Debat, Performance, Offentligt rum, SkulpturIDA HØJGAARDAugust 02, 2020Jeannette Ehlers, La Vaughn Belle, Ida Højgaard, Ida Højgaard Thjømøe, I DO ART Agency, English, Den Kgl. Afstøbningssamling, I Am Queen Mary, Sara Ahmed, Frantz Fanon, Dekolonisering1 Comment

THE SUBVERSIVE POTENTIAL OF VISUAL VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY ART

It all started with a question: What price do we pay for civilisation? For Walter Scheidel, a professor of history and classics at Stanford University, Western civilisation has come at the cost of glaring economic inequality. The sole exception, in his account, is widespread violence – wars, pandemic, civil unrest; only violent shocks like these have substantially reduced inequality over the millennia.

Writing this in the middle of the corona pandemic and uprising against racism, just weeks since the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, UK, was thrown in the river, and only days since the statue of Hans Egede in Nuuk, Greenland, was covered in red paint and tagged with the text ‘decolonize’, all pointing to demands for a redistribution of power and responsibility, it has raised the following question: What potential does visual violence possess as a subversive instance regarding still persistent colonial mechanisms?

With my background in art history and postcolonial studies, I have looked intuitively to the Danish contemporary art scene and found the material for exploring my question here. The first two artworks I want to focus on are from an earlier study I conducted back in 2017, during the centennial of Denmark’s sale of the Caribbean islands of St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix to the USA after more than 200 years under Danish colonial rule: Whip It Good by Jeannette Ehlers, and Cuts and Burns by La Vaugh Belle.

Now, in 2020, I must include in this article a closing perspective to the 7-meter tall sculpture I am Queen Mary (2018), which is placed outside the West Indian Warehouse in Denmark and made as a collaborative work by Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle in the wake of the focus on Danish Colonial History in 2017. The three artworks share common themes: colonialism, violence and the female body.

Throughout my analysis, I will point out how in all three artworks either the body or traces of a body is used to give a voice to a subjugated subject. This subject can counter a dominant colonial narrative by producing the untold and invisible stories which, by pointing to ambiguity, challenge the notion of history as objective and complete. It is, however, first through the violent and rebellious actions, that the artworks succeed to transform the oppressed subject into something more than an artefact with two legs – to a person that provides resistance. I, therefore, argue that:

The visual violence is the transformative element that grants Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle’s artworks with subversive potential. By visualising violence the artworks produce counter-narratives – that is, alternative stories that can challenge a modern colonial discourse that still affects Denmark as well as the rest of the world.

Jeannette Ehlers, c-print from recordings of the performance Whip It Good in the Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen, 2014. Photo: Casper Maare.

Artwork I, Jeannette Ehlers – Whip it Good

In Whip It Good, Ehlers reproduces one of the most violent forms of punishment in slavery throughout history: the act of whipping. It’s a simple, yet strong revolt against the past. The first time I saw the Danish/Caribbean artist using the whip was through her 5-minute video work of the performance, at her solo show SAY IT LOUD! in Nikolaj Kunsthal (2014).

In what follows, I will consider these different elements in Ehlers artwork:

The white canvas
The black female body
The act of whipping

The white canvas is the centre of the artwork, which I understand as an image of what Sara Ahmed has stated about whiteness – that it is: “a point in which the world unfolds” (Ahmed, 2007:154).

She argues that the world is still very much organised through the colonial binary oppositions (white/non-white, west/other, cultural/primitive), where it is one's orientation to whiteness that determines one's being-in-the-world. Hence, when I talk about whiteness, it is to be understood as more than skin-colour – it’s a structure, given that it determines what bodies can and can’t do, and how some bodies are different, more exposed, objectified, and less ‘home’ in the world – to use a word from Frantz Fanon.

During the performance at the Royal Cast Collection, the white canvas was surrounded by white antique statues, which brings forth classical images of ideal beauty. The central location of the white canvas, in a room dominated by the white canon of art history, makes the ‘It’ being whipped in Whip It Good an image of the Western Subject. It draws on all identity signifiers associated with the geographical area 'West': such as 'white people’, ‘Christianity', 'civilized', 'rationalism' and 'modernity'. According to postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Spivak, this Western identity has granted the Western Subject its sovereignty – and established its rule of world history.

Video still from Jeanette Ehlers' Whip it good in the Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen, 2014. Camera: Markus von Platen. — Video still from Jeanette Ehlers' Whip it good in the Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen, 2014.
Camera: Markus von Platen.

The black female body: By placing her black female body, in contrast to the white canvas, and the statues from antiquity, Ehlers non-white body certainly seem less ‘home’ in the Royal Cast Collection.

It is especially her body paint, known from voodoo traditions in East African rituals, where the living world is connected to the spiritual, that brings her into contact with the forgotten stories and non-western world views – a knowledge that is often referred to as 'naive' and 'primitive' within the secular framework of the West (see Danbolt 2016:7).

In this sense Whip It Good reproduces the colonial discourse's rigid binary opposition, as the white canvas, which can be read as a representation of the Western Subject, is confronted with a black woman who represents the group of people who identifies with her.

I do not see her identity as representing a homogenous group. The identification with her is negotiated based on who sees the work, and how this viewer identifies with the intimate relationships between colonist/colonized and gender/race. It is a showdown against slavery, but also against masculine violence and domination.

The act of whipping: As the female body confronts the white canvas, Ehlers characterizes both the colonial ruler, who was the owner of the whip, and the white man's domination in the previously mentioned art historical canon, as the marks of the whip brings out Jackson Pollock's action painting or Lucio Fontana's chopped canvases. By putting her body to display then, she brings back Denmark’s often-invisible colonial history and the racializing and male dominating processes which still happen in Denmark.

It is especially through her hybrid identity – Danish-Caribbean – that she demonstrates “She is here, because we were there”, as she points out herself in her performance piece INTO THE DARK (2017). Though, I argue, it is first when she takes the whip and slams and whips the white canvas, that she, and the group she represents, becomes more than the subjugates subject. She reclaims their subjectivity, by the violent act, and by this turn the colonial subject-object positions around.

To recap: Jeannette Ehlers puts the colonial binary opposition to display, but challenges it and reclaims subjectivity by exercising violence against the white canvas of modernity. By taking the whip, the group Ehlers represents becomes a resistance group. The whipping then is the transformative element in the work. And the sound from the whip gives me an imaginary slap in the experience of the artwork, a shock, bringing the invisible stories to the present, and makes me see my own whiteness, my own femininity, and that I'm not neutral. It creates a space of exchange, where the borders of culture, the understanding of time and identity is contested. It creates a new articulation, an alternative narrative, which makes Whip It Good into a counter-discourse to the colonial discourse and our society.

If I was asked to take the whip, would I have done it? It’s a rhetorical question, I don’t intend to answer. I have wondered, however, whether it is necessary to expose the black body to point to the continuing colonial power or whether it is possible to visualize it without the dependent colonial binary opposition. I will discuss this through the following comparative analysis of La Vaughn Belles' work Cuts and Burns.

Artwork II, La Vaughn Belle – Cuts and Burns

In La Vaughn Belles' installation work, the artist from St. Croix has developed a (pattern) language that can visualize the voice of the resistance during Danish colonial rule in the Danish West Indies.

I will consider these different elements in La Vaughn Belles artwork:

The act of cutting and burning
The “invincible” body
The white paper roll

I went to see the artwork in 2017 at the art space meter in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, where La Vaughn Belle, an artist from St. Croix, held a solo exhibition called Ledgers From a Lost Kingdom. As I enter the exhibition room, I'm immediately confronted with Cuts and Burns; a long paper scroll that is approx. 1 meter wide and hangs from ceiling to floor.

La Vaughn Belle, Cuts and Burns. At meter, 2017. Photo: Rikke Luna & Matias © I DO ART Agency.

La Vaughn Belle, Cuts and Burns (detail). At meter, 2017. Photo: Rikke Luna & Matias © I DO ART Agency.

Nothing is written in ink, but the artist has carefully cut and burned holes through the paper. What strikes me first is that it is a language I do not immediately understand. Should the burned holes be read from right to left, or from left to right? Or, perhaps it should not be read as writing?

The burned holes look like wooden ornaments used in old Nordic houses, which is also supported by the work Constructed Manumission and photographs of the Danish colonial architecture from St. Croix, that was built in Frederiksted after The Fireburn; a fire started by slave rebels in 1878. Also, the title of the work, Cuts and Burns, has a sound of rebellion to it, referring to the two most widely used forms of resistance during the colonial era.

I find the work hair-raising. On the one hand, it puts an enormous fragility and beauty on display in the paper's neat pattern, which reminds me of traditional subtle women’s work like embroidery. And, on the other hand, it reminds me of the inhumane, monotone physical work that the slaves did in the plantations on St. Croix. Creating both these connotations, of women’s work, but also slavery, makes me question how the categories of gender, race and class intersect. The holes also make me think of cut and burned skin, which brings forward associations with slaves that were often branded with a stamp and self-harm, applied to escape traumatic pain.

The work, therefore, feels ambivalent in La Vaughn Belle's physical absence, as her subjectivity is still present in the carved pattern, and exposes an insurgency against a fragmented and traumatic colonial history.

La Vaughn Belle, Constructed Manumission. At meter, 2017. Photo: Rikke Luna & Matias © I DO ART Agency.

The white paper reminds me of the many constitutions, manifestations, foundations and law complexes formulated by the 'West' through the establishment of modern nations and community structures. The white paper, like the white canvas in Whip It Good, can thus be an image of the “reasoned” and “enlightened” modernist Western subject, especially with the papers anthropomorphic size. Like Whip It Good, the colonized subject in Cuts and Burns also confronts this whiteness – here with the rebellious actions of burning and piercing the white paper of modernity.

It says: I am here! I am present! And I provide resistance, even if you have silenced me and made me invisible! These actions are in many ways damaging to the paper, but in the cuts, a new pattern reveals and new letters are produced, a different story, a counter-narrative.

I read Cuts and Burns as an alternative to the comprehensive archive available at Rigsarkivet (the Danish National Archives), which contains over five million historical sources from Denmark's colonial era on the Caribbean. The archive was digitised in 2017 and has only then become available to people who do not have the opportunity to visit Rigsarkivet in Denmark.

The archive consists mainly of letters, pictures, protocols and descriptions brought back to Denmark by the Danish colonists. It, therefore, contains the colonists’ perspective on history. The archive is consequently a discourse of Denmark's colonial history, as the archive is a structured-whole of statements collected by the colonial empire Denmark.

The history of the colonised people is not recognised as being missing in the archive. Especially after hearing the Danish Minister of Culture, Mette Bock’s speech, at the opening of this digital archive three years ago: "Et uhyre fornemt sæt arkivalier som med enestående komplethed fortæller om kolonitiden på de danske Jomfruøer [An extremely distinguished set of archives which, with outstanding completeness, tells about the colonial era of the Danish Virgin Islands]." (Bock 2017, emphasis added).

By only preserving the knowledge that can be reduced to writing, the Danish archive has selected who’s history applies as the common history. Since the history of colonised people is often not found in writing but has continued in material culture and in oral traditions, the imperial project of the West persists by ignoring these other sources. Cuts and Burns can thus be seen as a counter-narrative to the digital Danish West-Indies archive, as La Vaughn Belle develops another language that can tell an alternative story and provide the colonised with a voice.

Like Whip It Good then, Cuts and Burns turns the relationship between coloniser/colonised around through her violent, rebellious actions of 'burning' and 'cutting', as she penetrates the paper roll with her subjectivity, and challenges the objective authority of the Danish National archive.

Jeannette Ehlers & La Vaughn Belle, I am Queen Mary. Photo: Rikke Luna & Matias Albæk-Falk © I DO ART Agency, 2018.

Artwork III, The Queen of them all

In the wake of the focus on colonialism in 2017, the two artists La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers joined forces to create a collaborative sculpture to memorialize Denmark’s colonial impact in the Caribbean and those who fought against it. When I attended the reveal of the sculpture I am Queen Mary in March 2018, it felt like a breakthrough. We finally got a public sculpture that could manifest the necessity of continuing to problematize Denmark’s colonial legacy, also after the 2017 centennial.

I find the sculpture I am Queen Mary as a hybrid, not only of the two artist's physical bodies (because it is) but also of their artistic practice.

Being a 3D-scanning of the two artists’ bodies, the sculpture represents the rebel queen Mary Thomas – the most popular leader of the 1878 ‘Fireburn’ uprising on St. Croix. Queen Mary in her pose on a throne is based on the iconic photograph of Huey P. Newton seated in a peacock chair with a rifle and spear in either hand. In the sculpture, Queen Mary is armed with a sugar knife in one hand and a torch in the other enabling her with the rebellious and violent actions of cutting and burning already dealt with above.

What I find most significant about I am Queen Mary is her location. Placed in front of the West Indian Warehouse, that for 250 years was used to store Caribbean sugar and rum brought in from the colonies and today houses the Royal Cast Collection which set the stage for Ehlers video work of Whip it Good, the queen stands out as a counter-narrative to the dominance of Eurocentrism represented in this place.

The 5-meter high bronze replica of Michelangelo's David standing next to her, only makes this even more obvious and overwhelming. There is no doubt that she is the underdog in this situation and not David, who has joined forces with the bigger, stronger adversary. And yet, with her persistent and insistent presence, with her violent and rebellious attributes, I see her as a protestor locked on to a very heavy historical loaded place.

Jeannette Ehlers & La Vaughn Belle, I am Queen Mary. Photo: Rikke Luna & Matias © I DO ART Agency, 2018.

Closing remarks
With this article, I do not in any way encourage physical violence to radically change a colonial discourse. On the contrary, I find that even the visual violence presented in the artworks by Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle have a subversive potential as they create conflicting discourses.

However, changing a hegemonic discourse is by no means easy. For instance, Cuts and Burns is in no way exhibited in Denmark as much as Whip It Good. Nor has it been displayed in the major established art institutions, such as SMK (the National Museum of Art), which arranged the re-performance of Whip It Good in May 2017. Though the SMK and other institutions like Copenhagen Municipality have supported the later work of I am Queen Mary, Jeannette Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle still have not received the funding for making the sculpture permanent (currently its material is styrofoam).

Hopefully, by being as insistent as the I am Queen Mary sculpture itself on creating awareness on this issue, they will receive the funds. One could ask if we have the will in Denmark to fund artists and artworks that questions the notion of ‘Danish’ history and identity? It may also be considered whether the artworks have made a difference in changing the colonial power structures of white supremacy. But, this does not change the fact that Whip It Good, Cuts and Burns and I am Queen Mary in visualizing and revoking violent actions have a subversive potential, as they call out that we should keep asking questions about how history is told, and about who is telling it.

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IDA HØJGAARD

Ida Højgaard is an independent curator exploring how art can encourage social engagement. She has worked with commissions of public art for the Danish Building and Property Agency since 2018 and is currently developing a public art programme for Eigersund Nærging og Havn and Magma UNESCO Global Geopark in Norway. In 2020-2021 she is the curator of the Art and Science Pavillion at Roskilde Festival.

Ida holds a master’s degree in Art History from Copenhagen University, and her primary field of research is the visual arts from 1850 to today, particularly cross-cultural perspectives on art and culture; the interrelation between globalisation, migration and culture and the theoretical and political issues relating to these topics.

Ida has contributed to idoart.dk since 2020.