Inadequately Expressive
Irradiated by LabRat
Via commenter BH, an Atlantic article arguing that everyone has missed the point of Makode Linde’s “brilliant” golliwog cake.
The article does go into some detail missing from the original reporting on it, the important bits of which were a) The culture minister and her entourage had no clue what she’d be walking into other than that it was purportedly about female genital mutilation, and b) the minister had been under media fire previously for supposedly being pro-censorship of art, or at least heavily critical of “provocative” art. So yes, it was basically a setup meant to put a politician in a no-win scenario, which banked on her going along with it, which was a pretty good bet.
It also argues that it was actually a brilliant piece of art whose point was to demonstrate Sweden’s disconnect from the reality of Africa and Africans and illustrate the alienness of the experience of being black or African in Sweden. The article concludes:
There’s no doubt that Adelsohn-Liljeroth and the many Swedes involved in campaigning against FGM seem to be kind-hearted, noble-minded people who oppose racism and would like to help the victims of female genital mutilation. Linde, even if he has corralled them all into a disastrous photo op that could even cost Adelsohn-Liljeroth her job (it shouldn’t), probably doesn’t mean to embarrass them personally so much as draw attention to the subtle racial politics of Sweden’s popular conceptions of FGM and Africans generally. That’s not an easy thing to explain to people in words, but a screaming cake seems to have done it.
To which I would reply: no it didn’t. If it had, neither the Atlantic article nor the Africa Is A Country article explaining it would need to exist.
For one thing, that’s not what Linde said it was supposed to do at any point, and as the artist one presumes he would know. (His statements on the cake have been mostly semicoherent and range from LOL I TROLL U to “you’re just not sophisticated enough to understand”, and reinforce the “performance artist as unrepentant and undirected attention whore” impression.)
For another, if your art needs to come with a lengthy explanation of what exactly it’s supposed to express, it has essentially failed as art. Guernica doesn’t need to come with a “war is horrible” pamphlet in order to understand the painting, although if you’re unschooled in art history you’ll probably wonder what the point of having everyone’s features squashed on one half of their face is*. Even if you don’t know it was painted during the Spanish Civil War in the aftermath of a bombing, the idea that it’s about senseless suffering and chaos comes through just fine on its own. It’s not standard representational art, but it’s not enigmatic either.
Not all art is even meant to express something other than “pretty!”, or for that matter “ugly!”. It doesn’t necessarily need to. But when it IS meant to express a particular thing, it’s on the artist to make sure their point is even possible to take from the result, much as it’s on the writer to communicate their ideas efficiently and not on the reader to possess advanced detective skills to find it. Dumb audience members who aren’t going to get it and probably don’t want it exist, but when almost the entire world can’t find the expressed idea, that’s not on the audience as a failure, it’s on the artist.
It’s entirely possible that all that’s being expressed is that it’s possible to make really racist images and have people go along with them as long as you manipulate them in the correct ways, and then deduce that what makes this possible to accomplish is a meeting in Swedish culture of norms of avoiding conflict with the abstractedness of Africa and Africans to most Swedes. But I really do not think that makes the cake, or the artist, brilliant. Upsetting people by being blantly offensive not a high-order skill, and sadly neither is manipulating politicians who are feeling public opinion pressure.
At the end of the day it’s still just a really offensive cake.
*The point of cubism is to show all perspectives from one point of view. That’s pretty much the entirety of it.
April 24th, 2012 at 4:59 pm
The cake itself looked to have been crafted with some art, it had the look, except for the artist’s head, of one those Stone Age Venuses that archeologists study. That’s as far as I get before my eyes start rolling.
April 24th, 2012 at 5:05 pm
And really, when your art is less comprehensible than fucking Picasso, you need to look up the basic definition of “communication” again.
Unless you’re being inscrutible simply for inscrutibility’s sake. I can appreciate that too. But at least be honest about it.
“I’m just trying to confuse people because it’s funny.”
April 24th, 2012 at 5:06 pm
I’m fairly certain that was a deliberate reference to Sarah Baartman, or “the Hottentot Venus” as she was stage-named. Which makes it a bunch more offensive, IMO.
April 25th, 2012 at 5:33 am
I am permissive in the extreme on a great number of subjects, but I found this art piece baffling, particularly considering that the performance art spectacle was set up to humiliate someone who has been supportive of women’s rights on the subject of FGM seems bizarre, to say the least. Unless the artist is saying that no white people can have any opinion on Africa, I truly don’t get it. My first reaction was why is some guy in Sweden doing contemporary art employing blackface, which is associated with Minstrel shows in the US from the period after the Civil War through Vaudeville? The only really stretch of a connection I can make would be that the artist was saying only someone African can address African issues, because African issues are not relatable to lily-white north Europeans. Like I said, I’m baffled. Why would one seek to alienate a rare politician who is trying to do something that improves the lives of others beyond their own borders?
This whole controversy did make me think, though, of an interview I saw of art expert Sister Wendy regarding Serrano’s Piss Christ calling it “comforting art”:
“I think comforting art is art that is very easy to react to. I might be tempted to say that Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ is comforting art, in that everyone knows exactly what they think about it. They’re not challenged in the slightest. Ninety percent of them think its blasphemous and a few like me think, well, it might not be. It might be a rather ham-fisted attempt to preach about the need to reverence the crucifix. Not a very gifted young man, but he’s trying his best. But that’s comforting art, you see, because it’s so easy to have an opinion and a reaction. Everyone thinks they can do it.”
I dunno - maybe it doesn’t compare, but for some reason, it seems similar to me. A cheap shot to some on an easy mark, and a deeply intellectual conundrum to others.
People who go into politics and public life in some way should expect they will be humiliated on occasion, but sometimes attempts to humiliate someone can backfire on the antagonist. This would make more sense if the politician had publicly shrugged off the plight of African women who face FGM.
As it appears to me, however, I think it is inane.
April 25th, 2012 at 5:46 am
I thought about doing a sixth article in my series on “Discrimination, distrust and xenophobia”, using this incident to illustrate the problem of the liberal artsy-fartsy approach to such realities . . . but this was just too off-the-wall for me to make sense of it.
(BTW, Labrat, how did you like the last article in that series? I enjoyed your comment on the fourth one.)
April 25th, 2012 at 8:56 am
And really, when your art is less comprehensible than fucking Picasso, you need to look up the basic definition of “communication” again.
I don’t want to get into a defense of Picasso’s work in general, but I feel compelled to defend Guernica in particular. I saw the painting in Madrid when I was 17, an age at which I was a complete math and science geek with no time at all for artsy-fartsy stuff. But I have to tell you, upon seeing that giant painting (it’s huge!) in person, it hit me with a psychic wallop that brought me to the edge of physical illness. In a way reminiscent of Lovecraft or Giger, there is just a wrongness to that painting that is impossible to convey in lesser reproductions.
If you ever have a chance to visit Madrid, I’d encourage you to take the time to visit the Sofia. Even if Dali and Picasso aren’t your cup of tea, I think it’s worth it to experience how powerful that painting really is.
April 25th, 2012 at 2:22 pm
The Atlantic article did make me feel a lot more sympathetic of the culture minister, though, than I was on first hearing the story. I still think walking away would have been a better response, but I can see how given the background and the lack of warning she could have made the choice she did when the situation was suddenly thrown at her. It was kind of a sick trap set up to humiliate her, and unfortunately she fell for it, as did the others around her. And while it was a mistake on their part, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to suggest that she deserves to be set up as some kind of poster-girl epitomizing Swedish racism.
April 25th, 2012 at 4:43 pm
Yeah, I’m with you there. She still didn’t make the best choice, but it removes the “who thought this was a remotely good idea” factor.
April 26th, 2012 at 7:33 am
Maybe the artist is actually pro-FGM and is trying to fuck with people who are anti?
April 26th, 2012 at 8:42 am
Still an example of cowardice. She should have just left in disgust.
When someone sets you up the bomb, you launch all Zig. You do not make your time.