I wasn’t paying attention at the end of my last blog post. I was led to believe by my own stubborn behavior that I was being tricked into believing many of the pit falls Oguibe describes in his text are only stepped in by those who are ‘othered’ or marked (a term I will discuss momentarily). Certainly I still believe that many of the examples Oguibe describes in the the first part of his text can also be found in the art world when not in relation to the Other. But after several days of contemplation I’ve come to realize that I can never be placed in the position of the Other, I live unmarked by race in accordance to western ideologies. How then can I determine that these pitfalls aren’t actually different? I cannot ever know if they are the same or different, but I am going to accept that they exist in varying terms and I must acknowledge that.
To be marked in our society is to be of noticeable difference. It is in the most simple of terms (or at least my own simple understanding of the terminology) to be defined by your cultural background first and foremost (or to put it bluntly, your race). Oguibe begins his second essay of part one entitled Art,Identity,Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art. with a description of an interview between American critic Thomas McEvilley and Ivory painter Ouattara. An interview which quickly slips into an otherization of Ouattara.
As Oguibe states McEvilley begins the interview with what seems like a rather benign question “When and where were you born?”. After a series of other seemingly equally harmless questions Oguibe’s point is made in this passage:
...that in dealing with the power that McEvilley represents, he is engaged in an ill-matched game of survival, a game that he must play rather carefully if he must avoid profound consequences, a game that he must negotiate with patience to avoid his own erasure, his own annihilation, a game that he must ultimately concede in order to live. (11)
This statement is what initially set me on a path of initial irritation. Because just like McEvilley’s series of questions, that statement taken out of context could readily illustrate the hardships faced by any artist trying to succeed in the art world, regradless of race. However as Oguibe goes on to describe for an artist who has been deemed as Other, it is the day to day reality of the situation. Oguibe explains that these attitudes are a product of colonial ethnography and a colonial desire for a faceless native. This train of thought is in fact the very same one which occurs countless times in Morrison’s articulation of the African character in American literature. I’ve once again run out of words which are stronger than the one’s I’ve read and will once again resort to quoting those I’m reading:
Thus is Ouattara forced, in the interview in question, to iterate and endorse, a bio-narrative of savagery, and thus to wedge his savaged body into the requisite margin between nothingness and subjecthood where he transfigures into the object of his possessor’s desire, into an inter Polaroid picture. (14)
He follows that statement further down the page with a portrait of the so called native, in it’s relationship to western thinking and it’s power of ‘authority’:
The faceless native, displaced from individuality and coalesced into a tribe, a pack, demands and justifies representation because she is a lack. In the event authority is appropriated and transferred from her... Even more specifically, the imposition of anonymity on the native deletes her claims to subjectivity and works to displace her from normativeness. Not only does anonymity conveniently underline her Otherness, her strangeness, her subalternity, anonymity equally magnifies the invented exoticism of her material culture, which in turn becomes a sign of her constructed exoticness. (14)
Oguibe continues this discussion and it’s connection to the contemporary African artist with the use of term borrowed from philosopher Fanon. He goes on to describe the phenomenon of the ‘palatable Negro’. An Other who is easily consumed and removed of all authority, one who personifies anonymity and is available to be penetrated by the West. If that phrase seemed slightly pornographic, it was intentionally so. Oguibe makes the connection between the Other and pornography quite well in this simple excerpt of text:
Pornography as a strategy rests on the localization of desire and the intensification of pleasure through the effacement of the subject, the detachment of the locality of desire from the web of subjective associations and reality that impinge on the possessor’s sense of social responsibility. In other words, its principal device is the objectivization of the source of pleasure. (15)
Oguibe finishes this essay with a brief description of how these practices affect the African artist both in their artistic integrity but also in simple economic terms. These concepts remove complexity from African art in the hopes that it can be consumed by the general western public as simplified, pornographic, just for pleasure. When artwork is associated with this kind of language it is priced differently, viewed differently and respected less. Upon re-reading this essay I am know longer so frustrated with the language used by Oguibe to make his point. In fact I am upset that I was so quick to brush off the author’s anger as self-indulgent and a product of his nonacceptance of one’s own actions. I initially believed he was playing the role of the helpless victim, one who does not acknowledge their own part in the game, but simply blames the side for their downfall. How very wrong I was, Oguibe’s anger is not a product of blame, it is a frustration with an entire system which needs to be changed. One where even the act of trying to change it fosters it’s existence. You have my attention Oguibe, I’ll keep listening.
With respect to Olu Oguibe’s readings I have also included in this post a link to a youtube video entitled Dance with Manbungo, The African Warrior,every girls fantasy. Tease. While I would not say that this particular video rests in the world of either literature or art, it does however make an excellent example for many of the ideologies written about above. I am in by no means placing judgement upon this man. I simply want to view his actions through this specific lens. Are his actions products of a society where he is Othered? By playing the lowest common denominator in African stereotypes (the savage) is he catering to a white audiences desire to ingest such simplified perceptions of Africans? I’ve no answer to these questions yet and I do not know enough about this man to determine whether or not his performance is satirical. It is clearly meant to be humorous, but is this video a product of the same game Oguibe describes being played between McEvilley and Ouattara, a need to Other oneself in order to gain acceptance (willingly or not)?
