Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft by Julia Skelly

Author:Julia Skelly [Skelly, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Design, Textile & Costume
ISBN: 9781472569431
Google: dq4yDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2017-05-04T20:39:57+00:00

The black female body in context

In order to understand the critical, radical work that Thomas in particular is doing with her paintings and sculptures, it is important to further illuminate the history of the black female subject in visual and material culture. Art historian Charmaine Nelson has written of how nineteenth-century sculpture, marble sculpture specifically, was part of racializing discourses that were inextricably linked with discourses related to artistic taste, slavery, and gender. According to Nelson, the very whiteness of neoclassical marble sculpture highlights the privileging of whiteness as a race. As Nelson observes, “The whiteness of the marble medium was not of arbitrary significance but functioned to mediate the representation of the racialized body in ways that preserved a moral imperative essential to the ideals of nineteenth-century neoclassicism.”87 She goes on to state that “morality, then, was the measure of ‘good’ art, which was produced through the disavowal of the biological body, which was also the sexual and racial body. Marble was not incidental but critical to the process of representation, since it facilitated the fetishization of the body, representing it in a moral guise that could be visually understood as art.”88 Ultimately, she concludes that “what the white marble of nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture really suppressed was the possibility of the representation of the black body, which registered racial-color difference at the level of the skin.”89

As Cheng reminds us, “Especially when it comes to representations of women and racial minorities, the visual is almost always negatively inflected and usually seen as a tool of commoditization and objectification.”90 Implicit in this statement, of course, is the commoditization and objectification of the black slave body. Nelson discusses the representation of the slave body in neoclassical sculpture in The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), and Marcus Wood has suggested that engravings that represent black female slaves being punished in eighteenth-century abolitionist texts are often pornographic in objectifying the suffering black female subject.91 Many scholars have noted the revulsion and attraction that white spectators felt looking at black bodies at various points in history, whether female slaves or the Hottentot Venus.92 During the period that slavery was still commonplace in both Europe and the United States, this revulsion/attraction manifested in black individuals being perceived as subhuman, which resulted in rampant sexual abuse toward black female slaves by white male slave owners. As Nelson suggests, this endemic sexual violence was inextricably tied to the constant representation of black women, in “high” and “low” art, “as sexually excessive, immoral and licentious.”93 Later, when slavery had been abolished, the revulsion went underground—though certainly did not disappear as ongoing racism and hate crimes, from lynchings to police shootings, attest—and the attraction became more acceptable. For instance, in the 1920s in Paris, as Petrine Archer-Straw has discussed, “Negrophilia,” the desire not only for black bodies but also for black culture, was a major part of the avant-garde scene.94 Negrophilia, of course, influenced the work of canonical male modernists such as Picasso, whose interest in African masks is evident in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

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