Representation:
This essay aims to analyze how two works, the Portrait of John Punch (Angry Black Man 1646) by Kerry James Marshall and The Rivers Monument by Marianne Nicolson, both explore representation in art in different ways. The first, as the title explains, is a portrait of a black man John Punch, who was sentenced to a lifetime of slavery after being caught trying to run away. The second is a monument that is supposed to represent two major rivers in Canada, the Fraser and the Columbia river. These two rivers were an integral part of daily life for First Nations people, for purposes ranging from fishing to travelling and even exchange of goods. This essay purposes to compare and contrast how these two works broach similar topics, and in doing so will also touch on the general purpose of art and why representation in art is significant and directly related to social phenomena. It will also touch on how settler colonialism intricately weaves into and impacts representation in and through art.
It should be noted that Marshal is a black American artist, and a large part of his inspiration behind his work dates back to his education, and the lack of black representation in art in the seventies and eighties. Whereas this can’t be pinned on any one specific individual, it is a quintessential example of the efforts to eradicate black lives and experiences as a show of white dominance as presumably in that era, the movers and shakers of the art world were all Caucasian Americans. This piece looks at white supremacy from an art history perspective and in doing so not only showcases art’s ability to represent but also how powerful a role it plays in bigotry and creating a divide. To explain why representation in art is powerful, we must first unpack the purpose of art. According to me, among many others, two of the main purposes of art are to express and understand. Artists express so that viewers can relate. In this understanding of another’s struggle and the empathic relief of feeling less lonely about one’s own dilemmas, emerges the feeling of unity and togetherness.
In this way, representation in art has the power to bring communities together through empathy. This becomes a problem when a certain sect of humanity is denied this expression solely on the basis of skin colour. Lack of representation in art, among many other pillars of society, can breed isolation within communities and create racial divide. It leaves individuals of racially or ethnically diverse backgrounds feeling singled out, and by not showcasing different coloured bodies creates exclusivity and security in white homogeneity. As an Indian girl child growing up in a western metropolitan city, I felt only a small percentage of this exclusion when all the billboards had white, skinny models that looked the furthest from what I could ever dream to look like. Pairing that with the already racist mindset of 1970's America would mean serious danger for anyone who wasn’t white.
An interesting and relevant fact about Nicolson’s monument is that her original proposal of this exhibit for the Vancouver airport had a line from the gospel that directly critiqued the misuse of these two rivers, and how the need for industrial profit overthrows the needs and rights of First Nation tribes. This line was obviously seen as controversial and made to be removed from the piece. This act of deliberately and intentionally removing something integral to the meaning of an art piece is ironically symbolic for what colonizers have done to indigenous people over the years by destroying the rivers that accounted for majority of the First Nations livelihood. This piece, both the original and the fate it suffered before being adapted, follow a trajectory of settler colonialism. It shows how British colonial power led to the destruction of indigenous culture, and how the rights of First Nations are still being denied.
Settler colonialism also comes into play when looking at the thousands of indigenous pictographs destroyed by the building of dams on these rivers, and the ones currently being actively defaced. This ties in with the concept of representation in art. The erasure of representation of a marginalized and vulnerable cultural group shows a clear and defined power hierarchy being played out through vandalism even today. This again shows the significance of representation in art, as to be able to be represented, an individual or group must hold power in the social and racial hierarchy to lawfully protect the art that represents them.
To conclude, art holds the power to communicate the experiences of humanity as a collective, inclusive of all races and cultural backgrounds. If misused, it can lead to real time elimination of voices and experiences, furthering the pre-existing racial and cultural divide. Though both pieces differ in form and medium, as the first is a painting and the second a monument, both show how the distribution of power on the basis of race and culture creates a bidirectional relationship with representation. Representation in art reflects reality, and to cultivate a harmonious inclusive environment where diversity is celebrated, we must lay emphasis on the balance of racial and cultural representation not only in art, but in all forms of communication.
Wonder:
This essay aims to create a dialogue between stills from Andrea Fraser’s performance titled ‘Little Frank and his Carp’ and the text ‘Notes from Liminal Spaces’ by Hiromi Goto. Both pieces, though different in medium, investigate the phenomena of wonder and how it is used to stimulate intellectual or emotional exploration. Andrea Fraser is an American performance artist who explores the area of institutional critique. This is the critique of assumed values and norms of art and institutions of art, such as galleries and museums. It aims to investigate who and what art institutions are built for, who benefits from the art market, and who decides what is put in a museum and what is not. A key factor of institutional critique is the investigation of wonder, described as a primary emotion by French philosopher Rene Decartes. It is a cause of astonishment, something to marvel at or admire and is often used in visual culture to denote the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in their tracks. Historically this is seen as an important aspect of human experience, specifically linked to curiosity and intellectual exploration.
Here, wonder is played out by Fraser in a theatrical manner to draw attention to the narrative surrounding modern art controlled by the gatekeepers of the art world. Her performance takes place at the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum in Spain where the video follows Fraser as she picks up an official audio guide from the museum and proceeds to explore it. Her expression exaggeratedly changes every few seconds depending on the tone and dialogue of the male voice on the guide. The persona Fraser puts on here is one a of a naïve, impressionable, bordering on whimsical gallery visitor. Her expression changes drastically from anxious to relieved the instant the narrator mentions that the gallery tries to make viewers feel at home. At one instance Fraser gathers stares as she lifts up her dress and starts performing sexual actions on the museum walls following the tour guides dialogue. This satirical show of blind faith in a stranger and his pre-recorded narration of a tour guide points to a larger issue, the trust instilled in the gatekeepers of the art world.. Her costume choice also plays into the shock value of the film, as her neon green dress stands out among the plain museum walls. In this way, wonder is used as a tool to garner attention, through which larger and debatably more intellectual issues such as the control of the narrative surrounding modern art is explored.
Hiromi Goto is a Japanese-Canadian writer. Her text ‘Notes from Liminal Spaces’ covers a range of topics from race, gender and sexuality to representation and fiction. The
author uses an interesting form to weave in anecdotes and learnings from her own life into the text, keeping these relative to the fictional narrative she tells. The story itself can be classified as speculative fiction, a topic Goto covers in her own voice in the expository section. It follows the protagonist Eiko on a night where she discovers a non-human phenomenon. After being convinced that she must eat a mysterious green orb found in the body of dead birds, she tried to convince her daughter and partner of the same. What exactly this phenomenon is, is up to the readers to decode, hence the term ‘speculative’ fiction.
The expository section of the text is used to analyse and explore the genre of speculative fiction. In relation to the genre she writes, ‘Speculative fiction allows for paradigm shifts that can have us begin experiencing and understanding in new, unsettling ways. They can disturb us, and can propel us beyond the conventions, complacencies, or determinedly maintained ignorance of the ideologically figured present into an undetermined future.’ Although differing in medium from Fraser’s work, the text also uses the shock value of wonder to capture and engage the reader. It is in this state of peaked interest where the reader’s curiosity is probed and an opportunity for intellectual exploration presents itself. Here I would argue that more than intellectual exploration this text allows for emotional exploration through the feelings of discomfort and unease created by the formal qualities of the genre. The eerie and mysterious tone of writing along with the lexical field of horror with phrases such as ‘black mound of feathers’, ‘ shiny organs’ and ‘ruptured cavity’ creates a sense of the unknown. As echoed by Goto in the expository section, this text allows the reader to hold space for feelings of unease and discomfort, without having their core self inflicted with the same. I believe that this second hand experience of something out of the ordinary and slightly detached from reality could be a cathartic practice that helps readers process similar emotions related to the unknown.
To conclude, both works interweave the phenomena of wonder successfully with their respective genre’s, Fraser’s with institutional critique and Goto’s with speculative fiction. It is through this tool that the audience is allowed a window to explore complex intellectual and emotional concepts.
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