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KELLIE JONES 11 A.K.A. Saartjie The “Hottentot Venus” in Context (Some Recollections and a Dialogue), 1998/2004 Some Recollections, 2004 (Part 1) A decade ago I put together a proposal for an exhibition on the image of the Hottentot Venus. Titled “Reclaiming Venus,” the show was motivated by numerous African American women cultural practitioners who began to take up the theme in the late twentieth century. My first inspirations were visual artists Renee Green, Tana Hargest, Lorna Simpson, Carla Williams, and Deborah Willis, and writers Elizabeth Alexander, Lisa Jones, and Suzan-Lori Parks. As one version of my prospectus read: Reclaiming Venus Curator—Kellie Jones In the early 19th century, Saartjie Baartman, a Khoi-San woman of southern African, was displayed publicly throughout Europe as the “Hottentot Venus.” Exhibited as a live anthropological specimen, European fascination with her buttocks and genitalia was the cause for such spectacle. Upon her death, Saartjie’s labia were dissected and installed in the Musee de l’Homme where the famous “Hottentot Apron” remains to this day. Since the late 1980s, African American women artists in particular have begun to reclaim Saartjie Baartman as a heroine. They have created work that considers her objectification in light of contemporary ideals of beauty and racial and gender stratifications. This show would explore such work but also more broadly examine issues of female agency, how women claim and control their bodies and sexuality in the 1990s. In addition to art objects, video plays an important role in the show. In collaboration with scholar Fatimah Tobing Rony, I would like to create a video/film component that looks at misogyny and female objectification in the genre of music video, but also includes video makers who are not afraid to affirm and contemplate the power of the body—sensual, erotic or otherwise. I am especially interested in addressing young women about feminist aspiration and action, concepts which seem to have been eclipsed in the last 20 years particularly in the realm of popular culture. Over the years I was unsuccessful in finding a home for the show in the United States. When Okwui Enwezor invited me to contribute an exhibition to the Second A.K.A. Saartjie 127 Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, I just knew this was my chance to finally see “Reclaiming Venus” come to fruition. I was wrong. For one thing Okwui was dead set against the idea. I had not yet read his now classic essay, “Reframing the Black Subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation,” in which he states: The Hottentot Venus, whose supposedly horrendous-looking vagina is now preserved in formaldehyde in a museum in France, and the black man on the auction block, as objects of denigration, become props of . . . ideological fantasy, the degenerative sketch from which whiteness stages its purity. These two historical scenes, in which the black body has been tendered as display, reproduce the abject as a sign of black identification.1 Of course I was miffed to have the show rejected once again. But I rallied to produce the exhibition “Life’s Little Necessities: Installations by Women in the 1990s.”2 At the Johannesburg Biennale I was able to explore some of the same ideas of women’s agency, power, and sexuality for which the Hottentot Venus was an emblematic figure. The context of the Biennale and South Africa also focused the show more centrally around concepts of the global, transnational, and postcolonial. Okwui’s action had also saved me from stepping smack into the midst of a controversy in the post-apartheid milieu surrounding race, gender, authority, and nudity, and more specifically the seeming appropriation of the nude black female body by others. The responsibilities of artists, critics, and curators, notions of censorship, issues of historical trace in new images, and themes such as “representational violence” were debated over email, in the press, and on panels, as well as in books and essays printed somewhat later.3 Undeterred I decided to stage a dialogue on the subject of the Hottentot Venus as a way to tackle ideas of the body on display, women and agency, creativity and embodiment . What does the body say? Does gesture function as it own language? Are terror and pain inscribed in the body then “written” by the corporeal form? Re-membered there? If Saartjie Baartman’s body is initially conceived by the West as a monstrous one, evincing a grotesque and “hyperbolic sexuality”4 what does that imply about the...

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