The Spectacle of Violence in Laylah Ali's Greenheads

The Spectacle of Violence Laylah Ali's Laylah Ali, Unt it led, 2000, Gouache o n paper, 19 x 14 in. Michelle Wright W e have invented two types of violence in the West the "primitive" and the "civilized." The "primitive" speaks out to us from the pages of our major newspapers , horrified accounts of the savagery indigenous to Africa, India, Asia, and South America. It is violence with no past and hopefully no future, bereft of any rationale or greater moral purpose. It reduces the perpetrators to the status of animals—a status that is constantly re-imposed, for it has never occurred to us to understand "those people" in any other way. Civilized violence, of course, is our violence: not so much violence as struggles for democracy of which people get in the way; not so much violence as a police action, a retaliatory strike or, our favorite description nowadays, a "preemptive strike." In other words, the victims may resemble mangled, helpless bodies, but they are actually perpetrators denied the pleasure of harming us. Civilized violence is represented by CNN's blurry but fascinated satellite images, precise and complex maps detailing the actions, or, in art, historic bas-reliefs in which there is no blood, only noble profiles and fancy armor. Primitive violence reveals itself in anguished faces and the sober montage of destroyed landscapes and always, always, slow and loving camera pans over every inch of the mangled naked body, the writhing, unhappy bodies. Most often, these bodies are colored, non-white. Unt it led, 2000, Gouache o n paper, 19 x 13 in. 1 1 4 * Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art Unt it led, 2000, Gouache o n paper, 12 x 14 in. Laylah Ali's Greenheads series offers us a canny contradiction. For those of us vaguely or even painfully aware of the currency of our racial stereotypes, it is hard to read these gouache-on-paper paintings in either a general or specific sense: race and its Western implications lurk everywhere. Laylah Ali's Greenheads series offers us a canny contradiction . For those of us vaguely or even painfully aware of the currency of our racial stereotypes, it is hard to read these gouache-on-paper paintings in either a general or specific sense: race and its Western implications lurk everywhere. The faces are dark, the white of the eyes and teeth in exaggerated contrast, like Sambo, like Jolson—like any representation of the black that is eager to underscore the unnaturalness and naturally frightening aspect of black skin on humanoid bodies . There are panels where a ball game is being played or paused to turn away a young player and that ball, though deprived of its Pan-Am markings and seriously undersized, must be version of basketball, that game those people play so terribly well, kill each other over—or was that tennis shoes? No matter: the tennis shoes are also present, even if worn by a minimum of characters (the rest seem to be wearing wrestling boots). The forms of violence depicted are exotic or ancient, the sort of thing you hear Africans do (not our soldiers in Vietnam or Nicaragua mind, nor the CIA, flagged countless times by Amnesty International), and should there be any lingering liberal doubts that these are not 1 1 6 - N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art Unt it led, 2000, Gouache o n paper, 10 x 14 in. Unt it led, 2000, Gouache o n paper, 10 x 14 in. black people, witness the "rubber necklace treatment," the burning tires placed around the necks of Winnie Mandela's enemies by her infamous soccer team (look again—no, no, definitely basketballs, not soccer balls). So, if these figures are black, what is the point to this series? Art critic Ann Wilson Lloyd shows us how our eyes and minds constantly move between the dynamic colors, the beautiful figurations, the reminiscently 1970s retro look...and the stark fact of the torture depicted. We have been taught that brutal violence and pleasing aesthetics do no belong together, and so attempt to make sense of the contradiction . That is certainly true of primitive violence (well, I'll...