Africaine: Candice Breitz Wangechi Mutu Tracey Rose Fatimah
Tuggar
Soraya Murray
Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Number 16/17, Fall/Winter
2002, pp. 88-93 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nka/summary/v016/16.murray.html
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CANDICE BREITZ . i
WANGECHIMUTU
TRACEY ROSE
FATIMAH
Journal of Contemporary African Art
homecoming of an off-camera character. Her face is bare except
for plain spectacles, and in contrast to the aforementioned
works, we see a woman effectively desexualized and normalized
into the mainstream expectation of someone in her position.
Lastly, Venus Baartman (2001) poses Rose as Eve archetype, nude
in a grassy knoll, poised as if startled to attention by a predator.
Caught in the moment of pre-capture, her body is robust and
she seems unaffected by her own nudity in the exposed setting.
The name of this work references Saartjie Baartman, the domestic slave who in the nineteenth century was paraded by her
owner as an oddity, for profit. The women of her people called
the Khoisan or "Hottentots," were considered anomalous in the
West for their distinctive, pronounced buttocks. South African
Baartman became known as the infamous "Hottentot Venus",
and was highly sought after as human curiosity, a freak. In her
life her body was displayed and studied; in her death she was dissected and her bones ultimately acquired by the Musee de
l'Homme in Paris.
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Candice Breitz, Ghost Series #5,1996, C-print, 27 x 40"
In these works, the very problematics of historicization, colonialism and tourism are enacted on the literal surface o f the
African female form. Anthropological portraits such as these,
while apparently documenting a fading way of life, in fact trap
and isolate the subject symbolically from their intended context
and environment.
Decontextualized, the native is readily
exploited and exoticized as a commodity on the basis o f her
image or physical shell. It is upon this remaining husk or sheath
which Western desire for the other may be projected. With these
works, Breitz appears to challenge ideologies of race on the
grounds o f a binary essentialism, while paradoxically locating
her visual discourse in the very same milieu. Included in the
exhibition were several postcards bearing surface alterations
made with "Tippex", as well a series of poster-sized C-prints.
While the larger images commanded attention due to the sheer
space needed to present them, the smaller works clearly carried
the greater impact by virtue of their understated poignancy. The
effect o f this protective erasure, while emotive in the markings
on the smaller works, dissipated in the large-scale works that
functioned visually as enlarged reproductions and lacked the
vitality or spontaneity of their originals. Easily overlooked, these
diminutive works bore both intensity o f sentiment and intimacy
of experience.
Tracey Rose presents four photographic works that act as
sexualized archetypes o f black femininity. Cicciolina (2001) features Rose as a dominatrix porn star caricature, sprawling on a
sport scar. Her heavy, cornstarch make-up and leather gear conjure images of drag queens and the trashy video quality o f
pornographic movies. The scene occurs in an urban setting,
with the spotty patches of grass looking as used up as the woman
herself. The title makes allusion to Italian porn queen and politician Cicciolina, famous in the art world for her marriage to Jeff
Koons and, more importantly, the graphic works Koons used her
body to create. In Lolita (2001) the oversized grill o f a shiny, red
fire truck, frames the figure o f a nightmarish rag-doll woman
with candy-apple red hair, frilly dress and crimson mary-janes.
Her eyes are painted on, open and staring. The frilly underskirt
she wears billows slightly in the breeze revealing white, cotton
panties, while she rams an absurdly large candy cane into her
mouth.
Tracey Rose's Mami (2001) depicts a middle-aged woman,
clearly a governess or housekeeper, as she eagerly greets the
90 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art
O f the four works, Rose's Mami bears the most potential for
multilayered meaning and ambiguity. Were it not for its didactic name, there would be a poignant slippage between the presumption that the woman pictured is the housekeeper o f the
sprawling mansion, and the possibility that she is in fact the
houseowner. Shot in various significant locations in the vicinity
o f Johannesburg, the pieces vacillate between narrative photography and performance documentation. The scale of the works,
the role-playing and the performative aspects inherent in the
construction o f such photographs cannot help but conjure
Candice Breitz, Ghost Series #6,1996, C-print, 2 7 x 4 0 "
Tracey Rose, Lolita, 2001, Lambda print Ed. 1 /6,47 x 47"
Cindy Sherman and her oeuvre. Unfortunately, this is not Rose's
strongest work. Her four photographs bear little of the virtuosity of Sherman's craft, nor do they transmit the intensity that
usually accompanies Rose's artistic practice.
The resultant
images are drearily unimaginative and anachronistic within the
discourse of black female self-imaging strategies.
Fatimah Tuggar utilizes imagery both personal and gleaned
from mass media to explore the inner workings of access to technology, what she calls "soft power." Each of her three wall-sized
works illustrates digitally constructed domestic spaces, which
exist only virtually and in their representation in the form of
inkjet prints. Tuggar digitally collages elements of photographs,
advertising, catalogs, film footage and popular magazines to fabricate a patchwork world that is both fanciful and visually flattened. Interesting are the disjunctive perspectival relationships
between objects depicted, the space they occupy and any figures
inhabiting the frame. In Tuggar's Bedroom (2001), a hut with a
thatched roof is seen from the interior. The bed seems fairly natural in its placement and angle, however a large television at the
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center of the composition seems to float eerily a few inches above
the floor. Decorative plaques cover the far wall, many of which
are not apparently of traditional African style. Upon careful
inspection, some of the plates appear to float forward or recess
into the wall due to their awkward placement and less than
seamless integration into the image.
The Cake People (2001) is Tuggar's most visually arresting
work, because of its uneasy interrelationship of placement, figure and objects. In the foreground a young black woman wears
a homemade fuchsia dress with frills at her shoulders and hem.
Smiling modestly, she presents a cake with an awkwardly obtuse
image of a thatched hut and African female form perched atop.
In the background are symbols of a domestic Western kitchen
including a tiled wall, utensils, pots, kettle, and disproportionately huge oven appliances. To her right, a layered cake is decorated as a patch of green land atop which rests a hut whose occupants have come out to stare curiously at the viewer. Images
begin to speak of globalization, transplantation, the permeable
membrane of culture and its effects on a domestic level. While
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Nka -91
Wangechi Mutu, Pin Up Series (detail), 2001,
watercolor and collage on paper, 10 x 13"
Wangechi Mutu, Pin Up Series (detail), 2001,
watercolor and collage on paper, 1 0 x 1 3 "
some of the more disrupting juxtapositions seem absurd or sur-
womanhood, particularly black womanhood, and then regurgi-
realistic, on further contemplation they seem no less fantastical
tated it in Technicolor. For better or for worse, it's all there: the
than the common presence of the "oriental" in domestic settings
hair products the collagen, the heels, the surgery, the weave, the
of the West.
liposuction, the madonna/whore complex. As with Breitz's pho-
By far the standout, Wangechi Mutu's Pin-Up
Series (2001)
tographs, these works locate the battlefront of identity on the
creates an emotional critical mass of references to art history,
surface o f the female body; only in this case, the battleground is
fashion motifs, issues o f race, class, beauty standards, mutilation,
ravaged and penetrated by the eye.
Western and African culture.
Twenty-four watercolors, each
In addition to the Pin-up
Series are Mutu's three large-scale
roughly the dimensions of a fashion magazine, are arranged on
collages entitled Soul on a Peg-Leg (2001), Riding with Death
the wall in a grid formation. Strangely reminiscent of children's
My S/eep(2001), and Queen Ugly (2001). Each of the three works
book illustrations, the collage and watercolor works contain sur-
features a central female character articulated in watercolor and
in
realistic, hellish female forms culled from the artist's darker
collage, drawing from visual codes that reference femininity, cul-
mental regions. Characters with absurdly huge lips twist their
ture, beauty standards and metamorphosis. In Soul on a Peg-Leg,
bodies to reveal reddened stumps where arms should be. Posed
Mutu presents a fantastical woman with mushrooms floating
for their absurd Kodak moments, the Frankenstein models'
against a grayish non-space of a background. She wears an elab-
mouths are agape, their skin mottled, their oversized hair
orate headdress of butterflies and abstracted African masks. In
straightened, some limbs are unaccounted for. One plays coy
the background one can vaguely identify a secondary figure with
with the viewer, one works the camera, another strides forward
banana skirt a la Josephine Baker. Riding with Death in My Sleep
with an unseemly monkey-child in tow.
is an appropriate central image as it is the most fully realized and
These small images
seem to have their own internal, hermetically sealed narratives.
multilayered vision of the three. A bald hybrid woman with bal-
They draw one in with their interplay of color, texture, and
looned, collagen lips crouches against a muddied background.
intensity, then blow you back with their ferocity and dystopian
Her pinkish head contrasts with her body, which is as the feath-
vision.
ers of an exotic multicolored bird. The ground on which she
Alternately illustrative and confounding, Mutu's conceptual-
rests sprouts something disconcerting, which one eventually
ization is peppered with references to everything from Romare
comes to identify as leathery, mushrooms comprised of porno-
Bearden and the automatous stylings o f the surrealists to rap
graphic images. In the sky are fantastical creatures reminiscent
videos, pop culture and radical plastic surgery. It is as though
of a Hieronymous Bosch tableau: a sperm-like conglomeration
Mutu has choked down every possible denigrating vision of
of hair with an elephant's head trumpets through the air trailing
92-Nka
Journal of Contemporary African Art
Wangechi Mutu, Pin Up Series (detail), 2001,
watercolor and collage on paper, 10 x 13"
Fatima Tuggar, The Cake People, 2001,
computer montage, inkjet print on vinyl, 48 x 52.25"
a fleshy-colored tail. Below, a cat, lizard and butterfly are grafted into one improbable and frightening hybrid that scuttles like
a claw across the earth.
Mutu's Queen Ugly (2001) is all flesh, hair, pink stilettos and
diamonds. These fantastical, butchered women refer simultaneously to the overarching societal negation of the black woman's
body, as well as the mechanisms of internalized self-loathing.
Literally depicting missing extremities, the work calls to mind
both psychological and physical trauma, the fragmentation of
black female subjectivity, and the maiming of the body. The
extreme violence done to these caricatures points to the legacy of
rape and degradation heaped on the black female form, both literally and figuratively. Mutu externalizes images of the hypersexed female body as transgressed, incomplete, the missing parts
unrecuperable. Queen Ugly is a paragon o f hideousness in
Western culture. Mutu's images as a whole persist in a push-pull
of psychosexual attraction and repulsion. Indeed, it is not unlike
the ambivalence a young woman might feel toward her own
body when faced with the chasm that separates her from idealized Western notions of beauty. Utilizing a raw, degenerative
style, Mutu steadfastly articulates the potential for destructiveness and violence underlying many of our basic assumptions
around representations of beauty and identity.
the overarching pressure to aggrandize blackness, especially during black history month, the up-and-coming curator showed
sharp discernment in articulating the burgeoning thrust toward
a broadened approach to self-imaging strategies. Africaine furthered the potential seeded by artists such as Kara Walker for the
representation of the black body to frankly include ambivalence
and self-loathing alongside pride and a deep-rooted sense of cultural belonging. Installed in the Mezzanine level gallery, the
exhibition seemed deceptively understated considering its troubling imagery and brazen agenda to push the envelope. In this
regard, the exhibition is auspicious as a whole, though individual works sometimes faltered.
Intermittently successful and problematic, the exhibition was
promising less in its rather obvious theme, but more so in its
courageousness in presenting difficult work. Indeed, this curatorial endeavor indicated an investment in tackling the dark
undercurrents belying the positive black female image. Despite
The exhibition AFRICAINE was at the Studio Museum in Harlem,
New York from January 24, 2002 through March 3 1 , 2002.)
Soraya Murray is a doctoral student in History of Art at
Cornell University
Notes
* Rosamund Purcell, Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical
Monsters, (Vancouver: Chronicle Books, 1997), p. 30; Sander L. Gillman
Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality Race and Madness.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
From conference in Montreal entitled Contact Zone: African Art and
New Technology, April 23,1999.
Please see http://www.isea.qc.ca/africa/colloque/biocol/tuggar_e.html
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