Adam Patterson Stage II – Unit 7 Central Saint Martins Spring Term – 2015

THE PROBLEMATIC SELF: PERFORMING DECOLONISATION & CREOLISATION

1

-INTRODUCTION-

The ability to perform oneself wholly is a privilege unavailable to the artist who is

Othered by the gaze of the white, western art world. To elaborate, artists who neither

belong to nor benefit from western, contemporary art culture, due to the nature of their

colonized bodies and exotified condition, do not and cannot perform themselves but can

only perform their own Otherness, when considered by the intelligentsia of the western

bourgeoisie. Despite this seemingly discriminative practice by the western cultural

centre against the far reaches of the former Empire, the performance of the colonial

artist’s Otherness is crucial to fulfilling a collective decolonisation and dismantling of the

professed status quo of the Western gaze.

Historically, the presence of the Other in the Western art world has been rejected

due to its maintained traditional nature (deemed “primitive”) preceding its intervention,

invasion, interruption and interception by the European colonial enterprise. Succeeding

these encounters between coloniser and colonised, trends of adopting and

appropriating this “primitive” art were made popular by a selection of European

Modern artists – a popularisation serving as one of the primary introductions and

acceptances of art of the Other while, simultaneously, exotifying it, laying claim to an

Otherness that did not belong to Europe, granting importance to the art but not the

artists.

With the heralding of the Postmodern and the Postcolonial, artists of colonised

origins finally began entering the Western sphere of discourse. Through methods of

partial assimilation and appropriation of the grandiose ideologies and aesthetics of art

ingrained by the bourgeoisie (the same ideologies that previously devalued these artist

practices), Postcolonial artists have begun to internally undermine, subvert and

deconstruct notions of taste and ideological dictation of what art can be and, more

importantly, where an artist can come from.

However, pure assimilation and erasure of the Other’s identity in conjunction with

its entry into the Western art world does not resolve the voiceless condition of this

artist but merely encourages it. A distance of Otherness – the strategic use of its

desirable power against the Western gaze – may offer a more validating position for

these Postcolonial artists and their respective discourses, granting a resistance to

complete assimilation and cultural obliteration while concurrently decentralising the

West, negating its position as the pure model of civilisation and culture. Through this

negation will the voice of the Postcolonial artist be returned, reclaimed and respected.

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The Postcolonial body, in performing itself, in performing its Otherness, not

necessarily through the medium of performance art but through the theatricality of

appropriating the title of “artist” (formerly reserved for Westerners), thus, being an

artist, may be capable of suspending the dictatorial gaze of the West, as well as

decolonising the remnants of the Empire. In seeking to reclaim culture and voice, stolen

and warped by histories of oppression and silencing by the colonial enterprise, the

Postcolonial artist may rebuild notions of Selfhood through a new culture – the Creole.

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1

-THE MUSEUM, PRIMITIVISM & NEO-COLONIALISM IN ART-

“We lived in an atmosphere of rejection, and we developed an inferiority complex.”

(Césaire & Depestre 2000: 91)

The museum, in the West, has forever stood as one of the final outposts of imperial

power in its collection of ‘oddities’ scavenged from the primitive worlds. The museum

lives as a space of institutionalised exoticism; a human zoo exhibiting the cultural flesh

and fibres of absent peoples. The very concept of the museum, in its zombie revival of

dead societies (killed by the Empire), is a means of preservation and promotion by those

in agreement with exoticism (Césaire, 2000: 52). Museums declare in a proud zeal, “This

is Empire, this is Progress!” At the heart of Modernism was the myth of history that

justified colonialism through this idea of ‘progress’ (McEvilley, 1992).

The occidental visitors to these colonial spaces, in viewing a fetishised,

commoditised cultural pillaging of the Other, establish and reinforce the postcolonial

gaze, weaving it systematically into the attitude of the West. The disinterested

disconnect exuded by the West towards the Other, encouraged the distancing of all

cultures and peoples who did not belong to the Centre – the only use of these peoples

seemed to be visual stimulation; a colonial voyeurism:

[T]he European […] is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for

new examples of what the Description de l'Egypte called “bizarre jouissance.”

(Said 1979: 103)

The museum, as an institutional body and postcolonial space that promotes a

Eurocentric homogeneity in opposition to the Other, seeks to insinuate a lack of

development in peoples outside of the West, falsely implying a temporal and

progressive difference being equivalent to spatial difference (Massey 1999). Space, as a

parallel to progress in a homogeneous interpretation by the West, has been used to

manipulate the art and culture of the Other as evidence of lacking development in

contrast to that of the Centre. In further reducing and distancing the disposition of the

Other, curation of these postcolonial spaces plays a significant role:

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Representing indigenous peoples as both hostile and welcoming, exotic and

savage lent an emphasis to the primitive, the barbaric, and the heathen that

accorded well with both pre-Darwinian natural history and Victorian

evolutionary theory.

(MacLeod and Rehbock 1994)

Through the manipulation of space, filtered through the postcolonial gaze, the Museum

serves as an imperial tactic to include the Other in the Western scope yet, not from a

point of respect but of intrigue, curiosity and exoticism. It can be argued that this space,

in its rejection of Othered artists and the colonial appropriation of their work,

contributed to the neo-colonialist, artistic phenomenon that was Primitivism.

Formerly celebrated as a breakthrough in Modernism and European Art,

Primitivism, explored by Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Fauvists alike, paved the way

for a Neo-colonialism, disguised as a charitable embracing of the primitive Other by the

European cultural elite. A desire for escape from the Centre, from civilisation, a desire

for Otherness swept this wave of western artists. As noble as their intentions may have

been, these artists moved through the non-westerners and their respective cultures as

rampantly as their colonial predecessors. It was not an attempt to understand nor

empathise with the Other, but merely a cultural appropriation which, in fanciful terms,

allowed cultural recognition for the primitive Other but, in actuality, proved to be a

selective ideological pillaging that sought to dehistoricise and exotify the ‘Third World’

(Amselle, Mellott & Van Dam 2003: 974-975).

The satisfaction of human desire is possible only when mediated by the other's

desire and labor.

(Lacan 1966: 98, 99)

Regarding Lacan, an understanding or analysis of these colonial inclinations

towards the Other may be attained. In the presence of the Other’s production, whether it

be of civilisation, culture or selfhood, the western subject, the western ‘I’, exerts a

libidinal urge to re-assimilate the Other into his own European sensibilities of

homogeneity or, a need to re-establish sameness. The threat instilled in the desire for

the Other is the anxious trap of the western ‘I’ to be Othered, himself, in the gaze that

looks upon him. There is an irrational fear left in the westerner by the colonial

enterprise, a fear of losing power, a fear of losing the power over the Other and the loss

of Otherness, itself, a fear of wholeness – diversity:

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Diversity, which is neither chaos nor sterility, means the human spirit’s striving for a

cross cultural relationship, without universalist transcendence. Diversity needs the

presence of peoples, no longer as objects to be swallowed up, but with the intention

of creating a new relationship. Sameness requires fixed being […]. As the Other is a

source of temptation of sameness, Wholeness is the demand for Diversity.

(Glissant 1989: 98)

Edouard Glissant’s definition of diversity illustrates quite accurately the fear of the

westerner, in reasoning his inclinations to appropriate the colonised body and its

identity. It is a preservation of sameness, a preservation of an exotified timelessness of

societies necessary to the mind of the westerner in the survival of his notion of

superiority over the Other, a restless exoticism disdained previously by Césaire

(Glissant 1989; Césaire 2000). In the rape of cultures, the West finds a vampiric self-

preservation through the vice of colonialism. This cannot be attested more so than in the

Primitivist works of Gauguin. Fleeing a civilisation in which he felt sexually repressed,

he painted and enacted his desires through Tahitian women, through a “dense

interweave of racial and sexual fantasies and power both colonial and patriarchal"

(Solomon-Godeau 1986: 315).

There is purpose behind this Modernist chronology in that we must understand the

postcolonial past and present in order to envision a decolonised future. In recognising

and analysing the behaviour and actions of the West in attempts to maintain its colonial

power and universal model of selfhood, strategies for decentralisation and

decolonisation may come to fruition.

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2

-THE BODY OF THE PERIPHERY-

“Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced

performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the

reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The

social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-

going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in

moments of historical transformation.”

(Bhabha 1994: 2)

As said Homi K. Bhabha, aptly illustrating what may be applied to Postcolonial

artists in their arrival toward the loosening threshold of the western art world,

highlighting and reiterating the significance of Glissant’s aforementioned notion of

diversity in the hope of re-establishing and reclaiming a sense of selfhood for the

decolonised (Bhabha 1994; Glissant 1989).

It is evident that, through the majority of works produced by Postcolonial artists

after the dawn of the Postmodern, the emancipated body, the body of colour, the body of

Othered matter – skin, flesh, fluid and face – in its performance, its very presence of

being lived and experienced, bore the greatest significance in contributing a plethora of

discursive strains to the previously white elite art context. Not exclusively through

performance, but through the performative being of the decolonising artist, the

appropriation of the ‘artist’ title, the ‘art world’ arena, the Postcolonial body carves an

illusory selfhood disguised as ‘sameness’ while maintaining a Creole diversity.

In exploring the approach of appropriating the materials offered by the western art

world, working and living through and in spite of them, David Hammons is a fine

example of an almost indifferent and oblivious opposition against western high culture.

In the 1981 work (debate exists as to whether it is such), Pissed Off, photographed by

Dawoud Bey, Hammons quite casually urinates on the derelict, deteriorating Serra

sculpture, T.W.U. (1980-1981), as seen in Franklin Street, Manhattan. This infiltration of

institutionalised high culture into the lived spaces of inhabitants of a 1980s pre-

gentrified Tribeca had no chance of being accepted kindly or wilfully without any form

of resistance. Hammons’ approach may be articulated through a 1995 Frieze review of

his work by Coco Fusco and Christian Haye:

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[Hammons] is, in actuality, a masterful investigator of how an oppositional black

cultural identity can be generated through a dialogue with 'high' culture, particularly

as it is articulated through standard English. His method relies on punning and other

kinds of word games that short-circuit the dominant cultural interpretation of any

given object or term to be redirected for his own purpose.

(Fusco & Haye 1995)

David Hammons, Pissed Off, New York (1981). Photographed by Dawoud Bey.

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In a more conscious effort of resisting colonial powers and reinforcing ideas of

selfhood, Ras Akyem-I Ramsey, a Rastafarian artist from Barbados, deals with “the Blakk

‘diasporic-body’ as “object & commodity” in western cultures,” (Ramsey 2008).

Ramsey’s practice is significant in the performance of his own body in craving true

decolonization, true selfhood. Ramsey’s work, in seeking to reconnect with the cultural

womb, while struggling against ancestral amnesia, hoping to establish a non-hostile

perception of ‘home’, becomes an attempt to animate the ideal Creole self, a selfhood

that lives a layered temporal experience, opposed to the western self that lives in spite

of history. Ramsey’s emphasis on himself, the struggle to reclaim selfhood in wrestling

with the Otherness historically plotted against him, resonates with Rastafarian ideology

of selfhood:

The pronoun ‘I’ has a special importance to Rastas and is expressly opposed to the

servile ‘me’. [...] [T]he use of this pronoun identifies the Rasta as an individual.

(Owens 1976: 65, 66)

In liberating the colonial servitude instilled by language, expression and the very canon

of western art ideology, Ramsey performs as an artist in opposition to the central

powers, emancipating himself as a subject and not a consumable object of the western

cultural appetite.

Ras Akyem-I Ramsey, Pieta from the series, “Michel’angelo”, c. 2000.

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Through a more consciously apolitical effort, the 1970s Catalysis works of Adrian

Piper are powerful contributions to the decolonisation of the postcolonial body and the

imperial periphery. The presence of her body-made-repellent through various sensory

self-alterations or self-violations, intended to challenge the order of the social field “at

the level of dress, sanity and the distinction between public and private acts,” (Reckitt &

Phelan 2001). Piper insists that, when carrying out these social interventions, involving

her presence in the public space while doused in pungent liquids or wet paint or

emitting loud belching sounds from a hidden audio player, etc., she must not declare

that she is “doing a piece,” in addition to her choice of not “using art frameworks,”

(Lippard & Piper 1972). This active choice against western art ideology widens the

scope of art, not just in the potential of how it can manifest in a Postcolonial context but,

in how it may be read in a more general sense, in opposition to western discursive

modes of interpretation.

Adrian Piper, Catalysis III, New York (1970).

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There is a multitude of artists living on the periphery of the imperial centre,

working against and despite the centre, appropriating western art ideology in order to

deconstruct it and carry out a self-decolonisation. Without falling to the imperial snare

of assimilation, a resignation of Otherness, a subscription to synonymy, artists such as

Hammons, Ramsey and Piper, in their respective approaches of high culture oblivion,

subjective reinforcement and public self-abjection, prove significant in adapting cultural

strategies to dismantling the remaining colonial powers while developing a sense of

selfhood as a result of their layered temporal experiences, progressing towards the

notion of the Creole.

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3

-RECLAIMING THE SELF: BECOMING CREOLE-

“[...] how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them

/ both, or give back what they give? / How can I face such slaughter and be cool? /

How can I turn from Africa and live?”

(Walcott 2007)

“I only have one language; it is not mine.”

(Derrida 1998: 1)

The Other serving as a “temptation for sameness” (Glissant 1989: 98) is a problem

also faced by the periphery, itself. Others may experience anxieties of selflessness in

regarding their own statuses as foreigners – the fear of being “in addition,” (Kristeva

1991: 4). This is a trap. The self of the postcolony lives not in the Otherness prescribed

by an historical robbery of selfhood – history has only severed the wholeness of the self

in the postcolony. To fall to synonymy, to submit to assimilation, does not remedy this

segmented self but only succeeds in erasing it. Resistance against similitude alongside

the deconstruction of the clear division between centre and periphery – ‘us’ and ‘them’ –

will shape the path to the diversity of the Creole.

The performance of the self by artists of the periphery as presented in the West is

indeed a tackle of social structures and systematic irregularities – a performative

gesture of the enunciation of this problematic self “would in the act prove the opposite

of what its testimony claims to declare,” (Derrida 1998: 3). That being the case, the

Creole hybrid model of decolonisation calls, not for an individual performance of

emancipation by the periphery or the performance of assimilation by the centre but, for

a mutual effort towards performing decentralisation. The boundaries of the centre

cannot merely be expanded from the peripheral externs; the centre must abandon its

sterile master trope and offer a degree of fertility in aiding the flourishing of

hybridisation and diversity. For both periphery and centre, it cannot be a selection of

histories – of historic selves – that is the trap of history; a collective memory must be

maintained in order to reclaim the whole self.

All in all, there is equal importance in artists of the periphery problematising their

selves, through the performance of Otherness in the Western gaze, to emphasise

difference as a dismantling force (Ashery 2015) along with artists of the centre

problematising their privilege in order to open way for discursive action to deconstruct

and subside said privilege.

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-CONCLUSION-

A postcolonial, Creole model of understanding and interpreting experience does

not necessitate a retrospective glance at history but a collective consciousness of that

which echoes in the bone – the layered temporal cultural impulses that resonate in both

coloniser and colonised; whether these manifest as an oppressor’s sense of guilt or an

oppressed sense of selflessness is not the focus of this discussion. History does not

adhere to western ideology; it lives in our blood, our collective ancestral memory.

In recognising all that defines art culture in conversation between the centre and

the periphery – the colonial manifestation of the Museum, the Neo-colonial phenomenon

of Primitivism, the subliminal actions against western art ideology by Postcolonial

artists succeeding the Postmodern and the progress made towards hybridisation and

Creolisation – the significance of the performance of decolonisation and strategies in

furthering it can be identified.

The problematic self, the peripheral self, the Other, must continue to self-

problematise and, likewise, the central self, the Universal self of the West, must begin to

problematise and question its own privilege, its own cultural positioning within the

wider global context. The Creole cannot be acquired by a single party; it must be met in

wholeness.

The performance of creolisation and decolonisation – an active revolt of the flesh

against the structures that seek to bind it – requires a collective consideration of

historicised behaviours, designed to maintain an order belonging to a decadent,

stricken, dying model of civilisation perpetuated by the Bourgeoisie (Ce saire, 2000: 31),

and the dismantling of such through conscious efforts in decentralising the West as a

speculated cultural zenith thus, granting a progression towards a decolonisation and

reclamation of selfhood through the model of the Creole.

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