David A. Bailey, 'Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire'
In: Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. Edited by Ragnarr Farr. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts in association with the Institute of international Visual Arts, 1995, pp. 57-81.
Look a Negro! ... Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened! ... I could no longer laugh, because I already knew there were legends, stories, history and above all historicity...Then, assailed at various points, the corporal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema ... it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person ... I was responsible for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. [1]
Frantz Fanon
In these lines extracted from a passage in The Fact of Blackness, the most emotionally expressive essay in Black Skin White Masks, Fanon records a revelatory encounter with constructs and representations of the black body in twentieth century European-based culture, in a form of writing which is at once political, psychoanalysis and political philosophy, exploring voyeurism - 'Look a Negro!... Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened! ...' ideology - 'I already knew there were legends, stories, history and above all historicity...', and identification - 'it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person ...' to convey a seemingly overpowering burden of representations - 'I was responsible for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.'
Throughout Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon's most psychoanalytically based work, his investigation of the complex, intersecting, symbolic and semantic spaces which signify racial and sexual difference marks an acute awareness of the changed conditions of ideological struggle around race and ethnicity in the postwar period:
In its earlier formations, during the periods of slavery, colonialism imperialism, the black/white metaphor at the centre of racist ideologies was characterised by its relative stability and was naturalised by the hegemony of a Eurocentric world-system. In the modern period, by contrast, its transcendental signified was de-biologised, as it were, and the fixity of the primordial racial metaphor was thrown into a state of dialectical flux. It was in this context that the metaphorical character of 'race' was recognised in the human and social sciences. It was precisely because of the recognition of the meaningless of race that the signifier itself became the site for the making and remaking of meanings. [2]
In the post-holocaust, postwar environment of semantic, symbolic and nationalistic unfixity, Fanon's writing, striving to analyse, disrupt, and transcend the binary logics of subordination inscribed in the languages and philosophies of European hegemony, addresses the site of racial signification and, in the enunciative moment of interrogation, intervenes in the flow of a multi-accentual range of voices and meanings, opening up, in these interrogative, polyvocal, spaces of signification, the possibility of an alternative discourse, a re-inscription and re-location of cultural identity and agency. [3]
In a reading of Fanon's contemporary significance to both multicultural politics and postmodernist art practice, Homi Bhabha describes
... the ambivalence and liminality enacted in the enunciative present of human articulation that results in the signs and symbols of cultural difference being conjugated (not conjoined or complemented) through the interactive temporality of signification. This produces that object of contemporary, postmodern political desire, what [Stuart] Hall calls, 'arbitrary closure', like the signifier. But this arbitrary closure is also the cultural space for opening up new forms of agency and identification that confuse historical temporalities, confound sententious, continuist meanings, traumatise tradition, and may even render communities contingent: The African drumbeat syncopating heterogeneous American postmodernism, the arbitrary, but strategic logic of politics, the material space of the body - these moments contest the linearity of pedagogy and the sententiousness of rational agency. [4]
Kobena Mercer's essay in this catalogue examines the polyvocal and hybrid nature of contemporary work around the sites of black identification, whether across geographies of transcultural diaspora or of the human body, and the ways in which recent art practice has brought into the field of vision transgressive concepts of memory, fantasy and desire, expressed in multi-accentual visually based works which echo and reformulate Fanon's multi-accentuality in the context of the 90s. Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire investigates contemporary strategies of representation through a diverse range of disciplines, genres and media, often transgressing the sententiousness of European aesthetic tradition, in work by UK and US based artists from diverse diasporic and cultural positions. Although there are many readings which can emerge from encountering their work, the artists who have been invited and commissioned for this project were approached through an interest in the way their practice addresses these spaces of polyvocality, where the possibility of new forms of cultural agency can begin to emerge, offering strategies of cultural resistance against the closure of discursive thought and interpretation that refuses to acknowledge the racial, sexual and cultural diversity which is the basis of contemporary urban communities.
Films such as Territories (1984), Looking for Langston (1989), The Attendant (1992) and The Darker Side of Black (1994), exploring contemporary inter-racial themes of male sexuality mediated by a re-mixing and re-invention of genres, from cultural history to documentary to fantasy, have placed London-based artist Isaac Julien as one of the most innovative black filmmakers in this area of debate. In the structures and narratives of these works Julien 'interrogates the way in which power enters into looking at relations across the symbolic black/white divide of racial identity.' [5] Central to Julien's work is the way in which these complex ideas become expressed through cinematic media and genres, enabling him to construct various forms of black male subjectivity through a series of mise en scènes, which are centred on the construction of the look. In the film The Attendant (1992) this scenario is addressed in the space of a gallery, where the symbolic dividing line between people looking at art and people looking at each other becomes blurred land confused within a spectacle of fantasy, desire and memory. The film is about a black man who works as an attendant in London's Royal Academy of Arts and the realm of his fantasies, evoked by the nineteenth century history paintings of which he is custodian. What makes this narrative so compelling is its navigation of the complex voyeuristic exchanges of looking and watching, mapping homoerotic desire, with a digital blend of Cocteau and Genet, across landscapes of race and sado-masochism in the Piccadilly galleries, with Purcell's Dido and Aeneas played at half speed as soundtrack.
This filmic navigation of the complex exchanges of looking and watching is developed in Julien's most recent film titled That Rush! (1995) examining the genre of US TV talk shows. That Rush! is about the rightwing TV host Rush Limbaugh (allegedly single-handedly responsible for the popular base of the latest aggressive breed of white male Republicanism) whose talk shows consist of heavy-handed satirisation addressed at affirmative action and other equality issues, with often literally abusive verbal snipes at those who represent community based campaigns against sexism, racism, government inaction, homophobia, etc. In a series of short edited sequences, Julien reproduces television footage of Limbaugh on his show, which is interjected by a series of comments written and performed by Patricia Williams, who analyses the sinister social and political meaning of Limbaugh's performances and views, arriving at conclusions which are both disturbing and ironic.
Visual discourses surrounding post-colonial identity, inter-racial relationships, the body and masquerade are explored by American artist Lyle Ashton Harris through the photographic genre of self portraiture, enabling him to challenge the way that others perceive him. This continues his ten-year critical investigation of the black body, beauty, ambivalence, and the matrix of desire. In Harris's word, 'I see myself involved in a project of resuscitation - giving life back to the black body.' In the series of photographs titled Reflection of a Past Life Through Glass, 1987-1988, Harris 'develops a post-essentialist conception of black selfhood', [6] by subverting the black performing minstrel stereotype, and by playing on the paradoxical relationship between identity and representation through the use of various forms of artifice - make-up, wigs, the nuances of gesture and posturing. Through a sequence of stark black and white photographs of black faces painted white, 'Harris not only parodies the existential anguish of inauthenticity that remains unsaid, and unspeakable, in the discourse of black cultural nationalism (by making literal Fanon's metaphor of 'black skin, white mask') but camps up the categories of race and gender identity in sexual politics by positing a version of black masculine identity that mimics Judy Garland and a hundred other (white) feminine icons of metropolitan gay male sensibility.' [7]
In The Good Life, 1994, Harris draws from an extensive archive spanning several decades of family photographs taken by his grandfather, Albert Sydney Johnson Jr., which he combines with a series of unique large-format polaroid portraits of himself, his family and friends positioned against a velvet backdrops in the red, green and black colours of Marcus Garvey's UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) flag. In this body of work, Harris expands upon his notion of 'critical autobiography' to include family and friends, and by inference broadening the definition of family. Seductively constructed images such as Touissant L'Ouverture, Venus Hottentot 2000, and Saint Michael Stewart represent a subversive meditation on disguise and disclosure with a layering of historical identities that disarms viewers, meeting their gaze so as to resist conventional projections. The Good Life installation combines these different photographic genres, using as a backdrop within the frame the same political colours that are painted on the walls of the gallery. The subjects of the portraits and the space by which they are held intertextually mirror each other in a statement about changes in the African-American self image.
Isaac Julien and Lyle Ashton Harris offer a contemporary re-working and critique of Fanon's psychoanalytic position, which is crucial to the understanding of the work of young London based artist Steve McQueen. Entering into a domain of fantasy with an invitational, rather than confrontational mode of address, to draw the viewer into a space which problematises simplistic and reductive concepts of identity [8] McQueen frames his work within a sophisticated installation environment incorporating muted sounds, disorienting camera angles and other effects, to create an environment of confused spectacle for the viewer, in which ambiguity abounds.
Identification, voyeurism and spectacle are explored in McQueen's ten minute black and white film installation Bear (1983) in which a film of two naked black men, engaged in physical conflict, is projected into a darkened space. At first glance, one my be reminded of the nude wrestling scene between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Ken Russell's film Women in Love (1969) but on further looking, there is a scene of a much more complex and sophisticated narrative evolving in this piece. The two men appear to be fighting but there is also a sense of tease and playfulness between them which seems orchestrated for the spectator and reminiscent of Barthes' analysis of the construction of wrestling as spectacle. The muted sound, and the way the film is projected over a highly polished floor, add to the ambiguity and seduction of the piece. Furthermore, the sequence of edited camera positions shifting from mid-shot to close-up to two-aperture to underneath-position is linked to the film's key cinematic theme, the motif of the direct-look. The black subject looks back, turning the question of who has the right to look back onto the audience, which has to ask itself who or what it is looking for.
Voyeurism, identification and spectacle return in McQueen's new film installation Five Easy Pieces, 1995. McQueen constructs a disparate iconography using a series of independent set pieces in black and white: a tightrope walker, a group of hula-hooping men, a man urinating, and an unsettling passage in colour of rapidly passing eyes. McQueen has problematised the position of the viewer by frequently using overhead shots which place the spectator in a submissive position in relation to the image. The film is remarkable for its mute poise and elegance combined with a rigorously formal approach, and a brooding, mysterious tension. This tension is created at the expense of the viewer: a combination of the emphasis upon physicality - which stops short of any sexually explicit narrative, and the disarming camera angles which challenge traditional subject/object relations. In Five Easy Pieces McQueen presents a series of enigmatic images which function as a meditation on cinematic technique, sexuality and power.
In the work of Julien, Harris and McQueen we encounter reverberations of Fanon's analysis of black male subjectivity, through the aperture of hybrid, postmodern notions of diversity within visual culture. London based artist Sonia Boyce critically explores what has been described as diaspora aesthetics, in work which progressively re-defines relationships of national and personal identity in a British context. Boyce examines the multiplicity of her own identities as a black woman who is British, Caribbean and European, from a viewpoint which is not reducible to being 'representative' of these voices through imposed interpretations.
Sonia Boyce's artistic practice has used a range of different media to involve audience participation in this exploration. In the exhibition The Invisible City (1990) an interactive photo-booth was created, in Photovideo (1991) digital photography, hair and video were used, in Do You Want To Touch (1993) a range of hairpieces were displayed and in the Bank show (1994) hair and designed wallpaper were used. Throughout these installation pieces hair is a key signifier in her work. In the installation Do You Want To Touch (1993) various types of hair were placed on view in the public domain as spectacle, to be handled and viewed on plinths and glass cases, whilst in exhibitions such as Photovideo and the Bank show, different textures of hair were displaced onto domestic objects, such as a settee covered in straight hair and a bed decked with a mass of afro wigs like a duvet. Boyce's new work develops further the encounters of Do You Want To Touch and the Bank show. In both of these installations hair, and its presence in relationship with wallpaper designed by the artist, were employed as fetishistic objects to confuse emotional reactions in the viewer. In Do You Want To Touch the spectacle of a range of black 'creepy crawly afro hair' which dominated the space created a claustrophophic reaction to the work, with a tension between wanting to touch and wanting to look. This was developed further in the Bank show where the afro hair on the bed was surrounded by walls papered with images of the artist clapping, suggesting perhaps celebration or a more sinister interpretation. In her project for Mirage, Boyce uses photography to conjure the moment of the 'sight' of intimacy between a black and white couple. A huge billboard publicly records the moment of their kiss, allowing Boyce to create an arena for the spectacle of miscegenation, in which the seductiveness of the image competes with its status as an entrenched taboo.
Running through the work of these artists the interplay between readings of cultural identity and visual practices of representation takes place against the implicit background of the dense multicultural cityscapes of contemporary metropolitan culture. Marc Latamie, based now in New York, but born a black citizen of Fanon's birthplace, Martinique, traces a different line through the visual, psychic and political legacy of colonialism. Latamie's work interrogates his island heritage, particularly plantation life represented by French rule, the sugar-cane industry and the black wooden shacks which represented the homes of so many of Martinique's people on the plantations.
Sugar, the axis of colonial Martinique's world, becomes Latamie's aesthetic medium. It refers to a poetic story of Latamie's childhood when he remembers boats arriving to port bringing with them a distinctive sweet/savoury aroma emanating from the mixed cargo of red cod fish and sugar. These imported goods entered the local grocer's shops where the tasting of grains of brown sugar became a special ritual introducing children to this unique combination of smells that Latamie reworks through what he describes as their ' aesthetic' values. In the work Allibaba (1994) white refined sugar is meticulously overlaid on the figurations of an oriental carpet, while in Sargasses (1994) a tall rectangular metal skeleton structure rises out of white sugar dunes. Through the evocative connotations of the sugar and other materials, one can encounter in these works some of the sensations and emotions Latamie experienced as a child.
Latamie's new installation The Factory (1995), recreates an early Antillean plantation worker's hut which contains elements connoting Martinique's history and industry: a shelf with bottles of sugar and rum, and an impressionistic video of a field of sugar cane flowers. Nearby, a series of photographs document the existing sugar factory in Fanon's birthplace, Trinité. Sugar is the central presence as in earlier works, but now situated within a disorientingly hybrid environment where any ethnographic readings the viewer may have are subverted and questioned.
Like Julien, Latamie and Black Audio Film Collective, Renée Green approaches her work intellectually, informed by a rigorous research method based on a variety of sources from literature and history (particularly art, popular culture and institutional histories) to anthropology. Earlier works have consisted of skilful reversals of cultural imperialisms through parody - the artist becomes anthropologist, fact-finder, traveller, explorer, collector and classifier of 'whitophilia', a reversal of negrophilia. In Bequest (1991-1992), Green created an installation within the permanent collection of the Worcester Art Museum. Clapperboard screens redolent of the prevailing architectural style of New England were overlaid with texts by Melville or Hawthorne that have contributed to the American myth, as well as texts that reveal the parallel and obscured histories of African-Americans.
Green's more recent work has focused less upon simple inversions of power and influence and more on the complex and sometimes hidden structures of cross-cultural exchange. Using a variety of media, from new technology to video and sound as well as found objects and photography she explores how ideas are transmitted between people and from location to location. In Import/Export Funk Office (1992), Green created an archive that documented the trade of ideas and language between African-American and German culture from the 1960s to the present day. The bulk of the material was gathered as a result of the shadowing by Green of a particular German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen, and involved the recording by Green of Diederichsen's encounters with African diasporic culture in Cologne, New York and Los Angeles. The result is a rich mixture of anything from hip-hop music to slang, presented in the moment of translation from one context to another, and recuperating inter-cultural fertilizations often ignored by conventional mappings of influence.
The mixed media work Revue (1990), re-presented in Mirage, continues Green's investigative approach, by focusing on two women who, both connected with Paris but at difficult times, were the object of white fears and fantasies. The Hottentot Venus was in fact a young African woman, Saartje Bartmann, whose physique led her to be displayed and exhibited as an object of 'scientific' and circus-like entertainment around Europe. Her preserved naked body was, until comparatively recently, on display in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. Green links the Hottentot Venus through time with her successor Josephine Baker, the renowned African-American cabaret diva of the first half of this century. Green reproduces contemporary sources by white critics who represent Baker as an exotic, even sub-human or animalistic being. Green's work exposes the desires and fantasies that a white audience project onto Baker, but she also give space for Baker to 'reply' by providing her own remarks. The image of Baker's body is repeated several times, becoming alphabetised and more hieratic in the process. Using contradictory texts, and sounds, Green avoids the pitfalls of privileging the visual construction of the female body over any other. Finally, by using small plastic models of native African animals, Green links the exploration, classification and ultimately, commodification of the 'dark continent' as a foreign territory for the West, with the historical classification, construction and consumption of the beings and bodies of women of African descent.
In the work of Eddie George and Trevor Mathison of Black Audio Film Collective, a concern with investigating and disrupting white colonial constructions of black identity is explored through the medium of sound. Their work derives from a belief in the importance and urgency of establishing a contemporary black film culture and hence in a progressive audio-visual culture with distinctive black voices, audible presences. As members of the collective they have collaborated on film projects such as Handsworth Songs (1987), Twilight City (1989) and Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1992).
Since 1983 they have been working on an examination of the aesthetics of imperialist thought and vision, of which the tape/slide works Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality (together titled Expeditions) are the first two parts. Both of these works use sound as an innovative medium: in Signs of Empire, the sound design is a complex, cyclic, almost incantatory soundtrack, in Images of Nationality it is a haunting, almost biblical recitation of colonial narratives and expedition stories.
The Black Room, an installation piece commissioned for Mirage, investigates audible representations of racial terror, in both colonial and metropolitan settings. The piece takes as its starting point Fanon's Notes on a Dying Colonialism, completed just before his untimely death, in which he projected the 'wishes, hopes and speculations made for his beloved, Algeria' and 'the culmination of his corpus'. 'Has his beloved betrayed or honoured him?' they ask, suggesting that The Black Room provides a space in which this proposition can be addressed. In a series of spaces with subtly modulated degrees of darkness and ambient light combined with image and sound, there emerges an evocation of the 'faint bittersweet odour of a love mis-shaped through the exigencies of time and politics', a sensation the artists describe as 'the smell of disappointment'. Using sound, video, coloured light and natural materials - oil, salt, rice, sand, coco shells - the artists create the meditational atmosphere of a shrine. Each room reflects a different phase of Fanon's passing: from death, to transformation, and finally, to ascendance.
In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon analyses the different white connotations of words denoting blackness in European language systems, where black is repeatedly associated with evil and sin. This interrogation of the cultural meaning within written language inspires the work of US artist Glenn Ligon, whose evocative textually based painted surfaces bring issues of identification to centre stage. His work refer to a range of literary sources, daily newspapers, film dialogues and academic texts. Ligon re-works these textual fragments figuratively. As an integral process in his practice, Ligon makes an image of the text through stencilling it onto the surface of the work's material, placing this physical trace of his identity as maker, within the literary narrative.
Two distinct works have been selected for Mirage. Rumble Young Man Rumble, co-produced with Bryron Kim, is a white punchbag on the surface of which is stencilled the text of a monologue referring to white oppression spoken by Muhammad Ali in the 1977 film The Greatest. The iconic status of Ali, both world champion fighter and outspoken orator for African-American rights and Islamic values in the 70s, is transferred and re-inscribed onto a new form of iconic object, redolent with evocations of contemporary oppression and cultural resistance. The other works selected are the startling black and white text paintings of the Prisoner of Love series, whose point of origin is a quotation from Jean Genet, which is then intervened by the artist, quoting from other texts: White, a seminal essay interrogating whiteness by UK film theorist Richard Dyer, and How it Feels to be Colored Me, by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston.
Ligon selects a line, a paragraph or passage which is hand-stencilled and repeated again and again onto canvas. The process is intense and is repeated to such an extent that the surface of the textual image is blurred, smudged, disfigured. This constant repetition of phrases, lines and passages is mirrored in the repetitious stencil process which gives these words different meanings. In this sense Ligon exploits claims made by literary theorists and semiologists about the way language systems can be repositioned to yield different meanings according to who is speaking, where he or she is speaking from, and who is making the readings. As Ligon observes, this process reflects the way he becomes involved as an artist in obsessively re-reading the texts which are his sources.
The visual works in Mirage employ a diversity of artistic forms using heterogeneous elements: sugar, hair, video, film, photography, text, painting, wallpaper, architecture, sound, light, smell. The overall effect is an invitational mode of address to the viewer, an encounter with a range of sensations and experiences which complement each other, re-inscribing and relocating meanings in the process of their decipherment. Entering these contemporary 'Fanonian spaces' one is delivered 'into a place of radical uncertainty - a place where commonsense assumptions about the nature of identity are thrown into question.' [9]
[1] Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. Pluto Press, London, 1986. p. 112.
[2] Kobena Mercer. '1968: Periodising Politics and Identity.' in Cultural Studies. Routledge, New York and London, 1992. p. 430.
[3] See Homi K Bhabha. 'Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt' in Cultural Studies. Routledge. 1992.
[4] Homi K Bhabha. Ibid, 1992. pp. 58-59
[5] Kobena Mercer. 'Dark and Lovely: Notes on Black Gay Image.' in Bodies of Excess. Ten 8, vol. 2 no.1. Birmingham, 1991. Revised and reprinted in Kobena Mercer. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. Routledge New York and London, 1994.
[6] Kobena Mercer. lbid.
[7] Kobena Mercer. lbid.
[8] See Kobena Mercer (op.cit), where Keith Piper's distinction between an 'invitational' and a confrontational mode of address is applied to a reading of Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston.
[9] See Kobena Mercer's essay in the catalogue, p. 19.