“Giving Back the Gaze”; Exploring Complex and Multifarious Self- representations in the work of Myra Greene and Renée Cox. Jessica Jones-Berney MRes American Studies Abstract In this thesis I explore photographic attempts by African American women artists to produce experimental and diverse self-representations of the black female body. It considers the works of two black women photographers, Myra Greene and Renée Cox, and their contribution to a new visual language that focuses on abstractions and multifarious depictions of the black female body to explore the ever shifting identity of African Americans. The first chapter focuses on photographer Myra Greene and how she embraces abstraction, ambiguity and obfuscation as a form of intellectual and aesthetic empowerment. The artist deliberately complicates readings of her body in order to decentre the black body and shift it out from under the intense scrutiny of the ethnographic gaze. The second chapter examines the work of Renée Cox. It is an interdisciplinary analysis of the artist‘s multifarious and multilayered self-representations to reflect the impossibility of defining the black female experience as one monolithic construct. By engaging with ideas of recontextulisation, reappropriation and inversion, both photographers are self-aware rather than complicit in the perpetuation of the black woman‘s body in exhibition. They deliberately embrace notions of hybridity and ambiguity to defy single interpretation and contest ways in which the black female body continues to be read through representation of the past. This thesis considers the importance of positioning these women in a larger artistic movement of African American women artists who explore similar systems of observing and defining the black female body. In very different ways, Cox and Greene both challenge derogatory cultural and historical representations. I will explore their artistic efforts to reinstate and appropriate self-representations in a black female creative paradigm, for purposes of individual and communal empowerment. Contents Page Number Introduction 4 1. Changing Visions of the Self: The Photography of Myra Greene 15 2. Beyond Classification: The Self-reflexive Navigation of 51 Stereotypical Categorisations in the work of Renée Cox. Conclusion 99 Bibliography 105 Images 112 Introduction In the latter half of the twentieth century a growing wave of African American women artists began using their own bodies in very experimental and explicit ways to re-explore notions of black female self-representation. Their works challenge American history and visual culture that has stripped black women of their subjectivity and attempted to define her by a collective identity that is circumscribed by stereotype. This thesis is an exploration of visual aesthetics in contemporary African American female photography. It focuses on two black women photographers, Myra Greene and Renée Cox, and the very different ways in which they produce complex, multifarious self-representations to reflect the impossibility of defining the black female experience as one monolithic construct. It will discuss their photographic attempts to convey and control complex images of self-representation and how they engage with ideas of visibility and invisibility, recontextualisation, reappropriation and inversion to implode white patriarchal definitions of black womanhood. By creating a new visual language that is primarily focused on the black female body, Greene and Cox are part of a burgeoning movement of experimental African American women artists who, since the 1970s, believe that inserting oneself into art is the most efficacious means of exploring ideas of gender, race and identity. In order to better understand Cox and Greene‘s rootedness in a cultural context that has historically been neglected, it is important to outline the broad contours of a movement of African American female artists who use art to make bold, political and often controversial statements. In the 1960s Faith Ringgold‘s artwork responded with immediacy to the political milieu of the time. Her paintings exposed the violent realities of black/white power relations and integrationalism. However, her denunciatory subject matter was almost too political for its time because it spoke truths about social injustices that people were not willing to hear. America‘s volatility became the politically charged centre piece of her work, which resonates with black artist Charles White‘s assertion that .Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent..1 Other black women to embrace art as a polemical political tool are performance artists Lorraine O‘Grady and Adrian Piper who both engendered disguises to make their bold statements. Refusing to fall victim to the same shunning that museums enacted against Ringgold, O‘Grady made her messages unavoidable by storming art galleries that had denied black artists their space to exhibit. Similarly Piper adopted disguises to infiltrate public spheres where she could observe people‘s intransigent attitudes towards race. In more recent years, Kara Walker has become known as one of the most controversial African American artists because of the satirical scenes of violence and rape she creates using fairytale- like silhouettes to evoke the mise-en-scene of a children‘s pictorial. 1 Patricia Hill and Melissa Ryan, Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection, (Boston University Art Gallery, 2005), p.86. While Walker reexamines African American representations using the silhouette form, my thesis focuses on black women‘s explorations of the body through the photographic lens. Therefore, I will chart an aesthetic lineage by contextualising Greene and Cox in relation to other women photographers exploring similar themes regarding black women‘s self- representation, particularly Lorna Simpson‘s idea of .absent-presence. and Carrie Mae Weem‘s theory of .giving back the gaze.. As the first African American woman to be chosen to present her work at the Venice Biennale in 1993, Simpson is an influential figure in American photography. Her black and white photographs are concerned with issues of visibility and invisibility, engendering an .absent-presence. through fragmented and faceless self- representations. In some photographs the artist turns her body away from the camera to limit visual access, in others she crops the image so that the viewer‘s gaze is directed to specific areas of her body; the collarbone, the neckline, the mouth, to signify on disempowerment and voicelessness. These faceless, headless and at times blind-folded self-representations disrupt the traditional relationship between the spectator and the subject. By refusing to reveal her eyes Simpson avoids looking out but also curtails the viewer‘s ability to look in and observe her. Her work is a critique of documentary photography because it .disrupts even as it embodies a sense of clarity for the viewer.. Huey Copeland describes Simpson‘s work as .asserting the presence of one black woman who remains even as her figure is ghosted away,.2 which identifies the photographer‘s ability to define presence through absence. Simpson‘s notion of .absent- presence. is significant to my reading of Greene‘s work because it is present in Greene‘s binary aesthetic of revelation and concealment, invitation and exposure, vulnerability and power. Simpson blindfolds herself and turns her back away from the viewer to complicate ideas of visibility and invisibility, clarity and fragmentation, thus recognising the potential of these visual techniques as empowering sources through which the artist is able to control her representation by making herself indefinable. A body that is headless and a face with eyes that have been covered or an expression that is obscured are difficult to read because they are depersonalised, making the familiar unfamiliar. Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist Coco Fusco asserted that .the barrier. in Simpson‘s work is .expressed through limited access to dialogue and framing. We feel like voyeurs. We‘re captivated by the stories, but we‘re never really on the inside..3 Fusco identifies how Simpson places limitations on the viewer to relinquish them of the power that the voyeur traditionally possesses. This feeds into my readings of Greene and Cox who both disrupt traditional ways of seeing and understanding black women‘s representation. 2 In Huey Copeland‘s .Bye, Bye Black Girl.: Lorna Simpson‘s Figurative Retreat‘, Art Journal, (June, 2005), p. 76. March 2010 3 Coco Fusco, .Lorna Simpson.. Bomb, No. 61 (New York: New Art Publication, 1997), June 2010 Carrie Mae Weems is concerned with the power dynamics of seeing and controlling what is seen in order to .give back the gaze. to her black subjects. The gaze is an important means in American visual culture through which racial fears and fantasies are perpetuated and played out. Therefore, the effort to determine the power of the gaze and take back control of it is significant in the work of contemporary African American women photographer‘s who are attempting to be aesthetically free. Like Simpson, Weems confronts visual processes of representation and definition, examining through a lens of social and cultural politics. She is skeptical and curious about the expanding possibilities of documentary photography: Even after the nontruth value of documentary photography, I find it still remains an important form to explore and use. That photographs are only half-true is just fine with me, indeed it‘s that one half-truth that is the half most interesting and in the greatest need of illumination.4 4 Kellie Jones, .A Contemporary Portfolio,. Exposure Vol. 27, No. 4 (Fall 1990), p.30. 5 Kristin G. Congdon, Kara Kelley Hallmark, Twentieth Century United States Photographers, (London: Greenwood Press, 2008), p.340. 6 Statement by Carrie Mae Weems from .Talking Art with Carrie Mae Weems., in bell hooks, Art on My Mind, (New York: The New Press, 1995), p.85. With a critical eye, Weems retells histories of racism to .beautify the mess of a messy world..5 She reappropriates slave daguerreotypes, recycles racist stereotypes and examines complex relationships concerning race and class to reexamine photography as an instrument of violation. In a similar vein, Cox uses her own body to re-explore the historical framing of racist imagery and engage with more contemporary popular visual culture that circumscribes black women‘s behaviour and perpetuates racist stereotypes. Both Cox and Weems construct a reproachful oeuvre to divulge the exploitive potential of documentary photography in order to create what Weems has described as a .space in which black women are looking back.. 6 Debra S. Singer extends upon Weems‘s theory, noting that returning the gaze enables the image to resist .assumptions about the structure of .the gaze. as an active male scopic drive onto a passive female subject..7 While Thomas Piché believes that Weems‘s photography disrupts the .objectifying, dispassionate gaze of the camera. by returning the gaze, thus transforming the black female subject from inert to challenging and demanding answers to difficult questions with her reprimanding eyes. In an interview with the artist, bell hooks acknowledged how Weems‘s photographs explore .the spaces in the shadows that facts don‘t allow us to see, the mystery..8 7 Debra S. Singer, .Reclaiming Venus: The Presence of Sarah Barrtman in Contemporary Art., Black Venus 2010. Ed. Deborah Willis, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). P. 89. 8 hooks, Art on My Mind, p.85. 9 Michael D. Harris refers to Walker‘s ability to .present the unpresentable. in Coloured Pictures: Race and Visual Representation, (Chapel Hill: The University of Chapel Hill Press, 2003), p.211. I have chosen to examine Greene and Cox because of the very different ways in which they challenge the power of the gaze by complicating ideas of visibility and display. Both artists are concerned with the historical framing of racist imagery and experimental ways of signifying on problematic context through photography. In their very different ways they each use their own body to create sites of resistance. Gestures of defiance can be found in the quiet, contemplative complexities of Greene‘s oeuvre, which are like visual whispers on the canvas. Her inscrutable aesthetic plays with ideas of accessibility and clarity, which I engage with historical readings of the black female body in a racist context. While Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw was concerned with .Seeing the Unspeakable. in the controversial silhouette-style work of Kara Walker,9 my analysis of Greene is more focused on viewing the unviewable in her work. I consider the ways in which she navigates complex self-representations that simultaneously engage with ideas of revelation and concealment. Similarly, Cox‘s photography is concerned with the hyper visible and invisible. She creates a visual language laden with bold declarations and popular cultural references to encompass an aesthetic of exaggeration. However, this aesthetic complicates straightforward notions of concealment and revelation because the artist‘s identity is hidden beneath an array of personae and cultural references. Consideration of Kara Walker‘s methods of observing and defining women‘s bodies for a moment provides insight into understanding Cox and Greene. Walker creates haunting visual narratives that disrupt .any simplistic dichotomies of good/bad, right/wrong, or black/white that a viewer might bring to the work..10 At first glance, her black-paper silhouettes could be mistaken for images from a children‘s pictorial. However, closer inspection unmasks a more sinister side to the .fairytale. setting where the artist explodes romanticised notions of slavery. Her caricatures depict scenes of antebellum violence and abuse, while conveying the artist‘s concern with nineteenth century craniologist arguments which supported racist stereotypes. Walker‘s idea of the silhouette as a .blank space that you [can] project your desires into. It can be positive or negative. It‘s just a hole in a piece of paper, and it‘s the inside of that hole.11 explores similar ideas of visibility, fragmentation and wholeness that Cox and Greene are addressing. Walker creates black-on-white figures with featureless interiors to explore real and imagined atrocities, repurposing African American stereotypes and re-framing history to create highly charged scenes that are visually branded onto the imagination. In Walker‘s opinion, .The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that‘s also what the stereotype does..12 She reconfigures this traditionally European form to create figures with obfuscated identities that explore the real and imagined atrocities of slavery. Her fearless confrontation of race relations and willingness to rip open the fragile wounds of a collective memory pushes the boundaries of 10 Barbara Thompson, Black Womanhood, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), p.357. 11 Kara Walker in Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, .Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker., (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p.23. 12 Kara Walker in Psyche A. Williams-Forson‘s Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, p.199. black women‘s representation. Cox‘s radical repurposing of black female stereotype is as provocative and highly charged as Walker who admits that All of the bad vibes, the bad feelings, all of the nastiness, and all of the sort of vulgar associations with blackness, and the more base associations in this culture about Black Americans or Africans bubble up to the surface of my brain and spill out into this work.13 13 Statement by Kara Walker from her official website, The Art of Kara Walker, August 2010, Both Cox and Walker venture into the imaginary; they create tableaus of counter-memories that act as spaces of interrogation where imagined characters rupture the seams of a romanticised African American history documented by whites. Similarly, photographer and theorist Carla Williams explores issues of physicality, beauty, sexuality and power. She is concerned with histories and transformations of the body. Her exhibition How to Read Character engages with genuine historical documents pertaining to racial differentiation theories, which she cross sections with her own body to spark a visual critique of the racist process. Like Greene and Cox, Williams complicates her self-presentation to explore systems of observing and defining the black female body. In some of her images, she constructs herself as a white-looking slave to address issues of racial passing and transformation. This inversion of a black woman portraying an enslaved white body considers the changing visions and perceptions of the black female form. Grappling with the transgressive act of changing one‘s identity and the idea of making oneself unrecognisable to achieve liberation resonates with the work of Greene and Cox. The first chapter, .Changing visions of the self: The photography of Myra Greene., investigates the contemporary self-portraiture of the Harlem born photographer. The artist, who currently teaches at the Department of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico. Her self-reflexive photography explores the every-changing nature of African American identity. This chapter focuses on how she engages with an ambiguous visual discourse to create multifarious representations that are ultimately empowering in their failure to represent. Previous studies of Greene have provided broad overviews of her exhibitions but have failed to make detailed analysis of individual photographs.14 This chapter provides close readings of photographs from Greene‘s Self-Portraits exhibition (2006, Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), to demonstrate how she is reworking the traditionally white lens of ethnographic classification to deconstruct the elements that reduced black women to objects. Issues of distortion, indecipherability and obfuscation are crucial to Greene‘s work because they complicate and contest the seeming transparency of ethnographic classification which laid the African body bare beneath the scrunitising lens. My in-depth reading of Greene‘s images illustrate how she is experimenting with photography as a medium to create a visual language of oppositions; revelation and concealment, erasure and emergence, the hyper visible and the invisible. These tensions serve to complicate our understanding and interpretations of black women‘s imagery to convey that there is no definitive black experience that can be named or classified. Simpson‘s theories on absent presence are key to my investigation of how Greene is disrupting any straightforward readings of the black body. I will explore Greene‘s thought- provoking use of colour to complicate perceptions and presuppositions of blackness in order to create photographs that transcend surface impressions to explore an interiority of depth and meaning. 14 Such studies include Carla Williams‘ essay .Myra Greene,. in Contact Sheet, No.132 (2005), Shawn Michelle Smith‘s piece .Taking Another Look at Race: Myra Greene and Carla Williams., Visual Studies Workshop, (New York: University of Rochester, 2009), Deborah D. McLeod, .Here‘s the Thing: Twinned Photography Exhibits Reconsider Objects‘ Thingness., Baltimore City Paper, (Baltimore: Times-Shamrock, 2006), and Jeffreen M. Hayes and Bennie F. Johnson‘s essay =Conversations Most Intimate: The Lens of Myra Greene‘, The International Review of African American Art, .The View From Now. Vol. 22, No. 2, (Hampton: Hampton University Museum, 2008). This chapter investigates how the metaphorical meaning of Greene‘s work extends to include historical context. I draw upon Sander L. Gilman‘s discussion of the exhibition and exploitation of black women to contextualise Greene‘s resistance to modes of self-display that have referenced the black body as scientific specimen or eroticised spectacle. Ultimately it will examine how Greene creates complex, indeterminable images that are empowering in their constant state of re-definition. She encompasses an ever-changing aesthetic as a medium for empowerment, playing with distortion and indecipherability, erasure and emergence, external and internal and light and dark to complicate ideas of accessibility in her work in order to resist pinioned representations of African American women. The second chapter, .Beyond classification: The self-reflexive navigation of stereotypical categorisations in the work of Renée Cox., focuses on the Jamaican born fashion photographer turned artist. Cox has extensive experience in fashion photography having worked in Paris as an Assistant Fashion Editor and then New York where she carved a decade long career with a host of esteemed magazines from Essence and Cosmopolitan to Sportswear International. Her fashion background not only informs the glossy aesthetics of her conceptual photography but it has made her self-aware and astute to the depiction of black women in fashion and media and how the contemporary black female body is still being read through representations of the past. This chapter examines how Cox reappropriates derogatory characterisations of black women to break down the visual ways in which they have been contained through stereotype. The artist signifies on demeaning representations in American visual culture to implode them and give new meanings. Borrowing from a range of pop-cultural references from historical icons, the comic book genre, television and stage performance, to contemporary children‘s toy and fashion industry, Cox constructs a new and empowered black female identity. Throughout her career, Cox has encompassed an array of characters, from her controversial depiction of the religious figures Christ, Eve and the Virgin Mary to Queen Nanny of the Maroons and a destitute suburban housewife. She engenders these personae with an eye towards .the deconstruction of stereotypes and the empowerment of women..15 This chapter focuses specifically on Cox‘s self-representations of the historic Venus Hottentot and futuristic Rajé and their relationship to issues of appropriation and reappropriation. It will consider Michael D. Harris‘s questioning of whether it is .really possible to appropriate racist images and terms and drain them of their poison?.16 by examining the ways in which Cox‘s self- portrayals revise the cultural and historical marginalisation and misrepresentation of black women. According to Cox, .Too many black folks wait for white people to validate them, and I don‘t need that validation..17 Rather the artist produces experimental installations to create a hybrid identity that reflects the multiple layers of her own individuality and extends beyond the parameters of white patriarchal classifications imposed on black women. I will examine the different ways in which Cox presents a malleable and unfixed self-representation to reflect the diverse and ever shifting identity of African Americans. In contrast to Greene, Cox‘s work is a mêlée of mass media images and therefore this chapter explores Cox‘s work through an interdisciplinary lens to examine the different ways in which she responds to a host of cultural influences and engages with other artists who are reclaiming black female subjectivity and attempting to .give back the gaze. through photography, poetry, installation and performance art. 15 Renée Cox, .Feminist Artist Statement., Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base, March 2010, 16 Harris, Coloured Pictures, p.190. 17 A statement by Renee Cox in Patricia Meschino‘s .Mercury Rising., Skywritings, (Kingston: Angstrom Graphics, 2001), p. 33. The thesis will examine the diverse and experimental ways in which both Greene and Cox explore ideas of self-reflexivity, black female subjectivity and the multifariousness of their identities. They each represent different facets of a cultural wave in which black women artists are inserting themselves into their art to reconfigure and reclaim black female subjectivity. It endeavours to explore the new ways in which these two artists recover the black female body by reclaiming photography and the representation of their bodies beyond subjects of Western fascination and the white supremacist gaze. Chapter One Changing Visions of the Self: The Photography of Myra Greene. The work of the contemporary African American artist Myra Greene is concerned with changing visions of her self. Using the medium of photography she explores the landscape of her own body to uncover what she describes as .beauty, melancholy sentiment, physical and emotional recollections as they play out on the surface of the skin..1 Perturbed by the different ways in which she is perceived by others because of her skin tone, Greene‘s exhibitions Self- Portraits (2004) and Character Recognition (2005-2007) rework the traditionally white lens of ethnographic classification by inserting her own body into visual paradigms formerly used to elevate whiteness through the subjugation of blackness. In her rendition of a highly-coded scientific format,2 Greene juxtaposes a painful African American visual past with our immediate present, showcasing her agency by reclaiming a form that has been used as an instrument of white oppression for purposes of artistic self-empowerment. However, she is doing more than simply returning to and reproducing visual representations that have derogatory connotations for black women. By redirecting the camera‘s gaze to her own body, she also reconfigures a photographic portraiture practice that did not regard the black body as worthy of artistic depiction. It has become axiomatic to claim, as Deborah Willis and Carla Williams do, that, .If someone of another race, gender, or class has primarily defined one‘s external image, it is enormously difficult to claim any part of one‘s self that references the stereotype, no matter how 1 A statement by Myra Greene from the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Oct 2009, 2 Ethnographic classification is a way of recording the branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of different human cultures. According to Paul Hockings ethnographic photography can be defined as .the use of photographs for the recording and understanding of culture(s), both those of the subjects and of the photographers,. in Principles of Visual Anthropology, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), p.201. In my thesis, I am referring more specifically to ethnographic photography and how the camera was used to record racial physiognomy in an attempt to establish a racial hierarchy because it is a photographic process that Greene signifies upon to explore her own ethnic features. old it is..3 Nevertheless, Greene returns to the medium that categorised the women of her race in order to deconstruct the elements that stripped black female subjectivity and reduced black women to objects.4 By interjecting her own body into the visual discourse, Greene goes beyond critiquing derogatory modes of black women‘s depiction from the outside; rather she infiltrates its structuring principles in order to implode a form of representation that claimed to determine African American identities under the guise of racial anthropology and other racist creationist theories.5 By critiquing from the inside, Greene demonstrates that she is the self-reflexive architect of her own exhibition, presenting her body in ways that signify upon derogatory representations of black women but ultimately go beyond these static visualisations to make herself visible in self-empowering ways. 3 Deborah Willis, Carla Williams, The Black Female Body, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002) p.197. 4 I realise that these methods of objectification are not solely specific to black women, but are applicable to women in general. However, the focus of this thesis is refined to the concerns of representation of African American women. 5 One of the first examples of imagery being used to categorise human specimens was by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), a German anthropologist who measured and compared racial types through craniometrical research. His cranial drawings were used to support the idea that evolutionary differences existed between human races and ethnic groups. These racist creationist theories sought to validate a racial hierarchy and justify colonial rule. Drawing upon the new science influences of phrenology in the 1830s, American physician Samuel George Morton (1799-1851) proposed that intellectual capability could be determined by cranial capacity. Morton‘s theories on racial classification became the .scientific. defense of slavery in America and under his influence physician Josiah C. Nott published his own racial theories and, with the invention of photography, biologist Louis Agassiz continued to .document. racial difference. From Walter H. Conser, God and the Natural World: Religion and Science in Antebellum America, (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993), p. 23 and Eleanor M. Hight and Gary David Sampson, Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 2-6. 6 Inkjet prints are photographs printed from a digital file using tiny droplets of water-based dyes or pigments that are fired onto paper. Greene‘s Self-Portraits (2004) exhibition consists of twelve inkjet prints6 which depict different areas of her own body: head-face, shoulder, back, collarbone, stomach and thighs. This mode of display harks back to images of ethnographic classification in which the black body was .scientifically. scrutinised through a white anthropological lens. In the early 1800s the African body became the unwilling subject of pseudoscientific inquiry that attempted to define racial differences as biological distinctions between black and white people. Anthropologists and scientists, like Louis Agassiz, embraced photography as a device through which visual characteristics could be documented to determine a racial hierarchy.7 Greene reconfigures this photographic medium by interplaying ideas of concealment, revelation, erasure and inscrutability to establish an aesthetic practice of ambiguity that encompasses issues such as .body, memory…and the ever shifting identity of African Americans..8 Each photograph possesses a weathered quality, tarnished with fading, scratched and discoloured remnants that seem to render the image as being from a time predating the artist. This falsely aged aesthetic provides a visual connection to the past, paying homage to the resilience of African American women through muted impressions of a body that is struggling to be seen. In this regard the exhibition becomes a visual excavation in which the contemporary black woman artist uses her own body as a template on which to recuperate and record black female presence, creating aged images that sustain and affirm lost and forgotten memories. Greene provides a filtered presentation of her body which re-creates the barrier between black subject and audience that ethnographic classification appeared to eradicate. The viewer is merely a bystander witnessing the re-emergence of the black body from a self-reflexive black individual‘s standpoint. In her commentary on the images, Greene writes that .While murky, these images reward with the 7 For example, J. T. Zealy‘s collection of fifteen slave daguerreotypes, a project commissioned and directed by Agassiz, exemplifies how the black body was stripped naked and scrutinised to delineate anatomical differences between white and black bodies. Zealy photographed his subjects-as-objects from the front and side using an early photographic process that produced images from light-sensitive silver-coated metallic plates. For a more detailed description of Agassiz and ethnographic classification see Brian Willis‘ essay .Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz‘s Slave Daguerreotypes. in Coco Fusco, Brian Willis, Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2003) p. 163-181. 8 Myra Greene. Interview. =Photographer Interview: Myra Greene‘ by Mestrich Qiana, (New York: Dodge & Burn, 2009), Nov. 2009 revelation of something, my body and my presence.”9 Her presence is undeniable, barely containable within the photograph, her body overflows the parameters of each frame in a way that refuses bracketing and classification. Yet, Greene‘s self-portraits are also oxymoronic: visually inserting oneself into art usually suggests an extension of intimacy, what printmaker Otto Dix describes as .confessions of an inner state,.10 and thereby a more direct and personal dialogue between the inward-looking artist and the viewer. However, rather than simplifying visual accessibility, Greene resurrects a body that is masked within the blurred appearance of her photographs in order to construct herself as consciously inscrutable. She is simultaneously individual and universal, personal and anonymous. 9 A statement by Myra Greene from her official website Myra Greene, Oct 2009. 10 Otto Dix in Self-Portrait in the Age of Photography: Photographers Reflecting Their Own Image. Erika Billeter, Roger Marcel Mayou, (Houston: Musée cantonal des beaux-arts Lausanne, 1986) p. 8. 11 Peter Hamilton, Chapter 3 .Policing the Face., The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography. Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves. (London: Lund Humphries, 2001), p 57. Greene‘s ambiguous mode of self-display is interesting considering that photographic self- portraiture was established to embrace a heightened sense of reality by capturing the subject as they appear in front of the lens. From its initial conception in 1837, a considerable reliance was placed on the supposed objectivity of photography. Peter Hamilton explains how .until photography appeared with its promise of foolproof objectivity, images could only be illustrative, for they could represent but they could not be used, in their own right, as evidence..11 However, considering the obscure nature of Greene‘s photographic self-portraits it is intriguing as to why she uses a medium renowned for accuracy and exactness to create deliberately ambiguous and indistinct representations of herself, particularly when they are more reminiscent of handcrafted images than actual photographs. By her own admission Greene writes that she .experimented with photographic techniques to create a random patterning and destruction of the photographic ideals of clarity and precision.12, thus distorting the very principles that justified the use of photography in ethnographic classification to document seeming .facts. of racial difference. 12 A statement by Myra Greene from her official website Myra Greene, Nov. 2009. 13 hooks, Art on My Mind, p.100. This chapter argues that Greene reworks the visual techniques of distortion and erasure by creating indefinite photographic self-representations that are empowering in their lack of finality, generating a sense of absence that avoids fixed representations. Greene is blurring boundaries and working against rigid frames to embrace abstraction as a form of intellectual and aesthetic liberation. This perplexing presentation ruptures the legitimacy of assumptions regarding black identities which have masqueraded as realities. bell hooks writes that In trying to gather the evidence to name black female experience, the reality and diversity of lives, the facts are muddled, our memories unclear. How to name accurately that which has been distorted, erased, altered to suit the needs of other?13 However, rather than trying to .gather the evidence to name black female experience,. as hooks does, Greene‘s unresolved aesthetic relays her own experience as enigmatic. While hooks is conceptualising in the abstract, Greene applies such ideas in precise ways, deliberately obfuscating her self-portrayal to complicate our understanding and interpretations of black women‘s imagery to convey that there is no definitive black female experience that can be named or classified. In condemnation of the close scrutiny and examination of enslaved African Americans laid bare before the ethnographic lens, Greene‘s abstruse self-presentation decentres the black body, shifting it out from under the glare of the ethnographic gaze, to create photographic windows through which the artist is observed but never fully revealed. The credo that underpins Greene‘s work is evident in the statement: .I really believe that the medium you use should compliment [sic.] the metaphorical meaning of the work..14 This is apparent in her decision to create self-portraits from ink-jet prints. This medium lacks the lustrous surface of chromogenic colour print and instead produces dark, brooding tones that are richly contemplative and possess a raw grittiness. The torn edges of her photographs and scratched impressions on the body‘s surfaces create images that exist through hardship, reflecting the artist‘s concern with history, memory and emotion as inscribed on the body. Favouring the melancholy tones rendered through ink-jet prints, Greene‘s photographs are as dark and mysterious as they are thoughtful and introspective. These self-representations embody Susan Sontag‘s notion of photography as an .elegiac art.15 because Greene uses colour to convey her disposition through sombre greys, dismal browns and indiscernible blacks that sheath the subject within a maelstrom of moody colours. 14 Myra Greene. Interview. =Photographer Interview: Myra Greene‘ by Mestrich Qiana, (New York: Dodge & Burn, 2009), Nov. 2009 15 Susan Sontag, On Photography, (St Ives: Clays Ltd, 1979), p.15. In Untitled (collarbone), (Fig 1), the undulating appearance of the artist‘s skin is characterised by the varying tonal levels demonstrating how Greene uses colour to create depth and defy clarity. The artist resists creating an opaque blackness, although equally she does not reverse it to its opposite transparency, by capturing the multi-tonal hues that reside in her dark skin and the finer details of her skin tone. Her collarbone protrudes out from under the surface transforming the taut skin into a stretched canvas on which colours radiate out from the dark; burnt umbers interfuse with clay browns as dusky greens and russet browns gather at the edges of the frames. Within the sills of her collarbone and along the right side of the neck jet black and dark greys form the darkest areas of the image, while light creeping in from the left illuminates murky greens and yellows from the dark. In contemplation of the images, Greene hopes that they became a reflection of not only attitude or memory, but my skin tone as well. This project presented a manner in which I might be perceived: heavy, shadowed, and definitely black. These new colors reflect the nature of my skin. While initially dismal, a sense of delicacy and grace rises out of the imagery.16 16 A statement by Myra Greene from The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Nov 2009. 17 This soothing and jarring can be seen as a trope in African American visual culture. Jazz has been described as being performed in this manner, for example, one account of jazz cornet player Joe .King. Oliver‘s performance recalls that the .music was so soothing and then when we put a little jump into it, the patrons just had to dance.. In Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America’s Music, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), p.87. African American artist Romare Bearden created art that attempted to capture the visual rhythms of jazz. Greene explores the landscape of her skin tone to bring intensity and depth to the seeming flat black tones, transforming what is originally perceived as .definitely black. into a range of colours that have no fixity. As the viewer spends time with the image definitions of a fixed blackness are challenged and what appeared from the outset to be .dismal. gives way to fragility, elegance and refinement. By interrogating the surface of her own skin, Greene forces the viewer to consider and contemplate the rich hues that exude out of the black. She uses colour in thought-provoking ways to complicate perceptions and presuppositions of blackness, creating a photograph that, while focusing on the exterior, transcends surface impressions to explore an interiority of depth and meaning. Untitled (collarbone) allows us to see the formations of the subject‘s collarbone, the fine creases of her neck and the smooth multihued skin across the upper chest. By drawing close attention to the texture and tonality of the skin, Greene is asking the viewer to engage with the image and observe more than the surface black. Ambiguous white wispy streaks run their course along the surface of the skin creating a look that is simultaneously soothing and jarring.17 The marks run parallel to the collarbone creating a visual harmony in the mutual direction of their flow, yet their scratched appearance is a harsh juxtaposition to the earthy hues of the skin. The result is a lacerating effect on the lucid appearance of the skin, a visual embodiment of fingernails on a blackboard, creating a photograph that is unsettled by interference and forced erasure. These wispy remnants invoke a worn, tampered appearance that instantly ages the image and captures the fragility of a body that appears to be struggling to be seen. The metaphorical meaning of Greene‘s work extends to include historical context because the artist‘s lack of resolution enables her to avoid being identified. In her resistance to the documentary mode, Greene is self-aware rather than complicit in the perpetuation of the black woman‘s body in exhibition, countering a racist tradition of black representation as scientific specimen and eroticised spectacle in favour of reconfiguring her body as a =work of art‘. Greene‘s interplay of revelation and concealment through light and dark raises the intriguing question as to why she is creating self-portraits that are not recognisable as herself. The answer lies in that by making the viewer work harder to see her, Greene undermines pinioned images of the black female body. The artist embraces ideas of ambiguity and ambivalence through her self-portraits to create representations of the black woman‘s body that are ultimately empowering in their lack of resolution. Greene is not allowing the complexity of her character to be determined through photographic imagery alone. Instead, she plays with ideas of visibility, surfaces and modes of visual ellipsis to disguise herself within her work. Experimenting with photography as a medium enables a multifarious identity to extend beyond the parameters of the frame. In turn, extending, or bleeding, the image concentrates our vision on the edges of the frame; the picture has no borders therefore it is printed to the rim of the photographic paper. In this regard Greene‘s visual techniques reject framing and bracketing because she uses the absence of visual borders to create a lack of fixity in her self-presentation. African American artist and cultural critic Carla Williams describes the images Greene creates as .constructed facades, ambiguous surfaces, the metaphoric walls we erect to protect ourselves from the world around us.. 18 Such a critical position acknowledges the virtually impenetrable barricade that Greene constructs between her body and the viewer as a defence mechanism intended to inhibit visual accessibility. However, in the artist‘s own explanation Greene posits that .the darkness requires the viewer to spend time with the pictures in order to see the body and its power,.19 which reconfigures Williams‘ assertion that the dark inscrutability is a visual technique to keep the viewer out. Greene‘s analysis provides a contemplative backdrop to her work. She describes how the images are designed to engage the audience because the dark depths and indecipherability commands the viewer to take a closer stance. She is using light and shade to play with ideas of accessibility, creating dark spaces and unfathomable depths that intend to draw the viewer towards the frame in a way that cultivates intrigue around the black female form. In Art on My Mind bell hooks considers black female representation in contemporary visual culture and the damaging implications of mainstream photography that has left African American women bereft of secrecy. She contends that 18 Carla Williams, .Myra Greene,. Contact Sheet, No.132, (2005), p.22. 19 A statement by Myra Greene from The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Nov 2009. 20 hooks, Art on My Mind, p. 97. In the accepted version of black female reality that predominates in mainstream images there is no subtlety to our experience. We are always portrayed as lacking in depth. Within mainstream art photography the vast majority of images representing black females are full frontal views of face and body. These images reaffirm the insistence on transparency, on the kind of surface understanding that says to the viewer, .What you see is what you get..20 Greene‘s depictions represent self-empowering refutations of what hooks targets as the proliferation of photographed black women as devoid of subtlety. Her work engages with Lorna Simpson‘s theory of absent-presence because Greene complicates visions of herself by eradicating .transparency.; she interplays exposure and concealment to create layers of depth and meaning that obscure the body and reinstate an air of mystery to her self-presentation. Simpson‘s concern with clarity and obfuscation is applicable to Greene‘s self-portraits because both artists construct images that deliberately inhibit visual access. Simpson refutes the idea that the multiplicity of one‘s character can be documented through photography by complicating the ways in which her body can be read. The artist blindfolds herself, crops her body and turns her back against the viewer. In Greene‘s work, the body is also cropped so that each area is afforded an entire frame in which the finer details of skin tone and texture are captured, resulting in portraits that are rich in visual contemplation. These details reinscribe intricacy and subtlety to the black form because the viewer is required to navigate and search the image in order to find the subject‘s presence within the shadows. Greene‘s photographs constitute an additional barrier to the clarity and interpretation of each image because they lack titles; there is no textual designation indicating which part of the body is being shown. Although reproductions of Greene‘s photographs are often accompanied by bracketed titles such as .(shoulder). and .(neck and back)., naming the images in this way means that they are partly translated for the viewer, taking away from the overall ambiguity of the series.21 Such .labels. are in danger of simplifying the photographs to surface body parts when Greene does more than document her body surface. Greene seeks to transcend the body‘s exterior realities to explore depth of feeling and sensation; by generating gloomy hues and dark pockets of space she creates images that are pensive and brooding. Her aesthetic style implies that beneath the surface of each photograph there is more going on than originally meets the eye. By focusing on the temperamental tones of her skin and the tactile quality of the surface in 21 While these bracketed titles are avoidable in exhibitions, ironically, it has become inevitable that I have had to use these headings in my thesis as a way of referencing Greene‘s photographs. images such as Untitled (collarbone), Greene works .to transform her body surface into layers of sensibility and emotion..22 22 A statement by Myra Greene from The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Nov 2009. 23 Carla Williams, .Myra Greene,. Contact Sheet, No.132 (2005), p.22. 24 In =Controlling Images and the Gender Construction of Enslaved African Women‘ Rupe Simms denotes how the .mammy., .mule. and .Jezebel. tropes emerged out of slavery to justify the harrowing treatment of enslaved women and contributed to .the social construction of African women‘s gender. in the American consciousness. These tropes constituted a direct assault to the sexual expression of black women. The characterisation of the .mammy. trope depicted black women as having coarse manners, pitch black skin tone, heavy set body and big lips, therefore constructing an image of ugliness that stripped African American women of a femininity reserved for white women alone. The conceptualisation of the .mule. categorised black women as .subhuman beasts who were only to be valued for their labor. and .could justifiably be beaten to death, worked to death, and otherwise treated as domestic stock. (882).The binary .Jezebel. trope demonised the black woman for corrupting men through her carnal impulses and excessive sexuality, reducing her to a black savage possessing animalistic mentality and driven only by sexual desire. These tropes manifested false conceptualisations of African American women, projecting counterfeit notions of black womanhood that ultimately assaulted black female sexual expression. Rupe Simms, =Controlling Images and the Gender Construction of Enslaved African Women‘, Gender and Society, Vol. 15, No. 6 (Dec, 2001), p. 879-897. By visually harnessing an air of ambiguity to her self-portrayals, Greene‘s exhibit can be interpreted as a condemning response to the historical exhibition of African American women laid bare for purposes of white titillation. While the artist displays her unclothed body in close proximity to the camera, she avoids becoming a .spectacle. by curtailing her self-exhibition through visually impeding methods, working defensively against what Carla Williams describes as the .Now you see us, Now you think you know us”23 assumption about black female representation. To elaborate, some contemporary black female photographers have taken issue with the .documentary. label attached to photographic art because it infers that what is being created is automatically self-reflexive and therefore visual truths can be concluded about the artist-as-subject. The black female body has held a contentious position within American culture, rendered visible through derogatory stereotypical misrepresentations,24 yet ultimately invisible in the absence of accurate depictions that pertain to the multiplicities of black women‘s identities. Kimberly Wallace-Saunders, for example, acknowledges the outpouring of black female stereotypes that .seem to tower over our imaginations to such an extent that more accurate representations of African American women wither in her shadow.. 25 She, like many critics before her, worries that they have .a tenacious, provocative, and troubling hold on our national imagination,. reducing the complexity of black womanhood to limited and misconstrued understandings in American visual culture.26 25 Kimberly Wallace-Saunders, .The Body of a Myth: Embodying the Black Mammy Figure in Visual Culture,. Black Womanhood, Ed. Barbara Thompson, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), p. 163. 26 Ibid. There are many examples of this critical tradition. See Chapter 3 .Back to the Kitchen. in Patricia A Turner‘s Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Cultural Images and their Influence on Culture, (New York: Doubleday, 1994) and Chapter 6 .Jemima and Jezebel in the New South. in Diane Robert‘s The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region, (London: Routledge, 1994). 27 Patricia Hill Collins, .Learning From The Outsider Within: The sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.. Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research, Ed. Mary Margaret Fonow, Judith A. Cook. (Indiana University Press, 1991) p. 35. Greene‘s barely determinable images hinder voyeuristic tendencies because her body is never displayed in intrusive ways; she masks herself within the misty form of photographs that shift between the fairly decipherable to the deliberately inscrutable. Her body is exhibited in ways that emphasise sensuality over sexuality as she photographs her face, neck, back, stomach, arms and thighs, as opposed to more intimate and revealing areas. By adopting this sensual and more emotive self-presentation Greene invokes one of the key tenets of black feminism, self- definition, which Patricia Hill Collins determines as .challenging the political knowledge- validation process that has resulted in externally-defined stereotypical images of Afro-American womanhood. by .replacing externally-derived images with authentic Black female images..27 Greene disputes these .externally-defined stereotypes. by creating photographic portrayals that are far from oversimplified and that resist embodying or conforming to a single interpretation. Instead Greene‘s sensually ambiguous self-portrayals coalesce in a nonrepresentational visual discourse that produces complex and multifarious self-representations. The artist has said of herself that: Confronted with an upswell of bigotry both personal and public, I was forced to ask myself, what do people see when they look at me. Am I nothing but black? Is that skin tone enough to describe my nature and expectation in life? Do my strong teeth make me a strong worker? Does my character resonate louder than my skin tone?...The lessons learned are haunting and frightening in these modern times.28 28 A statement by Myra Greene from her official website Myra Greene, Nov 2009. 29 A statement by Adrian Piper in Maurice Berger‘s Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, (Baltimore: Fine Arts Gallery University of Maryland, 1999), p.15. Greene explores her skin surface and tone to address presuppositions of race which resonates with the work of philosopher and artist Adrian Piper. As a light-skinned African American woman, Piper has been the subject of inadvertent racial passing most of her life, presumed to be white and consequently made to feel guilty by the inaccurate assumptions of others when her black heritage is made known. She describes the trajectory of her self-conscious artwork and writing as a .compulsion to embody, transform, and use experiences as a woman of colour in constructive ways, in order not to feel powerless..29 Piper has developed a hybrid style from working with a range of media and exhibiting performance pieces, multi-media installations and photo-and-text pieces. In similar ways to Greene‘s manner of self-portrayal, the inability to typecast Piper‘s work connotes her effort to produce complex representations of African American women that rebuke existing stereotypes and reflect the impossibility of defining the black female experience as a monolithic construct. Greene‘s Self-Portraits are intended to captivate and draw the viewer towards the frame, while Piper asks difficult questions in her work that jar her audience out of its comfort zone. Piper is more direct in her approach by exposing closeted bigots in her Calling Cards series. The first instalment, My Calling(Card)#1: A Reactive Guerrilla Performance for Dinners an Cocktail Parties, is a performance piece in which Piper handed out calling cards to guests who had made racist remarks, assuming that they were only in the company of white people. The irony of the line, .I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you,. reflects the absurdity of a situation in which a black woman is made to apologise for reprimanding racism and made to feel accountable when other people misinterpret her as white. Piper uses diction such as .manipulative., .socially inappropriate. and .discomfort. as touchstone expressions for her difficult experience, which according to Ann E. Kaplan shows, .What happens when the look is returned - when black people own the look and startle whites into knowledge of their whiteness?.30 Piper‘s calling cards simultaneously reprimand and empower, inverting the pain and discomfort she feels back onto the perpetrators of the comment. This confrontation forces people to analyse unselfconscious attitudes about race, providing what Piper identifies as a .therapeutic. result for herself and .catalytic.31 results for those forced to confront their intransigent attitude. The second instalment of Calling Cards calls attention to the way in which the black woman has been regarded by society. The card reads 30 Ann E. Kaplan. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze, (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 4. 31 Berger. Adrian Piper, p.80. 32 Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card) #2, http://msvuart.ca/index.php?menid=02&mtyp=17&article_id=96&sby=4&sbyk=6&sbyn=&pin= (Dec 2009) Dear Friend / I am not here to pick anyone up, or to be picked up. I am here alone because I want to be here, Alone. This card is not intended as part of an extended flirtation. Thank you for respecting my privacy.32 This piece conveys the importance Piper places on the way that her body and the bodies of black women in general, are interpreted within a social context. Piper forces the receiver to confront the hyper-sexualisation of black women and question why the same courtesy and respect historically more often afforded to white women, although frequently denied to women in general, is not extended to black women. Greene‘s approach is more ambiguous compared to the overtly confrontational style of Piper‘s performance pieces; she subtly references the historical sexual exhibition of black women by not photographing her most intimate areas while Piper‘s calling cards directly address the presupposition of black women‘s hyper sexualisation. Greene complicates her self- presentation in deliberately ambiguous ways to defy single interpretations while Piper‘s artistic voice is less vague prompting the question as to which approach is more effective: directness or ambiguity? Arguably there is more visual interference in Greene‘s self-portraits; murky surfaces, scratch marks and dark indecipherable tones distort the picture, creating a visual noise that complicates the artist‘s message and makes the photographs more susceptible to misinterpretation. However, it is important to note that the idea of misinterpreting a photograph is in itself problematic because it implies that there is a correct reading, which is not achievable. In Out of Order, Out of Sight Piper discusses the artist‘s quandary in retaining interpretive control of the work and how misinterpretations .may cause experimental changes in the audience that the artist intended actively to avoid, or explicitly rejects as a misreading of or projection onto the work..33 Taking this assertion into consideration, how effective is Greene‘s use of ambiguity as a critical tool in the context of African American women‘s overwhelming misrepresentation in visual culture? 33 Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, (London: The MIT Press, 1996), p. 93. As the fashioner of her own image, Greene is free to imagine her own representation in unbounded, self-actualising ways. It therefore seems incongruous that she chooses a purposefully ambiguous aesthetic that inevitably places the burden of interpretation on the viewer. This, coupled with the paradoxical nature of the exhibit‘s title, .Self-Portraits., begs the question as to why Greene is creating autobiographical images that conceal her body almost to the point of unrecognisable abstraction. Her work is tightly controlled; every creative decision is important and yet there is a tension in that Greene cannot control the viewer‘s interpretations. However, Greene is fully aware of this tension and by her own admission she enjoys the different ways in which her images are received. Carla Williams writes When I first saw this current series of untitled self-portraits, the images were virtually impossible to penetrate-deliberately dark, dense, and obscure. Myra had sent them around for feedback, and I told her I couldn‘t really make them out enough to make sense of them. I simply couldn‘t see them. Myra wrote back to say that several people had said the same thing but that‘s how she liked them and she was moving forward with them.34 34 Carla Williams, =Myra Greene,‘ Contact Sheet, No.132 (2005), p.22. 35 Deborah D. McLeod, =Here‘s the Thing: Twinned Photography Exhibits Reconsider Objects‘ Thingness‘, Baltimore City Paper, (Baltimore: Times-Shamrock, 2006), p.1. Feb 2010. By rendering herself virtually anonymous within these photographs Greene is simultaneously inside and outside, both the subject and creator. She is within the photograph, but the experimental nature of self-presentation allows her to become an indistinguishable .other. that transcends her individual self. Art critic Deborah McLeod reminds us that the images do not actually look like the artist when she asserts: .Greene‘s method of imagining is almost as indiscernible as an ultrasound of a life yet to be met. Her provisional shapes in the dark might be your own, anyone‘s..35 However, whether or not we recognise the subject as the artist, an enduring presence is apparent nonetheless; the outlines of a body are visible and the dark tones project a sense of the subject‘s mood. There is a danger in assuming that Greene‘s anonymous representations transcend the individual to create universalising images of the black woman‘s body, particularly in the context of how .the collective. has been used negatively in conjunction with African American women‘s representation. It would be wrong to suggest that Greene‘s work is automatically speaking for a fictitious .collective. of black women who share unifying experiences. Lisa Kennedy refutes the use of .the collective body. condemning the .phantasm with which I share blood, history, and hips.36 for reducing the multiplicity of African American experiences to a single entity that denies individuality and creativity. Kennedy writes of .the inherent failure in casting the collective over the individual or mistaking the individual vision for the collective reality..37 This is important to consider when analysing anonymity and ambiguity in Greene‘s work. While her anonymous portrayals enable the image to extend beyond the individual, the artist does not claim, nor do I wish to imply, that her equivocal pictorial presence is representative of a wider body of black women. Rather, there is a tension between individuality and collectivity in her work because by refuting and avoiding representing a specific collective past she represents a different form; a collectivity of powerlessness, emptiness and absence. Greene conjures a non-essentialist collective identity. Curator Jeffreen M. Hayes, for example, observes that .Greene invites the viewer into her psyche. to encourage the spectator .to consider what is beyond the subject, beyond the image, beyond the object..38 This positions Greene‘s photographs as touchstones for an extended exploration of the body and self which is also reflected in her use of the frame. 36 Lisa Kennedy, =The Body in Question‘ in Michele Wallace, Black Popular Culture, Ed. Gina Dent, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), p. 106. 37 Ibid., p. 110. 38 Jeffreen M. Hayes, =Myra Greene‘, The International Review of African American Art, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Hampton: Hampton University Museum, 2008), p. 11. Nov 2009. These borderless photographs do not restrict or confine her body; instead of being cramped within the parameters of the image Greene is expanding out of it, she commands the frame as opposed to being contained by it. This aesthetic technique is empowering for the artist because her photographs can be seen as gateways through which her body is extending beyond the visual limitations of the viewer‘s eye; she is accessing what is visually inaccessible to the viewer. Similarly Greene simultaneously embraces anonymity and ambiguity within these images to create visual intervals that allow the viewer, in part, to intervene in the artistic space39 and, according to Hayes, question .what we see of her and what we see of ourselves..40 In this regard Greene invites our participation, positioning the viewer from passive observer to active contributor in the emotive reading of these images, but never allowing the viewer unbounded visual accessibility or more control of the image than the artist herself. 39 bell hooks writes that .presence is made more manifest by the spaces left vacant in the work that leave room for us,. in Art on My Mind, p. 50. 40 Jeffreen M. Hayes, =Myra Greene‘, The International Review of African American Art, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Hampton: Hampton University Museum, 2008), p. 11. Nov 2009. Greene‘s equivocal aesthetic is particularly evident in the panel of her face, Untitled (face), (Fig 2), which depicts the artist with her eyes closed, ambiguously lost in solitary reverie or caught in a painful memory. The contours of her face appear relaxed and yet the skin‘s surface is disrupted by discolouration in the print and the movement of white chalky marks down her features. These wispy white streams create a veil as they cascade down the face, exerting a false pressure that seems to pull down upon her eyelashes, interfering with the image‘s lucidity and partially erasing her facial features. The bubbling discoloration of the print creates a similar look of pressure on the skin almost as if Greene‘s face is being pressed against a screen, while the overall murkiness and flow of the lines appear to consume the subject, as though she is submerged in water. Furthermore the white etchings could denote hostile scratches and the murky remnants of tears as though Greene is trapped within the frame and attempting to surface out of it. This hauntingly beautiful yet equally dark and despondent image may be read as a visual metaphor for the artist enduring and overcoming hard times in her own life. It captures Greene‘s mood at the time of its inception: .I was experiencing my first true winter [in Rochester, New York]. The purple snowy skies dragged on my emotions, self-esteem, and attitudes for the season, which influenced these dark and dreary images..41 Her moroseness during this period informs the photograph‘s gloomy appearance through teary streaks and shadowy greys. The subject appears to be trapped within the frame, unable to surface from the lingering depression of colours that immerse her, while the downward streaks on Greene‘s face visually infer how the ominous weather .dragged. on her emotions. 42 These visual techniques of partial erasure, veiling and submersion complicate our reading as Greene‘s expression oscillates between contemplation and despondency. Whether the viewer interprets the subject as forcibly imprisoned or introspectively self-contained, Greene complicates ideas of internal and external surfaces with an unreadable expression to explore the relationship between psychological versus physical realities. 41 A statement by Myra Greene from The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Nov 2009. 42 This calls to mind the effect that weather had on Norman Lewis‘s abstract paintings. In the 1950s, while the artist was fishing off the shores of Long Island, her recalls that .it was foggy, and the sky and water catalyzed so that you could see the point where they fell together. Fog, this ethereal filter, fascinated me. It became the dominant undertone in much of my painting then.. In Ann Eden Gibson, .Black is a Color: Normal Lewis and Modernism in New York., Norman Lewis Black Paintings 1946-1977, Ed. Stephanie Saloman, (New York: The Alabaster Group, 1998), p, 24. It is important to recognise that Greene‘s ambiguous approach may be a sign of her contemporary status which places her in a different context to the crusading black female artists establishing themselves in the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement. Greene, who was born in 1975, is removed from the racial turbulence and political milieu that charged this period and the rigid stereotypes and social impediments that confronted her predecessors, while neither redundant nor fully reconciled, are no longer as definitive in contemporary America. African American women artists today are working in a post civil rights era where formative discrimination is supposedly nonexistent. They have been socialised in a different time and, while they still face prejudice in regards to exhibition space, scholarly criticism and that the general recognition of their work is small compared to their white and male counterparts, they do not have to contend with the same degree of formative discrimination that faced their predecessors. For example, in 1948 the African American artist Faith Ringgold was prohibited from studying fine arts at the City University of New York because it was not deemed an appropriate profession for a black woman. Unsurprisingly, these feelings of alienation took shape in her work which grapples with issues of white/black power relations, social injustice and the failure of racial integration. Working within the same turbulent period as Ringgold, Bettye Saar‘s =The Liberation of Aunt Jemima‘ reconstructs prevailing stereotypes of black women in order to deconstruct them and shine a light on racist imagery. The discrimination facing these black women artists has not gone away; however Greene‘s experience demonstrates that prejudices are differently deflected in contemporary America. This is evident in the prevailing lack of exhibition space afforded to African American women artists and the considerable difficulty in discovering and obtaining materials on photographers such as Greene. Greene‘s ambiguity exemplifies a different protest approach that departs from the clear optical messages generated by Ringgold and Saar whose work continues to challenge misconstrued representations by making the black woman‘s image visible in self-aware and self-empowering ways. This distinction is not intended to position Greene‘s ambiguous aesthetic as any less effective than her predecessors. However, it is important to draw attention to Greene‘s contemporary status when observing the themes of visibility, erasure, revelation and concealment in her work, particularly as these concepts have taken on different meanings since the 1970s. In Dark Designs and Visual Cultures cultural critic Michele Wallace articulates the transition in her own conceptualisation of the black woman‘s body since the 1970s: I would like to make a point that I didn‘t know how to make when I published Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman in 1979…invisibility, marginality and silence are not always disadvantages. Visibility, centrality, and voice, or what I like to call noise, are not always advantages.43 43 Michele Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Cultures, (London: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 112. This provides one example of a shift in black female intellectual thought and how notions of invisibility and silence, which formerly held largely negative connotations, have taken on new meanings. Greene seems to recognise this development in Self-Portraits by deliberately playing with themes of invisibility, erasure and the decentring of the black body. She uses light and dark within her photographs to create spaces of contemplation and introspection and by complicating notions of visibility through an ambivalent treatment of erasure, Greene‘s images alternate between fading away into the frame and emerging out from the darkness. Each photograph appears to be caught at the transitional stage of its own development; polarised in it‘s evolution from a lifeless canvas to one that is teeming with the artist‘s bodily presence. Such a reading implies a visual discourse of emergence in which the concealed nature of Greene‘s body within the murkiness of the photograph allows for the revelation of her durable presence. In Untitled (face) and Untitled (back and shoulder) Greene‘s body is concurrently fading and emerging and as such exemplifying the tensions at play in her work. She creates a visual language of oppositions: revelation and concealment, erasure and emergence, a prematurely old appearance in newly developed photographs which serve to complicate our reading of black female bodies. Greene‘s preoccupation with abstracted representations of the body becomes even more interesting given the turbulent history of abstractionism in the wider African American art movement. In the early 1960s many Black Nationalist artists called for an end to abstraction because of its refusal to address material realties head-on. Sharon F. Patton acknowledges that the .cultural underpinning of Black Nationalism/Black Power forced artists to be accountable,.44 therefore African American artwork that did not specifically advance the racial cause was discredited by the movement. Black artist Jeff Donaldson, a key member of Chicago‘s Africobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), expressed this anti-abstract expressionist position in his 1968 essay, .The Role We Want for Black Art.. As a representative voice of the commune, Donaldson had little interest in .art for art‘s sake. because he valued visual messages that spoke directly to the needs of African Americans and anything that didn‘t was .a waste of valuable time and creative energy..45 Furthermore, the Eurocentric roots of abstract expressionism undermined Black Nationalist artists‘ will towards a uniquely black movement that was committed to the social uplift of African Americans. Some black art figures viewed abstract expressionism as a fundamentally white arts movement, dominated by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and because it constituted yet another arena that African Americans were marginalised from it was not a viable visual space in which to create political consciousness among black people. 44 Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.217. 45 Jeff Donaldson, .The Role We Want for Black Art., William L. Van Deburg, Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, (London: NYU Press, 1997), p.219. Therefore, considering the body of black intellectual thought that has condemned abstract expressionism as a form of social protest in the late 1960s, to what extent is Greene‘s abstraction successful? Her ambiguous self-presentation and visual ellipsis, the dark spaces and unclear formations of her body, can be criticised for being evasive because they avoid conveying the more concrete messages that black nationalists demanded of the black artist. Her murky style arguably avoids the gray areas of human experience and yet her veiled presentation provides a visual dimension to the discussions of racial invisibility put forward by writers such as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Furthermore, her work can be seen on a continuum with performance artists Adrian Piper and Lorraine O‘Grady who adopt disguises in their art to challenge, complicate and interrogate perceptions of race. It is important to recognise that because Greene is not of the same generation as the Black Nationalist artists the abstraction in her work takes on very different meanings. In my opinion her ambiguity and fragmentation is not an evasive device; rather it reflects the inability of a static visual object to give a complete representation of complex humanity. Her elusiveness is deliberate. In this regard, Greene‘s style can be likened to one of the most prominent African American experimental abstractionists of the 1950s, Norman Lewis. Lewis‘s art eludes clear perception. His abstract style ran against the grain of many African American artists at the time who were focused on creating issue-driven works that addressed the important matters of race, gender and sexuality. As Kinshasha Holman Conwill asserts, Lewis .rejected absolutes in favour of the more difficult pursuit of the unchartered, the unexpected, and the ambiguous..46 Greene‘s Self-Portraits share this rhetoric of nonspecificity. The way in which her dark exteriors encompasses traces of brown, yellow and green, can also be likened to Lewis‘s use of the colour black, which he believed contained all the shades of the rainbow.47 In regards to his painting .Blending., Lewis commented: .I wanted to see if I could get out of black the suggestion of other nuances of color, using it in such a way as to arouse other colors,.48 In a similar vein, Greene can be seen to challenge the monolithic concept of black because she embraces blackness to reveal rather than conceal complexities in the same way that Lewis saw 46 Kinshasha Holman Conwill, .The Importance of Being Norman Lewis., Norman Lewis Black Paintings 1946-1977, Ed. Stephanie Saloman, (New York: The Alabaster Group, 1998), p.9. 47 A literary example of the rainbow like quality of black can be found in Toni Morrison‘s Song of Solomon. The author describes the multiplexed nature of the colour black: .You think dark is just one color, but it ain‘t. They‘re five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don‘t stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another…May as well be a rainbow.. Song of Solomon, (London: Picador, 1978), p. 40-1. 48 Ann Eden Gibson, .Black is a Color: Normal Lewis and Modernism in New York., Norman Lewis Black Paintings 1946-1977, Ed. Stephanie Saloman, (New York: The Alabaster Group, 1998), p.11. .a world in blackness. where .the dark tones it produced when mixed or juxtaposed in large proportions with other colors became metaphors for experiences of nature in both town and country..49 Gibson continues that Lewis .used the techniques he developed to articulate the potential of black paint to suggest forms and ideas barely seen (or not seen at all)..50 Greene uses black defensively to counter the historical overexpose of black women because through veiling her body she professes to the hidden complexities of her identity. In this regard the colour black, as a conglomeration of all other colours, becomes a metaphor for Greene‘s almost impalpable self-representation because while it is difficult to penetrate it also masks the other colours, which makes it more intriguing. Ultimately, Greene establishes nonspecificity to blur boundaries between the figurative and non figurative, simultaneously conveying presence and absence. Her images possess the binary quality of bodies that are submerged and surfacing, calling to mind the disappearing bodies of David Hammons‘s canvases.51 49 Ibid., p.16. 50 Ibid., p.16. 51 Hammons pressed his greased body up against paper to create his Body Prints series in the early 1970s. The artist‘s body appears to be disappearing on the canvas. 52 White constructed cultural images to emerge out of slavery embellished African American women‘s breasts and buttocks which, according to historian K. Sue Jewell, placed black women .outside of the sphere of sexual desirability and into the realm of maternal nurturance.. This depiction was the slave In many respects, Greene‘s depictions are detached: her eyes are closed and we are shown images of her back, collarbone and thighs which give little indication of the identity of the owner. In the absence of direct eye contact or a determinable facial expression the only way in which Greene can be read is through the fragments of her body that she chooses to provide. One obvious and very significant aspect of her self-portrayal is the artist‘s aversion to exhibiting her breasts, buttocks or genitalia, resulting in desexualised images that run contrast to historically white-male renderings of black women specifically through their genitalia from which assumptions of their sexuality were delineated.52 In my reading of her photographs, Greene master‘s attempt to reconfigure the rape of enslaved black women; by disavowing white men‘s sexual interest in African American women the female slave could be seen as the initiator of sexual advances. K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond, (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 40. 53 This name was coined by Baartman‘s exhibitor Henrick Caesar as part of her advertisement campaign. 54 J J. Virey in .Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature., Sander L. Gilman Vol. 12, No. 1, "Race," Writing, and Difference (Autumn, 1985) p. 213 draws on this historical framework as her photographs take on new meanings given that she is the self-aware creator of her own image. A comprehensive understanding of the exhibition and exploitation of black women through their sexuality is provided by the cultural historian Sander L. Gilman in his essay .Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.. Gilman‘s discussion focuses on Saarte Baartman, a South African tribeswoman who was shipped to England in 1810 because her voluptuous figure and elongated labia were deemed spectacles worth showcasing in Europe. Baartman‘s body fascinated and titillated European audiences from London to Paris and even after her death she was unable to escape exhibition when her remains were dissected and displayed behind glass in Paris‘ Musée de l‘Homme. In this essay Gilman compiles nineteenth- century anthropological studies of the black woman‘s body to formulate an understanding of where the .scientific. debasement of the black female body through her sexuality began to take shape. He focuses on the development of the .Hottentot Venus.,53 Baartman‘s derogatory alias, and how she came to represent black womanhood in the nineteenth-century European imagination. A representative example of the nineteenth-century imagination around Baartman is J. J Virey who was most abhorrent in his proposition that the .voluptuousness. of the black woman‘s body is .developed to a degree of lascivity unknown in our climate, for their sexual organs are much more developed than those of whites..54 With historical hindsight, Willis and Williams point out that Baartman‘s engorged buttocks were the result of steatopygia, the excessive accumulation of fat around this area, which is common among the Khoisian women of South Africa from whom Baartman originated. Furthermore, Willis and Williams identify Baartman‘s distinctive labia as .a result of genital manipulation-a kind of beauty mark, like a piercing or tattoo.55 to negate anthropological claims that her atypical genitalia was a hereditary trait of black women and signified sexual libidinousness. 55 Willis and Williams, The Black Female Body, p. 61. 56 Samuel Solly and John George Moojen, =Examination of the Hottentot Venus – 27th Nov. 1810‘ reprinted in Bernth Lindfors, Africans on stage: studies in ethnological show business, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999) p. 41 57 Ibid., p.41. 58 Alexander Dunlop was the English army surgeon who escorted Baartman on the passage over to England. 59 Solly and John George Moojen, =Examination of the Hottentot Venus – 27th Nov. 1810‘ reprinted in Lindfors, Africans on stage, p. 41. The degree to which Baartman was complicit in her exhibition became the subject of an English court hearing waged by abolitionists to assess the terms of her exploitation. In .Examination of the Hottentot Venus – 27th Nov. 1810,. notes compiled from an interview with Baartman as part of the investigation, solicitors Samuel Solly and John George Moojen determined that she had .no complaints to make against her master or those that exhibit her. and was .to receive one half of the money received for exhibiting herself,.56 ultimately concluding that Baartman was .not desirous of changing her present situation..57 The extent to which this attests to the reality of Baartman‘s experience is contentious considering that, according to the same solicitors, she understood .very little of the Agreement made with her by Mr. Dunlop58 on the twenty ninth October 1810..59 Ayo Abietou Coly argues that Baartman‘s .lack of foresight undermines any reading of agency. in her situation as she was .ignorant to the larger ideological implications. of her exhibition, .particularly the erotically and sexually charged nature of these images when showcased out of context, their deployment supporting racist and colonialist theses about primitiveness..60 In the absence of the most intimate areas of her body, Greene may be signifying upon the ways in which Baartman‘s genitalia and her buttocks served as .a central image for the black female throughout the nineteenth century..61 For European audiences fascinated by the anomaly of her appearance compared to their own standards of beauty and womanhood, Baartman signified an intriguing .Other. that required close examination in life and death. Baartman‘s exploitation provides a contextual backdrop, albeit a very different context, to Greene‘s self-empowering photographs because the artist can be seen to claim her own body in protest at disempowered African American women whose bodies were forcibly detached from their personal right to self-definition. 60 Ayo Abietou Coly, =Housing and Homing the Black Female Body in France: Calixthe Beyala and the Legacy of Sarah Baartman and Josephine Baker‘, in Black Womanhood, Ed.Thompson, p. 259. 61 Gilman, .Black Bodies, White Bodies., p. 216. 62 Carla Williams, .Myra Greene,. Contact Sheet, No.132 (2005), p.22. In contrast to the undignified visibility of Baartman‘s exhibition, Greene is more of an enigma to avoid being immediately identifiable or transparent. Historically African American women have had a complex relationship with sexual expression due to a history of enforced sterilisation, laws banning miscegenation, unavailable abortions and stereotypes such as the asexual .mammy. and the hyper sexualised .Jezebel., tropes which displaced the social construction of black women‘s gender from African American women. In the context of this history, Greene‘s photographs are enigmatic, unresolved and difficult to interpret, encompassing an aesthetic of ambiguity to re-establish privacy and dignity on behalf of black women historically stripped of both. In reference to Self-Portraits, Carla Williams asserts .Though we have to struggle to make them out, we won‘t give up. They are too precious..62 Here Williams infers the significance of Greene‘s heterogeneous .self. because the viewer is constantly working to decipher and understand her representations. A degree of perseverance is required from the viewer in addition to the artist, whose body appears to be fighting its way to the surface, because we must spend time with the image to locate Greene within the murky shadows. In this regard Self-Portraits can be seen as a set of visual secrets curtailing the intrusion of the outsider‘s gaze, offering misty glimpses of a body that is communicating in a visual exchange of ideas with which the viewer is only partly engaged. Greene oscillates between revelation and concealment by cutting off intimate outlets to the viewer through an emphasis upon closed eyes and obscured areas of the body. Therefore it is difficult to distinguish where the exchange between the artist and audience begins or ends. Greene‘s work is hard to infiltrate which suggests that she is the only person who may truly experience it from the inside out, yet by the artist‘s own admission she intentionally creates murky images to draw the viewer in closer. A key facet to her work is this tension between closeness and distance, trespass and invitation. This push-and-pull aesthetic commands the viewer to take a closer stance without conceding too much access, thus Greene generates a lack of resolution to her self-presentation that has no finality. Greene‘s artistic restraint from too much visibility has culminated in what Carla Williams coins .hard rocks. and .stone walls.63, protective shields that filter the voyeuristic gaze and restore dignity and privacy to the subject. Greene‘s preoccupation with obscuring surfaces complicates the process by which the image is understood allowing for the reversal of the relationship between the surveyor and the surveyed; it becomes difficult for the black female subject to become an object of voyeurism when she is self-aware in the concealment of her body. Although Williams‘ hard-rock/stone-wall analogy acknowledges the inscrutability of Greene‘s Self-Portraits, it fails to recognise the residual softness that several of these images possess. In the absence of harsh angles and bold contrasts in colour, Untitled (face) presents the 63 Ibid. viewer with muted hues that seep into one another. White chalky marks run like watery currents down the surface of her skin, creating a soothing visual discourse that is more cathartic than abrasive. The effect of these sensuous lines plays into the overarching ambiguity of Greene‘s work; do they indeed represent teary streaks running down her face or are they intended to create a mellow haze that infers a more meditative state? The overall effect is a contemplative visual space where behind closed eyes the artist is self-realising and self-defining. Untitled (shoulder), (Fig 3), is arguably the visual antithesis of the aforementioned photograph of Greene‘s face. In this image the viewer is presented with the subject‘s upper back, a .stone-wall. that is utterly devoid of emotion. By presenting her back to the camera‘s lens the artist projects herself into the frame, creating a barrier between herself and the viewer but also between the viewer and the concealed space behind her. The viewer is unable to access this alternative space, therefore it becomes an empowering domain for Greene‘s self-actualising. This photograph depicts the tactile landscape of the subject‘s body, drawing close attention to the strong muscular contortions of her back and the indentures of the skin to symbolise growth and strength in the body. Strength is implicit in the terrain of the back where dark crevices of the skin are juxtaposed with lighter areas to create a surface that appears weathered with age. This rock-like appearance is demonstrative of Williams‘ .hard rock/stonewall. comparison, yet the white currents running across the skin provide a movement to the piece that juxtaposes with the solid rigidity of her back, adding a more ethereal dimension to the photograph. These white watery currents are visually ambiguous; do they scratch or soothe the surface? While watery and flowing in appearance they also embody the harsh coarseness of a billowing wind as though the skin‘s surface is embattled by the elements, producing the look of a body that continues to struggle but is ultimately enduring.64 As these ambiguities play out on the surface of the skin we 64 The water damage appearance calls to mind the wall decorations of cabins in the rural south, like they have been pasted on to a wall to withstand harsh winter climates. The deliberate water damaged look of her photographs possess a vulnerable beauty that resonates with Jean Michel Basquiat‘s opinion of Da Vinci‘s paintings that they were even more beautiful with water damage on them. In Jana Evans Braziel‘s Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p.177. 65 Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002), p.30. 66 Carla Williams, .Myra Greene,. Contact Sheet, No.132 (2005), p.22. are reminded of Greene‘s concern with the .ever-shifting identity of African Americans,. which is as diverse, extensive and ever-changing as the terrain of her own skin. This image conveys the landscape of the artist‘s skin as it shifts from dark, hostile and defensive to velvety smooth and contemplative. In Untitled (neck and back), (Fig 4), an overcast presence is generated within the frame as though the body is hanging in the balance of forming and dispersing, like tempestuous clouds in a thunderstorm. Greene has turned inwards from the voyeuristic gaze and between the charcoal grey creases of her neck and water ravaged appearance of her skin, the image takes on a gloomy and dejected tone. Carrie Mae Weems has revealed that the motivation behind her own photography is to alleviate and .rise above. the depiction of blacks always as the .victim of the gaze..65 However, Greene contends that, "If we [African American women] are truly in control of our own artistic expression, are we not allowed to say that we are down, quiet, contemplative, or even depressed? Not because of our race, just because we are. "66 In light of this assertion, the gloomy appearance of Greene‘s photographs is empowering because it attests to the reality of her emotional experience. There is no charade in that she does not shy away from admitting to being depressed, vulnerable or silent. This provides a visual rebuttal of what Michele Wallace coined .the myth of the superwoman. as attributable to black women. Wallace delineated the fallacy of .a woman of inordinate strength, with an ability for tolerating an unusual amount of misery…This woman does not have the same fears, weaknesses, and insecurities as other women, but believes herself to be and is, in fact, stronger emotionally than most men..67 Wallace explains how this characterisation of the .invulnerable. black woman developed during slavery, painting the pretence of a strong woman who could withstand separation from her family and endure the hardship of slave labour.68 Continuing in a similar vein, K. Sue Jewell‘s discussion of cultural images of African American women aligns the .emotional make-up of [the] mammy. with .traditional gender roles associated with masculinity...fiercely independent, aggressive and powerful,.69 delineating how enslaved blacks were hyperbolised into women of excessive strength who were able to endure destitution. Untitled (neck and back) breaks down the pretence of a strong black woman devoid of emotion as the mercurial appearance of the photograph‘s surface creates an image saturated with emotion. The subject possesses an evanescent quality as though her scarcely perceptible figure is in danger of vanishing like vapour at any moment. Greene is a fragile and vulnerable presence in the photograph, barely visible but enduring nonetheless. 67 Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (London: Verso, 1990) p. 107 68 Ibid., p. 138 69 Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond, p. 42 The blurry appearance of a photograph that is weathered creates a time-warped quality that visually exports Greene to a different epoch. By harnessing techniques that .age. the image, Greene creates faded visual mementos of the past that reinforce the idea that she is revisiting official visual records through which African Americans were documented as a way of paying homage to their existence. Similarly to Untitled (face), the washed-out look of Untitled (neck and back) attains to the aesthetic quality of a memory too, but one that is fighting to surface from beneath the weight of its own erasure. This visualisation of remembrance, combined with the anonymity of Greene‘s identity, may be signifying on a legacy of loss and recuperation within African American history. Therefore by creating an image that is scarcely visible to begin with, Greene employs photography as a medium to represent a form of cultural recovery; by alluding to the faded visual remnants of her body, Greene is signifying upon African American visual history and the precariousness of its survival. For example, bell hooks recalls how the display of ancestral photographs in southern black homes constituted sites of resistance…private, black-owned and-operated gallery space where images could be displayed…Growing up inside these walls, many of us did not regard them as important or valuable…I can confess that those walls of photographs empowered me, and that I feel their absence in my life. Right now I long for those walls, those curatorial spaces in the home that express our will to make and display images.70 70 hooks, Art on My Mind, p. 59. In Greene‘s self-portraits are private manifestos made public as they recapture the look of photographs that have been cast to one side, stored away for years, disused and abandoned. By exploring the recuperation and restoration of black women‘s portraiture, Greene reinstates the value of autobiographical photographs, resurrecting them on gallery walls where the finer details of her body are afforded close-up attention. Furthermore, the fading and emerging quality of these photographs seems to recall and remember, as though Greene is requesting the viewer to bear witness to the regeneration of her presence. The concept of recollecting black women‘s bodies through photography takes shape in Jewelle Gomez‘s essay, .Showing Our Faces: A Century of Black Women Photographed., in which she pays homage to the matrilineal photographs that her grandmother carefully preserved. Gomez attests to women‘s resilience through preservation: When the extremes began to fold back onto themselves, threatening to drown me in their oppressive weight, I run home to my grandmother, Lydia. Under her bed in a sturdy box she keeps the history. Carefully wrapped in tissue paper, secure in plastic bags, lie the photographs of one hundred years of black womanlife…Those black faces are an index to the memories of who we really are. She saved them because…she was certain they‘d be important again. Someday.71 71 Jewelle Gomez, =Showing Our Faces: A Century of Black Women Photographed‘, Ten 8 Quarterly Photographic Magazine No. 24 (1988) p. 19. 72 Jeanne Moutousamy attests to the lack of value afforded to photographed black women when she was collating images for her historical overview Viewfinders. Moutassamy approached Winifred Hall Allen, a descendant of the prolific black photographer James Van Der Zee, in the hope that she could acquire images from her collection. However, the experience was less than fruitful; the few surviving, albeit ill forgotten, photographs were cast away, damaged and abandoned as Allen had not considered them worth rescuing from destruction. Gomez writes how .[Allen‘s] sense of the prevailing cultures sentiments about their lack of worth was, of course, sadly accurate.. In Gomez‘s =Showing Our Faces., p. 17. 73 Sontag, On Photography, p.9. 74 Ibid., p.9. Gomez finds solace in the black faces of the women projected back at her from whom she gains a sense of her historical lineage. Her grandmother‘s careful handling of these visual relics denotes their personal and historical worth and reinforces the process by which they are preserved and observed so that these black women remain unforgotten. The idea of a photograph providing the visual anchorage of one‘s ancestry interplays with Greene‘s own introspective aesthetic. Her body, as it surfaces from dark corners and murky spaces symbolises reclamation of the black woman‘s body, signifying upon recovery of what has been lost within black visual history or what has not been considered valuable.72 For Susan Sontag .photography came along to memorialize, to reinstate symbolically, the imperilled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life..73 Her description of photographs as .ghostly traces. that .supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives.74 can be likened to Greene‘s own spectral style. The fragmented and dispersed nature of Greene‘s self-portraits appear as .ghostly traces. as though the artist is visually excavating and re-imaging unattainable possessions of the past. By complicating her self-representation to create virtually unrecognisable images, Greene calls into question the assumed objectivity of a photograph as what you see is not necessarily what you get. Out of the initial darkness Greene‘s body shifts into focus, an indiscernible presence on the canvas. Cast in subdued yellow, earthy greens, jet black crevices and murky greys that transition into dusky browns the subject is fugacious. This intense exploration of skin tone reveals how Greene is doing something more with her photographs by signifying on the body‘s exterior to explore a complex consciousness beneath the surface. Greene recounts that, .Throughout my artistic practice I have returned to the body to explore a variety of issues. as .when transformed by the process [of the photograph‘s development] the body and skin transform into layers of sensibility and emotion..75 By externalising an internal psychological dimension, Greene‘s emotional state permeates the surface of the skin giving way to a presence that is almost living and breathing within the frame. This notion of an existing animate presence located within the photograph extends to Greene‘s more recent exhibition, Character Recognition (2005-2007), in which the snapshot depictions of the artist‘s head pertain to facial features commonly associated with African American physicality: thick lips, broad nose, dark skin. However, Greene is not content with simply documenting her race: .Using a photographic process linked to the times of ethnographic classification, I repeatedly explore my ethnic features. The lessons learned are haunting and frightening in these modern times..76 75 A statement by Myra Greene from The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Nov 2009. 76 A statement by Myra Greene from her official website Myra Greene, Nov 2009. Character Recognition moves beyond slave imagery by creating beautifully detailed prints that capture the minute details of the artist‘s face, details that were not considered worthy of close inspection in past depictions of enslaved men and women. Greene is effectively breathing life into her photographs by paying close attention to the sensory elements of her face; the intense glare of her eyes, a slightly opened mouth making room for the departure of breath, and a hint of a smile as her closed lips turn up slightly at the corners. Even the billowing smoky aesthetic that congregates at the edges of some of the frames evokes the look of warm breath against the camera‘s lens. By capturing the elements of a face that is breathing, seeing, hearing and almost smiling, Greene draws close attention to humanising elements which ethnographic studies of slaves eluded. Greene resists the documentary mode by rupturing any straightforward understanding of her presentation. She is challenging racist traditions of black representation in which the black female body has been rendered devoid of sensibility and subtlety. In their contemplation of black women‘s photographic representation, Willis and Williams observe that The history of the image of the black female body, like photographic history generally accounts for what has been included and what excluded, what has been reproduced and what repressed, what has been anointed as .art. and what relegated to the obscurity in historical archives.77 77 Willis and Williams, The Black Female Body, p. ix. However, Greene deliberately engages with this binary discourse, signifying on inclusion and exclusion, clarity and ambiguity, to create a visual language of oppositions in which her body is emerging and disappearing. Negating the .what you see is what you get” mentality, Greene explores the skin‘s tone and texture to capture hues that appear black at first but give way to the emergence of browns, greys, yellows and greens. The viewer is encouraged to transcend the external darkness and bear witness to the illumination of surprising colours and the movement of the body as wispy lines flow across the skin‘s surface. By embracing techniques of ambiguity and abstraction, Greene contributes a visual dimension to the whole body of postmodern theory in which Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag write against the interpretation that photography is defined by accuracy and objectivity. She engenders a temperamental aesthetic as though the shape and shade of her images are constantly on the verge of transforming into something different, subject to change with her mood. These seemingly tangible representations shift from resolute and imposing to contemplative, vulnerable and barely visible. This ever changing domain engages with the unfixed discourse of Greene‘s self-presentation to create nebulous portrayals that attest to the multifariousness of black female identity through a continued state of non-recognition. By resisting the idea of a monolithic homogenous black identity, Greene can be viewed as anti-essentialist. She is constantly blurring boundaries and working against rigid frames so that the audience may work to decipher but ultimately fail to interpret as they encounter the black female body through abstraction. Chapter Two Beyond Classification: The Self-reflexive Navigation of Stereotypical Categorisations in the work of Renée Cox. Renée Cox is an exhibitionist. Her photography is an .art-biographical.1 journey in which she adopts alternate personalities to explore the multiple facets of her own personality. Valerie Cassel recognises that in Cox‘s work .the notion of identity no longer resides in the understanding or acceptance of a monolithic whole, but rather the multidimensionality of each individual..2 Her experimental installations embrace alternative personae to implode white patriarchal, historical and cultural images that have attempted to control, contain and define what black women should be. On a continuum with Myra Greene, Cox creates multifarious and multilayered self-representations to reflect the impossibility of defining the black female experience as one monolithic construct. She inserts her own body into her work to reappropriate derogatory cultural and historical representations of black women. They are bold and daring indictments of racism, sexism, exploitation, colonialism and religious ideology. The artist is always strategizing; across a range of exhibitions she engenders alternative personae to address changing perceptions of African American women‘s bodies as we move into the twenty-first century. She asserts that 1 Renée Cox. Interview. .Channelling Nanny of the Maroons., by Jonathan Greenland, Jamaican Gleaner, (Kingston: The Gleaner Company Limited, 2007), April 2010 2 Valerie Cassel, Splat, Boom, Pow!: The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art, (Texas: Contemporary Art Museum Houston, 2003), p. 27. 3 Renée Cox. Interview. .Renée Cox. by Cristinerose Parravicini, Virus Mutations, No. 14, (Nov 1998), Feb 2010 The body image for [black] women is going towards a major metamorphosis-from the voluptuous body of the beginning of the century to the strong, determined body of today‘s women.3 This chapter will focus on two of Cox‘s photographic performances; firstly the artist‘s depiction of the nineteenth-century .freakshow. attraction Saarte Baartman, and then her futuristic superhero alias, Rajé, to demonstrate how Cox engenders alternative persona that cross time, place, space and identity to contest the misreading of black women‘s bodies through stereotype. By inserting her own body into alternative and imaginary visual frameworks, Cox is engaging with the idea of revisionism that other black women artists also pursue in order to deconstruct racial misconceptions and fantasies of dominant white cultural representations of black women. Venus Hottentot 2000 (1995), (Fig 5), is exemplary of nineteenth-century Europe‘s exploitation of the black woman‘s body. 4 In this collaboration with photographer Lyle Ashton Harris, Cox signifies on Saarte Baartman, the original Hottentot Venus, to challenge the superficiality of racist stereotypes.5 The artist dons metallic breasts and buttocks, a nod towards the artificiality of fabricated black female stereotypes and how they no longer .fit., literally or figuratively, the contemporary black body. She depicts two bodies; one made of metal and her own body which is visible beneath, to recreate the ambivalence that surrounded Baartman as a figure of both titillation and scientific enquiry, a .European fetish wrapped in a garb of ethnography, sex, and science,.6 simultaneously desired and abhorred. 4 The use of this image for the cover of Deborah Willis‘s most recent publication, Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot", a compilation of images, essay and prose regarding the visual history of black women, reflects its significance in the visual reconfiguration of historically demeaning depictions of black women. 5 In this chapter I extend upon the discussion of Saarte Baartman that began in Chapter One to reflect the different ways in which contemporary black women artists are re-examining, reconfiguring and reclaiming her body, memory and spirit. My examination of Cox and Greene in relation to Baartman places them in a larger movement of African American women artists whose research, writing and art memorialises and pays tribute to her lasting influence. 6 Clifton C. Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p.116. Baartman‘s arrival in Paris in 1814 coincided with a growing fascination in science to define biological boundaries and, as Mary Lynn Stewart observes, the body of ethnographic imagery that emerged in Baartman‘s wake focused more on the .racial stereotyping and sexual projections of European artists and viewers,.7 than the Khoisan culture from which she originated. French scientists of the era were not concerned that Baartman‘s engorged physicality was a result of steatopygia, the intense accumulation of fatty deposits in the buttocks, or that it was feature typical of the Khoisian people and was considered attractive.8 Instead, there was a greater need among European anatomists, both during and after Baartman‘s lifetime, to reinforce her status as =Other‘ in order to prove that she was the .missing link. between animal and man. Cultural historian Sander L. Gilman reflects on nineteenth-century colonial notions of =black‘ as .the antithesis of European sexual mores and beauty,. and that the Hottentot, the epitome of essential blackness, was conceived as .the lowest exemplum of mankind on the great chain of being..9 In this regard, Francette Pacteau holds Greek statuary and its .Classicist insistence on rules of symmetry and proportion,.10 responsible for Western society‘s marginalisation and exploitation of the engorged Hottenot Venus. It was through a culmination of this mythology and iconography surrounding Baartman‘s performance: =.Sartjee.-themed popular posters, ballads, broadsheet caricatures, articles, and printed satires.,11 in which she was described as .one of the wonders of the world.,12 that European audiences perceived Baartman to be subhuman. 7 Mary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s-1930s, (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2001), p.25. 8 Viren Swami and Adrian Furnham, The Psychology of Physical Attraction, (London: Routledge, 2008), p.94. 9 Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, (London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p.83. 10 Francette Pacteau, The Symptom of Beauty: Essay in Art and Culture, (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), p. 134. 11 Rachel Holmes, African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus (New York: Random House, 2007), p.42. 12 Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman, p. 79. Cox‘s photograph deconstructs what Gilman posited as .the central image for the black female throughout the nineteenth century,.13 by providing a new model for the twenty-first century black woman that satirises the out datedness of the exorbitant breasts and large buttocks. In this way the artist addresses her concern that .images of women in the media are distorted. when .women are imprisoned by those unrealistic representations of the female body..14 When physically encasing her own body in enhanced prosthetics, Cox can be seen to wear the Hottentot stereotype because the metallic appendages are symbolic of the stereotype as a cliché that is emphatically distinct from her. The thin white strings that hold the fake protrusions in place can easily be broken. Thus the artist is able to physically and emblematically disengage from this derogatory characterisation by discarding the costume. In my reading Cox engages with Ayo Abiétou Coly‘s notion of .recycling. racist imagery through .decomposing and recomposing.15 colonial stereotypes of black womanhood, by drawing attention to the large breasts and buttocks as separate parts that have been deliberately exaggerated and rendered onto the black body, mirroring the way in which racial misconceptions are imposed on African and, indeed, African American bodies. The artificiality of the distorted figure also reinforces its disposability and by choosing to wear the costume-as- stereotype and then being able to disrobe, the artist enacts her artistic agency to detach herself from the derogatory iconography it references. Cox is concerned with Baartman as a figure stripped of her humanity, scrutinised and looked at as scientific specimen. As little remains of Baartman‘s own account of her history and nineteenth-century drawings of her are either crudely exaggerated advertisements or anatomical illustrations attesting to the irregularity of her 13 Gilman, .Black Bodies, White Bodies., p.216. 14 Renée Cox, .Feminist Artist Statement., Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base, March 2010, 15 Abiétou Coly, .Housing and Homing the Black Female Body in France., p.270. anatomy, Cox expresses a side to Baartman that was ignored by colonial audiences and unacknowledged by the French anatomist George Cuvier who was responsible for the dissection and exhibition of her remains.16 16 Cuvier was given official permission to perform an autopsy on Baartman and his findings were published in the Mémoires du museum d’histoire naturelle (1817). Baartman‘s skeleton and body cast was displayed at the Muséum d‘Histoire Naturelle and Musée de l‘Homme before being repatriated to her homeland, South Africa, in 2002. 17 Renée Cox, Interview, .After Hot-En-Tot; Interview with Renée Cox., Spelman College, Atlanta, GA, Oct, 22, 2009. March 2010 < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdyJntItCy8> The artist‘s metal-coated body presents the dichotomy between Hottentot the curious .freakshow. and Saarte Baartman the woman, to address what was projected onto her and what may be deemed as the more private and personal side to her. Cox references the caricature but not as a parody; her determined, hand-on-hip stance offsets the humour that one would ordinarily associate with a subject who deliberately exaggerates his or her features. Furthermore, the artist uses her reprimanding stare to symbolically .give [Baartman] back her gaze..17 By returning the look, Cox subjects the spectator to the scrutiny of her own gaze. This destabilises the traditional separation between subject and object because by deliberately objectifying herself and denuding the viewer of the voyeuristic gaze, Cox reconfigures the dynamics of exploitation that Baartman was victim of. The historical distortion of Baartman and the artificial accentuation of Cox‘s own body also calls to mind the derogatory African American .mammy. stereotype in slavery and after, whose pitch black skin, heavy-set body and engorged anatomy constructed the binary image of a black woman that emphasised maternity, yet stripped her of desirability. This imagined black woman was regarded as asexual and therefore neither a threat to her white mistress nor a temptation to the white slave master. Cuvier‘s autopsy of Baartman had posited that the peculiarity of her genitalia, more specifically her elongated labia, was a sign of her unbridled carnal impulses. These radical misrepresentations of black women‘s sexuality are implicit in the oxymoron of one of Baartman‘s many pseudonyms, .Hottentot Venus., which Bernth Lindfors points out intentionally implies that .however highly sexed. she may appear to be, .the Hottentot woman can never become an erotic threat.. 18 This also illustrates how black women‘s sexual expression was caught between two conflicting ideological constructions; one which hyperbolised her sexuality and one which negated her attractiveness, and both were forged outside of her control. In this regard, the simultaneous exaggeration and confinement of Cox‘s metal encased body comments on the contemporary trappings of the black woman‘s image. The artist is referencing Baartman‘s exploitation in the past to reflect on how black women‘s representations today may still remain imprisoned by the dominant culture‘s distortion of black female sexuality. For example, the hip hop video genre depicts barely clothed women gyrating their hips, in what can be seen as a contemporary performance of the black exotic dancer that perpetuates the image of sexual availability, even in a very different contemporary context.19 18 Lindfors, Africans on Stage, p.30. 19 For a lengthier discussion of the representation of black women in hip hop see Chapter Four of T. Denean Sharply-Whiting‘s Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women, (London: NYU Press, 2007). 20 Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson, Recovering the Black female body: self-representations by African American women, (London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 263. In Venus Hottentot 2000 Cox is using her own body to map the intersecting oppressions of race, gender and sexuality that sought to define Baartman and continue to impact on African American women today. However, unlike Baartman, the artist is in control of her appearance and she uses costuming - her well-groomed hair, make-up and gold jewellery - to convey a dignified femininity that counteracts the way in which Baartman‘s own was distorted by her exploiters to represent an excessive and .crude stereotype of black femininity..20 Cox‘s expression of anguished fury also serves to debunk the infrahumanity that colonial Europe associated with the black female subject. Cox‘s objective here is similar to that of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks‘ in Venus (1996), a play that depicts the imagined life of Baartman. Parks attempts to humanise Baartman by expressing the .elaborateness of her speech, her dreams, and her expressions of affect. to .elevate her above the merely bestial..21 This dramatisation was criticised for breaching reality and depicting Baartman in historically inaccurate ways. One of its most vocal critics, Jean Young, believed that it wrongly depicted the protagonist as .an accomplice in her own exploitation.22 and softened the brutality of her environment, while Harry Elam and Alice Rayner argue that .both the spectacle and the narrative fail to produce the real Baartman, or the real story. and because she is .built up artificially and rises out of the gaze of her spectators; narratives falsify and fragment her on stage..23 However, considering the little evidence that remains of Baartman‘s own account of her life, Parks is attempting to resurrect the private woman behind the Hottentot image. Likewise, Cox uses her own body to flesh out those crude nineteenth century caricatures and anatomical drawings that interpreted Baartman‘s pronounced genitalia as a sign of her primitivism and dehumanised her in the nineteenth-century white European imagination.24 21 Sanya Osha, =.Venus. and White Desire. Transition, No. 99 (2008), p. 90. 22 Emmanuel Sampath Nelson, African American Dramatists, (London: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004), p. 342. 23 Harry Elam and Alice Rayner, .Body Parts: Between Story and Spectacle in Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks. in Deborah R. Geis, Suzan-Lori Parks, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2008), p.77. 24 Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, p. 133. 25 Lorraine O‘Grady, .Olympia‘s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity. (1992) in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, Ed. Amelia Jones, (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 177. Photographer Lorraine O‘Grady also identifies Baartman, alongside the black exotic dancer Josephine Baker, as one of the icons of black womanhood most in need of recuperation and revision.25 In her 1992 essay .Olympia‘s Maid., a cultural critique on reclaiming black female subjectivity, O‘ Grady reiterates Toni Morrison‘s belief in the early 1980s that black women could better express themselves if they reverted from .explaining it to them. to .showing how it feels to us..26 Cox and Parks are part of a burgeoning interdisciplinary movement of African American women artists because they attempt to unravel the enigma of Baartman and reclaim her image through poetry, theatre, photography, and installation art, by integrating the viewer into the experience; making the spectator feel the experience to better understand it. 26 Ibid. p. 177. 27 Elizabeth Alexander, The Venus Hottentot (1825), Callaloo, No. 39 (Spring, 1989), p.268. 28 Elizabeth Alexander. Interview. .An Interview with Elizabeth Alexander. by Christine Phillip, Callaloo, Vol. 19, No. 2, (Spring, 1996), p. 502. Elizabeth Alexander‘s highly praised collection of poems, The Venus Hottentot (1990), is a literary counterpart and source of inspiration in the creative re-imagining of Baartman‘s personal experience behind her very public exhibition. In the title poem Alexander attempts to .take the viewer back. to Baartman‘s autopsy table by interspersing her imagined thoughts with Cuvier‘s. In this invented scenario, Alexander gives the Baartman of her imagination the chance to plot her revenge: If he were to let me rise up/from this table, I‘d spirit/his knives and cut out his black heart,/seal it with a scientific fluid inside/a bell jar, place it on a low/shelf in a white man‘s museum/so the whole world could see/it was shriveled and hard,/geometric, deformed, unnatural.27 The author gives her imagined Baartman a voice through poetry to get at the .rich and textured inner life.28 beneath her heavily documented exterior. This effort to .recuperate. a voice for Baartman is significant considering that at the time of her exhibition, her own self-expression was distorted by satirists who wanted to cash in on the public fascination surrounding her. In 1814, one writer commandeered Baartman‘s voice to construct a letter intended for her cousin: .My cousin, they say a lot of bad things about the French. The more that one lives with them, the more that one learns to esteem them..29 This is one example of Baartman‘s voice being ventriloquised without her permission and misused to bolster the opinion that she respected her exploiters and was content in her exploited position. 29 Lindfors, Africans on Stage, p. 28. 30 The .peep. box contains an 1812 caricature of four men standing back and watching as a Hottentot figure is attacked by a dog. 31 .Permitted. (1989) and .Revue. (1990) are two other examples of Greene‘s exploration of representations of the black female body in western art history through installation. By contrast Cox, Parks, Alexander and installation artist Renee Greene, create works of recuperation to .give. Baartman a space in which her pain, humiliation and mistreatment can be imagined, felt and reevaluated. Greene‘s mixed media installation .Sa Main Charmante. (1989), .takes the viewer back. to the stage on which Baartman was exhibited. Written on a ladder-like structure are the details of Baartman‘s appearances across Europe intermittent with Cuvier‘s anatomical writings, while Josephine Baker‘s voice can be heard singing in the background. At the base of the ladder two footprints are painted on top of an upturned soapbox, inviting the viewer to step in to the exhibition. In doing so, they will become part of the performance. Under the glare of the spotlight to their right, the viewer simultaneously becomes an object on the auction block and spectator as they gaze into the .peep. box beside them. 30 Similarly, in .Seen. (1990), an installation from the same series, viewers must ascend a small staircase in order to enter and observe the piece.31 As they take their position on the wooden .slave rostrum., which is plastered with documents of Baartman‘s autopsy, the viewer is once again implemented in the voyeuristic performance. Their movements on the small stage are projected onto a large white screen at the back, allowing bystanders to observe the faceless silhouette from afar, in a display that attempts to mirror Baartman‘s own exploitation. Greene‘s installations actively incorporate the viewer and transforms them into the .exhibit. to make the audience feel a part of the experience in order to understand it. In doing so, she also draws attention to the inherent impossibility of truly being able to empathise with such unimaginable and disturbing experiences. The artist explains: Power is related to seeing and vision. Being able to see and name something implies a certain amount of power. I keep trying to make viewers aware of the process involved in seeing, so that it doesn‘t seem self-evident.32 32 Collins, The Art of History, p.25. 33 Paul Lane, .Breaking the Mould?: Exhibiting Khoisan in Southern African Museums., Anthropology Today, Vol. 12, No. 5 (Oct. 1996), p. 7. 34 Ibid, p. 7. By turning the camera back on the observer and reversing subjectivity, Greene directly exposes them to the power, pressures and racial inequality of observation. A similar technique was adopted by South African artist Pippa Skotnes in her controversial exhibition, .Miscast: Negotiating Khoisian History and Material Culture. (1996). The exhibition was a conglomeration of artefacts belonging to the Khoisian Bushmen: diagrams, letters, moulded human torsos, hair, teeth and nails, which the artist amassed in the hope that they would prompt viewers to reconsider their own understanding of these largely misrepresented indigenous peoples. Skotnes covered an entire gallery floor space with lithographs, newspaper clippings, colonial documents and academic papers on the genitalia of Baartman and other anonymous Bushmen, anticipating that the literal act of walking on .the debris.33 of oppressed bodies would force the observer to engage in the re-evaluation of colonial and indigenous interactions. Archaeologist Paul Lane found, .there was no way of skirting over the material, no way of avoiding treading on it. because the .actual, physical involvement with the substance of the exhibition became inevitable..34 Lane explains how the unavoidable interaction made him .increasingly uncomfortable. because his movements around the gallery were constrained.35 Skotnes‘s determination to relocate the abused and oppressed bodies of the past into a contemporary setting was reiterated in large red letters on the gallery wall: .There is no escape from the politics of our knowledge, but that politics is not in the past. That politics is in the present..36 In this way it can be seen that Cox‘s Venus Hottentot 2000 intervenes in a constellation of artistic works that together make a visual and political case for revising Saarte Baartman in postcolonial as well as new artistic contexts. By more precisely mapping controlling imagery of the past onto her own body, Cox also draws attention to the fact that the same politics that governed black women‘s representations in the past are still prevalent in contemporary America. 35 Ibid, p. 7. 36 Greg Dening, Mr Bligh's Bad Language, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 178. 37 Collins, The Art of History, p. 25. 38 This was quoted by a viewer who experienced .Seen. in Collins‘s The Art of History, p. 25. As revisionist works that condemn the exploitation and abuse of oppressed bodies, Cox, Greene and Skotnes‘s visual responses to Baartman work in different ways. Greene and Skotnes engage the viewer with archival imagery by temporarily reversing conditions of exploitation and observation, to force them to reconsider their notions of subjectivity. Greene‘s installations are, to borrow Lisa Gail Collin‘s words, .contemplative sites. that avoid .reproducing a context for the continued consumption of…overexposed bodies,.37 because it is the viewer who is subjected to feelings of vulnerability and the .fear of exposure..38 Greene .returns. the spectator to the scene of Baartman‘s exploitation, believing that oscillating the viewer between observer and observed is the most productive way to examine the history of human exhibitionism. She makes it difficult for the viewer to observe from a distance. By comparison, Cox‘s own body is the centrepiece of her work. She maps nineteenth-century distortions onto her body to force the spectator to observe how historical misrepresentations of the black female form continue to feed popular stereotypes and influence misconceptions of black women in the Western imagination today. Ultimately, by inserting herself into the photograph, Cox avoids charges of exploitation and unlike the very limited agency afforded to the woman that she references, the artist is in full control of her self-presentation; she commands the attention of the viewer but also subjects them to the scrutiny of her gaze, which engages with Carrie Mae Weems‘ theory of .giving back the gaze.. Coly recognises that Cox‘s intentional exaggeration in Venus Hottentot 2000, is part of an .emerging artistic and intellectual tactic of commentary on and subverting the colonial production, assemblage, and editing of the black female body..39 By extension, I would add that Cox embraces the visual strategy of exaggeration in her 1998 photographic series, Rajé. The artist‘s dominatrix alias .Rajé. is an exaggerated, self-aggrandising embodiment of black female aggression that Greg Tate christened an .Afrocentric super heroine..40 She emblematises Cox‘s agenda to attack visual white supremacy as she conceives of it, revise race and gender stereotypes and challenge white patriarchal corporations by reconfiguring the skewed representation of African Americans in American history. Mary Helen Washington has observed that those who attempt to .forge an identity larger than the one society would force upon them…are aware and conscious, and that very consciousness is potent..41 This is true of Cox‘s alias because Rajé is a hyperbolic manifestation of the artist‘s own frustrations and discontent towards discriminative and misogynistic systems of control. It is through Rajé that the artist is able to fight her imaginary battles, referring to her as .the reincarnation of myself as 39 Ayo Abiétou Coly, .Housing and Homing the Black Female Body in France., p.270. 40 Greg Tate, .Rajé: A Black Woman Superhero., Crisis, Vol. 105, No.2 (The Crisis Publishing Company, Apr-May 1998), p. 36. 41 Mary Helen Washington, Midnight Birds. (Anchor Press; New York, 1980), p. xv. a superhero..42 Just as performance theorist Richard Schechner regards .doubling. in Anna Deavere Smith‘s stage performance as .the simultaneous presence of performer and performed,.43 Rajé is the projection of a larger, bolder and more powerful version of Cox. The artist‘s colourful and emboldened performance of a superhero takes place in the imaginary comic-book format. Considering Bradford W. Wright‘s assertion that the .paternalistic, imperialistic, and racist. content of American jungle comics .posed justification for Western colonial domination and white supremacy. by depicting Africans as either .brute savages or minstrel-show stereotypes.,44 this genre is a culturally significant setting in which the artist challenges the skewed assumptions regarding black women‘s identities that have masqueraded as realities. 42 Cox in an interview with Cristinerose Parravicini. 43 Richard Schechner, .Anna Deveare Smith: Acting as Incorporation., The Drama Review, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), p. 64. 44 Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2003), p.36. 45 Bethany White, .Fragmented Souls: Call and Response with Renée Cox., Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure, Ed. Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green, (London: NYU Press, 1998), p.45. Although artist Bethany White believes that Cox‘s photography .challenges viewers to leave historical stereotypes. of black women .by the wayside,.45 the artist‘s performance of Rajé may also be viewed differently. Rather than an outright rejection of demeaning characterisations of black women, Rajé can be interpreted as a culmination of different aspects of colonial and American antebellum stereotypes, whereby the artist transposes negative stereotypes into a positive resource to empower her superhero alias. In reference to the status of African American women, Cox states that .Folks are still comfortable with us in positions of servitude. I think presenting a black woman superhero as an agent of change ruffles a few feathers and shakes up the status quo..46 Rajé is revolutionary. She represents an inversion of derogatory representations of black women in popular American visual culture, reconfiguring the ways in which the black woman‘s image has been demonised in the comic book genre and black beauty standards have been marginalized and distorted in the children‘s play doll and fashion industry.47 In doing so, she considers and is responding to Michael D. Harris‘s question .is it really possible to appropriate racist images and terms and drain them of their poison?. 48 Cox‘s experimental installation creates a hybrid identity, drawing upon representations of black women in popular American visual culture to self-reflexively navigate and reconfigure their problematic and stereotypical categorisations. By harnessing traditionally white-authored iconography used against African American women to suit her own artistic purposes, Cox contests Audre Lorde‘s assertion that .the master‘s tools will never dismantle the master‘s house..49 Instead, Cox can be seen to transform the way in which externally-defined representations of black women have been to their detriment. 46 Cox in Tate‘s .Rajé: A Black Woman Superhero., p. 36. 47 I will return to the issue of distortion and the black female body later on in the chapter. 48 Harris, Coloured Pictures, p.190. 49Audre Lorde. Sister Outsider, (California: The Crossing Press/Freedom, 1984), p.112. In her influential essay, .Learning From the Outsider Within., Patricia Hill Collins enumerates black female stereotypes: Mammy, Sapphire, Jezebel, and Matriarch, as distortions of the characteristics that white patriarchy found most ominous in black women‘s behaviour, such as assertiveness, endurance and independence. Collins asserts: When Black females choose to value those aspects of Afro-American womanhood that are stereotyped, ridiculed, and maligned in academic scholarship and the popular media, they are actually questioning some of the basic ideas used to control dominated groups in general…By defining and valuing assertiveness and other .unfeminine. qualities as necessary and functional attributes for Afro- American womanhood, Black women‘s self-valuation challenges the content of externally-defined controlling images. 50 50 Hill Collins, .Learning From the Outsider Within., p. 39. 51 Cox in an interview with Cristinerose Parravicini. 52 Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, (London: Greenwood Press, 1980), p.22. 53 Cox in an interview with Cristinerose Parravicini. Cox claims that she takes .stereotypical representations of women and turns them upside down, for their empowerment..51 Rajé is an amalgamation of stereotypes designed to besmirch the black woman‘s character. However, Cox subverts the negative content of this iconography by using it to to create an empowered image of black womanhood. The artist does not revise southern antebellum stereotypes to create the same .positive. images that black women novelists of the late nineteenth century sought to promote. As black feminist critic Barbara Christian among others has observed, writers like Harriet Jacobs and Frances Harper substituted negative stereotypes of black women with .racially uplifting. images that drew upon the feminine gentility of the virtuous mid-nineteenth century white woman. However, Christian maintains that this method was inevitably counter-effective .since positive female qualities were all attributed to the white lady, these writers based their counterimage on her ideal qualities more than on the qualities of any real black woman..52 They also recognised that the only way that white readers would identify was to create .white. black women characters who were .uplifting. the race. Therefore, this nineteenth-century literary revisionism sought to elevate black womanhood by idolising the virtues of white womanhood. Twenty-first century Rajé, on the other hand, was not created for the purpose of white identification and has no use for the virtues of refinement and elegance that some nineteenth-century literature deemed exclusive to white women. In order to be an impervious statement of militant resistance who, according to Cox, .demands equality for all peoples who have been oppressed.53 it is necessary that Rajé embodies the strong and assertive characteristics of black womanhood that white patriarchy deemed so threatening. The .controlling images. outlined by Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought are the foundations on which Cox builds her superhero. The passive mammy was a gross exaggeration of the black woman‘s body; she supposedly doted on the needs of the white family and was stripped of her sexuality. The Sapphire was allegedly aggressive; the Jezebel was considered highly sexualized and the Matriarch‘s strength and independence was deemed emasculating. At the crux of these externally defined images lies the ideological justification for the racial, sexual, and economic exploitation of black women, which is why Rajé is able to draw her strength from these victimising characterisations as a strong statement of black female empowerment. If these stereotypes functioned so that .black women should fall into one of these categories. then, according to Trudier Harris, .they are in their .proper roles., as defined by the scale of perception of black female bodies in American popular imagination..54 Through Rajé, Cox clearly endeavours to implode the ideological boundaries confining black women to .proper roles. in history by projecting the image of a contemporary woman who is not contained by white patriarchal definitions. Therefore, Rajé does not fit neatly into one category; she is exorbitant, aggressive, independent and sexual, crossing time, place and space to fight the symbols and symptoms of black women‘s oppression embodied in the white man, by warding off colonial forces, challenging capitalism and even running for President. Hill Collins writes: 54 Trudier Harris, Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 2. 55 Hill Collins, .Learning From the Outsider Within., p.39. It is one thing to counsel Afro-American women to resist the Sapphire stereotype by altering their behavior to become meek, docile, and stereotypically .feminine.. It is quite another to advise Black women to embrace their assertiveness, to value their sassiness, and continue to use these qualities to survive in and transcend the harsh environments that circumscribe so many Black women‘s lives.55 Cox is doing the latter by channelling the aggressive, resistant and autonomous traits of the Sapphire image into Rajé. The artist takes a stereotype that was assigned to black women deemed to have risen above their status because they possessed male-identified traits, and turns it into a powerful and strong image. While the Sapphire remains synonymous with bad black womanhood, Audrey B. Chapman believes that this reading fails to acknowledge that she was in fact .acting out because her man [was] not respecting, appreciating, or desiring her..56 This draws on the Sapphire‘s ability to stand up for herself rather than branding her as confrontational. In Exorcising Blackness Harris surmises: .The black woman became the lascivious slut when her sexual favors were desired and the matronly mammy when the whites needed someone to care for their children..57 Historically the black woman‘s image had been disposable to the needs of white dominant culture and fashioned into whatever role was required of them. Cox‘s reappropriation of stereotypes addresses how black female identities have been made malleable to suit a racist agenda. Black women‘s behaviour historically had been defined for them in order to mask injustices committed against them. This is best exemplified by the fallacy of the Jezebel seductress who, to use Hill Collins‘s words, is .central to the nexus of elite male images of Black womanhood..58 The notion of a woman driven only by insuppressible carnal impulses deflected the reality of abused black women fulfilling the sexual and economic needs of white men. 56 Audrey B. Chapman, Getting Good Loving: Seven Ways to Find Love and Make it Last, (Chicago: Agate Publishing, 2005), p.101. 57 Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p.29. 58 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, (New York: Routledge, 1991), p.77. However, the application of the Jezebel stereotype to Rajé is not to suggest that Cox is reinforcing black women‘s sexual availability to white male desires. Instead, it is to highlight how Cox‘s performance recognises the power of the erotic. Wearing only a tight, colourful swimsuit, thigh-high black boots and surrounding herself with half naked male models, Cox-as- Rajé embodies Audre Lorde‘s idea of the erotic as a .replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation..59 Rajé is sexualised but not to her degradation and her sexuality is not being used to define her character. As Lisa E. Farrington believes: 59 Lorde. Sister Outsider, p.54. 60 Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image, (Oxford University Press US, 2005), p. 223. 61 Cox in an interview with Cristinerose Parravicini. 62 Jo Anna Isaak in Renée Cox: American Family, (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 2001), p.4. Rajé and her female companions exude the sexual power and control that is associated with the character of the dominatrix and that decisively sabotages the docility associated with the black servant.60 Here, Farrington recognises that Cox uses Rajé‘s .sexual power. to elevate the image of black women from a position of servitude to a position of control. Moreover, the self-aware artist presents Rajé with an eye towards beauty; neatly braided hair, earrings, bracelets, and her finely contoured figure, to create a sexual and attractive black woman whose femininity has not been distorted like the Jezebel caricature. However, even though Cox admits that .Rajé is a little fantasy and a lot of humor.,61 displaying her scantily-clad physique and surrounding herself with attractive, chest-bearing male models, could have a potentially deleterious effect if seen only to appropriate lascivious representations. Cox is no stranger to controversy. In 2001 the artist‘s American Family series was described as .a veritable minefield of taboo topics..62 The exhibition consisted of photographs taken from Cox‘s family album; pictures of her childhood self, her mother, father, uncle and grandparents, which are juxtaposed with sexually explicit images of her adult self. In =Boarding School‘ (2001), the artist is seated with her legs apart, wearing only white pants with a narrow slit at the front. Positioned beside this image is a self-portrait of Cox as a child, radiating youthful innocence as she plays a guitar and smiles at the camera. The stark contrast between the two images is disturbing; an unsettling mixture of nostalgia and pornography. However, these images are more complex than simply falling into the reductive binary of positive versus negative. For Cox, this body of work is .a rebellion against all of the pre- ordained roles I am supposed to maintain: dutiful daughter, diminutive wife, and doting mother..63 She deliberately courts controversy to unnerve the viewer and push them out from their comfort zone and into a space where they are forced to confront women‘s circumscribed roles. Jo Anna Isaak believes that Cox presents herself as the .ideal mistress of the erotic imagination. and performs in .erotically charged personal narrative of pleasure and repression.64 because the .pleasurable contemplation of black femininity has always provoked fear and guilt in the white male viewer..65 Cox creates spaces of interrogation which draw attention to the very act of viewing and defining and call into question the power of the patriarchal gaze. As Rajé, Cox maintains this trajectory. The artist produces complex self- representations that reflect her preoccupation with body and form, implicit in her strong, athletic physique and powerful stance, and yet she inevitably sexualises the image through the deviant connotations of black knee high boots, a flesh-exposing leotard and half naked men. Cox complicates bell hooks‘ postulation that .the degrading images of blackness that emerged from racist white imaginations and circulated widely in the dominant culture. could be .countered by 63 Renée Cox, .Feminist Artist Statement., Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base, March 2010, 64 Isaak in Renée Cox, p.4. 65 Ibid., p5. =true-to-life‘ images.66 because she inserts her body into a fantasy framework. It is in this fictional arena that Cox satirically reconfigures characterisations of black women‘s sexuality to demonstrate her autonomous artistic control over her own black female sexual expression. 66 bell hooks, .In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life. Ed. Liz Wells, The photography Reader (London: Routledge, 2003) , p.391. 67 Rupe Simms, .Controlling Images and the Gender Construction of Enslaved African Women., Gender and Society, 15.6 (2001), p. 882. In the face of an American visual tradition that has denigrated black women through their sexuality and reinforced the image of a salacious woman who is controlled by her sexual impulses, it is ultimately empowering that Cox does not shy away from overtly sexual representations but re-appropriates their negative meaning into powerful images of black womanhood. Cox recognises, alongside other daring female photographers, that different artistic approaches contain different risks of reception. For example, Carrie Mae Weems‘s photograph, =Portrait of a Woman who has Fallen from Grace‘, signifies on the demonised black female stereotype by depicting the artist lying on a bed with her legs spread in a sexually suggestive manner. Weems‘s seductive pose and unashamed gaze towards the camera epitomises the .bad- black-girl. fabrication that the African American woman .truly enjoyed being ravaged by her master and his sons,. in order to justify that .abusing her was simply satisfying her natural desires..67 Weems‘s depiction of a demonised black woman signifies on controlling images that defined their sexuality in opposition of the .virtuous. white woman, which is what Cox is also doing in her performance of an excessive black woman who is uncontainable. These two artists push the limits of photography to create audacious self-representations that flirt with voyeurism by appropriating externally defined stereotypes of black women. Weems is highly conscious of the history of black women‘s visual imagery in America and she deliberately signifies on derogatory and self-affirming depictions of black women to convey and control complex images of self-representation. In contrast to .Portrait of a Woman who has Fallen from Grace., Weems‘s self-portrait from The Louisiana Project series, in which the artist stands tall and gazes into a small hand mirror, is the epitome of femininity. She is smartly dressed, her hair is neatly pinned back, and her head is gracefully raised towards the mirror. However, the accompanying caption is jarring against the elegant image: .I looked and looked and failed to see what so terrified you.. It references the skewing of black women‘s femininity. The .you. she addresses is the white collective .you. responsible for distorting the black woman‘s image into something that should be feared; a lewd, lusty, loud-talking and aggressive woman. By lightly grazing her face with her hand, Weems searches her reflection for the unrecognisable trait deemed so threatening in the black woman‘s character that it needed to be ideologically restrained through stereotypes and physically controlled by eugenics.68 However, the artist is unable to see this mythic black woman, whom Michele Wallace described in 1979: .too domineering, too strong, too aggressive, too outspoken, too castrating, too masculine.69 because this is not how she views herself from within. 68 Judith A. Baer describes the abuse of black women‘s body from the slave era, when women were raped by their masters to replenish slave numbers, to the US government‘s coercive effort to control black women‘s reproduction rights: .Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Black women suffered disproportionately from the implementation of mandatory sterilization laws…Even as these laws were repealed, sterilization abuse against Black women continued in hospitals and mental institutions at the hands of government-paid doctors…By the 1970s, sterilization had become the fastest-growing form of birth control in the United States, increasing from 200,000 cases in 1970 to more than 700,000 in 1980. A disproportionate number of these sterilizations were performed on Black women.. In Historical and Multicultural Encyclopaedia of Women's Reproductive Rights in the United States, (London: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), p. 25. 69 Wallace, Black Macho, p.91. The aforementioned photograph is only one example of the well-established lineage of multidisciplinary black women artists who have tried to salvage black women‘s representations through dignified depictions: Elizabeth Catlett‘s sculpture, .Homage to Black Woman Poets. (1984), Emma Amos‘s, .Creatures of the Night. (1985)70 and .Tightrope. (1994), and Myra Green‘s, Self-Portraits (2004) are also indicative. Cox‘s depiction of Rajé complicates this visual tradition of subtle and more dignified representations of black women because her aesthetic embraces the very superlatives that Wallace listed to describe black women deemed to have .gotten out of hand..71 70 This painting attests to Josephine Baker‘s aptitude as a performer without sexually objectifying her or reiterating the subjugating circumstances in which the dancer‘s black body was cultivated for white Parisian audiences. The Baker of Amos‘s creation is not performing and her gaze does not linger out towards an expectant audience, thus she is liberated from male voyeurism. The artist negates the sexual excessiveness that was commonly associated with Baker by compositionally dissecting the dancer at her hips to reject the cultural trend to sexually exploit the performer through her hips. 71 Wallace, Black Macho, p.11. 72 Ibid, p.108. 73 Renée Cox, .Feminist Artist Statement., Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art: Feminist Art Base, March 2010, Cox‘s incarnation of a black super heroine may be problematic if read as reinforcing the male-identified myth of the .black superwoman. by creating the facade of an invincible woman possessing masculine characteristics of power and autonomy. Wallace warns, for example, that the fallacy of a black woman possessing .inordinate strength. and not having .the same fears, weaknesses, and insecurities as other women. has always been misleading and ultimately damaging to the social development of young black girls: Would you like her to believe that she could go without sleep and food indefinitely and that she needed no shelter? Or would you want her to know something of her actual capabilities and human weaknesses…How long do you think she‘d survive if you deceived her?72 Cox is guilty of this deception because her superhero alias bolsters the image of a black woman possessing exorbitant power which is surprising considering Raje‘s mission is to .educate all children about African American history.73 and rescue the black narrative tradition from skewed white historical interpretations. In claiming that .this body of work exposes the ultimate truths and contributions, past and present that blacks have made in the United States,.74 Cox fails to acknowledge her own contribution in this regard. The Rajé series attests to the super- strengths, invulnerabilities and .imaginary advantages.75 of a black woman who is able to fight colonial forces, break the evil symbol of the Swastika, and walk through fire unscathed. However, this depiction of an undefeatable, .one-woman Amazon army.76 ultimately undermines the pedagogical element that Cox claims for her work. On the other hand, the way in which Rajé is characterised by excess, embracing the .too domineering, too strong, too aggressive. traits that Wallace speaks of, is empowering because Cox pushes against the confines to rebel against an American visual culture that historically favours its women controlled and subservient. There seems no way of containing a woman whose mammoth size dwarfs Times Square, who fights off colonial armies, walks through fire and is able to stand afoot the globe in the Rajé series. Therefore, Cox satirically embraces a rhetoric of exuberance in order to reappropriate demonising and disempowered associations of the .excessive black woman. and create a new and empowered figure that is big, bold and beautiful.77 In order to achieve this, Cox chooses to construct her critique in a distinctly fictional realm where the artist is uninhabited and free to give .women a sense of empowerment. while illustrating to the female population that .she can do anything and go anywhere without following the law of 74 Cox in an interview with Cristinerose Parravicini. 75 Wallace, Black Macho, p.108. 76 Tate, .Rajé: A Black Woman Superhero., p. 36. 77 In American culture representations of .excessive. black women defined by their size and commanding nature, albeit defined within the ranks of servitude, are illustrated in Zora Neale Hurston‘s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Lorraine Hansberry‘s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and more recently in Ernest Gaine‘s A Lesson Before Dying (1993).This extends to contemporary visual culture, in films such as Soul Food, where black women continue to be defined by a rhetoric of excess to their detriment. For example, authoress Bebe Moore Campbell believed that Whoopi Goldberg was .too everything to make it to the Big Time: too dark with hair too nappy, and looks too unconventional.. In Mia Mask, Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p.249. tradition and limitations..78 However, this rhetoric is also complicated by Rajé‘s fantasy framework because the richly coloured comic book aesthetic of her cibachrome prints suggests that these aspirations are limited to the imaginary and that there is no place for them in the real world. 79 78 Cox in an interview with Cristinerose Parravicini. 79 Cibachrome prints are used for the reproduction of digital slides on photographic paper. They are known for their archival qualities because the rich, saturated colours and image clarity does not fade in normal light. 80 Robert Stein, .The Profitability of the Nantes Slave Trade, 1783-1792.. The Journal of Economics History, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Dec.,1975), p.779. 81 J. Christopher Herold, Bonaparte in Egypt, (London: Harper & Row, 1962), p.160. In my reading, one of the most intriguing elements of Rajé as a body of work is the way it functions as a postcolonial critique. Concerned with issues of slavery, suppression, resistance, race and gender, Cox-as-Rajé operates as a visual counterattack to white supremacy. In 1998, at the initial staging of the series, the larger-than-life superhero was blown up onto billboards at the Fin de Siecle art festival in Nantes, France, a city once named the ville des négriers (city of the slavers) because it was considered the capital of the French slave trade.80 This historically significant port was an appropriate, albeit controversial, venue for the artist to stage her multifaceted critique of racism, colonialism, and patriotism, especially considering the anti- Napoleon sentiments of Rajé to the Rescue, (Fig 6). This photograph reworks Jean-Leon Gerome‘s 1862 oil painting, .Oedipus., which depicts the French emperor on horseback facing the dilapidated Sphinx of Giza with the shadows of his infantry just visible behind him. It represents a popular belief at the time that French soldiers used the Egyptian monument, a symbol of the heart and cradle of Egyptian civilisation, as target practice for their artillery practice.81 Cox‘s reconstruction is an attempt to counteract colonial aggression in Africa. In her image, Rajé swoops down from the sky to intercept the crossfire. However, the superhero‘s efforts are fruitless because the imperialist legion has already destroyed the Sphinx‘s nose. The role that Rajé plays is confusing because regardless of her inability to defend the Sphinx, she still salutes the viewer and directs a gaze that implies she is triumphant. Perplexingly, the formidableness that seems innate to Rajé in other photographs is lacking in this image. Instead, the superhero is suspended awkwardly above the French army, ineffective and potentially farcical. Although the photograph is historically inaccurate – nowadays it is more commonly agreed among historians that the Sphinx‘s nose was sabotaged prior to Napoleon‘s arrival by Muslims Arabs who disapproved of its worship and coined it the .Father of Terror.82 - Cox successfully draws attention to the destruction of African heritage that lay in the wake of Napoleon‘s expedition in Egypt. This photograph demonstrates that even behind fantasy there may be perceived a focused critique of Europe‘s colonisation of Egypt. Raje‘s defense of the Sphinx‘s dilapidated nose challenges colonial Europe‘s disdain for African features while confronting historical iconography that, according to Emmet John Sweeney, has largely overlooked the destruction of African monuments through the .more fanciful than faithful. depictions of the Sphinx with its nose still intact.83 82 Andrew Humphreys and Siona Jenkins, Egypt, (London: Lonely Planet, 2004), p. 108. 83 Emmet John Sweeney, The Pyramid Age, Vol. 2, (New York: Algora Publishing, 2007), p. 31. Taxi (1998), (Fig 7), is another example of Rajé as a postcolonial critique. In this photograph a gigantic Cox is terrorising Times Square. Large enough to straddle a yellow taxi cab that is attempting to make its way across a busy intersection, the artist-as-Rajé unleashes a tirade of anger through crimson eyes, bared teeth and razor blade nails. At first glance the image could be dismissed as caricature; an oversized black woman wearing thigh-high black boots and a multicoloured leotard, waging a King Kong style attack on America‘s most iconic city. However, when time is taken to observe the more intricate details of this photograph, the paradoxical significance of Times Square as the epicentre of a city self-professed as the cultural capital of the world, yet laden with images of a white America, becomes a charged setting for the artist to wage her attack. Rajé‘s overwhelming presence and firm-footed stance makes a physical and metaphorical stamp on the heart of American culture. Her black female presence is made gargantuan so that it can not be ignored.84 By making herself colossal, Cox-as-Rajé refuses to be the .shadowy black presence.85 that Toni Morrison believes African Americans have been in canonical white literature.86 In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison writes that 84 The artist‘s self expansion calls to mind Puff Daddy Sean Combs‘ own advertising conquest in Times Square in 2008. The black rapper turned entrepreneur advertised himself on one of the largest billboards ever to be displayed there. The accompanying slogan .I am King. conveyed a similar .I am conqueror. rhetoric that is implicit in Cox‘s depiction. 85 John Cullen Gruesser, Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic, (University of Georgia Press, 2007), p.1. 86 Toni Morrison was not the first to acknowledge this marginalisation. Richard Wright‘s Black Boy (1945) depicts his experience of social and political alienation in the repressive American South, a highly limiting environment in which the writer described himself to be .ringed by walls.. In 1952 Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man addressed the social invisibility of black men. Writing as a way to make himself more visible in mainstream culture, Ellison‘s novel addressed black alienation though themes of light and shadow, and blindness and vision. 87 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, (Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 5. There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States.87 Cox is addressing the same forces that Morrison incriminates for the marginalisation and subsequent denial of black creativity in the development of American culture. In Taxi the artist surrounds herself with iconography attesting to white cultural supremacy in order to present herself as an unavoidable, explosive black female presence right in the middle of it. Visible to the left of Rajé is Batman, a white billionaire .champion of the people. who remains one of the only globally recognised superhero disguised in black and treated criminally until he has proven his worth to the fictionalised city of Gotham. Beside Batman on the advertisement is his female counterpart, Cat Woman, a white woman turned feline felon and therefore incriminated and bestialised in black leather. Cox‘s incorporation of these comic book characters comments on the ways in which the colour black is connotative of criminal behaviour. In the larger context, in Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies, Patricia A Turner uses children‘s animation to illustrate how darkness became synonymous with evil in Western culture: By persistently wrapping evil characters in dark cloaks, capes, cowboy hats, and hoods, and rendering the good ones in starched white aprons, gowns, and uniforms, the Disney studios ensured that several generations of American children would shudder with apprehension when darkness appeared on the screen and would utter sighs of relief at lightness.88 88 Turner, Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies, p.109. 89 Amber Wilson, Jamaica the People, (Oxford: Crabtree Publishing Company, 2003), p.15. Turner‘s example of the demonization of blackness in popular children‘s visual culture offers one explanation to why Cox dresses her fictional, comic book alias in this colourful garb. A secondary motive for the artist‘s leotard, emblazoned with green, yellow, black and glaring red, is to reference the flag of her birthplace, Jamaica, a black nation colonised first by Spain, then the British until it achieved Independence in 1962. Cox proudly wears these colours to emblematise the determination and resistance of a black nation that disengaged itself from colonial powers, first by uniting with the other Caribbean Islands to form the West Indies Federation and then succeeding a year later to become independent within the British Commonwealth.89 The black nationalistic connotation of Rajé‘s costume reinforces the image of a powerful woman who uses her strength to conquer the heart of American civilisation. It plays up to the =colonised turned coloniser‘ image that Cox reiterates throughout the series. For example, in Motherland (1998) an enormous Rajé and two black male models stand on top of Earth, positioned directly above the illuminated African continent. The superhero‘s expression is defiant because she is claiming back the homeland from which Africans were forcibly removed. In Taxi Cox displays black female dominance, power and aggression. She partially mirrors the .matriarch. stereotype that Barbara Christian deems to be a contemporary variation of the mammy image and that emerged from the Moynihan Report in 1965. This report was meant to target the cause of black poverty in America but instead it blamed the deterioration of the African American family on the prominence of black female-headed households. Black women were vilified for being overly aggressive, outspoken and unfeminine. The report aggravated the already strained relations between black men and women by holding black women accountable for the emasculation of black men. This fuelled the concerns of Malcolm X and other Black Nationalists that black men needed to re-assert their manhood in the face of emasculating women. The matriarch label was an attempt to regulate black women‘s behaviour because it implied that if a black woman was too strong then her family would fail. Black female-headed households were held accountable for seriously hindering the progress of African Americans because .it was so out of line with the rest of American society..90 Therefore, rather than looking towards the reasons behind the prevalence of single parent households, the report shifted social blame onto black women. In consideration of this, Cox uses her Rajé alias in retributory and condemning ways. For example, in Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st Century, Clarence J. Munford discusses the .Great White fear. of Black retribution in what he considers to be its contemporary form: 90 .The Moynihan Report. reprinted in Robert Wallace Winslow‘s The Emergence of Deviant Minorities, Social Problems and Social Change, (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1972),p. 33. The Southern slaveholder had trembled in his boots at the thought of the Black .night of the long knives.. Knowing that the oppression and super-exploitation of Black citizens had not ended, and uneasy of conscience, today‘s slumberers in white suburbia are troubled by the same nightmare.91 91 Clarence J. Munford , Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st Century,(Africa World Press, 1996), p.44. 92 Harry M. Benshoff, Sean Griffin, America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), p.76. 93 In 1901 George T. Winston, president of the North Carolina College of Agricultural and Medical Arts, expressed his view of the black brute as .lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. His ferocity is almost demonical. A mad bull or tiger could scarcely be more brutal. A whole community is frenzied with horror, with the blind furious rage for vengeance.. This characterisation was later cinematised in D. W. Griffith‘s Birth of a Nation (1915), a film that Thomas Cripps described as .a sacrifice of black humanity to the cause of racism. because it depicted black men as brutal rapists of white women, which Benshoff and Griffin deem to be a .reflection of white men‘s fears about black male powers.. George T. Winston, .Relations of the Whites to the Negroes,. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. xvii, (Jul 1901), p. 108-109. Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.40. Benshoff and Griffin, America on Film, p.76. However, Cox is not creating a savage black woman terrorising Times Square to simply reiterate colonial and antebellum stereotypes. She goes beyond mere reduplication by continuing to play up to the fantasy of white constructed images of African Americans and reworking demeaning aspects of this stereotype in order to reaffirm black female insubordination. In this regard, parallels can be drawn between Cox‘s aggressive depiction in Taxi and characteristics of the fictitious Black Brute, whose .brutal, animalistic, and hypermasculine. traits .threatened the white establishment because of his alleged sexual prowess..92 This white constructed stereotype demonised black men as sexual predators who targeted white women in order to justify white retaliation.93 Cox incorporates specific components of the Black Brute into her Rajé persona, bolstering the image of a fantastical, Afrocentric super heroine with the capability to be predatory and destructive in whichever period she chooses to appear. As I have argued, Cox picks and chooses from the abundance of mythology surrounding the black woman in America. It is empowering that Cox‘s reappropriation of stereotypes subverts the malleability of black female identities from a disempowering tactic used by white oppressive powers against black women, to suit her own artistic agenda. The exaggeration of the artist‘s physicality in Taxi can also be seen to signify on the oversized dimensions of the mammy stereotype. It is as if Cox has taken the residual boldness of the mammy, her strength and robustness, and magnified it to create the gargantuan Rajé. According to Collins, the mammy was considered .harmless in her position of slave, unable because of her all-giving nature to do harm..94 This is a particularly damaging characterisation because it masks social realities by perpetuating the facade of an African American woman who is fulfilled in her position of servitude. 94 Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p.72. 95 The actress was heavily criticised by the NAACP for perpetuating black stereotypes. 96 The radio series was called Fibber McGee and Molly (1945-1953) and in its first few episodes the character Beulah was played by a white man, Martin Hurt. 97 Ernest Cashmore, --And There Was Television, (London: Routledge, 1994),p.103. By referencing this stereotype as she stands at the cultural crossroads of America, Cox is also commenting on the mammy‘s long and troubled representation in the landscape of popular American visual culture. In her Oscar winning performance as Mammy, Hattie McDaniel wilfully fought with Vivien Leigh‘s Scarlet O‘Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and later reprised the role of a mammy in Song of the South (1946).95 In 1950 ABC‘s The Beulah Show, which was adapted from radio,96 became the first American sitcom to feature an African American woman cast as the lead, albeit a role in which she was maintained as mammy to serve the needs of an idealised white middle-class family. Over the three years that it ran, five actresses portrayed Beulah: Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Amanda Randolph, and Lillian Randolph, all of whom perpetuated the image of a .selfless black domestic who cared for the white family more than her own flesh and blood..97 A more apt example of the mammy as a .symbolic backdrop.98 in American popular media can be found in MGM‘s animated series, Tom and Jerry. The black maid of the house, Mammy Two Shoes, was only depicted from the neck down in her seventeen appearances between 1940 and 1952.99 She was grossly exaggerated with thick black arms, enormous hands and pronounced calves. Never pictured without her apron and destined to clean up after two animals intent on running amok, this characterisation marginalised the role of the black woman to domesticated servant.100 Mammy Two Shoes constitutes an absent black female presence that is seen but rarely heard and even Lillian Randolph, who lent her voice to the character on the few occasions that she did speak, was uncredited for her role. It is significant that this popular cartoonisation of a black woman was created by two white men, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, because it exemplifies the same marginalisation that Michele Hilmes deemed .double erasure.101 in her reference to the white man who played the radio version of Beulah. Hilmes‘s term can be applied to the long tradition in popular American visual culture that has represented black women without hearing or properly seeing them. 98 Ronald L. Jackson, Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media, (SUNY Press, 2006), p. 40. 99 Karl F. Cohen, Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America, (McFarland, 2004), p .56. 100 Jason Mittell observes that .Tom & Jerry cartoons were regularly changed for television, transforming the character of a black maid, Mammy Two Shoes, into an Irish maids by redubbing her voice and coloring her legs and arms (all that was seen of the character) white…By eliminating references to blacks and other nonwhite human characters out of fear of complaints of racism, television programmers effectively created a white-only genre of programming.. In Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, (London: Routledge, 2004), p.64. 101 Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952, (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 258. A more physical example of the grossly exaggerated, yet silenced, mammy image in contemporary America is the southern luncheonette, =Mammy‘s Cupboard‘, (Fig 8). Just beyond a row of white antebellum homes in Natchez, MS, stands this 28-foot tall novelty restaurant. Built in the 1940s, the diner resides beneath the colossal red brick skirt of a black woman who wears a red poker dot bandana and horseshoe earrings. Beneath Mammy‘s Cupboard‘s smiling face, the figurine‘s arms are permanently positioned to support a large brown tray and the greeting sign at the front of her skirt reads, .Come In: We‘re Open.. Helen Taylor recognises the conspicuously racist nature of the figurine by writing that .in order to eat, you enter a door in her voluminous skirts. and therefore .her very body invites invasion and knows no privacy..102 However, Anne Butler views the restaurant very differently which reflects the ambivalent position that the mammy icon holds in American history. In a tone devoid of sarcasm, Butler nostalgically writes, 102 Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone With the Wind and its Female Fans, (London: Virago, 1989), p. 168-9. 103 Anne Butler, Audubon Plantation Country Cookbook, (Singapore: Pelican Publishing, 2004), p.60. 104 In Melvin Edwards‘s Lynch Fragment series (1963-1966), the African American artist welds chains and horseshoes with other steel objects he views as the tools of the oppressors; bolts, barbwire, padlocks and wrenches, to create abstract, sometimes masklike sculptures that resemble instruments of torture. 105 This phrase was first delivered by the protagonist Janey‘s African American grandmother in Zora Neale Hurston‘s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She wanted her granddaughter to understand the position of black women as she understood it having lived through slavery: .So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don‘t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule un de world so fur as Ah can see.. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, (Virago Press: London, 2005), p. 29. and what better symbol of that good-old Southern hospitality and good old down- home Southern cookin‘ than Mammy, so enormous she wears a becoming 5-foot chain as a necklace and horseshoes as earrings.103 It is unsettling that Butler does not recognise how these .becoming. accessories call to mind the trappings of slavery; the chain around Mammy‘s neck doubles up as a neck brace and the horseshoe earrings104 reinforce the status of the black woman as .de mule uh de world..105 Patricia Hill Collins regards the .mule. as central to the victimisation of black women in the workplace because these animals are .dehumanized objects…living machines. that .can be treated as part of the scenery..106 The mountainous Mammy‘s Cupboard sustains this deleterious image because it represents a smiling black woman who was only constructed for the purpose of serving others. This architecture functions as mystification; it is designed to make racism blend into the scenery and appear normal behind the content face of a black woman who is willing and wanting to serve. However, Mammy‘s Cupboard is conspicuously racist and just as her shadow looms over Highway 61, this African American stereotype continues to cast its shadow on American visual culture. 106 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, p. 43. Although Cox can be seen to signify on the robustness of the mammy stereotype, she does not make Rajé strong for the purpose of being a work horse. Instead Rajé is strong for the purposes of black female empowerment. The super heroine‘s lean physique, skin-tight garment, razor blade nails and black heeled boots, negate the large breasted, confabulated buttocks of the .harmless. mammy in order to appear powerful, defiant but also attractive. Cox‘s reversal of the mammy stereotype to create the image of a strong black woman who is self-aware and conscious of her rights follows in a black visual tradition that began in the 1960s. One of the earliest examples of this transformation was Murry DePillars‘s illustration Aunt Jemima (1968), which depicts the character as a militant figure, breaking out of her cardboard pancake box and wielding her spatula as if it were a sword. Similarly, in Jon Onye Lockard‘s painting No More (1972), Aunt Jemima‘s clenched fist breaks through the packaging, calling to mind the black power salute that American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos performed at the Mexico Olympics in 1968. In 1972, the stereotype reoccurred in Betye Saar‘s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, in which the grossly exaggerated black woman holds a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other. In these images Aunt Jemima is transformed from a docile servant to a politically aggressive symbol. Her domesticated tools become the armoury of empowerment. Cox continues this revisionist tradition in The Liberation of U.B and Lady J, (Fig 9). The artist implodes the outdated stereotypes of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima and replaces them with the athletic physiques of models Rodney Charles and Roshumba. Arm in arm with her newly liberated characters, Rajé strides forward from a backdrop laden with the .content. faces of a smiling Aunt Jemima and proud looking Uncle Ben. Similarly to DePillars and Lockard, Cox emancipates her reconfigured characters from their respective pancake and rice advertisements, wielding their strength, assertiveness, beauty and sexuality like weapons. By interpreting Rajé as an amalgamation of the most intense aspects of African American stereotypes, Cox carves a new image of black womanhood from her own unique standpoint. Given that the artist claims her work to be largely autobiographical, she counters attempts to define black women from the outside by defining from within. Cox‘s rhetoric is in tune with Audre Lorde‘s credo: .I can‘t depend on the world to name me kindly, because it never will…So either I am going to be defined by myself or not at all,.107 and Clarissa Sligh‘s mantra: .She didn‘t know who she was but she knew she wasn‘t who you all said she was.. Literary scholar Houston A. Baker also addressed this concern when he termed the heightened critical interest in black women‘s self-expression from the 1980s, .the most dramatically charged field for the convergence of matters of race, class, and gender..108 And Ann DuCille was perturbed by the intellectual probing of black women‘s self expressivity, questioning why they had become the, .subjected subjects of so much contemporary scholarly investigation, the peasants under glass of intellectual inquiry in the 1990s?.109 DuCille argued that black women authors 107Audre Lorde in Elizabeth Alexander‘s Power and Possibilty: Essays, Reviews, and Interviews. (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p.95. 108 Houston A. Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing, (University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.1-2. 109 Ann DuCille, Skin Trade, (Harvard University Press, 1996), p.81. and artists found themselves at the, .suddenly busy, three-way intersection. of academic inquiry and in danger of being .run over by [the] oncoming traffic. of scholars and historians.110 110 Ibid. p, 83. 111 Hill Collins, .Learning From the Outsider Within., p.39. 112 Cox in an interview with Cristinerose Parravicini. 113 Ann DuCille in The Black Studies Reader, Ed. Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, Claudine Michel, (London: Routledge, 2004), p.269. Cox‘s image crosses the decades in terms of American culture and African American cultural studies because the artist can be seen to stand at the centre of DuCille‘s busy intersection in Taxi. However, there is little danger that Rajé‘s formidable presence will be .trampled. by oncoming traffic. On the contrary, she takes a swipe at the yellow taxi cab which symbolises a shift, in Collins‘s terms, in the .power dynamics underlying the process of definition., from white constructed stereotypes and critical thought to a .black female-centred analysis..111 However, Cox theoretically undermines Rajé‘s rhetoric of freedom from ideological and stereotypical constructs of the black female body, by modeling her superhero on Mattel‘s black .Christie. doll. The artist states: .Rajé is against any of the stereotypes, prejudices or misconceptions that are true within certain groups of people..112 However, considering Ann Ducille‘s assertion that these dolls were .symbol and symptom of what multiculturalism has become at the hands of contemporary commodity culture,. providing only the .face of cultural diversity without the particulars of racial difference,.113 it seems contradictory that Cox would model her black super heroine on this sex-stereotyped emblem of undiversified hegemonic beauty. The artist even created an 11inch miniature version of the superhero which was displayed behind glass at the exhibition. Cox asserts that the stilettos she wears in her photographs create an assertive and strong image, demonstrating to women: .you can put on your pumps, give your body a good line…and keep pressing on..114 However, in Barbie‘s world, where according to Mattel‘s advertising slogan: .We Girls Can Do Anything.,115 feet that have been permanently moulded into high heels may be read as symbolising the deformation of women to fit patriarchal desires and systems of control. In defence of Barbie, youth-marketing expert, Gene del Vecchio, credits the figurine for being a device through which .girls can dream of the achievement, glamour, romance, adventure and nurturing opportunities that may someday be theirs..116 However, del Vecchio‘s assessment of Barbie fails to identify the doll in DuCille‘s terms, as .an icon-perhaps the icon-of true white womanhood and femininity..117 This failure to acknowledge Barbie as a symbol of white girl‘s aspiration also overlooks how the Christie doll, in the two decades before she was allowed to share Barbie‘s name, served to reinforce white hegemonic values of beauty. 114 Cox in an interview with Cristinerose Parravicini. 115 Mary Frances Rogers, Barbie Culture, (London: SAGE Publications, 1999), p. 95. 116 Gene del Vecchio in Daniel Delis Hill, Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999, (Ohio State University Press, 2002), p.204. 117 Ann DuCille, .Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference. in Differences 6 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p.50. 118 DuCille, Skin Trade, p.53. In 1967 Mattel premiered its first black doll, .Colored Francie.. Unsurprisingly, this derogatory label didn‘t last long in the politically charged civil rights atmosphere of the time and was replaced a year later by the Christie doll. However, Christie‘s narrow facial features, svelte figure and long flowing hair did little more than reinforce the idea that .black is most beautiful when readable in traditional white terms,.118 thus setting a virtually unachievable standard of beauty for African American girls. It wasn‘t until 1980 that Christie was officially afforded the .Barbie. namesake of her white counterpart. Christie‘s exclusion from the Barbie brand partially mirrors the marginalisation of black women from the women‘s liberation movement from the 1960s to the 1980s. The irony was lost on Second Wave Feminists who rejected Barbie‘s embodiment of .oppressive conceptions of feminine beauty. for reifying a .thoroughly disempowered stance vis-à-vis men,.119 but failed to recognise that their exclusion of black feminists reiterated Barbie‘s relationship to Christie. It is arguable that Rajé expresses the imagined anger and frustrations hidden beneath Christie‘s permanent smile and that the Rajé doll represents an empowered black female figure for children to play with. However, for Cox to model her .Afrocentric super heroine. on a doll that was manufactured by a white capitalist corporation and warped African American standards of beauty by idolising whiteness, and to then exhibit the Rajé doll in a glass enclosure, seems to contradict the artist‘s oeuvre. 119 Michael A, Messner, .Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender., Gender & Society, Vol. 14 No.6, Dec. 2000, p.776. 120 Carol A. Strickland. May 2010 121 Anonymous writer for Comic Vine, Jan 2010 < http://www.comicvine.com/nubia/29-34121/> 122 In 1975 ABC piloted a television movie entitled Wonder Woman starring Lynda Carter. The success of the one-hour episode prompted network to place the show in regular rotation and it continued airing until 1977. Then Carter moved to CBS‘s The New Adventures of Wonder Woman which ran until 1979. By tracing the roots of the demonization of one of America‘s first black comic book heroines, Nubia, it becomes clearer why Cox‘s hyperbolic black super heroine is not uncomplicatedly the most inspiring icon for black female empowerment. In 1973, responding to the civil rights and women‘s liberation movements, DC Comics‘ new editor Robert Kanigher debuted Nubia, Wonder Woman‘s black twin sister.120 Created from dark clay to match her sister‘s birth from white clay, Nubia possessed inordinate strength, high intelligence and the ability to heal.121 She only featured in two issues but had DC Comics chosen to elongate Nubia‘s appearance, the character could have made a promising black heroine in American visual culture. It is therefore difficult to comprehend why in 1977, following the recent success of the television series,122 Mego Corporation produced a Nubia doll and advertised her as: .Wonder Woman‘s super-foe! That heartless arch-mistress of evil. 123 thus transforming Nubia into Wonder Woman‘s black nemesis. The accompanying television commercial was equally separatist, depicting two young girls, one white and one black, playing with their respectively coloured dolls. In the commercial the young black girl-as-Nubia commits a villainous act to which Wonder Woman is called to the rescue. The closing shot in the commercial is of the Nubia doll; her hands are bound and she is being led away by Wonder Woman in an image shockingly reminiscent of slavery. Watching the black girl deepen her voice in order to play the part of the villain is a chilling reminder of Dr. Kenneth Clark‘s .good doll/bad doll. sociological experiment in1954, which reversed segregation laws on the basis that they inspired racial self-loathing. 123 Anonymous writer for Wonder Woman Museum, Feb 2010 124 Statement made in .A Girl Like Me. documentary, Kiri Davis, Director, Reel Works Teen Filmmaking, Producer, Oct 2009 125 Ibid. Kiri Davis re-enacted this experiment in her award-winning documentary, =A Girl like Me‘ (2005), in which she interviewed a group of black adolescent girls to unveil their perception of beauty, and whether they considered themselves to fit these standards of beauty. The underlying question was why do African American women let white standards of beauty rule their lives? Sadly, their responses identify beauty as the antithesis of themselves, recalling childhood aspirations of wanting to look like Barbie, stories of mothers using bleaching cream on their daughters, and being told, .bad hair is hair that you have to relax because it is kinky..124 One interviewee, Jennifer, articulates the difficulty of black girls finding their place in society when American culture has become almost synonymous with white culture. Her concern that .everybody else is throwing their ideas and what they believe we should be at us,.125 resonates with the same grievances black feminists Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and artist Clarissa Sligh voiced decades before. Furthermore, Kiri Davis‘s reconstruction of Dr. Clark‘s .doll test. conveys young children‘s continued preference for the .good. white doll, a disturbing indication that children‘s perceptions of race may be less changed than one supposes from fifty years ago. This analysis of the .white culture-inspired valuing of lightness.126 in the black community calls to mind the battered psyches of Gwendolyn Brooks‘s Maude Martha, Toni Morrison‘s Pecola, and Maya Angelou‘s desire to wake from her .ugly black dream. to long blond hair that would .take the place of that kinky mass that momma wouldn‘t let me straighten..127 Adding to this, Denise Duhamel‘s collection of poems, Kinky, explores the imaginary psyches of ethnically diverse Barbies. In one poem she writes: .Black Barbie looks exactly like White Barbie…Even the Julia Barker doll, who was supposed/to resemble the actress Diahann Carroll, wound up/with White Barbie‘s tiny hands, flexed feet, and slight nose..128 Duhamel illustrates how black women‘s beauty is often defined by and held to the standards of white hegemonic beauty. Considering the amount of literary and visual culture attesting to the traumatic psychological implications of the idolisation of whiteness over blackness, it seems strange that Cox would model Rajé on the .Christie. doll without challenging the impossible standards of white hegemonic beauty that pressurise African Americans and other ethnic minority groups in America today. In light of the artist‘s statement: .I don‘t have to look to Caucasian culture for what beauty should be about,.129 Rajé can be seen to reappropriate .Christie. because the super heroine‘s black braided hair, Jamaican flag 126 D. H. Melham, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), p.27. 127 Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, (London: Virago Press, 2001), p.4. 128 Denise Duhamel, Kinky, (Virginia: Orchises Press, 1997), p.20. 129 Renée Cox. Interview. .Using Her Body. by Karen Croft, Salon, (San Francisco: 2001), March 2010 inspired costume and will towards African American freedom from oppression attempts to right the gender and racial injustices perpetuated by the .Christie. doll. Rajé represents the strong, beautiful and racially proud black female icon that the American toy and beauty industry failed to provide for young and adolescent African American women. Cox wants to rectify the racial .self-loathing. that she believes many women suffer from and which .makes the cosmetic companies very, very wealthy. by creating art that serves to .moderate some of that self-hatred to enable us to begin to love ourselves..130 In this regard, the artist‘s performance of Rajé is a self-reflexive attempt to break moulds of representation and beauty. 130 Cox in an interview with Jonathan Greenland, .Channelling Nanny of the Maroons., Jamaica Gleaner News. 131 Writing in the 1980s, Audre Lorde surmised this opinion, observing that: .As white women ignore their built in privilege of whiteness and define women in terms of their own experience alone, then women of color become =other‘, the outsider whose experience and tradition is too =alien‘ to comprehend.. In Sister Outsider, p.117. 132 Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p.220. Cox‘s use of the bold alternative persona is part of an ongoing black woman‘s performance movement that began in the 1970s when African American women artists began to embrace theatricality and the alternative persona to confront issues of racial stereotyping, the marginalisation of black artists, and the objectification of the black female body. These women artists were responding to the social and political climate of the time; the Civil Rights Movement had not realised all of its aims, many black women felt marginalised from the women‘s liberation movement,131 and the 1980 election saw Reagan‘s campaign promise to reduce federal intervention through the dismantling of affirmative action policies. The Republican government wanted to roll back Johnson‘s civil rights measures and implicate colour-blind impartiality in housing, education and employment to remedy a system of statistical goals that, in the words of Nathan Glazer, attached .benefits and penalties to individuals simply on the basis of their race, color, and national origin..132 As a result, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the anti-discrimination employment legislation, was interpreted through a much narrower lens after 1980. In practice, this meant that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was scaled back and far fewer discrimination cases were brought to the bar. Reverberations of Reagan‘s swift right turn on affirmative action were felt in fashion and the performing arts. Bethann Hardison, a prestigious black model at the time, explains how editors and designers no longer felt the same pressures to use black models as they had in the 1960s: .Somewhere along the line the impetus dissipated…Now the economy dictates and there is little need to use blacks in shaping the image of how America views itself..133 Refuelling the dwindling civil rights impetus became a priority for black women artists who exploded onto the performing arts scene in the 1970s and 1980s. By adopting alternative personas, staging invasions on gallery openings and re-appropriating racial stereotypes, these women engineered new ways to challenge ideological and institutional discrimination. Adrian Piper pioneered this guerrilla-style performance in her series, The Mythic Being (1972-1976), in which the artist disguised herself in an afro, moustache, and dark sunglasses to, .Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear.: the black man.134 While Cox-as-Rajé encompasses traits of the fictional .black brute. by terrorising Times Square, it was two decades before this that Piper walked the real streets of New York acting out white racialised fears of the .violent. black man by .cruising. white women and staging fake muggings on white men. Piper became engrossed in her character: .My behaviour changes, I swagger, stride, lope, lower my eyebrows, raise my shoulders, sit with my legs wide apart on the subway, so as to accommodate my protruding genitalia…I follow them with my eyes on the street, fantasizing vivid scene of lovemaking and 133 Bethann Hardison in La Verne Powlis‘s .Marketing Black Beauty., Black Enterprise Vol. 12, No. 8 (March, 1982), p.46. 134 This quote was the title of the photo-text installations in the series. intimacy..135 Piper performed the socially contested figure of the .black man. as seen through obstinate eyes to reflect upon circumscribed notions of racial behaviour and force people to recognise, re-examine, and transcend their intransigent attitudes towards race. 135 Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight – Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p.117-118. 136 Lorraine O‘Grady, .Mlle Bourgeoisie Noire and Feminism., 2007. Lorraine O’ Grady Official Website, March 2010 137 Lynda Hart, Acting Out: Feminist Performances,(University of Michigan Press, 1996) P142 138 Renée Cox. Interview. .Fragmented Souls: Call and Response with Renée Cox. by Bethany White, Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure, Ed. Monique Guillory, Richard C. Green, (NYU Press, 1998), p.46. Following in Piper‘s footsteps, Lorraine O‘ Grady adopted the persona of Mlle Bourgeoisie Noire in 1980, ambushing art galleries and shouting lines of her guerrilla-style poetry, .NOW IS THE TIME FOR AN INVASION. and .BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS., to address the plight of the marginalised black artist and reprimand those of them who were timorous. Mlle Bourgeoisie Noire staged her protests at exhibitions that only featured white artists or displayed Eurocentric content. Her first was at the Personae exhibit at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She wore a dress of 180 white gloves purchased from charity shops because the artist viewed them as a .symbol of internal repression. that mirrored the equally repressed black avant-garde movement at the time.136 Piper and O‘Grady‘s experimental performances courted controversy in ways that made their work difficult to ignore. They exemplify what polemical performance artist Karen Finley deemed to be the .more hard-edged, less subtle. side of art because before the 1970s, women artists had .no tradition of foul-mouth visionaries..137 Their fearless performances paved the way for artists like Cox, who particularly valued the .in-your-faceness.138 of Piper‘s work, establishing a context for continued controversial artwork that pushed boundaries of black women‘s self-representation. As a beneficiary of this movement, Cox‘s alternative persona also embraces theatricality and costuming to make bold statements. In her Hottentot depiction, the artist‘s metal adornments reference the misrepresentation of the black female body in Western visual culture. Rajé‘s colourful leotard is a statement of black independence that symbolises freedom from colonialism and displays Cox‘s sleek figure to provide a new model of black womanhood that negates the frumpy, exorbitant mammy stereotype. Another controversial performance artist to embrace the pop-culture mileu of the 1980s was the Jamaican model-turned-singer, Grace Jones. Her theatrical interrogation of the objectification of black bodies in Western cultures can be seen as a precursor to Cox‘s oeuvre, which emerged a decade later. Wearing a plethora of animal guises and body-paint, Jones signifies on colonial subscriptions of the African body as primitive, carnal and uncivilised to create a self-aware image of black womanhood that is fierce, strong and powerful. Her career is a portfolio of bared teeth, snarling expressions, and general ferociousness wrapped in zebra striped body-paint and animal attire. However, unlike Cox, Jones did not have autonomous control over her representation. Instead she exemplifies Sanya Osha‘s assertion that .black aesthetics do not conform to Western notions of beauty, the black subject is often thrust into the realm of animality..139 This is clearly illustrated in Jean-Paul Goude‘s promotional photograph of the singer for her Roseland performance in 1978. Jones is pictured naked on her hands and knees, trapped in a cage beneath the sign: .DO NOT FEED THE ANIMAL.. Although Jones‘s threatening snarl returns the scrutinising gaze of the viewer, Miriam Kershaw is right to acknowledge that this .heavily reproduced image tended to reassert a colonial rather than a postcolonial perspective..140 It calls to mind the caricature of the primitive black woman made 139 Sanya Osha, =.Venus. and White Desire. Transition, No. 99 (2008), p. 82. 140 Miriam Kershaw, .Postcolonialism and Androgyny: The Performance Art of Grace Jones., Art Journal, Vol.56 No.4. (Winter, 1997), p.21. 141 In 1927 French poster artist Paul Colin created 45 lithographs entitled Le Tumulte Noir, which depicted the exotic and erotic style of dance that Josephine Baker performed to Parisian audiences. 142 Kershaw, .Postcolonialism and Androgyny., p.21. popular by Paul Colin‘s Le Tumulte Noir lithographs, which depicts Josephine Baker imprisoned behind bars, animalistic and highly sexualised.141 Goude‘s photograph undermines the powerful presence that Jones generates for herself on stage because her larger-than-life character is confined to the parameters of a small enclosure. During her performance Jones was able to command the attention of the entire crowd with her wild stage antics. At one stage the artist, dressed in striped animal print, opens the door of a Bengal tiger‘s cage and instantaneously the lighting and sound cuts out. The audience is momentarily left in darkness, listening to the soundtrack of animals mauling each other. Moments later Jones is illuminated. She resumes singing but stops in between breathes to take ravenous bites of a bloody piece of meat that represents the slain tiger that she has overpowered. Parallels can be drawn between Cox‘s depiction of Rajé and Jones‘s all powerful, indestructible performance of black womanhood that plays up to colonial stereotypes of the .savage. black woman. Throughout the performance Jones embodies several animal guises, which Kershaw believes are quickly discarded to insinuate that .racial stereotypes are, themselves, a mask which will be manipulated throughout the performance..142 However, if this is to be believed, then Goude‘s photograph may be read as problematic because of the absence of costuming. Jones is disencumbered from her elaborate headdresses and animal prints but she still remains in a cage, as if to reinforce the colonial opinion that black women should be exhibited and then thrown back into confinement. Another example of Jones‘s objectification was during her performance at Studio 54 in 1978. Jones‘s microphone malfunctioned while she was singing, yet, despite the deterioration in sound quality producers allowed her to garble her way through the set because, according to Robert Roth, they .felt that the audience had come to see Jones cavort with the dancers while changing into several costumes..143 In his review of the show, Roth questioned, .Is the next step for Jones to eliminate her live singing and just move her hips?.144 This denotes how the singer‘s performance became more about the eroticisation of her body parts than her vocals. This Studio 54 appearance transposed Jones from a self-conscious artist who defined her own performance to an objectified woman defined by her performance. It draws attention to the potential problems of African American women artists who deliberately expose themselves to the pressure of the gaze by re-appropriating stereotypes. Cox and Jones‘s exaggerated performances walk a thin line between parodying and perpetuating detrimental characterisations of black women. In regards to Jones‘s performance, Alison Pearlman asserts: .The spectator conditioned to the accelerated pace of its constant masquerade is relativistic about appearances, and therefore likely to understand Jones‘s primitivism as a mask, not as a symbol of human nature..145 However, this interpretation is dependent on the viewer being aware that Jones‘s constant movement from human to animal is signifying on, rather than reinforcing colonial labelling. Similarly, Cox re-appropriates stereotypes for self-affirming and revisionist purposes to chip away at pejorative representations of black women. However, her performances are also problematic if they are only seen to reinforce the derogatory image of an uncivilised, hyper- sexualised black woman, particularly in the context of fashion photography, which perpetuates the motif of the black woman as eroticised animal solely for aesthetic purposes rather than as a visual critique. 143 Robert Roth, .Grace Jones: Studio 54, New York., Billboard, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Jan, 1978), p.69. 144 Roth, .Grace Jones., p.69. 145 Alison Pearlman, Unpacking Art of the 1980s, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p.93. Cox has extensive experience in fashion photography. Before focusing on conceptual art, the artist worked in Paris as an Assistant Fashion Editor for three years and then moved to New York where she continued to work behind the lens for a further decade. Her fashion background not only informs the glossy aesthetics of her Rajé series, but it has made her conscious of how black women have been represented in the fashion world. Contrary to Rosetta Brookes‘s opinion that the transitory nature of fashion photography places it at the .lightweight end of photographic practice,. photography theorist Paul Jobling identifies how the .deeper ideological signification. of the fashion photograph can .make a lasting rather than fleeting impression on the consciousness of any individual..146 Jobling describes how .fashion photography beckons us into a world of unbridled fantasies by placing fashion and the body in any number of discursive contexts..147 However, what happens when the fantasy is at the expense, and to the degradation, of the subject? For example, in 1977 Donyale Luna, the original black supermodel model who inspired the first black mannequin in 1966,148 posed for photographer Peter Beard. In this image Luna looks like a slain animal discarded on the beach; her body is naked apart from the slashed, leopard print skirt and chain-like anklet that she wears. Her expression is one of fierce, eroticised pleasure and her arms are thrown above her head in a powerless and demeaning manner. She is caught between the erotic and the animal, the dominatrix turned dominated. Five years earlier, Beard photographed model Naomi Simms in a similar manner, scantily clad and straddling a crocodile at Coconut Grove. He later photographed Iman in the Somali desert, naked, apart from a leopard print headscarf and posing beside a leopard. She is positioned on her hands so that her body imitates the lithe and predatory stance of the animal 146 Paul Jobling, Fashion Spreads: Word and Image in Fashion Photography Since 1980, (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1999), p.2. 147 Ibid. 148 Richard Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p.82. and their faces are so closely aligned as they look out across the desert, that a close affinity between woman and animal is implied.149 Although Beard‘s fascination with Africa inspired a number of photographic collages attesting to the beauty of the landscape, the photographer‘s tendency to photograph black women naked and only in the wilderness, raises concerns about the objectification of the black female body through the politics of colonialism, consumption and pleasure. As a white, male photographer, it may also be considered problematic that Beard engineered fictitious survival stories to .authenticate. the .wild. Africanness of his models. For example, Beard first discovered Iman when she was a student at the University of Nairobi. However, he introduced her to America as .the beauty from the bush,. fabricating the elaborate story that he rescued her from the .jungles. of Somalia, when in reality she was the well- educated, multilingual daughter of a diplomat.150 149 A more contemporary example of this type of photography is Naomi Campbell‘s 2008 cover for Russian Vogue. The model is strung up in front of the camera, her eyes appear menacing through damp and matted hair and her teeth tear at a piece of leopard print fabric that is entangled in the feathered dress that she wears. In a feature in the same issue, Campbell is topless wearing a black feline mask. 150 La Verne Powlis, .Marketing Black Beauty., Black Enterprise, Vol. 12, No. 8 (March, 1982), p.48. Unlike the aforementioned models and Jones, who took direction from photographer Jean- Paul Goude, Cox has autonomous control over her self-presentation. As Rajé, her deviant looking attire fuses shiny black boots with a slender fitting leotard, culminating in an ambiguous look that is simultaneously aggressive and feminine, as though the artist wants to be strong, but in a feminine way to accommodate changing definitions of the black female body. Fashion theorists Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton contend that the theatricality of costuming allows women to create themselves as spectacles, thus putting .distance between herself and her observers, a space within which to manoeuvre and to determine the meaning of the show. She takes control of the mask..151 This illustrates how costuming can be a source of empowerment for performance artists. In this regard Cox is exemplary of this because her colourful and exaggerated costumes, which are charged with references to the historical abuse of black women and become statements of empowerment and resistance, force the viewer to reconsider the pejorative meaning of the black female body as .spectacle.. Cox‘s self-exhibitionism is a statement of black female artistic empowerment; she is in control of her representation and she enacts creative agency by exhibiting herself in ways that challenge, revise and reconfigure historical and cultural misreadings of the black female body. Cox creates a hybrid identity in order to challenge and resist classification, reflecting her personal stance, .I don‘t like to categorise myself.. 152 Drawing from a range of cultural and historical references, the artist‘s malleable performances signify on, appropriate and reappropriate stereotypical representations used to control, contain and define black women. 151 Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton, .Fashion, Representation, Femininity., Feminist Review, No.38 (Summer, 1991), p.55. 152 Cox in an interview with Jonathan Greenland, .Channelling Nanny of the Maroons., Jamaican Gleaner. Conclusion Myra Greene and Renée Cox produce eclectic, experimental and diverse representations of the black female body that explore the ever shifting identity of African Americans. In their very different ways both artists present themselves in ways that refuse bracketing and classification. Cox‘s depiction of Baartman and Rajé challenges the same .Now you see us, now you think you know us. assumption about black female identities that Carla Williams associates with Greene‘s Self-Portraits exhibit. Both artists engage with Carrie Mae Weem‘s theory of .giving back the gaze. because of the diverse ways in which they each take back control of black women‘s self-expression. However, Greene and Cox‘s photographic styles and the ways in which they explore complex and multifarious self-representations are very different. Greene‘s preoccupation with obfuscation and an aesthetic of rupture is a key facet to her work. While Cox‘s hybrid identities refute the notion of the black female experience as a monolithic construct, which reflects the artist‘s resistance to modes of classification. Both artists seek to engage the observer. Greene‘s perplexing self-portraits possess a reluctant beauty, which encourages the viewer to spend time with the image in order to make sense of her obfuscated body. Cox strives to create .visually seductive. images that .bring the viewer in..1 1 Cox in an interview with Jonathan Greenland, .Channelling Nanny of the Maroons., Jamaican Gleaner. 2 hooks, Art on My Mind, p.49. By contrast, Greene‘s photography is meditative; her self-portraits are quiet and pensive. The cloudy greys, greens and browns create a visual indecipherability as though the artist and images are absorbed in thought and brooding. She generates dark spaces to create sites of contemplation, a concept that bell hooks acknowledged when she described how .shadows become the location of our destiny, outlining the shape of past, present, and future possibility..2 In this regard the shadows in Greene‘s work add layers of complexity to her presentation so that she never appears whole. In comparison to Greene‘s photographic musings, Cox‘s performances are exuberant. She does not fragment her body, instead she magnifies it. Cox‘s visual language is one of exaggeration, saturated with bold declarations and popular cultural representations. However, these self-representations are ultimately unrevealing because the artist‘s identity is hidden beneath an array of personae and cultural references that complicates her self-portrayal and plays up to notions of being beyond classification. In this sense, the glossy veneer of Cox‘s work pertains to the same masking qualities that inhabit Greene‘s impenetrable work. Therefore in very different ways both photographers engage with ideas of the hyper visible and invisible, which calls into question the public and private identities of these two artists. Greene creates layers of complexity by wrapping her body in a misty aesthetic and fragmenting herself so that she never appears too available to the outside gaze. Cox is bold, colourful and daring but ultimately she is host to a multitude of characters who provide a layering of popular visual cultural and references. Nevertheless while Greene‘s aesthetic engages with intangibility, Cox‘s audacious performances refuse to be evasive. Each artist is self-reflexive. Greene‘s own self-reflexivity goes hand in hand with her determination to make her viewers self-reflexive in order to rupture the legitimacy of assumptions regarding black identities which have masqueraded as realities. This is where Simpson‘s notion of an absent- presence is most palpable in Greene‘s work. Cox is also a highly self-conscious artist. Kianga K. Ford warns that .naïve reappropriations. of black stereotypes threaten to .regress rather than advance African American interests. because they .feed a white consumer audience‘s need for excessive and abject black images..3 However, Cox is not naïve; her performance of Rajé is media-savvy. She turns her critical eye on contemporary American visual culture to construct a glossy, 3 Kianga K. Ford .Playing with Venus: Black Women and the Venus Trope in Contemporary Visual Art., Black Venus 2010. Ed. Deborah Willis, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), p.96. commercial influenced image that signifies on and disrupts pejorative depictions of the black woman‘s body in the US consumer market. Rajé is a multiplicity of references. She is an empowered female warrior, reconfiguring America‘s black .Christie. doll to represent a black super heroine in a format that habitually degraded black women. Rajé‘s modelesque stature refutes the colonial stereotypes of the .savage. black woman that fashion photography continues to perpetuate. Furthermore, Cox satirically constructs an excessive black female image in the traditionally white comic book genre to critique derogatory and stereotypical representations of black women in American visual culture. As Maria Elena Buszek writes, Cox intelligently insinuates .a black, feminist beauty into the lily-white repertoire of pop-cultural imagery..4 Her photography is a politically inflammatory mêlée of mass media images. In many respects her exaggerated performances are the antithesis of Greene‘s shy and more closed off visual style, which is a reaction against the overexposure of African American women‘s bodies. While Greene‘s body is fragmented, Cox is keen to emerge as a striking, self-determined entity. 4 Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, (London: Duke University Press, 2006), p.350. 5 bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (Cambridge: South End Press, 2000), p.xvi. By comparison, some may deem Greene‘s self-presentation to be evasive. However, in my opinion the artist embraces the decentering of her body as a form of aesthetic empowerment. Similarly to Simpson‘s notion of .absent-presence., Greene is at the centre of her work precisely because of her relegation to the borders of the frame. This calls to mind bell hooks‘ theory From Margin to Center, which the feminist explains in reference to African Americans living in her home town: .Living as we did—on the edge—we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked from both the outside in and the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center..5 hooks‘ idea of looking from the outside in and the inside out is relevant to my reading of Greene and Cox because they are artist and subject, both within and without, challenging systems of viewing and defining the black female body. For each artist the act of viewing becomes as much the subject of her work as their own body itself. In Dark Designs and Visual Cultures Michele Wallace reiterates the importance of black artists who engage with the resurrection of black stereotypes, referring to them as a .Pandora‘s box in which our past is contained..6 Cox is not afraid to represent herself in ways that signify upon highly aggressive, overtly sexual or scientifically-laden representations of the black woman‘s body. Similarly, Greene‘s Self-Portraits and Character Recognition exhibits resurrect the style of ethnographic photography that harks back to the enforced documentation and violation of African bodies. In contemplation of visual representations of African Americans, Wallace argues: .We are in danger of getting wasted by ghosts, by what the black film historian Thomas Cripps calls .black shadows on the silver screen,. by effusions and visual traces that haunt us because we refuse to study them, to look them in the eye..7 In their very different and disturbing ways Cox and Greene represent themselves in ways that signify on the ghosts of culturally exploited black women‘s bodies. These artists are on a continuum because their works can be seen to follow the belief that .It is the artist's role to trouble the comfortable and to comfort the troubled,.8 by creating works that are inquisitive and haunting, troubling and self- reflexive. Greene‘s Self-Portraits and Cox‘s performance of the Hottentot engage with .ghosting.; the idea that their photographs are suggestive of history that haunts the image. Greene‘s reconfiguration of ethnographic photography alludes to the anonymous bodies, 6 Wallace, Dark Designs, p.121. 7 Ibid, p.191. 8 Danny Simmons and Brian Tate, Curatorial statement for .The Postmillennial Black Madonna. exhibit (2007), Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, July 2010 forgotten memories and untold narratives of slaves who were historically categorised behind the ethnographic lens. The artist‘s simultaneously emerging and disappearing appearance is an attempt to remember as well as acknowledgement that some experiences can never be reclaimed. Cox resurrects the painful memory of Saarte Baartman to construct a performance that is both visible and invisible. She uses an exaggerated exterior to get to the painful psychological interior, which is a similar strategy to Greene. And through Rajé, the artist inserts herself into a media frenzy of billboards, glossy magazine aesthetics and the children‘s play doll and comic genres, which inadvertently addresses the commodification of representations of women's bodies in popular visual culture as well as pejorative stereotypical depictions. According to Michael D. Harris, .If we accept the premise that black stereotypes are based in white fantasy and projected onto blacks. then the black artist who deliberately reappropriates these images .is playing with and complicating history and images rooted in nonblack culture..9 In this regard, Greene‘s reconfiguration of the traditionally white ethnographic lens and Cox‘s use of the typically white comic book genre challenges white racial perceptions of blackness in visual arenas that have dominated, marginalized, and pejoratively misrepresented black people. Cox and Greene are representative of a larger movement in African American women‘s art by creating a new visual language that is defining and reconfiguring historical abuses of black women‘s bodies. Harris questions .whether liberation can ever be found within a consciousness of victimization?.10 In my opinion, Greene and Cox both take control of this .consciousness of victimization. by determining the power of the gaze. As the self-actualising architects of their own images, these two artists embrace Carrie Mae Weems‘s theory of creating works that .rise above the depiction of blacks always as the victim of the gaze..11 In the context of the African 9 Harris, Coloured Pictures, p.194. 10 Ibid., p.206. 11 Carrie Mae Weems in Collins, The Art of History, p. 30. American women whose bodies have been exhibited as spectacle, violated for purposes of scientific scrutiny and masked beneath stereotypes, the gaze is an important means through which racial fears and fantasies are perpetuated and played out. The power of Greene‘s images resides in her ability to deny the gaze. By fragmenting and restricting visual access to her body she destabilises the conventional relationship between the viewer and the viewed. She circumvents reiterating derogatory modes of African American representation because her body is not offered up for the entertainment of the white male gaze. Similarly, Cox‘s representations of Hottentot and Rajé, while sexually suggestive in nature, are highly condemning because of Cox‘s self-assured ability to return the gaze. 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Images Fig 1 http://photography.cdmhost.com/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/p4023coll6&CISOPTR=2295 Fig 2 Fig 3 Fig 4 Fig 5 Fig 6 Fig 7 Fig 8 Fig 9