Kobena Mercer 'Eros & Diaspora'
In: Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Market Place. Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 282-293 "Eros & Diaspora", Reading the Contemporary, London: inIVA, 1999, pp. 282-293
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Fani-Kayode outlined his artistic credo in 'Traces of Ecstasy', the 1988 essay that followed Black Male/White Male, his first published collection of photographs, brought out in 1987. [3] While many were beguiled by the multiple adjectives with which he sought to name his identity - a modern African artist, a metropolitan black gay man, a key figure in Black British photography - the irony is that Fani-Kayode's life and work were never about the comforts or securities of mere identity. His kaleidoscopic vision, filtering African and European elements through his camera's optic nerve, and his passionate pursuit of carnal visual pleasure, reveal instead a heightened encounter with the emotional reality of the flesh in which it is precisely the ego's ecstatic loss of identity that is celebrated. The body is transfigured in Fani-Kayode's pantheon of 'smallpox god's, transsexual priests and desirable black men in a state of sexual frenzy [4] to create a new, plural beauty out of what Wilson Harris would call 'the ruined fabric of the shattered human'.[5]
Born in a prominent Nigerian family in the prelude to political independence, Fani-Kayode grew up across three continents - Africa, Europe and America - during the three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s that saw the world transformed by the emergence of the postmodern and the postcolonial. His biography was thus shaped by the characteristic diasporic experiences of migration and dislocation, of trauma and separation, and of imaginative return. Looking at how his aesthetic developed out of his response to the events that shaped his life, we can see that sexuality was central to the discovery of his artistic roots in the realm of the sacred, for the joyful affirmation of his love for life, which flows throughout the work, is testimony to the redemptive powers of eros.
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The dynamic of rage and desire was central to Fani-Kasyode's vision, and formed the mainspring of his unique aesthetic. To perceive the connections between his different roles as a transcultural animateur, we need to see how this dynamic shaped his art of photographic transfiguration, in which the body becomes a site for translation and metaphor - transporting meanings across codes of racial, cultural and sexual difference; how the camera becomes both a lamp and a mirror - emitting light into the unknown and reflecting the transience of voluptuous flesh; and how the act of representation itself shifts from the moment of documentary truth to the alchemy of the photographic darkroom.
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To see how Fani-Kayode used the hybridity of his experience as a starting point for doing something new, we should locate his specific techniques of visual interculturation in the broader art-historical context of modernism and colonialism. Here, we encounter a triangular rather than dichotomous matrix, of whose labyrinthine twists and turns Fani-Kayode was all too well aware. At the apex of this triangular relationship lies the vexed question of the mask and the historical realities that are masked by the dominant narratives of modern art in its encounter with the 'primitive'. Picasso's discovery of the aesthetic wonders of traditional African masks, fetishes and other artifacts in the storerooms of the Trocadero museum is a commonplace, but from an African point of view, such an artifact epitomised mere traditionalism and it was rather the Western aesthetic of verisimilitude that inaugurated a break in African modernist consciousness.
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In place of the sharply defined subject/object dichotomies that we encounter in the scopophilic force of Robert Mapplethorpe's work, in which the black body is fetishised to ward off the threat of the ego's loss of control, in Fani-Kayode's phantasia the viewer's look is cruised, caressed and seduced in the masquerade by which the protection of the gods is requested. It is the representation of such an act of propitiation that recurs across his tableaux when the converging sightlines brought to bear on the body create the sensation of 'hovering' between two worlds. In this structure of feeling we can trace what Nathaniel Mackey would call a 'fugitive aesthetic', borne of a restlessness that refuses the illusion of certainty in its search for ontological renewal. [20] Fani-Kayode's conjuring of erotic fantasy and ancestral memory thus moves us into a place that is beyond psychology - because it de-territorialises the ego's boundaries - and into a place beyond good and evil, which is to say, a somewhere other than that circumscribed by Christianity.
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[3] Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Black Male/White Male (London: Gay Men's Press, 1987).
[4] Fani-Kayode, 'Traces of Ecstasy', Ten.8, vol. 2, no. 3 (Birmingham: 1988), p. 70
[5] Wilson Harris, quoted in Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966-1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1992), p. 174
[20] Nathaniel Mackey, 'Other: From Noun to Verb', Representations, no. 39 (Berkeley: Summer 1992).