shape of the skull, nose and breasts, and every
aspect of culture was used as evidence to prove that humans were biologically distinct.
Art played an important role in the system, from supplying evidence of difference
in the comparison of Greek statues to African bodies to instructing young people
how to make race visible in images. While many radical artists were involved in the
struggles to abolish slavery, they were exceptions to the mainstream rule.
The highest price paid for the work of any artist in the 19th century was for Edwin
Long’s 1875 The Babylonian Marriage Market. This painting showed a slave auction
in antiquity, with authentic historical detail. In the foreground, facing the viewer,
was a racialized hierarchy of enslaved women ranging from a white woman at left who
looks at herself confidently in a mirror via Asian women to an African woman who
covers her face in apparent shame. The main action of the scene showed a woman being
unclothed on the slave block to the appreciative gaze of a male audience, who appear
to be mostly Jewish. This cornucopia of stereotypes won Long a position in Britain’s
Royal Academy and a career as a portrayer of the “types” that science then assured
everyone to be real.
In the present, race is a term whose very meaning is uncertain. Scientists have shown
that all humans share 99.9 percent of their genes and the visible markers of the
body are minor variations of no substantive importance. But racism has not gone away
as the recent wave of hostility to outsiders in Western Europe clearly shows. In
part that is because race is no longer understood as it was in the 19th century as
science but as part of popular culture.
One of the first feature films was D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic Birth of a Nation that
tells the story of the rise of Ku Klux Klan in the American South, using white actors
in black face to portray African Americans in atrocious stereotypes. Throughout the
20th century, films like Tarzan of the Apes presented Africans as primitive savages.
When such subjects were challenged by the civil rights movement and decolonization,
they were simply displaced to cartoons like The Jungle Book (1966) that portrays
jazz as literally the music of monkeys.
A new generation of artists is challenging us once again to rethink old means of
imagining ourselves and others. The controversial young African American artist Kara
Walker has challenged the prevailing assumption that all images of minorities in
the United States should show people engaged in positive and uplifting activities.
By contrast, her silhouette figures cut out of black paper show both Africans and
Europeans in an extraordinary range of what might be called perverse activities.
By using the 19th-century silhouette format once taught to polite Victorian ladies,
Walker at once reminds us that the leisure of such women was enabled by the free
or unfree labour of others and suggests that not that much has changed since then.
Her work makes us realize that oppression really functions to denature both the oppressor
and the oppressed. While some critics have fiercely denounced her work, Walker has
already won a MacArthur “genius” grant.
Another contemporary artist who sees the Victorian past in the present is Nigerian
Yinka Shonibare, who recreates elaborate ball-gowns of the period, correct in every
detail, except that the fabrics he uses are West African kente cloth, not the sedate
cottons and silks that Europeans of the period once wore. These dresses make colour
in all senses of the term visible. In similar vein, the Japanese photographer Yosimasa
Morimura photographs himself in a variety of staged situations, often wearing drag.
Posing as the model for Manet’s 1865 painting Olympia, Morimura completely alters
the dynamic of the image. Whereas the original showed a white prostitute, whose sexuality
was alluded to via the figure of her African maid, the photographic recreation forces
us to reconsider the question of what whiteness might actually be.
All these artists take the long view. They seem to suggest that despite the advances
of recent decades, the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism is far from played
out. At the same time, the very fact that artists from around the world are engaging
in such a reevaluation of history is itself grounds for a degree of hope. One thing
is certain: the body is going to be a key subject in art for a long time to come. |
