Pamela Edmonds
Black Body: Race, Resistance, Response
Shouts and Whispers: Racism Face to Face
The Black Body as a Site of Resistance
In/visible: Coming into the Light
(Re)Making Blackness: Eye to Eye
In/visible: Coming into the Light
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.
Ralph Ellison-Invisible Man (Ellison, 3)
For most of our history in the modern world, the representation of black people has not been in our own hands. Accustomed to distorted messages given to us through the institutions of westernized culture, we often believe and repeat those images that offend and hurt us. People of African descent continue to struggle with the paradox of black beauty defined for us by a Western gaze. Throughout the history of Western art, ideals of human strength and beauty have been represented by the nude figure. But that nude figure has been almost exclusively white. Both Michael Chambers and Buseje Bailey present critiques of this central motif in art history by focusing on the black nude figure. For this purpose, Chambers uses models with strong, beautiful, "ideal" bodies, while Bailey uses her own less-than-perfect but very real body.
The photographic work of Michael Chambers reverses stereotypical images of black beauty. Chambers' elegant prints often borrow the strategies of high fashion photography to emphasize the power and beauty of the nude black body. Extremely stylized and sensual, Chambers' expressive imagery has provoked controversy partly because he presents the nude black body, which has been historically associated with shame. During the era of slavery, black people were not allowed control over their own bodies, especially with regard to their sexuality, resulting in a range of demeaning associations, such as moral defiency and sexual deviance, that persist to the present day. Whether self-imposed pr societally contrived, restrictions continue against the uncomplicated enjoyment and expression of black sexuality. Because Chambers is equally interested in issues of gender bias and sexual choice, his images of black people are complex and occasionally sexually ambiguous. However, by deliberately choosing darker skinned models with strong bodies and features, Chambers subverts the negative signifier of blackness and celebrates the power and beauty of the black body and its ability to survive.
Chambers' earlier work focused on inserting the black body into the northern landscape, where it is considered to be out of place. Cold, northern and white, Canada seems inimical to blackness, despite over 400 years of black presence here. Chambers states that the black form has been isolated, ridiculed, and symbolically beheaded in this country. He often shows the male form as an ambiguous figure, sometimes appearing to be headless, but whose physical presence as a body is sculpted and strong, as in Boulder and Twirl. He tends to use black on black in his compositions, illuminating his subjects against black backdrops, highlighting the play of light on the dark skin of his models. Occasionally he will also use props, such as white, wiry straw, which, when it obscures the body (particularly the head, eyes, or neck), references white standards of classification and containment. Of his position Chambers says:
My intentions are to celebrate the human spirit and the power for survival, or the need for survival… I'm an artist and I'm speaking for myself. I'm not speaking for the entire black community. I'm proud to be part of this community, but I cannot represent everyone. The only person I can represent is myself is myself - and as an artist, I am digging in my soul to express what I'm feeling…the subject might be black, and might be nude, but it's really the energy of the image that I'm putting out that people hopefully communicate with."
More than a mere celebration of beauty, Chambers' black and white photographs also present images in which black cultural memory is physically inscribed in the body. In the work Bullseye, the black male body is presented from behind, with concentric circles of a bulls eye target branded into the back of his shaved head. In many of Chambers' early works the subjects' eyes are obscured, or their gaze is averted, reflecting historic power relations. Reduced to the machinery of bodily physical labour, blacks learned that there were fatal consequences to looking the oppressor in the eye.
In Chambers most recent images (using coloured gum-bichromate prints), the black body presents an assertive pose. Not only are the subjects, a black man and woman, named, but their gaze is no longer obscured. Orla I is self-assured in her stance and direct gaze. Her dark skin, elongated neck and shorn hair speak of a distinct African beauty that does not pander to standards of Western beauty. In Alton II, there is an allusion to a Christ figure, however, his defiant gaze speaks of triumph and survival.
Gomo George's sculptural installations also deal with the struggle over representation and recognition of the black body in relation to the "rest of the world". Taste was inspired by the controversy that erupted in 1996 when a black Caribbean-born woman won the "Miss Italy" beauty pageant. Denny Mendez, the reigning Miss Italy for 1996, is from the Dominican Republic, but has lived in Italy for many years and is a naturalized Italian citizen. She was not considered to be a "real" representative of Italian beauty. At the heart of the debate was the fact that Italy was changing from a relatively homogenous society to a multiethnic country. Taste includes seven "African mask" images positioned above black circles painted directly on the gallery wall. Inscribed in graphite below the circles the text reads "Call I Beauty", challenging the audience to question their own fixed notions of taste, not only in physical beauty but also in artistic canons. Arranged in a semi-circle on the floor are eleven poles each topped with a mouth and a protruding tongue that may be read as a sign of disgust, or as a reference to the sexualisation and fetishizing of the black body.
George, who grew up in the capitial city of Roseau in Dominica, emigrated to Canada in 1975. He says about this work: "My involvement with art, particularly African art, and the study of it, saw distinct parallels between the view of African art in the art world and the reaction that this beauty queen was getting in the context of the international competition. So I was looking at that and how the performance of the beauty queen related to the performance of the artist."
The artist, who is Rastafarian, is particularly interested in the relationships of acceptance and rejection within the transition from immigrant to citizen. Taste is part of George's series called Stories and Iyahlogues: Visual Memories, History and Identity. The term Iyah, when used in conversation, imparts the message that a connection exists between the speaker and the listener, relating to the tradition of call and response in African story form. In Names of African people I Know, George deals with the experience of being a member of the black diaspora and struggling for community and belonging. His work recognizes the ambiguous experience of being simultaneously African, Caribbean, and Canadian. The black body within the diaspora is represented by a series of anthropomorphic figures constructed from common materials: felt, wood, carved avocado seeds, shoe polish and bed springs. They are arranged in a procession, clearly asserting their presence as a group. At a distance they all look alike, but on closer inspection, individual characteristics appear, challenging the idea of a homogenous black "community" where each person is interchangeable. In this work, George also addresses the importance of affirming identity through naming. Affixed to each sculpture is an individual name, some distinctly African, others recognized as European, all names of friends and relatives of the artist (who chose to replace his given name of Franklyn with Gomo, which is a form of Jomo, as in Jomo Kenyatta). Incorporating the processes and traditions of African art-making into his contemporary Canadian practice, George transforms the materials of daily life into objects ofsignificance and reverence.
"Deep Black, Ashy Black, Pale Black, Jet Black, Pitch Black, Dead Black, Blue Black, Purple Black, Chocolate-Brown, Coffee, Sealskin-Brown, Deep Brown, Honey Brown, Red Brown, Deep Yella Brown, Chocolate, High-Brown, Low-Brown, Velvet Brown, Bronze, Gingerbread, Light Brown, Tan, Olive, Copper, Pink, Banana, Cream, Orange, High Yalla, Lemon, Oh, and Yeah Caramel."
Taken from text of Colored People, Carrie Mae Weems (Kirsh,16)
The history of black people is plural and diverse; its presence as an African diaspora derived from many cultures and ethnicities. Though there is no actual concept of authentic blackness, the idea of "mixed" race implies an otherness that encourages discriminatory practices based on skin colour. Variation has given black people a wealth of multiplicities in skin tone and hue, however (at least in North American or Western context) no matter how little"black" blood is in someone's genetic makeup, that person is generally considered black, according to colonial systems of classification. The word "miscegenation", or the mixing of races, was invented to describe a kind of contamination of the purity of the "white" race mixed with "black" blood. It gave birth to the "one drop" theory of racial identity, which was devised to protect the white gene pool.
Labels were also contrived to identify specific ratios of black blood to white, such as quadroon (1/4 black) and octoroon (1/8 black). One of the consequences of such a hierarchy is a crisis of consciousness that has caused some black people to discriminate against themselves in terms of skin tone - "light skin" being closer to white and therefore better.
Rebecca Fisk often uses her own childhood image and personal childhood memories of discrimination as the subject of her work. Oftentimes, she combines this imagery with text, highlighting how racist language can hurt and offend. She might deliberately insert the racist names she was called as a child growing up in small town Nova Scotia, in order to reclaim and subvert those words on her own terms as an adult. Her most recent work evokes a twentieth-century consciousness of miscegenation. confessions of an invisible sister… presents twelve digital prints of the artist's face photo-transferred onto canvas and covered with different gradients of "flesh-toned" pantyhose, beginning with white on one end, and black on the other, and various shades of browns in between. Fisks' image, which is taken from a grade seven school picture, reflects a point in the artist's life when she was trying to find her identity, transforming from child to woman. Feeling restricted and awkward in her body already, she was further "othered" as one of very few black children in her community, searching for racial affirmation - a child of so-called "mixed" race adopted into a white family. The serial repetition of the portraits suggests the influence of Andy Warhol's repeated celebrity images; however, Fisk relates more to the photographic work of black American photographer Carrie Mae Weems, an artist who Fisk admires for her own practice of subverting the conventions of documentary photography for political ends.
Fisk's work refers to the notion of invisibility and the lack of black imagery and presence in contemporary life. She is invisible by virtue of how others react to her as a black person. In her installation, nobody knows my name, her physical body is referred to but is absent. Composed of painted recycled cardboard boxes stacked into a pyramid, the work echoes the hierarchal structure of colourism, with its black boxes on bottom and white on top and various shades of brown in between. The solid pyramidal structure alludes to the rigidity of the implied social structure of colourism. On another level, the Egyptian pyramids, have been noted as among the oldest and most sophisticated structures in civilization, indicating, especially within Afrocentric thought, that African culture forms the basis for all civilization. Unlike the rigidity of stone structures, Fisk's cardboard box pyramid and its metaphoric hierarchies are capable of being dismantled and reconfigured (in a similar way to that in which notions of cultural identity and ethnicity are currently being re-defined.)
A black child was approached by a white child who rubbed his dark skin with her fingers and asked: "But how do you ever get clean?
Buseje Bailey's video, Blood begins in a wash of vibrant red, and elevates in visceral intensity as the camera slowly focuses in on the face of the artist herself who looks to be in an ambiguous state of ecstasy or pain, eyes closed, mouth open. On close inspection, we realize she is showering. Water falls over her body and its dull roar contributes to the cumulative emotive effect, as, arms raised, she begins to scrub away at her hair. The camera's eye scrutinizes her, moving closer, exposing the vulnerability of her body. What is she trying to wash away in that mad rage? This is one of the questions provoked by Bailey's projected image of this intense and personal experience of the body. The notion of black blood as a contamination is opposed by the idea of "blood" as a positive symbol and term of solidarity.
Bailey challenges stereotypes of women of African descent constructed by colonial and neo-colonial discourses. Her work helps to redefine the parameters of representation for the black female body and affirms the presence of black female subjects in contemporary society as complex and always changing. Body Politics deals with the artist's quest to place herself as an African-Jamaican-Canadian female artist within the discourse of mainstream institutional art practice. In this multi-slide installation, Bailey explores her own body as the site of this discourse and articulates her frustration with the academic debates that surround discussions of race and inclusion. Quoting from third-world writers, black feminist works and other ideologies of "difference", Bailey projects text fragments containing words such as "afrocentric" and "epistemological"onto her body. These images are combined with family photographs and other photographs of herself in order to recreate her own sense of personal history and memory. She says that in this work:
"I have exposed the nature of my 'being' and the nature of my practice in order to investigate and reconstruct myself in a tangible way - historically, racially... As an individual who is aware of art criticism, art theory and art history, the rhetoric of cultural politics has not helped me to effect changes in my life. As a matter of fact, I find the attempt to address cultural politics in the Eurocentric art community remains in the conceptual realm. I find the discourse fracturing. It ignores me as a living, breathing, creative and productive artist working today. There is very little connection between that rhetoric within the comfortable world of the Eurocentric power structure, and the politics of colour; all of which is used to portray me in a negative way--an outsider. Once the image of difference is constructed, convention has it that the sides debate from text to text, not face to face."
Within the academy, issues of race and gender have focused around the black woman as a principle signifier. Black feminist bell hooks calls the contemporary version of this pre-occupation "the commodification of Otherness", or "eating the Other" (hooks, 23). Mass culture, hooks argues, produces and perpetuates the commodification of otherness through the exploitation of the black female body. It has been the task of black women to transform this objectification, to become the subjects commenting on the meaning of the object, or to become the subject rejecting the object and revealing the real experience of being. Body Politics is rich with personal historical references related to Bailey's own sense of place as an immigrant living in a country where she has been further "othered" by race. It signifies the racialised body as a cultural text in its own right: its surface is inscribed with the histories of various racially charged confrontations and negotiations. Bailey's physical features become the anchors by which racial ideas are fastened onto individual bodies.
(Re)Making Blackness: Eye to Eye
Many of the artists in this exhibition also employ the strategies of autobiography and self-portraiture, a common element in work by black Canadian artists. They use their own image and body, as do Fisk and Bailey, or reference their own experience of self, as do Chan and George. Chambers inserts his presence as an artist consciously celebrating his own perception of beauty and strength. Until recently, Chrystal Clements made work that addressed her personal relationship to family, and the role of mother within the black family. Influenced by her upbringing in the rural black community of Gibson Woods, Nova Scotia, Clements developed a unique visual language using an intricate system of icons and symbols, derived from irons, aprons and houses, and common domestic materials, such as rust, coffee and tea. They worked together to suggest the cycles of repetition and recycling arising from generationally imparted knowledge. This has roots in the African traditions of storytelling. Recycling is another strategy employed by artists in this exhibition. (Lucie Chan recycles previous works by incorporating them in new installations, while George and Fisk recycle common materials giving them new connotations in their installations and assemblages.)
More recently, Clements' concerns have moved to articulating the position of the black body in North American society. In Visual Reality #1 and Visual Reality #2, the artist presents two sets of eyeglasses on separate shelves. Both shelves read "TRY THIS ON FOR SIZE" and viewers are invited to do so. One set of glasses is painted white, the other black, and the audience is invited to experience the "other" by obscuring their visual senses in this direct and obvious manner. Though we cannot know what is it like to experience another culture in this fashion, it does provoke thought about separation of viewpoints. Both positions are unclear: one cannot really see out of either set of spectacles.
In Push and On the Street, Clements comments on the endemic fear of the black body. In Push, the black body is symbolized by a series of a black circles painted on wood. Here, the artist has deliberately dragged the paint to one side so that the thickness of the paint rests on the outskirts of the circle, reflecting a marginalized position. On the Street alludes to the white fear of the black body, particularly the black male body, as a dangerous and threatening presence to be avoided. This is signified by abstracting and reducing the black figure to a series of distorted rusted "faces" seeminlgy shaped from twists of barbed wire. This work also comments on the condition of the black body, trying to assert a presence from a position of pain, separation and distorted perception. It echoes the previously quoted words of Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man- "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me" (Ellison, 3)
Black American scholar W.E.B DuBois compares the awareness of being black to being born with a veil. outside world, and the world within the veil is perceived very differently from that world without This veil not only precludes honest communication between blacks and whites; it also forces blacks to live in two worlds in order to survive. Whites need not understand or live in the black world in order to thrive. But blacks must grapple with the painful "double-consciousness". Du Bois notes
The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism
Several works in this exhibition explore notions of invisibility and veiled sight. The titles of Rebecca Fisk's works - confessions of an invisible sister... and nobody knows my name - refer directly to the struggle to become visible and to have a distinct identity. In her untitled installation, Lucie Chan creates huge, lace-like curtains (or veils) out of recycled parts of previous work, cut up into small shapes and reassembled. In Visual Reality #1 and #2, Chrystal Clements presents two sets of eyeglasses, one "black" and one "white", both of which obscure the wearer's vision, so that only vague shapes and blurred images may be discerned. While these artworks can act as metaphors for lived experiences in relation to identity and visibility, they may also refer to the often frustrated desire to confront and examine issues of racism in a clear manner.
Elements of survival and presence are also evident in the figurative work of Lucie Chan. Drawing is her preferred medium, and her primary subjects are black people, most of whom are drawn from memory and imagination. What gives these figures their interesting presence is their larger than life scale and their intricate surfaces and spaces. Chan cuts them out of large paper sheets and creates drawing installations where oversize figures and forms are not confined to the space of their frame or medium, but are overlapped and pieced together. The worked surfaces are sometimes sparse and shadowy, other times dark and laboured, giving the drawings a sculptural quality.
In a recent installation (mek back, shakey baby, mek back) Chan presented the figures of babies and young children dressed in what she refers to as "suggestive traces of danger control" - paraphernalia such as arm and knee pads and bandages. Boxing gloves, scissors, soothers, baby bottles, flashlights and other tools are interspersed within the space, suggesting reparation, covering up, and protection as well as risk and restraint. The works seem to allude to the fact that many of the more difficult experiences of racism and awareness of racial difference come in childhood.
In her installation for this exhibition, Chan has recycled elements from her previous work, cut them up into small shapes-leaves, hands, eyeglasses-and reassembled them into huge lace-like curtains. Behind the curtains one can discern human figures, but their identities and meanings are obscured.
Chan is not set on locating her work in any one cultural milieu; she is conscious of how her work relates to racial politics but deliberately avoids a fixed position by claiming and asserting undefined territory. She seems to claim a space beyond identity issues, improvising a space where contradictory desires and memories intersect. It could stand as a metaphor for the ambiguous position of contemporary artists of the black diaspora, defining themselves against and within the mainstream culture.
Fade to Black: Moving Forward, Looking B(l)ack
"Race" is a dying category; Whiteness, and the Blackness it makes for itself, is dying too. We will seize the day and make a new Blackness. Our new Blackness acknowledges the way each of us live beyond the Black community. I am a multitude of names, masks, community memberships. Denying this is tyranny - "race" is not my only state... I make new communities all the time, which does not make me a "multiculturalist" or a "cultural Mulatto" - it makes me a human being in the world... I am about making Blackness - the next step is to create a new and compelling politics to push the discourse forward.
Joe Woods as quoted in Victor Anderson's
Beyond Ontological Blackness (Anderson, 143)
Reclaiming the reality of multiple black experiences and imagery enables us to develop diverse strategies for visibility, affirmation and solidarity. By redefining and assuming cultural responsibility for ourselves, we hope to articulate a clearer understanding of our reality for others as well.
I share writer's M. Nourbese Philip's view that cultural racism becomes more blatant and pervasive during periods when people of colour are assertively claiming their rights. Although some insist that racism will never end, there will continue to be those, positioned as "black" in this time and space, who are determined to reclaim their own sense of identity for themselves, and who will continue to fight for the power to decide what we are called, what we call ourselves, how we present ourselves and how we are represented. This continual process of self-making and self-inventing is made possible by overcoming a colonized body, mind and soul. Thinking less exclusively about the meaning of "blackness" and more inclusively about what is meant by being a global citizen, we can defy stereotypical notions that all "black experience" has an essential nature. In response, it is hoped that the multiple and diverse portrayals of our traditions and aesthetics will continue to be recognized, inspiring new thought and new and positive ways of being and seeing "blackness".
Pamela Edmonds
Halifax 2001
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