Two upcoming exhibitions – one in Nottingham and one in London – present the work of photographer Leah Gordon through two different frames of reference.
This exhibition will also be preceded on the 15 June by a conversation between Leah Gordon and Guardian columnist Sean O’Hagan at 6.15 – 7.30pm.
The Second exhibition titled Leah Gordon ‘Caste’ presents new photographic work from Gordon that investigates the Haitian colonial history of racial classification. In 18th-century Saint Domingue Moreau de St Mery was responsible for charting: “a surreal taxonomy of race which classified skin colour from Noir to Blanche using names borrowed from mythology, natural history and bestial miscegenation.”
Following on from the popularity of an earlier post – If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and then you get kicked to the curb – focusing on the work of Renée Cox this week’s video feature includes two clips, each containing an interview with artist Renée Cox recorded at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art on 22 October 2009. The first is a conversation with an audience led by former Spelman Cosby chair Lisa E. Farrington, Ph.D., John Jay College, CUNY. The second is a one-on-one conversation that appears to have been filmed on the same day inside the Museum’s gallery space.
Each clip presents Cox ruminating on themes and driving forces behind her work including Race, Gender, Womanhood, Representation and Femininity. There are some overlaps in the conversation of each clip but also some interesting divergences.
The first conversation is pinned around specific works of Cox’s. It takes as its starting point the motivation for Cox’s work Hot-en-tot (1994) based on research she conducted which led her to find out about the “extraordinarily shocking histories” of human exhibition. Cox’s photographic work Hot-en-tot is inspired by the life and experiences of a Khosian woman, Saartje Baartman, who was objectified as a physiognomic curiosity and exhibited in Europe in the 19th century, as the ‘Hottentot Venus’. In Cox’s nude self-portrait her breasts and buttocks are covered with oversized prosthetic versions found for sale in a fancy dress shop. Cox discusses the power of the objectifying gaze and the importance for her in this, and other works, of revising history and creating a space to defy and return that gaze. Through revisiting Baartman’s body and the exploitative narrative that surrounded it – which became a potent symbol projected outwards onto the black female body as an abstract idea – Cox recreates, revises, and represents: A process that she employs through(out) her body (of work).
The second clip offers a more intimate and provocative discussion with Cox. She talks about the resonance of her work Queen Nanny of the Maroons (2004) which appeared in the exhibition Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic at Tate Liverpool in 2010. Generally though, this conversation explores more broadly the social issues that “inspire and impact” her work as a whole. Here Cox discusses specific issues surrounding: education and intergration in the contemporary context of the United States and; the comparative importance of race and skin tone as identity in Jamaica and the United States. Cox encapsulates her bold and assured approach to creating as she winds up the interview stating: “If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and then you get kicked to the curb.”
This article examines the controversy surrounding Jack Johnson’s proposed world heavyweight title fight against the British champion Bombardier Billy Wells in London (1911). In juxtaposing African Americans’ often glowing discussions of European tolerance with the actual white resistance the black champion faced in Britain, including the Home Office’s eventual prohibition of the match, the article explores the period’s transnational discourses of race and citizenship. Indeed, as white sportsmen on both sides of the Atlantic joined together in their search for a “White Hope” to unseat Johnson, the boxing ring became an important cultural arena for interracial debates over the political and social divisions between white citizens and nonwhite subjects.
Although African Americans had high hopes for their hero’s European sojourn, the British backlash against the Johnson-Wells match underscored the fact that their local experiences of racial oppression were just one facet of a much broader global problem. At the same time, the proposed prizefight also made the specter of interracial conflict in the colonies all the more tangible in the British capital, provoking public discussions about the merits of U.S. racial segregation, along with the need for white Anglo-Saxon solidarity around the world. Thus, this article not only exposes the underlying connections between American Jim Crow and the racialized fault lines of British imperialism, but it also traces the “tense and tender ties” linking U.S. and African American history with the new imperial history and postcolonial studies.
(c) Ian Berry/ Magnum Photos (detail via liverpoolmuseums.org)
A powerful touring exhibition from Magnum Photos of some of the most dramatic and iconic moments over 40 years of South Africa’s history, captured by photojournalist Ian Berry. This exhibition is part of Liverpool’s first ever international photography festival, Look11.
At the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool: 8 April 2011 to 6 November 2011.
The Exhibition Glenn Ligon: America is the first comprehensive mid-career retrospective devoted to this pioneering New York–based artist. At the Whitney Museum of American Art March 10–June 5, 2011.
The exhibition travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the fall of 2011 and to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in early 2012.
This volume examines the Enlightenment-era textualization of the Black African in European thought. Andrew S. Curran rewrites the history of blackness by replicating the practices of eighteenth-century readers. Surveying French and European travelogues, natural histories, works of anatomy, pro- and anti-slavery tracts, philosophical treatises, and literary texts, Curran shows how naturalists and philosophes drew from travel literature to discuss the perceived problem of human blackness within the nascent human sciences, describes how a number of now-forgotten anatomists revolutionized the era’s understanding of black Africans, and charts the shift of the slavery debate from the moral, mercantile, and theological realms toward that of the “black body” itself. In tracing this evolution, he shows how blackness changed from a mere descriptor in earlier periods into a thing to be measured, dissected, handled, and often brutalized.
Andrew S. Curran is a professor of French at Wesleyan University and a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine in the history of medicine. He is the author of Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe.
‘Timed out’ is a pioneering study of modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire. It addresses the current ‘global turn’ in the study of art by way of the transnational Caribbean, offering an in-depth account of the Atlantic world in relation to the mainstream history of art. It looks at why art of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora have been placed not only ‘outside’ but ‘behind’ the dominant art canons, and how the politics of space and time can be used to rethink the global geography of art.
‘Timed out’ will appeal to all those working in the field of modern and contemporary art and world art history, transnationalism and the geography of global visual culture. To read more click here…
Renee Cox is a Jamaican-American photographer who uses self-portrait to explore race, gender and empowerment. She has transformed herself into a range of historical figures inclduing: Queen Nanny of the Maroons the ‘Hottentot Venus’ and even Jesus Christ.
Cox has also created bold characters whom she embodies in her work: her superhero persona ‘Raje’ physically confronts racial stereotypes – issuing in a ‘bold new era’, and ‘Yo Mamma’, is a ’towering’ female figure both ‘regal and erotic’. In her work recreating famous landmark pieces of art, Flipping the Script, Cox works as an iconoclast of sorts, challenging the received truths offered by Leonardo Da Vinci and other classic artists.
These powerful personas and re-imagings have provoked strong responses, particularly her reinterpretation of the Last Supper which drew criticism from both the Catholic church and Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York from 1994-2001, who said Cox’s work defied ‘decency standards’. Cox’s response was “I have a right to reinterpret the Last Supper as Leonardo da Vinci created the Last Supper with people who look like him.”
Cox said, of her own work and approah to art, ‘If you don’t ask you don’t get. Then you get kicked to the curb’. With African Americans still vastly under-represented in the history of art and recognised as under-valued in artistic collecting by both collectors and art historians does Cox have a point? More importantly, does she have an effective approach to challenging this and the stereotypes and issues surrounding race and gender today?
@MinxMarple Thanks for recommending @nickmirzoeff this looks great - ordered it on amazon! On another note I've been seeing zeppelins again!Pressed1 day ago
The Second exhibition titled Leah Gordon ‘Caste’ presents new photographic work from Gordon that investigates the Haitian colonial history of racial classification. In 18th-century Saint Domingue Moreau de St Mery was responsible for charting: “a surreal taxonomy of race which classified skin colour from Noir to Blanche using names borrowed from mythology, natural history and bestial miscegenation.”
