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I initially wanted to attend the symposium The Image of the Black in Western Art to explore the potential of visual art as a tool for activism, especially in the instance of racism, which is strongly tied to visual experience. We see the color of skin, the shape of the nose, the texture and color of the hair. In fact, we often don’t see anything beyond color and physiognomy. (Interestingly enough I came across a short biography of black painter Alma W. Thomas in Eleanor C. Monro’s Originals: American Woman Artists who decided that blacks were best portrayed flat, without features, without mottling, like pattern.) If we saw beyond, how could it be that we continue to maintain such a segregated Baltimore? How could it be that I don’t date black men, for example? Of course it might be argued that cultural differences are what maintain the racial divisions.
That brings me to my other motivation for attending the symposium– segregation in the arts community in Baltimore. The dividing line in this case is not easy to delineate, but I know that the art events I attend are almost 100% white, and the Station North Arts District that supports and celebrates Baltimore’s emerging arts scene is an area that was black and is now being gentrified by mostly whites. Again, this is not an easy topic to discuss, and it may be argued that the segregation, at least in the case of the Station North Arts District, is an issue of class rather than race. But bear with me.
The symposium was held in conjunction with an exhibition at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute’s Rudenstine Gallery and the inauguration of the newly published volumes The Image of the Black in Western Art. Art historians, curators and writers came together to discuss how selected images reflect European attitudes towards blacks. Specifically, as Europe invaded Africa for its human and natural resources, the picture plane became an arena where cultural, moral and physiognomic differences between white Europeans and black Africans were reconciled. The picture plane is a place where African and European differences are articulated and then, as the pictures present themselves again and again to successive audiences, a tool by which the idea of these differences are perpetuated.
The symposium also discussed representational strategies that work to whitewash black and brown histories– take for example Alma-Tadema’s paintings where he whitens classical subjects who historically would have been brown skinned. Or intentional omissions, like the absence of Moses’ Ethiopian wife from the European painting tradition (actually, according to the documentary Black Is Beautiful the western tradition omitted his Ethiopian wife to hide not only his bride’s color but his bigamy as well, which was disagreeable to Europe’s cultural norms).
But much of the symposium did not engage contemporary instances of racism head on. Nor did it confront segregation in the art world. For one, the Rudenstine Gallery’s exhibition specialized in 16th and 17th-century prints, while the most contemporary work discussed in the panel discussion was John Ruskin’s copy of a portion of Paul Veronese’s “The Queen of Sheba Before Solomon”. At first, I was slightly discouraged. My own sense of activism was dismayed at this reserved, research-oriented approach that seemed to avoid contemporary instances of a pressing social issue; I have doubts about scholarly work’s ability to break out of its insulated sphere and effect social change. I also felt cynical about the legitimacy of the symposium. I understand academia to be a privileged world, and sometimes it seems like academics feed on the stories of disenfranchised people to justify their own existence without actually directly involving themselves in the struggle.
Indeed I cringed a bit when I attended the symposium’s main event, a formal panel discussion where five white male scholars from several renowned institutions presented their erudition to a mostly white audience. But cynicism can get in the way of learning, and we have to put it aside to begin to listen what these scholars’ careful inquiries have to offer.
I learned, for example, that in certain instances, Western art reflects an earnest, if naïve attempt to integrate blacks into European society. Let’s take one of the prints from the Rudenstine exhibition, Pieter Tanjé’s intaglio portrait of Jacobus Capitein from 1742. According to Wikipedia, Capitein was one of the first sub-Saharan Africans to study at a European University. The inscription below Capitein’s portrait reads
Does not Art here nobly sketch forth Capitein the Moor?
Does not wisdom shine forth from his modest eyes?
Does not eloquence pass through his lips?
Does not the mouth show a peaceful, humble soul?
Moors Rejoice! For your salvation breaks through the clouds.
God makes his countrymen preach his great deeds,
And strengthen him with His Spirit,
And your heart, were it made of stone,
Shall in repentance break into 1,000 pieces
So that the holy light shines forth in the darkness
And you shall see the Savior
Who is the salvation of the heathen.
The portrait tells us about the artist’s and audience’s conception of the black as foreign in appearance as well as in moral and cultural character. Capitein’s European clothes together with the text show us a European culture eager to embrace Africans so long as the black can assimilate European values.
Other prints in the show also treat assimilation. Apparently the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch from Acts 8:26–40 was a popular subject for art, and that image, of a white Philip baptizing a black Ethiopian serves as a symbol that reflects and attempts to justify what was happening in Europe at that time, namely, Europe was annexing the continent of Africa, its people, its resources and the land itself. Indeed, the archetypical significance of white as good and black as evil is explicitly employed in another print in the show, Jan Muller’s print “Creation of the World: Separation of Light and Darkness” from 1589 illustrates the passage from Genesis, chapter 1 “And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” Day is portrayed as a blond white man while night is a black woman.
Such a critical approach to Western art as I have begun to paraphrase here is not new. The idea that history can be manipulated and that it has been whitewashed by Europeans for Europeans is familiar to most people. For example, most people accept the fact that Jesus Christ was not a white man, despite the ubiquity of portrayals of Aryan Jesus. Nonetheless, all the ramifications of this white-centric understanding of the world have not been sufficiently described. At the risk of running too quickly ahead of careful inquiry, might not this prejudice of the black as the moral other still be in place? Might this factor into an explanation for the predominance of black inmates in United States prisons, for example? Of course the issue is more complicated than this, and this is a perfect instance where art scholarship cannot be hastily and directly plugged into the contemporary social issues that concern us.
In contrast to the more reticent scholarly presentations, Bonnie Greer’s presentation the evening before the panel discussion was more personal, closer to what I was looking for. Greer is an American-born playwright, critic and Officer of the Order of the British Empire who has lived in London since the 1980s. She showed her co-produced film Reflecting Skin, the first half of which documents her pilgrimage to various black icons in Europe, such as statue of St. Maurice, the patron saint of Germany, at the Cathedral of Magdburg, and various black Madonnas. She makes a point to tie the past to the present and remarks to one of the professionals she interviews at a glaring contradiction; while a black man is the patron saint of Germany, a black man on the street in a present-day German city would make you clutch your purse tighter. In the second half of the documentary, she talks with contemporary artists and designers. She speaks with Dutch artist Geraldo Steven Pinedo who built a model of a typical slave ship, wherein he modeled each slave individually in counterpoint to the manner in which they were stacked in like inanimate cargo, with total disregard of their humanity. She also spoke to Jean-Paul Goude about his construction of Grace Jones’ image, gently challenging his provincial conception of a savage dominatrix.
I asked her during the following Q&A to speak about her experience bridging the gap between the contemporary social-sphere and academic research, how does she come from the esoteric field of art history and art criticism to make an impact on issues like police racial profiling practices. Greer replied:
What is going on [in the United States] is going on [in Europe] too, but it’s not so much on the surface because of the origins of [the United States] and institutions like the Institute which are constantly revealing and shedding and sharing and building, and that’s part of the Republic, that’s part of how it functions, but in Europe, in the country that I live in, which is a kingdom, these issues of racial identity are urgent. They’re urgent like a gun to your head, and it’s a very dangerous time there now. So constantly there is the idea of art not necessarily being in service of these kind of questions but art emerging from these questions and actually giving another voice to these questions, so that, for instance, the very notion of discovering the Chevalier de Saint-George who was the contemporary of Mozart… when you get this sort of information in Europe it then begins to break open the entire edifice and it’s a very urgent thing, so it isn’t so much about separating the sort of really esoteric notion of making art in your studio or your atelier… it’s also front line… these things become part of the mix and very, very urgent.
Listening to Greer’s response again, it seems that she recognizes the need to connect the academic with present-day social and political reality. The form of her documentary reflects this: she leaves the studio to travel in person to these various sites, to speak with various people. She engages them in conversation. While the conversations don’t end conclusively, and while the documentary itself is not finally prescriptive, she has gone out to the world to both learn and engage. In this way scholarly research becomes activist art. Go back and reread her response to my question– you can substitute research for art and it makes great sense.
A webcast of the entire panel discussion is available here.
Joaneath Spicer of the Walters Gallery, who was involved with the publication of the volumes The Image of the Black in Western Art, will bring a related exhibition to the Walters in October of 2012 entitled Saints, Slaves and Diplomats: The African Presence in Renaissance Europe. Read more here.
Tags: Bonnie Greer, Peter Boyce, radarredux, The Image of the Black in Western Art, WEB Du Bois Institute
Filed Under: Community Feature Sights
It saddens me to see that whites everywhere feel that way about blacks. If we all look past skin color, we will see that we are all human. We bleed red blood and breathe the breath of the same God. I am a black American female artist and I know that I will continue to see and experience some of the same segregation in the art world that have been present since people decided that white is “right.” I actually wrote a thesis on this very subject. I wish it would stop, but it never will.
January 11, 2011 8:21 pm