... I don’t want to be too negative about it, but there is something slightly horrific about u.a.
Angelo Soliman i.R.; perhaps something inherent in death masks or the uncanny atmosphere created by printing a positive. It is disorienting
to read the print as a photographic negative whilst receiving the visual information that the faces have their correct colour, an impression further
accentuated by the fact that the European heads (bottom left) are weighted towards white.
Where Meet me in St. Louis, Louis is full of references
to aspects of the history of collection and exhibition of the exotic whether animal or human, ‘real’ or photographic, living or dead and Congo Blues echoes
with the history of cultural appropriation, colonial oppression and brutality, u.a.
Angelo Soliman, i.R. can be read as a photographic reversal of the history of representation of the Other. The photograph restores
the colour to, amongst others, the Soliman of the title (bottom row, 2nd from right). Most of the others are nameless and nothing is known of their history,
they are simply ‘specimens’ grotesquely over represented in the Gall collection. Viewing the collection as a whole one might be forgiven for assuming that
in eighteenth century Europe fully twenty five per cent of the inhabitants were non-Europeans. While it is true that science ( and especially medical science)
is interested in the abnormal and pathological in order to set the parameters of normalcy, it clear that such collections are pathological in their search
for ‘exotic specimens’. So it is ‘natural’ that Soliman
is included in the collection and the picture. |
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He represents an extreme but not uncommon state of affairs. After having been enslaved, transported to Europe, converted to Christianity,
he married and, against all odds, achieved high social standing at the Imperial court. After his death his skin was peeled off over his ears and stretched
on a wooden frame. He was then exhibited (along with others, one of whom had been an estate gardener) (un)dressed and decorated in conformity with the
European idea of a savage. The Emperor, Franz II, must have been inordinately attached to his new acquisition, since he managed to ignore, dissemble
and block repeated requests and pleas from Soliman’s daughter (also one supported by a request from a bishop) to give her father’s remains a
Christian burial.
It’s a black and white photograph, a black and white print. It restores Africans who were masked in white plaster of Paris to their original colour
and continues a metaphor of photographic process and representation into the blouse, a modern photo-print. It links the cultural perceptions of
the 18th and 21st centuries. It is a kind of National Geographic garment depicting exotic Others. They come from all corners and most cultures of the
world with the exception of the culture which designed and produced it. The staggered chess board pattern is the familiar game of exoticism - to be included
one has to be non-white, painted, decorated, flowered, or tattooed. In a word, outlandish. Perhaps, in the final analysis, the work is about the black
magic of photographic representation.
2000 |
