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DEBRA S. SINGER 7 Reclaiming Venus The Presence of Sarah Bartmann in Contemporary Art America is past-free; we rely on a swift evaporation of the what was. We move forward. And a protruding posterior is a backward glance, a look which, in this country, draws no eyes. Has no place. No rest. . . . What do we make with the belief that the rear end exists? —Suzan-Lori Parks, “The Rear End Exists” Numerous contemporary artists and writers in recent years have created works reclaiming the historical figure of Sarah, or Saartje, Bartmann. Exhibited, ostensibly as a paradigm of what her culture valued as physical beauty, Bartmann was viewed by European audiences as a grotesque yet exotic, deviant yet desirable, presentation of black sexuality. Her presence in European popular culture extended far beyond her five years of display. After Bartmann’s death, at least one other African woman was brought to Europe and presented as a “Hottentot Venus,” and many other unidentified women from Africa with similar physiques were photographed naked into the 1880s.1 Images labeled the “Hottentot Venus” developed into such a phenomenon that they circulated as one of the nineteenth-century’s most prevalent representations of a black female.2 As a result, Bartmann became an icon within Western society not only of all black women but also, more broadly, of the “mystery” of female sexuality. Equally significant, the “Hottentot Venus” also symbolized the perceived sexual difference between the white European and the black African and became a metonym for a feminized and subordinated Africa. More than a century later, her image remains a complicated site for the examination of the representation of the black female body in Western culture, sexuality, and ideals of femininity as well as visuality as a colonizing tool. Many of the artists and writers to engage Bartmann’s story have been women of African descent for whom the original circumstances of Bartmann’s exploitation continue to have a strong resonance. Their renewed interest in this previously overlooked subject of history follows in the wake of academic efforts by historians such as Sander Gilman, whose influential 1985 book Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness was one of the first widely available publications to examine the cultural implications and sociological context of Bartmann’s display. While examples can be found internationally across the literary and performing arts, my discussion will focus on works by six African American visual artists: Renée Cox, Renée Green, Joyce Scott, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deborah Willis. Engaging diverse artistic methods ranging from photography to quilting and from installation to performance art, 88 Debra S. Singer each recognizes Bartmann as a powerful symbol of the continuing objectification of the black female body. Despite this common point of departure, their works demonstrate the multiple possibilities in recuperating Bartmann’s story as they traverse the crossroads of sexuality and specularity, past and present, production and reception of visual representations . Several of the artists emphasize concerns relating to ideals of feminine beauty and racialized notions of the erotic. Others make explicit connections between Bartmann and Africa, pointing out how “looking at” may be perceived as a form of “possessing” and foregrounding issues of control over the display of the body. In still other instances, artists highlight the resonance of this nineteenth-century example with constructions of blackness in popular culture today. These artists explore the various ramifications of Bartmann’s story by working through the body, identified as a complex site for the production of difference. Each of these women offers either new formations of the self or presents what Abigail SolomonGodeau has described as “hybrid forms” of self-representation, in which we witness the absorption of the personal into the social to discover how black women’s subjectivity in the present moment is shaped by references to prior determinations.3 According to Solomon-Godeau, these “hybrid forms” are generally marked by the absence of an image of the artist’s physical body within the work, but nonetheless, they engage with issues of self-representation.4 Central to all of the works is the repossession of an ignored past in order to formulate new possibilities of black female subjectivity in the present. Analogous to how Bartmann served as a vehicle for redefining issues of race, gender, and sexuality in the nineteenth century, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries she symbolizes the need to reinvestigate how discursive formations of race inscribe onto the body particular...

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