Humanizing an Anti Human Agenda[1]
Sugar, Pineapples - A Subtlety & This Is Paradise
Kara Walker’s
A Subtlety was widely seen and critiqued for the two months it was on view at
the historic Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. Now cited for demolition, this
opportunity was consciously utilized to tell the story of the sugar commodity,
and the bitter exploitation that made its wide distribution and consumption
possible. My visit began with a trusted friend, speaking about our personal
memories of the Domino sugar factory. We spoke of the iconic nature of the
sign, anyone who has ever passed through the FDR drive has spotted it, billions
of people by now. As someone who is not from New York, but moved herself here,
I remember my frequent trips to NYC as a child and seeing that worn yellow
sign. I didn’t know the history of sugar then like I do now, or have the
critical understanding to place it in a historical context, but I knew the
image of sugar, and ask anyone who knows me well, I’ve always loved the taste.
By the end of our experience in the factory, we were heavy, quiet, and tired.
We needed to digest exactly what we were seeing and how it was being presented,
but there were so many intertwined layers. I knew immediately upon exiting the
premises that A Subtlety reminded me of another exhibit I had seen in 2013 at
el Museo del Barrio’s Bienal. The artist, Hector Arce Espasas, used the
pineapple commodity to tell a similar narrative about colonization and erasure,
exploitation and murder, the connection between enslaved black bodies and other
trans-Atlantic commodities, and the rhetorical contradictions power uses to
mask the reality of an oppressed life. I’d like to take some time to outline my
experience in both shows, and discuss why these artists know it is beyond
important, and in fact necessary, to make work about colonization’s effect on modern
life in the midst of severely confused and bleached ‘post racial’ and ‘post
sexist’ dominant cultural attitudes.
Upon entering the premises of A
Subtlety, a wooden wall encased the old factory, creating a visual barrier, but
even more noticeably, a sound barrier that would carry with me throughout the
entire show. We talked about the slightly upturned smile on the sugar babies
faces. It reminded us that children don’t want - or accept - pity for their
situation. They appear resilient, but they are holding baskets, the indicator
that they have been stripped of their childhood entirely and have already been
inundated as laborers. Their bodies produced, not even viewed as birthed, to be
groomed for their labor power and submission. “An import of 400,000 slaves
produced a population of 4 million at the time of the American civil War.”[2]
We can see here how reproductive labor becomes central to the success of the
southern US colonies, which I believe Walker was touching on by including
children and their labor so explicitly in the exhibit. It’s a slavery narrative that has clearly
been stricken from the record - what of black motherhood then?
Especially striking were the sugar
babies whose broken pieces lay dismembered in a pool of molasses. As we stood in
Brooklyn, which had had shootings over that very weekend, we remarked that this
image was as much an image of history as it was an image of 2014. As I write
this, Twitter is on fire with tweets from Ferguson, Missouri where protests
have erupted, demanding justice for Mike Brown, a young black man who has been
murdered by the Ferguson police with eyewitnesses sharing the account live.[3]
Weeks ago the story of Eric Garner shook New York after he was choked to death
by the NYPD.[4]
The stories of Shantel Davis, Renisha McBride, Kimani Gray, Ramarley Graham,
Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Oscar Grant, and a horrendous list
of so many others crossed my mind at that moment. These cases are the ones that
were able to penetrate the media, and it troubled me that so many people’s
lives have been snuffed out, and no one cried out. So often do I listen to the
way black people who are close to my heart speak about their lives in terms of
having not been one of these cases,
including my brother who accompanied me through this experience. We have had
countless conversations about this topic, and the dismembered sugar subtleties[5]
were the embodiment of those dialogues.
Impossible to ignore at any point upon
entering the premises, the Sphinx woman commanded the entire room with her
awesomeness - how I would imagine it would feel to stand before a Sphinx in
Egypt, but it was clear that her form and image was far more complex than to be
defined as simply a Sphinx replica. This particular Sphinx has lived all the generations
of lives of her history - a modern woman who carries Mammy and Minstrel and so
many other weights on her body and her face right into this present moment to
tower over all of us. Walker describes her: “It’s not a kind of Egyptophile
relic, this is someone from the New World.”[6]
The enormous body and posture of the Sphinx took us to ancient Egypt roughly
4,000 years ago.[7]
The archetypal mammy face and handkerchief took us to 1889 where a tune called
“Aunt Jemima” was being sung by a blackface performer who was wearing an apron
and bandana.[8]
The sculpted sugar curvatures recalled the life of Saartjie Baartman & the
Hottentot Venus[9],
a body always on display, complete with racist, ignorant white participants.[10]
And she was filming you the whole time![11]
Damn, you wish you were on Kara Walker’s level.
She sits inside of the Domino sugar
factory - an industrial giant whose roots are in excess, commodification, and
its operational system: capitalism. Arturo Escobar writes that, “Capitalism…is
of the essence for both the conception of modernity and its darker side,
coloniality.”[12] The industrial booms that are praised in the
dominant historical narratives are impossible without the exploitation of black
bodies - and we see a keen focus here on black women, specifically and
unapologetically.
The floor of the old Domino Sugar
Factory was soaked in years of molasses compounded - The air smelled sweet, but
it was suffocating in the same breath. The stark contrast between the dark
walls of the building, which have been stained with layers of sugar from the
refining process, and the bright whiteness of the Sphinx, made striking visual
and metaphorical connections. Brown sugar is bleached and refined to turn pure
white for aesthetic and cultural reasons, colloquially known as ‘plantation
white sugar’.[13]
There is, and never has been, a utilitarian purpose. Interrogating the
refinement of sugar - the whitewashing of sugar - is key to understanding its
symbolism as a colonial commodity that simultaneously symbolized wealth status
among whites. Howard Zinn writes that
“it is noted that, even before 1600, when the slave trade had just begun… the
color black was distasteful… Elizabethan poetry often used the color white in
connection with beauty.”[14]
He is discussing the naturalizing of race through the social construction of
racism and the capitalistic incentive for enslavement, and it manifests in the
sugar refinement process we commonly know today. Frantz Fanon put this even
more succinctly when he said “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must
clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”[15]
The sensory nature of this experience
relayed the contradiction of sugar and its social history. Kara Walker sees her
work not as ‘effectively dealing with history’ but being ‘subsumed by it’[16]
and I’m inclined to agree because the most successful part of the show, which
we know now was intentional, was the social experiment it became as people
experienced and interacted with the work. The various backlashes and pings of
social media discussions raged about the way the work was perceived, and under
whose narrative the story of the Marvelous Sugar Baby was told. Walker had
access to a space that was an intersection for multiple contradictions - historical
and contemporary. We are often told in mainstream settings, be they academia,
media, or otherwise, that these contradictions aren’t worth discussing because
revisionism and erasure makes it easier to justify anything the powerful deems
useless of preservation.
“The ‘discovery’ of America and the
genocide of Indians and African slaves are the very foundation of ‘modernity,’
more so than the French or Industrial Revolutions.”[17]
These events are the bedrock foundation of our modern culture.
Kara Walker is not the only artist to
literally mold their art through the layered and intersecting contradictions of
the 'colonial wound'. I’m borrowing this phrase from the brilliant author Walter
Mignolo, who writes in the preface of The
Idea of Latin America, “Perspectives from coloniality, however, emerge out
of the conditions of the ‘colonial wound,’ the feeling of inferiority imposed
on human beings who do not fit the predetermined model in Euro-American
narratives.”[18]
I saw Hector Arce Espasas’ piece This is Paradise at the 2013 Bienal at
El Museo del Barrio and I immediately saw connections while I was viewing A Subtlety because they were using
similar materials. His piece used the pineapple, another transatlantic
commodity whose presence in the lives of Europeans and Americans as a fruit of
‘tropical paradise’ was not possible without the exploitation and cold blooded
murder of black people. This is Paradise along with the accompanying print,
command the room. The pyramid arrangement of mercantile crates with shiny
silver pineapple ewers signify colonization and the triangular trade (and the
eventual triangular hierarchy of capitalism). My other immediate reaction was
to associate the ewers with struggling bodies, reminding me of reading on
slave-ship mutiny, which most often went unrecorded by the white men on the
ship, especially when committed by women.[19]
I couldn’t help but think of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit as somehow being
related to this. The ewers really evoke a 'strange fruit' and what would have
been flowing from the vessels, had they been filled, would be blood, like
Holiday's lyrics 'blood on the leaves.'[20]
The small parrot at the top of the triangle also brought the
viewer abruptly to the image of the ship - I believe Espasas wanted to bring us
right there - perhaps to insert what history has been lost from those voyages.
To the left is the print of King Charles
II receiving a pineapple from his gardener - believed to represent the first
one grown in a European hothouse[21].
The social history of the pineapple serves as a great symbol for
colonization’s evil mask. It was received in England as an 'exotic' commodity,
so rare that the King of England posed with the fruit as a measure of royal
privilege and status. It was considered both sweet and visually compelling, and
over time the pineapple made its way to the dinner table arrangements of high
class Europeans.
Arce-Espasas is using the pineapple as
a profound motif for the transportation of commodities and
emigration-enslavement of exotic bodies. In the same ways that Europeans
received the pineapple as this 'otherly' and 'exotic' fruit, the justification
for the exploitation and export of black bodies also relies on a naturalization
of a difference i.e. exoticisation. The pineapple's context in Europe masks
colonization by celebrating it as a sign of hospitality. Ironic, of course,
because it's presence in Europe originates in violence, not hospitality. But
all of that is erased from the European narrative because this is the very
moment in history where primitive accumulation of capital begins on these
exploitative terms.[22]
Whitewashed sugar was mass produced in
places like the Domino Sugar Factory and sold by mid century advertisers who
whitewashed its history for consumption by white people - this was a project to
mask the utter exploitation, violence, and oppression that it takes to mass
produce sugar along with many other commodities. It also masked the bodies of black people
that such violence was enacted upon. This was carried out through the
production of advertisements such as this Domino sugar ad, which pictures white faces at a
kitchen table with a bowl of fruit - but not just any fruit - notice the
pineapple centerpiece is present. So here we have the sugar and the pineapple
in the same room in this image. This advertisement generates correlations
between the erasure of history and its revision to appease the desires of white
people, providing a sweetness that was not previously available. Hector Arce
Espasas and Kara Walker have been using these two sweet substances of the
tropics to speak of our modern understanding i.e. lack of understanding of the
wake and perpetration of colonization. At the time where mass
production and marketing came together to sell the idea behind sugar as a
commodity, the pineapple was, and still is, widely recognized as a symbol of
hospitality. Quietness - and then connections - more specifically - contradictions.
Both of these
pieces stayed with me in my consciousness. They mapped an alternative landscape
to understanding colonization - to understanding modernity. Kara Walker and
Hector Arce-Espasas are rejecting post racial attitudes of tolerance and taking
it to the root. What are the present day struggles of peoples, workers and
their families, communities, who cultivate sugar and pineapple under global
finance capitalism today? What are the present day struggles of black people to
be, to simply live freely? What are the unique struggles of black women,
whether they be cis, queer, or trans* women? They continue to exist in a world
that has always used and hated them at the same time. Arce-Espasas and Walker are
pointing out how the cultural attitudes towards white supremacy, misogyny, and
capitalism are directly rooted in colonization - and at every turn we are
encouraged to forget, move on, stay silent. These artists refuse that. Mass
convergences of people are refusing it. We are armed and empowered with the
knowledge of history - a history that has been purposefully untold. It is our collective responsibility to uncover the contradictions of our present life.
[1] “The irrationality of
capital’s rational accumulation, its constant humanization of an anti-human
agenda was, in the onslaught of its expansion, understood to require profound
structural shifts in the operation of mediation in order to adequately distort the
field of intelligibility and operationalize it in accord with its deeper though
unrepresentable logic.” - Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production p. 298
[2] Martin Klein, Towards a Theory of Slavery
[3]
http://mashable.com/2014/08/15/live-tweet-michael-brown-killing-ferguson/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner
[5] “Once a luxury — subtleties were sugar
sculptures made for the rich as edible table-decorations — sugar became more
widely available due in large part to slave labor.” Roberta Smith, NY
Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/arts/design/a-subtlety-or-the-marvelous-sugar-baby-at-the-domino-plant.html?_r=0
[6] Kara Walker: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar
Baby" | ART21 "Exclusive" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRkP5rcXtys
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunt_Jemima
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saartjie_Baartman
[10] Kara Walker's Sugar Sphinx Spawns Offensive Instagram Photos, Cait
Munro http://news.artnet.com/art-world/kara-walkers-sugar-sphinx-spawns-offensive-instagram-photos-29989
[11]
Kara Walker
Secretly Filmed You Taking Selfies in Front of Her Sphinx by Rachel Corbett http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/kara-walker-filmed-you-in-front-of-her-sphinx.html
[12] The Idea of
Latin America, Walter Mignolo
[13] Plantation White Sugar http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/463432/plantation-white-sugar
[14] A People’s History of the United States, Howard
Zinn
[15] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
[16] Kara Walker: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar
Baby" | ART21 "Exclusive" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRkP5rcXtys
[17] The Idea of Latin America, Walter Mignolo
[18] The Idea of Latin America, Walter Mignolo
[19] "Mama's
Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”
Hortense Spillers
[20] Strange Fruit,
Billie Holiday https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs
[21] King Charles receiving the
first Pineapple cultivated in England
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3231524&partId=1
[22] Primitive
Accumulation of Capital
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Primitive+Accumulation+of+Capital
