Politics of Outrage: David LaChapelle's "The Rape of Africa"

David LaChapelle's The Rape of Africaconsists primarily of one large-format image of the same title. True to his aesthetic of visual deluge, LaChapelle traffics in the lushness of fantasy and dreamscapes, offering an image that is unapologetically weighed down by its own excess. Rich, saturated colors compete with an overabundance of objects, ranging from animals to weapons, jewels, religious iconography, and daily consumer goods, such as laundry detergent (bleach, to be specific). No inch is left unadorned, resulting in a kind of visual overdose that is incapable of underwhelming the viewer.

The scene LaChapelle depicts is a close re-creation of Sandro Botticelli's 1484 work Venus and Mars, in which Venus, the goddess of love, having successfully conquered Mars, the god of war, through sex, sits peacefully victorious as Mars sleeps, defeated and spent. Venus, fully dressed and aware of her surroundings, actively surveys the scene, as four small satyrs mischievously play with the naked Mars's clearly borrowed weapons. In the hardcover catalog that accompanies the exhibit, Colin Wiggins, from the London National Gallery, where the Botticelli piece is housed, offers an introduction to LaChapelle's work. Wiggins observes that in the Botticelli original the God of War has been "vanquished." ¹Botticelli's not-so-subtle point was that war is defenseless in the face of love's lure.

It is precisely this narrative that David LaChapelle attempts to intervene into, reversing its grammars for symbolic political play. In LaChapelle's The Rape of Africa, Venus is the black model Naomi Campbell and Mars is the white model Caleb Lane. As Africa, Venus is not triumphant but resigned, calloused in her stillness. Rather than keeping careful watch over the scene unfolding before her, her glassy stare is fixed on nothing in particular, pointed somewhere off-stage. Unlike Botticelli's Venus, Naomi Campbell is only half dressed, with her legs and right breast revealed and what remains of her torn dress transparent. Far from seeming depleted or vanquished, to borrow from Wiggins, Caleb Lane as Mars rests casually and carefree, with one finger placed pointedly on the tip of an upright golden bone. Surrounding Mars, three black boys, impossible to read as anything but child soldiers, play with weapons and armor. One of the boys, outfitted in an adult football helmet speaks into a gold megaphone.

The visual landscape of the piece, which simultaneously overwhelms the viewer and demands closer attention, divides the scene into two distinct sides, each with its own actors and accoutrement. The left-hand side, where Venus reigns limply, is relatively sparse, populated by a rooster, a lamb, a bare hanging light bulb, and one large diamond in an almost hidden corner. In stark contrast, Mars's side is crowded with gilded treasures—bars of gold, coins, a golden cross and handgun, grenades—that seem to amount to the spoils of war. Pointedly, one of the larger objects in the piece is a large diamond-encrusted skull, which could be read as homage to the artist Damien Hirst's 2007 work For the Love of God. But Hirst's skull is only one of a mash-up of contemporary pop cultural references, ranging from a wallpaper of Sun bleach to the title, which is perhaps borrowed from W. E. B. Du Bois but also gestures heavily toward the 2006 film The Rape of Europa. Between Venus and Mars, the scene opens up with a window burned into the backdrop, revealing dry land being mined by trucks and machinery.

Taking cues from his Renaissance inspiration, LaChapelle's morality is as transparent as his Italian predecessor's. Here, the West, comfortable in its masculinity and whiteness, has ravaged the African continent, rendering it a commodity, transferable property ripe for access (commodification of otherwise unadulterated beauty is in fact a recurring and...