Conference

paper for Conversas Volta das Margens: 7 ciclo de conferncias internacionais, Oficinas do Convento, Montemor-o-Novo, 2006 Exploring the Marginal Body In this paper, I hope to examine one of the most famous and over-determined icons of embodied marginality. My aim is not only to query whether marginality can be represented, but also to interrogate the efficacy of the notion of marginality itself in the visual field. The plight of Saartjie Bartmann has generated a veritable theoretical industry1 in the intersecting fields of gender and postcolonial studies, and has fed not only academics but also contemporary poets, playwrights and artists with a powerful iconography. The narrative has been deployed to explore the construction of race; the distribution of gendered roles within the visual field, particularly in the context of colonialism; the objectivity of science; and the relationship of humanity to other forms of creatureliness. It also, importantly, poses questions about the relative values of freedom and coercion and the relationship between slavery and racism in emergent capitalist societies. Furthermore, having suffered first the indignity of public exhibition, and then the posthumous fame of a publicised dissection, Saartjie Bartmanns body, both alive and dead, has for many feminists come to represent both a sacrifice and a monument, an emblem of the violence suffered by women of colour. Famously known as the Hottentot Venus, her story has been variously told, although surprisingly little is known about her person, and efforts to gain access to her as a subject have inevitably lead to speculation and reading between the lines. In all 19th century accounts, we are given to see Saartjie Bartmann through the eyes of the various white men describing her. Such objectification is equally evident in the choice of her sobriquet. The denomination Hottentot Venus which was also used for at least one other human exhibit in the early nineteenth century2 served not only to depersonalise Saartjie Bartman, but also linked her to an art historical canon, identifying her with a series of aesthetic

Zine Magubane, Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical

Odyssey of the Hottentot Venus, in Gender and Society, 15/6 (December 2001), ap. 817.
2

A naked Hottentot woman also called the Hottentot Venus was displayed in 1829 at a ball given by the

Duchess Du Barry in Paris.

representations from the Venus of Willendorf to that of Urbino and abstractions that underlined her gender and sexuality on the one hand, and her race on the other. Of khoi ethnicity, she was born in the Cape Colony of South Africa in around 1788. Her true name remains unknown to us, so that any form of nomination already performs an appropriation and reification. She was renamed Saartjie Barmann when the region came under Dutch colonial rule, and Sarah Bartman was later the anglicised version of her name. After marrying and then losing a child, it is thought that she became a domestic worker for a Boer farmer. In around 1810, she seems to have entered into a contractual arrangement with his brother, Hendrik Cezar, and the Alexander Dunlop, the English surgeon of an African ship. If were to believe the authenticity of this contract, in addition to performing domestic duties, she agreed to be exhibited in England and Ireland and be to remunerated a proportion of the profits from her exhibition, and repatriated five years later. Issues of her complicity in her own fate, and the ideological subjection and subjectification that such complicity implies, must, for lack of time, remain outside the remit of the present paper. Her interest as an exhibit resided in her apparently anomalous and at least to European eyes extraordinary physiognomy: her steatopygia (a high degree of fat accumulation around the buttocks, to which Khoi women are genetically predisposed) and the elongation of her labia also identified specifically with the physiognomy of khoi women, and thus named the Hottentot apron. Such exhibits of human oddities were popular forms of amusement in Edwardian and then Victorian England, but some were equally integrated into the more scientific programmes that underpinned the colonial projects an early form of ethnographic display that clearly separates them from us and interrogates the idea of a line of civilisational ascent between the dark continent and enlightened Europe. Because of her very singular appearance that would make a fortune for anyone who shewed [sic] her3 she was exhibited in Piccadilly Circus, where she was ordered by a so- called keeper to stand or sit or walk. (As an interesting point of contextualisation, the Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826, and in 1828, the London Zoo opened its gates in the grand manner befitting an imperial power.) Contemporary cartoons show Saartjie Bartman as an object of scrutiny, invariably naked, though with an ostensibly tribal adornment hiding her genitals, framing her as an object of both curiosity and ridicule, standing in profile in such a way as to expose her prominent backside, which clearly became
3

Cited by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in

French, (Duke University Press, 1999), p. 18.

a matter of obsessive public interest. In an article that has become canonical in the copious literature on Saartjie Bartmann, Sander Gilman identifies the intense fascination with the backside in the nineteenth century as a displacement for a fascination with the genitalia: Female sexuality is linked to the image of the buttocks, Gilman observes, and the quintessential buttocks are those of the hottentot. We are also told, however, that the staging of alterity-as-spectacle horrified some abolitionists, who brought Bartmanns owner to court, whereupon her contract was produced for the defence. She testified in Dutch, stating that she had come to London of her own free will and that she hadnt been sexually abused. Her exhibition continued and the following year she was baptised in the Christian faith in Manchester. We know that at some point prior to 1814, she landed up in Paris, and that in 1815, a panel of zoologists and physiologists examined her for three days in the Jardin du Roi, under the aegis of the great naturalist and zoologist, Georges Cuvier, who published the findings in 1824 in the context of The Natural History of Mammals. His descriptions of her abound not only in primitivist tropes, but also in associations of black femaleness with animality. Aged only twenty five or twenty six, Saartjie Baartman died in Paris in captivity, after more than five years of being exhibited. Depending on the account, the cause of her death was smallpox, pleurisy or alcohol poisoning.4 An autopsy was performed on her, first written up by Henri de Blainville in 1816, and then, in a more famous version, by Cuvier in 1817. The aims of this dissection were twofold: to compare a specimen of the lowest of the human species with highest ape (orang utan) as part of his broader investigation of the theory of a Great Chain of Being, and to examine her curious organ of generation. If Sander Gilman is correct in his observation that when her European contemporaries saw the female black, they saw her in terms of her buttocks and saw represented by the buttocks all the anomalies of her genitalia,5 then the encounter in Paris between the cadaver from Africa and the great man of European science literalised and hyperbolised that connection: in addition to her brain, Saartjie Baartmans vagina was also preserved in a jar at the Muse

See Anne Fausto-Sterling, Gender, Race, and Nation: The Comparative Anatomy of Hottentot Women in

Europe, 1815-1917, in Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, Deviant Bodies, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 20, 29. [Cuvier, Lindfors, Gray]
5

Sander L. Gilman, Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-

Century Art, Medicine, and Literature, (1985), in Race, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1985, p. 238.

de lHomme in Paris. The remains of Saartjie Baartman were finally returned to Cape Town in 2002, 186 years after her death. Gilmans argument, supported by an excellent array of visual material linking the image of the Hottentot Venus to that of the prostitute, leads him to a conclusion that, after Fanon, and especially after Said, we might consider to be incontrovertible, but that nonetheless remains relevant: it is an inherent fear of the Other that lies behind the synthesis of these images, that of the Hottentot Venus and of the European prostitute (p. 256). The white mans burden, he concludes, thus becomes his sexuality and its control, and it is this which is transferred into the need to control the sexuality of the Other, the Other as sexualized female. (256). Gilman invites us, then, to support the plausible idea that sexual and racial identity in the field of vision are interlinked and mutually formed through a process of negative differentiation. Just as whiteness needs blackness to constitute itself, so one might say that the Hottentot Venus operates as the repressed unconscious of European rationalism its underbelly, its dark Other and as the projection of gender and racial anxiety. So far, so predictable. Of course such thoughts were not even subliminally present in the contemporary representations of the Hottentot Venus: the various cartoons or anatomical drawings, or indeed the vaudeville play written in 1814 by Thaulon, Dartois and Basier (La Vnus hottentote, ou haine aux Franaises). But recent representations of her have attempted to reinstate her subjecthood: Rachel Holmes African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus; Barbara Chase-Ribouds Hottentot Venus: A Novel; the play Venus by African American feminist Suzan Lori-Parks, Elizabeth Alexanders collection of poems exploring African-American culture, The Venus Hottentot (1990), or the poem Hottentot Venus by South African Stephen Grey, though the extent to which at least some of these writings surreptitiously and unwittingly fall prey to earlier stereotypes remains generally (though not universally) unexamined. In the politicisation of art that took place in the late 1980s and 1990s, artists too were drawn to the Hottentot Venus as an icon in the contested field of identity politics. An evocation of her by African American artist Lyle Ashton Harris was included in his series The Good Life of 1994, and then shown at the group-exhibition Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire at the ICA in London in 1995. Harriss photographs are lushly-coloured and alluring in their camp posiness, suggesting, like many other works made at around the same time, that gender identity is performative rather than inherent, and ironically examining predominant kinship relationships from the perspective of a gay black American man. In The Good Life, he

juxtaposed photographs from his family archive with his own large-format Polaroid photographs staging real and imagined figures of American and African-diasporic culture. The result is a mythologised anthology of an African-American heritage. Posing as the Hottentot Venus, Harriss friend Rene Valerie Cox stands in profile, hands on hips, in a stance that emphasises breasts and backside. To her naked body are attached enormous metallic breasts and shiny metallic buttocks. Through the self-conscious use of these prostheses, we are given to believe that this is the belated empowerment of Saartjie Baartman: Venus as warrior. Harriss statement, couched in obligatory jargon, ostensibly supplements such a reading: This reclaiming of the image of the Hottentot Venus is a way of exploring my own psychic identification with the image at the level of spectacle. I am playing with what it means to be an African diasporic artist producing and selling work in a culture that is by and large narcissistically mired in the debasement and objectification of blackness. And yet, I see my work less as a didactic critique and more as an interrogation of the ambivalence around the body.6 But there seems little ambivalence here. Under a mass of exuberant dreadlocks, Rene Coxs gaze addresses us directly, seductively, in a way that reinforces rather than undermines Gilmans observations on the simultaneous eroticisation and objectification of the black female body. South African artist Penny Siopis has more credibly included many allusions to Saartjie Bartman in her work, beginning with Patience on a Monument: A History Painting of 1988. In Dora and the Other Woman, also of 1988, Siopis looks at Saartjie Baartman in relation to Freuds famous case history of Dora, recognising in both an expropriated sexuality in both narratives.7 The most explicit work engaged with this iconography is Saartjie Bartmann Cast, born Cape of Good Hope, died Paris, (1994), a title that, of course, attempts to re-confer subjectivity on Bartmann. The work was made for the exhibition Black Skin, White Looks, curated by Octavio Zaya for the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995, and consists of seven framed photographic images butted up against each other. Each image includes two photographs: at the top, different shots of details of the plaster cast that was made of Saartjie Baartman and stored at the Muse de lHomme, and at the bottom, repeated shots of her baptismal certificate from Manchester and her death certificate, from the archives of

Lyle Ashton Harris, quoted in Alan Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness: Franz Fanon and Visual Representation,

(Seattle and London: Bay Press, 1996), p. 150.

7

See Penny Siopis, in Annie E. Coombes, Gender, Race, Ethnicity in Art Practice in Post-Apartheid South Africa:

Annie E. Coombes and Penny Siopis in Conversation, Feminist Review, 55 (Spring 1997), p. 121

the Muse de lHomme. Siopis is clearly aware of the problems surrounding such re- appropriation of an image whose subject is already self-expropriated, as indeed, it would appear, of the relationship between the indexicality of the photographic image and the indexical nature of a plaster cast itself. The photographs are taken in such a way as to emphasise their objecthood and thus, their own mediatory role: we see, for example, the shadows cast by the certificates. Similarly, the strong chiaroscuro highlights the made quality of the crate in which the cast is kept. When Ive used Baartmans image, Siopis explains, Ive always marked it as a mediation even in the subtlest of senses as if putting the image quotation marks. This has involved including the odd contingent effects of the contexts which framed her the packing crates, the protective cushions, etc. (Coombes, 121). More than Harris, Siopiss verbal discourse reveals a recognition of the difficulty that such a project entails, the possibility (indeed, I would say the inevitability) of each re-presentation of Saartjie Bartmann being complicit in her re-objectification. It is just such an awareness that makes Afro-American artist Rene Green problematise the image of Saartjie Bartman in her invocation of the Hottentot Venus. In her installation of 1990, Revue, a diminutive reproduction of a clinical engraving of the Hottentot Venus is surrounded by a series of manipulated photographs of Josephine Baker. (The work, incidentally, was reinstalled for the exhibition Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference, and Desire in which Lyle Ashton Harris showed his Hottentot Venus, in London in 1995.) Ostensibly, the small scale of the Hottentot Venus and the blurring of Josephine Baker undid the danger of objectification. The installation also included a toy circus with a revolving leopard, viewed by critics to symbolise the Hottentot Venus as both captive and spectacle. On the wall were texts, which included excerpts from the account of a 19th-century traveller describing the indecent, lubricious nature of the dance of the negresses somewhere in Africa. These elements in combination, comments Green, were intended to stimulate viewers into imaging in-between spaces: in-between what is said what is not said and ways of being that didnt quite fit into what seemed to be the designated categories.8 But actually, Green leaves little air in those in-between spaces. The installation spells out, in clear, didactic fashion, a conscience-salving programme relating perceptions of the black female body to a history of colonial appropriation and exoticised, masculinist viewing. From

Rene Green, in Alan Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness: Franz Fanon and Visual Representation, (Seattle and

London: Bay Press, 1996), p. 146.

her pulpit, Green undertakes a campaign of self-righteous consciousness raising that is, when shes not rapping us over the knuckles. An earlier piece, Sa Main Charmante (1988-9) was a more direct tribute to Saartjie Bartmann. The title refers to a line in Cuviers report, where he concedes that she has a grace./Her charming hands; Such a lovely creature in her way.9 The installation included a structure resembling a slatted door mat or a ladder bearing a text describing Bartmanns ordeal, interspersed with quotations from Cuviers report. The slats begin on the floor and then climb up a wall, and are flanked by a soapbox, a peep box, and a klieg light. Here, Green is at least aware of the paradoxes attendant on reproducing images of Bartmanns body, so she avoids doing so. But that is where subtlety ends. One needs no degree in semiotics to grasp that the props chosen refer to looking and lecturing, attempting to put not only Saartjie Bartmann, but also the viewer himself into the spotlight. So Green is telling us something about the way we as observers, are implicated in the masculine voyeurism and in the subjugating role of science in the colonial projects. But I am uncomfortable about this we about this West that Green projects as the bad guy, as if it were a single, coherent entity. I am equally uncomfortable about this essentialised blackness and femaleness she propels into the victims role. I am disturbed, in other words, about Greens conflation pamphleteering conflation of identity with victimhood, and the facile way in which she brings these into alignment in the visual field. Perhaps the very format she has chosen, juxtaposing image with a text that, in Roland Barthes marvelous formulation quickens the image with one or more second-order signifieds,10 has become depleted as an exhibiting strategy. (show examples: images of Barbara Kruger, Carrie-Mae Weems, a little more elliptically Lorna Simpson. One might compare this to the more poetic, humorous, evasive and ultimately biting conflation of word and object in the no- less-politically-motivated work of Jimmie Durham to see just how it falls short.) All these works, I am arguing, fall prey to unexamined assumptions, and, however-well intentioned, land up reinforcing the tropes and stereotypes they aim to dispel. Indeed, many of the academic articles on Bartmann beginning with Gilmans do the same thing. To my knowledge, only one text Zine Magubanes brilliant Which Bodies Matter? radically
9

Quoted by Anca Vlasopolos, Venus Live! Sarah Barmann, the Hottentot Venus Re-membered, Mosaic, 33

(2000), page???)
10

Roland Barthes, The Photographic Message, in Image-Music-Text, details, p. 25.

opposes this tendency, exposing the blind spot of many other approaches to the Hottentot Venus.11 Most studies that discuss Bartmann (or Gilmans analysis of her), Magubane observes, may be scrupulous in their use of words like invented, constructed, and ideological but in their practice, through an unquestioned gloss on blackness, they valorize the very ground of biological essentialism they purport to deconstruct.12 Gilman, she says, means to argue that perceptions of difference are socially constructed, but he in fact focuses on inherent, unique and observable physiognomic differences differences, in other words, available as empirical, perceptual evidence. She accuses most scholars who have made the Hottentot Venus their business for not historicising the very idea of blackness (p. 822). Importantly, Magubane recognises that what matters here is not biology, but social relations: she accuses the unthinking reproduction of commonsense understandings of Blackness as it exists in the contemporary United States (822) that produces anachronistic and historically untenable assumptions about the homogeneity of black identity: assumptions that make it possible for Lyle Ashton Harris and Rene Green to identify with Saartjie Bartmann. Indeed, Magubane produces archival evidence that 19th-century travellers made much of the fact that the khoi people were not thought of as black or brown, but as yellow, thus arguing that the khoi did not represent blackness or Africanness as Gilman, and many others following him, have suggested. This argument has far-reaching consequences that, for lack of time, I cannot elaborate here. But Magubane continues to demolish every myth of the Hottentot Venus industry. Her work alerts us against the dangers of identification without historicisation, and through it we are invited to acknowledge the erroneousness of not recognising the ideological supports that shape the very idea of marginality. With this in mind, I am prompted to ask whether art that has an agenda of making visible of representing the marginal and the disenfranchised, can ever be based on anything but visible markers that presume that what one sees is who one is, a presumption that reflects a mimetic relationship between representation and identity.13 Perhaps there are limits to how much a fixed documental image, with or without text, can deal with something as

11

Jean Youngs study of Suzan Lori-Parks play Venus accuses its author of re-objectifying and re-commodifying

Saartjie Bartmann. See Jean Young, The re-objectification and re-commodification of Saarthie Baartman in Suzan Lori-Parkss Venus, African American Review, 31, (1997), pp. 699-708.
12 13

Magubane, Which Bodies Matter?, p. 817. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 7.

relational and unstable as identity and positionality. I am thinking, as examples, of works that involve perhaps a degree of exchange a triangular exchange between the artist, his or her object, and the viewer, in such a way as to allow us to tip-toe around all the booby- traps set by the question of representability. In such an exchange, an arena is defined an arena of sociability and communality, governed, as Nicolas Bourriaud so usefully puts it, by relational aesthetics rather than by the aesthetics of a private symbolic space. I am thinking for example of Kutlug Ataman training his video camera at four Women who Wear Wigs (1999): a wanted terrorist, a Muslim student, a Turkish journalist, and a transsexual prostitute and allowing us briefly to enter their lives. Or of Gillian Wearing who stopped people on the street and asked them to write their thoughts on a piece of paper and hold them up for a posed photograph. Im desparate, says the sign held up by a respectable looking young man in a suit and tie. Or of Phil Collins, included on this years Turner Prize shortlist. In one work, girls and boys in Baghdad pose for a Warhol-like filmed screen-test. In another, people are invited to strip and talk to Collins in a suite of an expensive hotel in San Sebastian. They Shoot Horses (2004) is an unedited, real-time projection of Palestinian teenagers in relaxed western gear jeans and t-shirts and trainers like any American teenager in an eight-hour dance-marathon organised by Collins. Collinss work dispels any easy polarisation between them and us, while eschewing the documentary stance of victim-photography. In presenting us with the other as familiar, as joined to us in human commonality, he engages the viewer in a politics more forceful than any direct political programme can do. Perhaps, if we want to really think about marginality, it is time for us all to put Saartjie Bartmann to rest.