A Guided Tour

In Postmodern art, meaning is often embedded beneath formal aesthetics. It is through the analysis, comparing and contrasting, or question asking that meaning in Postmodern aesthetics is articulated. The content of the contemporary art is can be esoteric when one is uninformed or unaccustomed to art evaluation outside of the formal. To practice interpreting the language of contemporary aesthetics, the following is a guided interaction with the work of two contemporary artists with useful juxtaposed images to aid in analysis and interpretation. Questions will be posed and answered with brief descriptions that include useful historical knowledge and contemporary art language. 

Renée Cox's Hott-En-Tot V.S. Wm.H. West’s Big Minstrel Jubilee

 

Do you know anything about Renee Cox? Does the name of Renee Cox's work mean anything to you? 

Do you see them both as "art"? Are they made for the same audience? What is Renee Cox wearing? Might her enhancements carry any symbolism?

Renée Cox is a popular contemporary artist that deals with numerous themes rooted mainly in race and women. The name of her photo, Hott-En-Tot, gives away its meaning. Saartje Baartman was a famous Khoisan woman from South Africa who was exhibited in human zoos (or freak show). Her display name, Hottentot Venus, is a composite of the derogatory name for the Khoi people, Hottentot, and the Roman Goddess of Love, Venus. Her body is a symbol of a racist Otherism that is now realized as tragic and regretful. Her large buttocks, elongated genitalia and large breasts are symbols for an identity (freak),that belittle her and transform her into a skeptical. Cox is recreating the symbolism in her features in a contemporary setting that is obviously jarring for their intentional fakeness and its defiant arrangement. Cox looks at you in the eyes and manipulates her identity—exaggerates her actual forms, now a brand of the fetishized African identity, to the point of ostentation. In this way, the black-faced minstrel evokes the same exaggeration of identity but from the other side of the interaction. He is exaggerating his body with another’s identity to become a spectacle himself. But of course, this is for an entertainment that the entertainer has the luxury of being in on. The skin of a black man is an object with engrained meaning itself: the tap dancing nigger, the bamboozled jester, shucking and jiving for claps and change. The minstrel makes light of this history. In a way, Renee Cox is responding to it by not allowing you to laugh. To see it on a stern, starring black woman robs it of its humor and calls attention to the seriousness of its past.

 

                       Yinka Shonibare MBE's The Swing (After Fragonard) and Fragonard's The Swing 

 

Do you know anything about the artists? Do the names of the works mean anything? 

When do you think both images were made? Does the period in which they were created change its meaning? Is there a difference in media? 

Yinka Shonibare MBE's The Swing(After Fragonard) was made in 2001. Fragonard's The Swing was made in 1767. Yinka Shonibare is a contempoary Nigerian artist and Fragonard was a French artist working in the Rococo style. 

Who makes art in both time periods? For whom were the images made, given their time periods? Does anything about the subjects carry symbolism of a people or culture? 

How might Yinka Shonibare MBE's nationality affect his art, if at all? Is his identity potentially important in the image? What about his sculpture signals his identity and other identities? Do they carry meaningful symbolism? 

Yinka Shonibare MBE is a contemporary hybrid artist. His parents are Nigerian but schooled in an exclusive boarding school in London. He straddles national identities and in the space between both influences he creates a dialogue about the identity created in Postcolonial Africa and how this informs life in the homeland of his colonizer. He calls himself a "postcolonial hybrid”. A motif used in this dialogue is the Dutch wax fabric, designed in the former-Dutch colony Indonesia and manufactured in Manchester, England. The fabric ended up being exported to Africa where it was absorbed into African cultures, creating a synthetic "African" aesthetic identity. "It's the fallacy of that signification that I like," Shonibare told Pernilla Holmes of ARTnew in 2002. "It's the way I view culture--it's an artificial construct." Shonibare MBE brings together Europe and Africa, colonizer and colonized, authentic and artificial, through his use of the hybrid "African" cloth and references to well-known European painters such as Fragonard and Goya. 

(Shinobare just recently added the MBE to his name, recently initiated as a Member of the Order of the British Empire. Even his name conjures thoughts of imperialism, globalization, and cultural confluence.)

With these ideas in mind, make light of the follow Shinobare MBE's images.