Ota Benga was a pygmy from the Belgian Congo, brought, with his ‘consent’ by the explorer Samuel Verner to be exhibited at the 1904
World Fair in St. Louis. He was subsequently (1906) exhibited in the Bronx Zoo monkey house causing much outrage from the black community and misgivings
on the part of some clergy who were concerned in case the faithful took it as proof
of Mr. Darwin’s theory. He eventually committed suicide. The picture also resonates with a parallel
item of Viennese history. These are just some of the numerous examples of the custom of exhibiting people (living and dead) as specimens to be perceived
as other, as exotic, but in any case as lower on the developmental scale. The over-lap
between the scientific and the popular was extensive. The stuffed
zebras in conjunction with the museum setting not only mirrors the collecting of individuals as examples in a taxonomic system, but draws attention
to the linguistic
affinity of photography and hunting. But there is a conundrum here. Whereas the eyes in the self-portraits (See e.g. Out of Austria or The
Big Game) are open and the eyes of the animals watch us warily, the eyes of the woman here are closed. The repose of the face does not suggest a
blink, the wrong moment to have taken a photograph, but rather a gentle, decisive refusal to look. Since we know nothing of her nationality or cultural
identity, merely something of her genetic inheritance, our stereotyping mechanisms, voyeurism and our gaze are reflected back at us. We are well and
truly at home, alone, with the our pre-conceptions and the burden of Western cultural history.
Made for Europe, the title for the whole work group as well as a single work has also much to do with stereotyping. So what
is it that has been Made for Europe? The carpets? Perhaps, but given the fact that the title applies to an entire series of works that seems unlikely.
Here, as with the other works in the group, while we gaze at the photograph and its details we are being asked to consider ourselves. |
 |
Ourselves in this case being in the first instance white males and in the second the other fully paid-up members of Western culture
club. We are being asked to examine our own gender and cultural background and the depth to which it defines our perceptual standpoint.
In the case of this photograph, what we are being sold seems to be the association with luxury, oriental opulence and implied harem-like
eroticism.  It
is an image that saturated with culture-specific meaning; with musings - academic and otherwise - but in any case highly masculine in its intimations
of power, constructed over centuries and intimately bound up with the exercise
of patriarchal might. Depictions of women of other cultures can be (and often are) extremely sensitive to subtle and easily achieved transformations
(at least for the duration of the photographic process) so that they reflect back an eroticism and availability not readily accessible in the women of
the colonising culture. Thousands of exposed female bodies, as anthropological and ethnological objects or otherwise disguised as artistically
valuable, often with disparaging
captions and overtones of double morality and frequently with outright
cultural violence. Here the message is softer, closer to the erotic than the pornographic. The lack of returned gaze is again ambiguous. |
