Contemporary art using humor to break stereotypes
Contribution from Catherine
In 1997, six years after the end of the apartheid, a South-African artist, Wayne Barker, was invited in Nantes (France) with a group of South African musicians, artists, filmmakers and dancers to the exhibition "Fin de Siècle”. The festival was created as a platform for the exposure of South African culture in a post apartheid milieu.
The story told by the artist himself:
“But very many clichees like zulu dancers, shit actually, not contemporary South-African culture. So I was sitting in bar and it raises spontaneously. I was one of the guests, the artists. And there was this huge French black man, a bodyguard. And every night at the bar “zulu, zulu, zulu”. Plus a French artist says to me, why my work is political and I am not black? And then I thought “Fuck this, this is scheisse.” I had a girlfriend, and there were big balls of chocolate mousse for the guests and everybody. And I took off my shirt and she put the chocolate mousse on me and I went to the piano. It was completely unplanned, then I did it and when I started to play, the bodyguard came to arrest me, but it was in a cultural center. Then I said “No, I am one of the performing artists.” That’s how it started.»
“This festival was portraying South Africa as a country a few centuries behind the main stream of art and music practice. It was geared toward the ethnic representation of S.A, seeming to forget the fact that as a nation we were, and still are, dealing with a huge amount of issues from the recently dismantled apartheid system, which comes with its own baggage. (…) And there it was, my action: to be covered in French chocolate mousse while playing a piano composition I had composed, “The African Basket” and then licked clean by a French woman. I saw this as a protest against how South Africa, how Africa in fact, was being represented and has been since the conquerors landed on the shores to enforce their gods and ways of seeing onto those savages. My being a White South African, meant to them that I was part of that charade and being no longer with them, as easily cast aside as a shipwrecked European; an extra in the peepshow of contemporary African art.”
“The piece dealt with how people are stereotyped and cast into identities. The music compositions are manifestations of loss. The idea of the sweetness of chocolate, the body painting and the licking, represents how we would like to see Africa. For me it was a cathartic initiation to humiliate myself by exposing my nakedness; the coating of this cute substance on my body a fantasy of colour. And then! to have the chocolate licked off, to the point of nausea, and there! back again to that same human being, without color or prejudice.“
To see a naked guy recovered with chocolate mousse licked by a woman while it is even not in the program of the event must have been a disquieting situation for the audience. Many people must have found it very shocking; some others hopefully may have understood immediately the message of the artist, others also must have found in it some food for thought. It’s the situation which makes this performance humoristic, the idea he had suddenly to take the bowl of chocolate mousse to paint his body and the whole meaning of this action in this particular place.
What is sure is that it has provoked new thought, changed the look of the French audience about South Africa.
Sources
About Wayne barker:
http://www.the-loop.com/smarthearts/html/wayne/websitecont.html
http://ntama.uni-mainz.de/content/view/194/29/1/11/
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