In the mixed media installation Revue, installation artist Renee Green combined several visual images and texts pertaining to the black female body: a small diminutive representation of the Hottentot Venus is centrally placed in the installation, surrounded by a series of photographically manipulated images of Josephine Baker. Framing these images on both sides run a row of texts, some of which quote Josephine Baker's critics and others excerpts from 19th century travel accounts. The installation also includes a small open cabinet on which a toy circus comprising several miniaturized animal representations is placed. On the floor in front of the installation another wind-up animal, a lion, is caged in its surroundings. The wind-up toy has been viewed by critics as stand in for "The Hottentot Venus," who was similarly caged and performed the part of an animal.
In the installation, Green deals with visual representations of the black female body, like the Hottentot Venus and Josephine Baker, which were prominently positioned at the center of Britain and France's popular exoticized gaze. Interestingly, Green's manipulation of the scale of the images, particularly of the small Hottentot Venus image, and the blurred focus of the Baker photographs precisely resists visual apprehension.
Green also concentrations on the fascination with the black female body as manifest discursively in nineteenth century travel literature and in critiques of Baker's performances. In contrast to the visual images the texts are blown up larger than life. One of the enlarged panels of the excerpts from a travel account reads: "The dance of the Negresses is incredibly indecent . . . she gets into positions so lascivious, so lubricious that it's impossible to describe them . . . It's true that the Negresses don't appear to have the depraved intentions which one would imagine; it's a very old custom, which continues innocently in this country; so much so that one sees children of six performing this dance, certainly without knowing what they're leading up to." The visual and discursive mediations on the black female both in the metropoles of Britain and France and in distant countries, as recorded by a traveler, are juxtaposed in the installation.
Revue was installed as part an exhibition The Body as Measure at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College in 1994. Revue was reinstalled for the exhibition Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference, and Desire in London in 1995.
Quote from Green
In particular I was interested in the way that an artist (filmmaker) and writer such as Laura Mulvey was trying to rethink the way in which certain ideas about visual pleasure were developed. I was also trying to figure out the way in which a body could be visualized, especially a black female body, yet address the complexity of reading that presence without relinquishing pleasure and history. (Read 146 )
Bibliography:
Fusco, CoCo. English is Broken Here. New York: The New Press, 1995.
Guillermo, Gomez-Peña. The New World Border. San Francisco: City Lights, 1996.
A site maintained by Gomez-Peña.
