COLUMBIA UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL of ART HISTORY

Winter 2021

COLUMBIA

UNDERGRADUATE

JOURNAL ofART HISTORY

COLUMBIA

UNDERGRADUATE

JOURNAL ofART HISTORY

Winter 2021

The Columbia Undergraduate Journal of Art History

January 2021

Volume 3, No. 1

A special thanks to Professor Barry Bergdoll and the

Columbia Department of Art History and Archaeology for

sponsoring this student publication.

New York, New York

Editor-in-Chief

Designers

Lead Editors

Editor

Noah Percy

Zehra Naqvi

Lilly Cao

Kaya Alim

Jackie Chu

Yuxin Chen

Millie Felder

Sophia Fung

Bri Schmidt

EditorialBoard

Yasemin Aykan

Noah Seeman

Michael Coiro

Drey Carr

Olivia Doyle

Kaleigh McCormick

Sam Needleman

Claire Wilson

Elizabeth Mullaney

Special thanks to visual arts student and lead editor Lilly Cao, CC’22, for cover art,

Skin I, 2020. Oil on canvas.

An Editor’s NoteDear Reader,

In a way, this journal has been a product of the year’s cri-ses—our irst independent Spring Edition was nearly interrupted by the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic and this Winter Edition arrives amidst the irst round of vaccine distribution. he humanities are often characterized as cloistered within the ivory tower, but it seems this year has irreversibly punctured that insulation (or its illusion). As under-graduates, our staf has been displaced, and among our ranks are the frontline workers and economically disadvantaged students who have borne the brunt of this crisis. In this issue, we have decided to confront the moment’s signiicance rather than aspire for escapist normalcy. After months of lockdown and social distancing in New York, we decided for the irst time to include a theme in our call for papers: Art in Conine-ment. We asked a few questions: How are the arts afected by the medi-cal, social, and economic crises which give rise to coninement? How are the arts enlisted in periods of personal or collective coninement? What aspects of coninement—restrictions on mobility, social isolation, architectural barriers—manifest in art? he irst among four extraordinary responses, Laurie Roark turns the academic lens towards vlogs. After a year lived through Zoom, Youtube, and Tiktok, Roark’s reading of Ann Hirsh’s “Scandalicious” ofers an examination of the uploaded videos we have relied on to preserve socialization and entertainment during coninement, arguing that the medium itself conines the artist to a display of disingenuous

narcissism. In Questioning the Useful Corpse Aubrienne Krysiewicz-Bell summons the AIDS crisis in the work of David Wojnarowicz to interrogate how the visualization of a pandemic’s human toll can resist lattening subjects to ‘victims’ and mobilize for action. It is a pertinent quest; this year images of overrun emergency rooms, stacked coins, and even mass graves seemed to fail to deliver a sense of urgency to much of the American public. hough COVID gave rise to our theme, we would be remiss to overlook the ongoing crises of injustice that appeared long before 2020, those of systemic racism and colonialism. Zoë Hopkins combines Black feminist and postcolonial theory to analyze an assemblage of Wangechi Mutu, demonstrating how categories of identity—gender, race, Self, Other—conine marginalized bodies, and how Mutu’s work imagines liberatory alternatives. he conining nature of colonial identity is explored again in the context of Southeast Asia by Ashleigh Chow. She examines Lee Wen’s hyper-racialized performance, Yellow Man in Jour-ney of a Yellow Man #1 (1992), to suggest that his ironic and paradoxi-cal self-presentation subverts the colonial gaze though it may appear to reproduce orientalist essentialization. In our varia section, Jennifer Yang assembles a collection of emerging contemporary artists—Wimo Ambala Bayang from Indone-sia, Yee I-Lann from Malaysia, Wawi Navarroza from the Philippines—to lay out how photography can challenge colonial legacies and fashion local post-colonial identities in a South-East Asia often overlooked by art historians. Finally, Calista Blanchard unsettles Christian and Pagan aesthetic divisions in the Caucuses, examining the pagan origins of 5th-century cross pillars in Georgian outdoor cathedrals. Her work contrib-utes to broader eforts to recover early Christianity’s continuity with the polytheistic past from later erasure. Together, this constellation of articles runs the gauntlet be-tween ponderance and provocation, delivering an array of truly exciting undergraduate work. We hope this small intellectual exchange can ofer readers insight into both the signiicance and continuity of our moment.

Happy Reading,

Noah And Yasemin

8Scandalishious Narcissismhe Boundaries of Intimacy in Internet

Video Performance

Laurie RoarkYale University ‘21

Table ofContents

21 Zoe HopkinsHarvard University ‘23

32Questioning the Useful Corpse

Representing AIDS in the

Work of David Wojnarowicz

Aubrienne Krysiewicz-BellHarvard University ‘23

40Of ‘Yellow’Performing Orientalisms and Cultural

Hybridity in Lee Wen’s “Journey of

a Yellow Man No. 1”

Ashleigh Chowhe Courtauld Institute of Art ‘21

60Reimagining Southeast Asian Postcoloniality

Local strategies of photographic represen-

tation in Indonesia, Malaysia,

and the Philippines

Jennifer YangUniversity of Sydney ‘22

77Stone Trees and Holy Forests

An Investigation into the Pagan Origins

of the Georgian Cross Pillar

Calista Blanchard Rutgers University—New Brunswick ‘21

Cyborg AssemblageWangechi Mutu and the

Politics of Hybridity

Varia

Art in Confinement

cial, and economic crises w

hich

giv

e r

ise to it?

CON FINE

MENT

How are the arts af ected by the medica

l, so

-or collective conf nement?

Wha

t as

pects

of con-How are the arts enlisted in pe

riods

of p

erson

al

tion, architectural barriers—

man

ifes

t in

art?

f nement—

restrictions on mobility, s

ocia

l iso

la-

A R T I N

Among 2020’s remarkable images were the grids of painted

circles that first lined New York City’s Domino Park. As unfor-

gettable signs of social distancing, they provide one sense of

confinement: the prohibition of interpersonal proximity.

8 Scandalishious Narcissism

Abstract

In 2008, video performance artist Ann Hirsch—then a graduate student at Syracuse University—became interested in YouTube as a means to explore media and sexuality, and she began uploading videos on a channel called “Scandalishious,” in which she performed as a college freshman named Caroline. Hirsch’s performance took place entirely from her bedroom in Syracuse over an eighteen-month period, and in it, she adopted the conven-tions of young women’s internet videos, performing the intimacy of opening the girl’s bedroom to the public eye—exposing the interior. In the project, too, Hirsch relishes in the online attention she receives, and her performance of the vlog—the “camwhore”—is the natural development of video art’s

Scandalishious Narcissism

Laurie Roark

h e Boundaries of Intimacy in Internet Video Performance

Figure 1. “Scandalishious” YouTube channel in 2008, reconstructed screen-shot via Net Art Anthology.

Columbia Undergraduate Journal of Art History 9

In 1931, Virginia Woolf relected on her success as a writer and

artist in the now famous speech “Professions for Women.” She en-couraged the young women in the audience to write, to create, telling them “the room is your own, but it is still bare.”1 Since the advent of the nuclear family, the girl’s bedroom has become an object of cultural fascination. he bedroom is a site of privacy and play, a site of budding intellect and sexuality. he bedroom is where young girls make friends at sleepovers, cover walls with drawings, pen diaries, and, more recently, make vlogs. Since the launch of YouTube in 2005, teenage girls have locked to the platform and uploaded book recommendations, dances, makeup tips, “story times,” and confession-als. Filmed in their bedrooms, these videos have made their private spaces public. In 2008, video performance artist Ann Hirsch—then a graduate student at Syracuse University—be-came interested in the videos girls and women were sharing on You-Tube.

1 Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in Interiors, ed. Johanna Burton, Lynne Cooke, and Josiah McElheny (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Center for Cura-torial Studies, Bard College, 2012), 36.

At the time, the platform’s slogan was “Broadcast Yourself,” and that is what its users did. he vast majority of videos were unpol-ished and low-i, many recorded on webcams and uploaded directly from laptops sitting on desks in bedrooms. Hirsch saw the site as a potential means to explore media and sexual-ity, and she began uploading videos on a channel called “Scandalishious,” in which she performed as a college freshman named Caroline. Hirsch’s performance took place entirely from her bedroom in Syracuse over an eighteen-month period, and in it, she adopted the conventions of young women’s internet videos, performing the intimacy of open-ing the girl’s bedroom to the public eye—exposing the interior. In the project, too, Hirsch relishes in the online attention she receives, and her performance of the vlog—the “camwhore”—is the natural devel-opment of video art’s “aesthetics of narcissism,” as discussed by Rosalind Krauss. his essay explores “Scandal-ishious” and the relationship between

“aesthetics of narcissism,” as discussed by Rosalind Krauss. his essay explores “Scandalishious” and the dualism of intimacy and narcissism in Hirsch’s internet-based performance. YouTube was never the non-hegemonic media utopia that Hirsch envisioned, but instead, a platform literally encoded with algorithmic restrictions. Hirsch’s adoption of tropes for young women on the internet, with her simultaneous refusal to let them go unchallenged, serves as a critique of online space—which at irst blush can seem liberating for young women, but that ultimately proves destructive.


intimacy and narcissism in Hirsch’s internet-based performance In her 1976 essay, “Video: he Aesthetics of Narcissism,” Ro-salind Krauss identiies the condi-tion of “mirror-relection” in video art. Unlike ilm, which had to be developed before it could be seen, the video cameras of the 1960s and 1970s produced instant feedback, projecting its image onto a monitor at the same time as it recorded. hus, the artist, ilming herself, could look at her own image in the monitor “re-projected with the immediacy of a mirror.”2 Krauss understood the “mirror-relection” of the monitor to break the artist’s relationship to the text—the objects external to her—instead displacing the self, “trans-forming the performer’s subjectivity into another, mirror, object.”3 For Krauss, this displacement of the self into a mirror object is the deinition of narcissism. Furthermore, that video art only exists in replay—a reproduction in the media which veriies its existence as art—reiies that narcissism. Krauss further asserts that video art becomes art only when it is broadcast, while the self can only be understood through feedback. We can apply the same narcissistic feedback loop which Krauss describes to the internet vlog, as it is ilmed

2 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: he Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 52.3 Krauss, “Video,” 54.4 “Scandalishious,” in Net Art Anthology, ed. Rhizome staf (New York: New Mu-seum, 2018), https://anthology.rhizome.org/scandalishious.

directly on a webcam with instant feedback on the computer screen.

Seeing one’s image on a computer screen, instantly and ininitely replayable, is an addictive narcissistic feedback loop. When an individual—artist or otherwise—sat-urates a digital landscape with images of herself, she begins to re-project her subjectivity onto that mirror object, altering her identity in the process. Hirsch’s projection onto the Caroline character is, on its surface, easy to critique. In fact, while Hirsch produced “Scandalishious” as a graduate student, she received a great deal of criticism from her professors and peers. Many of them saw the performance as merely a girl making self-indulgent videos, searching for attention online. In response, Hirsch defended her project by declaring that the performance “not only looks like all the other videos of girls danc-ing in their pants that you might ind on YouTube, it is that.”4 hen, it seems Hirsch was acting intention-ally self-indulgent within the inten-tionally narcissistic medium, using internet video as a space to explore her own relationship to media and sexuality as a young woman. In an interview with he Guardian, Hirsch explains that exploring her sexuality on the internet—from the privacy


of her own bedroom, even as she projected it publicly—felt safer than doing so in the oline world. hat feeling of safety on the internet is shared by many participants of the online community.5 he level of ano-nymity and objectivity we feel with our mirror-selves on the internet disconnects that identity from our tangible, oline reality, afording us the freedom of exploration and play in the digital space.

he character of Caro-line, then, functioned as the site of Hirsch’s exploration and play. Hirsch performed as Caroline in more than a hundred videos uploaded to the “Scandalishious” YouTube channel (ig. 1). All the videos are recorded on Hirsch’s laptop inside of her Syracuse apartment, typically in her bedroom, though sometimes in the kitchen or other interior rooms. She is always alone, recording herself either dancing or talking in a high pitched, valley accent to her audi-ence through the webcam. In one of the most popular videos on the “Scandalishious” channel with nearly 150,000 views, “caroline + bon-nie tyler,” Hirsch dances to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (ig. 2).6 For the duration of the ive-minute, forty-ive-second video, Hirsch dances in front of her web-cam, frequently checking her own

5 Mikhel Proulx, “Protocol and Performativity,” Performance Research 21, no. 5 (2016): 114, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1224341.6 Ann Hirsch, “caroline + bonnie tyler,” YouTube video, 5:49, Posted Feb. 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN2wUbfhYlw.

image on the monitor. Her dancing is unpolished, unrehearsed. She bobs her head, squishes her face, rules her skirt, points her butt toward the screen, and rolls around on the couch behind her, frequently lip-syncing to the love song, serenading her anonymous audience. When the song inishes, she approaches the screen to press a button to stop recording, and without a word or any ceremony, she signs of. In her un-polished dance performance, Hirsch is self-consciously both sexy and awkward, looking at her mirror-self in a narcissistic self-show, one that, in Krauss’s framework, becomes art only when broadcast. Taking You-Tube’s “Broadcast Yourself ” slogan seriously, Hirsch found fertile ground on which to turn her exploration of identity into performance art.

Aware of the status of her performance in the online world, Hirsch uses the vlog format and aesthetics to play directly into the tropes for young women online in 2008. Studying video art in graduate school, Hirsch modeled early video artists who countered hegemonic media. Hirsch envisioned You-Tube as a kind of non-hierarchical, utopian media-sharing platform, where artists and other individu-als (particularly women and people of color) could freely share work in


a “many-to-many media mode.”7 Instead, Hirsch found that women on YouTube, rather than creating freely, were recreating the roles they already knew, projecting a version of sexiness—already embedded in hegemonic culture—onto the mirror objects of their screens. Imitating the tropes that women reenacted in their videos, Hirsch hoped to reveal the awkwardness of that imitation, thus breaking down “the artiice of sexiness itself.”8

Hirsch sought to expose that artiice by breaking down a dichoto-my between the two types of videos she noticed that young women on YouTube were producing. he irst were videos in which women talked, allowing their faces to be seen and their identities known by the audi-ence. he others were “young faceless women” who danced for the camera, usually in a sexually provocative way, while hiding their identities.9 Hirsch sought to create a persona in Caro-line who combined those two tropes, allowing herself at once the vulner-ability of being seen as a person and as a sexual being, opening herself up to the voyeurism of a largely anony-mous audience. On “Scandalishi-

7 “Ann Hirsch on the art project that invaded her private life,” he Start podcast from he Guardian, produced by Eva Krysiak, Feb. 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/audio/2018/feb/08/ann-hirsch-art-online-youtube-scandalishious-the-start-podcast.8 “Ann Hirsch,” he Start. 9 “Ann Hirsch,” he Start.10 Walter Benjamin, “Louis Phillippe, or the Interior” in he Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: he Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 9.

ous,” Hirsch responded to trends on YouTube, mirroring the format of videos created in earnest by other young women. Frequently, too, she invented emotions to elicit responses from her viewers. At the same time, Hirsch felt the project had genuine emotional value for her as an indi-vidual and as an artist. As previously stated, for Hirsch, “Scandalishious” not only looked like what it was, it was that. he performance, in all its tensions, enabled a kind of intimacy between subject and object as the artist explored her own identity.

Sitting in the intimacy of her own bedroom, Hirsch dwells in the interior. he genre of the interior has been referred to by Walter Ben-jamin as “the asylum of art,” a scene rich for psychological probing.10 In the interior, we are concerned with the private individual and the traces of her dwelling, particularly objects, which leave behind the marks of her being there. “Scandalishious” gives a limited view into the objects of Caroline’s interior. In various videos, we see a red couch, a bed, and a closet full of clothes. Benjamin’s methodology can be closely applied to Hirsch’s videos, dwelling on the

Figure 2. “caroline + bonnie tyler,” You-Tube, screenshot via author.

Figure 3. Grid of response videos to “Scandalishious,” via Net Art Anthology.



Figure 4. “LETTERS TO AN INTERNET WHORE,” YouTube, screenshot via author.

Figure 5. “CAROLINE’S OFFICIAL GOODBYE VIDEO,” YouTube, screenshot via author.

interior as a space of psychological openness and vulnerability. Hirsch has said that Syracuse felt like a “very lonely, sad, cold, desolate place,” and because of that, instead of making art out in the world, she retreated inward, staying inside to make videos on the internet.11 Alone in her apart-ment, Hirsch revealed her private bedroom to an audience of anony-mous strangers online, and while she was performing as a character, this exposure made her vulnerable. Due to this vulnerability, the performance of Caroline frequently felt to Hirsch like a genuine expression of her own bottled emotions.12 In that way, the private safety of Hirsch’s performance enabled an intimate authenticity between the artist and the artwork, despite her deliberate manipulation of an audience who did not know she was performing.

Within months, “Scandal-ishious” began to gather an audience. Hirsch received immediate external responses to her performance, either in comments, private messages, or response videos. Increasingly, Hirsch felt a community forming around Caroline, and that commu-nity became a part of the project. Hirsch herself became embedded in this online world as she engaged with Caroline’s responses. Dozens of

11 “Ann Hirsch,” he Start.12 “Ann Hirsch,” he Start.13 “Scandalishious,” in Net Art Anthology.14 Ann Hirsch, “LETTERS TO AN INTERNET WHORE,” You-Tube video, 4:29, Posted December 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmlU4qaKl40&t=2s.

responses to “Scandalishious” have been archived in the Net Art Anthol-ogy.13 he videos fall into three main categories: teenage girls who admire and seek to emulate Caroline and her dancing; men who sexualize Caro-line, compliment her on her looks, and request certain dances; and hate comments, most from young men, who criticize Caroline for being self-obsessed, untalented, and attention-seeking—in the online slang of the period, a “camwhore” (ig. 3). he gendered nature of these three reac-tions is unsurprising, and it conirms Hirsch’s critique of and interest in YouTube as a gendered space.

In a video uploaded in De-cember 2008, “LETTERS TO AN INTERNET WHORE,” Hirsch, as Caroline, addresses and responds to Caroline’s “fan mail” from viewers of Scandalishious (ig. 4).14 Caroline, sitting on a chair in front of a wallpa-pered background and speaking in a high, bubbly voice, opens by encour-aging “fun and crazy” letters from her fans before focusing on the screen of her laptop—where she is also record-ing herself—to read her YouTube messages. She then begins reading a letter from a fan named Kevin, who makes explicit and detailed requests of Caroline, calling her dancing “erotic” and asking her to wear “tight


skinny jeans” and “rub [her] butt se-ductively” on camera. Caroline reads the letter in a deadpan voice, but her voice rises again when she inishes, turning her head slightly and break-ing her gaze with the monitor to look directly into the camera and ad-dress Kevin. She thanks him for his request, calls him “really sweet,” but says that she cannot follow through on such a speciic request because she is a “free spirit.” he juxtaposition between Caroline’s deadpan reading of the explicit letter with her bub-bly response to Kevin is at the core of Hirsch’s performance. Hirsch is clearly uncomfortable by the way that her videos—and her identity—have been co-opted by an audience of strangers. However, as her own identity is distanced by the mechan-ics of her online performance, she accepts those messages that make her uncomfortable. Choosing to respond to this message in particular, Hirsch utilizes her discomfort as a means of critique; the video makes public the explicit and violating nature of otherwise private comments, refusing to leave them unchallenged.

In the second half of the four-and-a-half-minute video, Caro-line responds to a message from a fourteen-year-old girl who expresses her desire to be like Caroline, as well as to a hate comment, which includes a death threat. Caroline responds to the hate mail by saying that it inspires her, that she feels as if she is “actually creating emotions and, like, visceral feelings in people”

and that she is “really making a diference…really doing something right” by expressing who she “truly [is].” he irony is, of course, that Caroline is a performance, not an au-thentic person. In this video, Hirsch is concerned with her responses on one level, and with questions of authenticity on the other. Hirsch spends a great deal of energy—in this video and in others—telling her audience that she is expressing her true self, that she really is who she claims to be. his efort is not only that of an artist trying to maintain a believable performance, but also an emblem of internet life. Because the internet allows one to curate one’s online identity, those identities have always been subject to suspicion. As a result, people with online person-alities—particularly young women—have been compelled to frequently reassert their authenticity, often by posting photos of themselves hold-ing paper with their usernames or other custom messages handwritten on them, or, as in Caroline’s case, posting videos reading comments and messages. Of course, Caroline’s video does not prove her authentic-ity. As the internet is a site for play and exploration, it is also a site for private deception, a condition which enables it to become fertile ground for the construction of identities, as in Hirsch’s case.

Even if one is not a video performance artist, to be on the internet at all is to perform. YouTube was never the non-hegemonic media



utopia that Hirsch envisioned, but a platform literally encoded with algorithmic restrictions. In “Protocol and Performativity,” Mikhel Proulx discusses the performance built into online systems, particularly in social media. Proulx asserts that “perfor-mance online is coded” doubly “both by ‘oline’ ideological systems as well as through ‘online’ technical systems.”15 herefore, Hirsch’s per-formance as a young woman online was coded before she even began it. Participating in online youth culture, which has a “heightened imperative to perform stylized ideals in identity performance” within “the relative safety of a personal com-puter,” Hirsch found herself free to explore the stylized identity of young womanhood.16 While at irst Hirsch saw her performance as an expression of free access to media-creation, she quickly found that online culture for young women was seeped in what Proulx calls “a shallow rhetoric of empowerment and self-serving individualism.”17 In his essay, Proulx examines the performance and installation work of Molly Soda, a millennial woman artist who, like Hirsch, explores the aesthetics and mechanisms of online performance

15 Proulx, “Protocol and Performativity,” 114.16 Ibid. 17 Ibid.18 Ibid.19 Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Sally Jo Fifer and Doug Hall (New York: Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990), 31.20 Rosler, “Video,” 31.

for young women. Proulx asserts, “Soda ofers up relentless, linked-in imagery of herself that does not quite sit right – does not pass for norma-tive or conventional.”18 he notion of the performance that “does not quite sit right” appears in Hirsch’s work, particularly in “LETTERS TO AN INTERNET WHORE.”

Hirsch’s adoption of tropes for young women on the internet, with her simultaneous refusal to let them go unchallenged, serves as a cri-tique of online space. At irst blush, the virtual arena seems liberating for young women, but it ultimately proves destructive. his critique of online media is a natural outgrowth of video artists’ critique of television media in the 1960s and 1970s. In “Video: Shedding the Utopian Mo-ment,” Martha Rosler establishes that video art of the period “posed a chal-lenge to the sites of art production in society, to the forms and ‘channels’ of delivery, and to the passivity of reception built into them.”19 In their utopian critique of hegemonic mass media, early video artists, acting under the legacy of the avant-garde movement, worked to merge “art with social life,” making “audience and producer interchangeable.”20 To

some degree, the intimacy established between Hirsch and her audience in “Scandalishious” does merge art with social life. However, the dynamic between Hirsch and her audience is not equalized, and Hirsch’s ability to respond to her letters and videos illustrates the power struggle at play between the two parties.

“Scandalishious,” operating in an intimate interior, focuses on the private feeling of Caroline talking to the webcam as if she were talking to a friend. Rosler asserts that video positions “the individual and the world of the ‘private’ over and against the ‘public’ space of the mass,” emphasizing “the experience and the sensibilities of the individual.”21 Due to that intimacy, however, viewers of “Scandalishious” felt they knew Caroline personally, a relationship which enabled their inappropriate, overly personal demands. In the end, Hirsch remains in power, as she withholds key information from her audience: she is not Caroline, and Caroline is not real. he perfor-mance, despite its apparent intimacy, can never be authentic through the lens of narcissistic video. Within Krauss’s framework, it is the medium itself—the artist always looking at her mirror relection—that has displaced the performer’s subjectivity into “another, mirror, object.”22 Ann

21 Rosler, “Video,” 32.22 Krauss, “Video,” 54.23 Ann Hirsch, “CAROLINE’S OFFICIAL GOODBYE VIDEO,” YouTube video, 7:26, Posted Dec. 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFX7iNgsAPY.

Hirsch, the performer, and Caroline, the character, have been irreparably severed by the webcam, the monitor, and the YouTube video player.

Toward the end of 2009, Hirsch was blackmailed by one of the viewers of “Scandalishious,” who demanded she send him a nude video. Out of fear of exposure of her private life, Hirsch had her university remove all traces of her from their website, and she stopped posting on “Scandalishious.” She backed away from the project, retreating this time into oline safety. In December of that year, however, she uploaded “CAROLINE’S OFFICIAL GOOD-BYE VIDEO” in which she told her audience, “I’m done being Scan-dalishious” and oicially closed the project (ig. 5).23 Speaking to her au-dience in the confessional video style, she says, “So, some of you know that I’m, like, an artist, and I was think-ing, maybe this is my art.” For a few moments, the bubbly, high voice of Caroline drops down to the authen-tic voice of Ann, as she explains what she sought to learn about herself and the internet on “Scandalishi-ous,” before she raises her voice back again, to the high voice of Caroline, backing up to perform one last dance. She says to the camera before she goes, “Whatever happens, know that I’m real, and that I’m here.” he



video closes as Caroline dances to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” spin-ning around her apartment.

Before turning of the webcam, Hirsch says a inal goodbye, giving acknowledgements to Gor-don Winiemko, her collaborator on the piece. In the end, then, Hirsch reveals “Scandalishious” as an art performance, rather than an intimate view into her own life. Ultimately, Hirsch’s performance of internet narcissism gave her a closed feedback loop, which at once enabled and endangered her, in which she ofered both connection and critique. Hirsch built a room for Caroline online, a room at once constricted and free, private and public, genuine and predetermined. In its contradictions, “Scandalishious” exposes the paradox of online life: one is free to explore the intimacies of identity, but one is forever constricted to the perfor-mance of narcissism.


“Ann Hirsch on the art project that invaded her private life.” he Start podcast from he Guardian. Produced by Eva Krysiak. Feb. 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/audio/2018/feb/08/ann-hirsch-art-online-youtube-scandalishious-the-start-podcast.

Benjamin, Walter. “Louis Phillippe, or the Interior.” In he Arcades Project,translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, 8-9. Cambridge, MA and London: he Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

Hirsch, Ann. “caroline + bonnie tyler.” YouTube video, 5:49. Posted Feb. 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN2wUbfhYlw.

———“CAROLINE’S OFFICIAL GOODBYE VIDEO.” YouTube video, 7:26. Posted Dec. 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFX7iNgsAPY.

———“LETTERS TO AN INTERNET WHORE.” YouTube video, 4:29. Posted Dec. 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmlU4qaKl40&t=2s.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Video: he Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October 1, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 50-64.

Proulx, Mikhel. “Protocol and Performativity.” Performance Research 21, no. 5 (2016): 114-118. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2016.1224341.

Rosler, Martha. “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment.” In Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. Edited by Sally Jo Fifer and Doug Hall, 31-50. New York: Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990.

“Scandalishious.” In Net Art Anthology, edited by Rhizome staf. New York: New Museum, 2016-2019. https://anthology.rhizome.org/scandalishi-ous.

Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” In Interiors, edited by Johanna Burton, Lynne Cooke, and Josiah McElheny, 32-36. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2012. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31822038710331.

Bibliography

Laurie Roark is a student at Yale University, where she will graduate with a degree in American Studies this spring.


Cyborg AssemblageZoë Hopkins

Wangechi Mutu and the Politics of Hybridity

Figure 1. Wangechi Mutu, Hide ’n’ Seek, Kill or Speak, 2004. Mixed media collage and paint on mylar.

22 Cyborg Assemblage

Wangechi Mutu’s Hide ‘n’ Seek, Kill or Speak is unwaver-

ingly confrontational. Exemplary of Mutu’s large scale mixed media col-lages on mylar, Hide ‘n’ Seek boldly embodies a clashing of the seemingly natural with the seemingly techno-logical, the human with the other-worldly, and the beautiful with the eerie—radically disrupting the pos-sibility of viewing it with any sense of comfortability or ease. Mutu’s collage features a goddess of East Af-rican mythology known as an nguva, a creature thought to be derived from the dugong—one of the most endangered mammals in East Africa.1 Crouching in the foreground of the

1 “Hide 'n' Seek, Kill or Speak.” he Studio Museum in Harlem, November 28, 2018. https://studiomuseum.org/collection-item/hide-n-seek-kill-or-speak.

painting is an nguva—a water-wom-an goddess of East African mythol-ogy. She ixes us steadily in her gaze, the whites of her eyes held distinct from the rough material of her skin. he nguva is deiant not only in her gaze, but also in the very fact of her presence, which eludes the politics of recognizability and slips into a coded, secret language. Does she rep-resent recollection or futurity —the pre or post colonial? Is she human or alien? Or perhaps she is neither? he nguva resists intelligibility under the conventional rubrics of humanism. She is situated beyond the lexicon of the subject or the normative “female igure.” his paper will interpret Hide

Abstract

his paper engages Wangechi Mutu’s Hide n’ Seek, Kill or Speak through a lens that combines Black feminism and postcolonial theory. Hide n’ Seek, which depicts an East African mythological creature called an nguva, is demon-strative of Mutu’s slippage between the borders of futurity and folklore, the recognizable and the unintelligible. Drawing from Homi Bhabha’s analysis of postcolonial interstitiality, as well as Hortense Spiller’s scholarship on the hi-eroglyphics of the lesh, I consider how the aesthetic and material dimensions of Mutu’s deiant work unsettle the coloniality of being human. My paper argues that Mutu’s work, and the binary-refusing thinking that undergirds it, advances posthumanist conceptions of being that is guided by a careful critique of race and gender—and the exclusion of those marginalized by those categories from the notion of being itself. Situating Mutu’s work within the theoretical rubric of the racialized assemblage rather than the self-determined subject, I will explore how Mutu seeks to decolonize the human, even moving beyond it completely. My paper determines Mutu’s work within a radical (de)gendered politics guided by a conception of the ways in which gender glitches (or fails) the Black body, and opens up alternative possibilities in so doing.


’n’ Seek through the lens of critical theory on postcolonial hybridity and Black feminist interstitiality, examin-ing Mutu’s work as a disruption of binary colonial and Western thought grounded in humanism. I will argue that in rejecting Western human-ism, Mutu’s piece instantiates a shift towards a post-human hybridity that is articulated in the otherized, gendered, and raced body, a para-on-tology that resists binary settlement.

As a point of departure, an explanation of postcolonial hy-bridity is fundamental to the argu-ment of this paper. Hybridity theory holds that the postcolonial body, indelibly marked and molded by both precolonial and colonial experi-ences and ways of being, emerges as hybrid. he postcolonial standpoint, formed in the cultural, political, and phenomenological breaks between the colonial gaze and the gaze of the colonized self, exists within the unique epistemological and onto-logical position that these interstitial spaces aford. In so doing, the post-colonial subject-but-object radically disrupts conigurations of the subject that rely on dual or binary systems of categorization—as has been canonized in Western philosophy. he theory of postcolonial hybrid-ity is perhaps most closely ailiated with scholar Homi K. Bhabha, who

2 Bhabha, H. (1985). Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817. Critical Inquiry 12 (1), 144-165. 3 Mutu interviewed in Moss, David. “Wangechi Mutu: this you call civilization.” 2010.

describes this rebellious, unconined modality of being in his seminal text On the Location of Culture. Bhabha writes: “it is the power of hybridity that enables the colonized to chal-lenge the boundaries of discourse, and which breaks down the sym-metry and duality of the self/Other, inside/outside, and which establishes another space of power/knowledge.”2 Mutu herself has articulated a critical understanding of the postcolonial being as a hybrid one. When in-terviewed on her artwork, Mutu expressed that “the idea of clear binaries—African/European, archaic/modern and religion/pornography—I’ve never really believed in that. I’m interested in powerful images that strike chords embedded deep in our subconsciousness.”3 Mutu’s quest to break down the barriers of binary thought, to situate her artwork with-in the cultural interstices of postcolo-nial hybridity, thus becomes a quest towards a kind of spiritual reckoning, a location of the self through the denial of predetermined discourses. he mythological, semi-divine being we encounter in Hide ’n’ Seek is the most obviously hybrid dimension of Mutu’s work: it is the irst site of disruption of convention-al, unidimensional, universal under-standings of the human that Western humanism and its foundational texts


take as immutable. he nguva, in her essence as a mythological creature, naturally transcends the category of the human and repudiates the tradi-tion of secular humanism, which demands that the free and rational being divest itself from the mythical and the spiritual. But at the same time, the nguva does not settle easily in this vein of categorization of being super-human, or so totally mythical that she immediately registers as not human. he nguva’s eyes, mouth, and ears, drawn from magazine clippings, are icons of human physiology that beg us to interpret her as sapient. he shape of her body also resembles that of a human, with limbs resembling arms and legs, and a human-shaped head. But the materiality of this body enacts a radical departure from the human: her skin is made up of an unidentiiable kind of pattern that is almost scale-like, perhaps an allusion to the mythological nguva’s existence as a water creature. Her spine is decorated with shimmering spots enhancing our sense that she is cross-ing the boundaries of the human, that she is somewhat alien to our understandings of human physicality. Observed in concert, these markings of the human and the “non” become co-constitutive facets of the nguva’s bodily assemblage, rendering her a igure in the break between half and full—a human but not quite human. he paradoxical encounters that Mutu stages in her work beg the question of lens: speciically, which gazes are operative in the forma-

tion of this work? On the one hand, Mutu’s nguva appears powerfully in control of the picture plane, con-fronting the viewer, daring us to gaze back at her. She does not concede to legibility under the rubrics of the normative body. She is represented as fragmented in her fantastical non-humanness—her lesh assembled out of a multitude of materials, her very physicality signifying a kind of irreconcilable fracturing, an aporia. But this registering of the nguva as alien, as subversive in her failure to acquiesce to normative physical-ity, necessarily calls coloniality into conversation: it is coloniality that constructs the normatively gendered and raced body. Even if we chose to view the nguva’s nonhumanness as superhuman rather than subhuman, her being is informed and regulated by colonial ways of seeing. Her frag-mentated, indeterminate form simul-taneously refuses and calls upon the gaze of the colonizer, both taunting it and calling it into being in the very act of this taunting. In imbricating the otherizing gaze of the colonizer with the intractable stare of the colo-nized, Mutu into motion a kind of double sight. he lesh of the nguva, and more generally, the human/in-humanness represented in materiality of Mutu’s work in many ways enacts this hybrid gaze and situates the aes-thetic of the piece in realms beyond the binary. Mutu’s igure is inescap-ably rendered within that complex psychological position of second-sight and double-consciousness


W.E.B. Du Bois famously describes: “he Negro is…born with a veil, and gifted with a second-sight,” Du Bois writes. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” he conspicuousness of the nguva’s eyes, which Mutu frames with Black skin, calls attention to the centrality of gaze in the psychological madness of racialization. he tense stare with which the nguva grips the viewer is fraught with these traumas. he un-fettered capacity of this double-sight to rupture, or “tear asunder” the spirit as Du Bois puts it,4 testiies to the absolute illogic of racialism and racial categories. he hybrid human/hu-manoid appearance of the nguva also visualizes rebellion against racial categorization, and with it the foundations of Western humanism. As Achille Mbembe argues, “racism is above all a technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, ‘that old sovereign right of death.”5 In other words, if the colonial infra-structure is contingent on deining and maintaining racial binaries, the postcolonial infrastructure is one that disrupts colonial categorizations of race. he nguva is racialized as Black, but she also transcends the colonial

4 Ibid5 Mbembé, J.-A., and Libby Meintjes. "Necropolitics." Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), 11-40. muse.jhu.edu/article/39984.

trope of phenotypical categoriza-tion. She is meant to represent a igure of East African mythology, which we are wont to assume sug-gests Blackness, given that icons of a given culture are often racialized as if they were born of that speciic culture. She also wears features that signify Blackness/Africanness—Mutu is known to frequently make use of pieces from historically Black magazines to build up her igures, actively lending them features that strike the viewer’s consciousness as Black. he skin around the nguva’s captivating eyes is dark brown in hue, and her lips are full—denoting a Black phenotype. It also happens that these features are some of the most recognizably human parts of her physique. At the same time, the majority of the nguva’s skin does not bear resemblance to any sort of hu-man skin-tone, and of course neither do the parts of her body formed out of machinery. So Blackness emerges again as both human and other: it is Blackness that carries the sole signiiers of human physiology, but Blackness becomes inseparable from alienness in its attachment to the nguva’s body. Blackness, then, like the igure of the postcolonial hybrid, instantiates a visual and (meta)physi-cal threat to colonial determinations of the human. Simultaneously, in forming the body out of pieces that


signify Blackness alongside pieces that signify neither Blackness nor humanness, Mutu exposes the total constructedness of race, revealing co-lonial mechanisms of socio-political control that hinge on categorizations and reject hybridity. he interrogation of race as a construction of biopolitical vio-lence begs a more careful examina-tion of the discursive space in which gender is made construct. he nguva does not settle within the conscripts of gender. While it is true that the nguva is conventionally as a “mythi-cal water woman from East African folklore,” and is historically referred to with “she/her” pronouns, the nguva igured in Mutu’s work renders this categorization insuicient in her cyborgian opposition to the gender binary: the body she inhabits not only eludes the human, but more speciically, it slips into the techno-logical. Parts of her shoulder, thigh, and feet are assembled from metal scraps and tools, redoubling the am-biguity of her body and articulating a kind of Afrofuturist science iction. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is useful in approaching the question of gender as it relates to the Mutu’s igure. Haraway famously declares “the cyborg is a creature in a post gender world,” arguing that in its non-singularity, the cyborg neces-sarily destabilizes the taxonomy of identity, and thus the idea of gender as ixed. Haraway underscores that the struggle for identities based in wholeness, or the struggle for “unity

through domination,” is foundation-al to the logic of Western human-ism, which relies on the myth of the universal, unitary subject to make its claims. he cyborg, on the other hand, is a repudiation of humanism’s demand for the unitary. But even the cyborg covertly, perhaps unwit-tingly, partakes in binaries. Take the words of Harraway as an example: Harraway famously declares in the inal line of her essay “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” But can these things not coexist? he nguva is both cyborg and goddess: her cyborg existence does not undo her ties with a spiritual and mythological lineage. While the nguva certainly approaches the idea of the cyborg in the lit-eral mechanics of her physique, she remains a fugitive of the binaries that even Harraway’s language falls into.

Looking towards Black feminist theory is useful in clos-ing some of the loopholes that Harraway’s work does not account for, speciically in the locus where gender meets racism and coloniality. he visuality of the nguva’s being calls upon the work of Hortense Spillers, who theorizes Blackness as a state of being non-gendered. In her deini-tive essay Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, Spillers writes that Blackness is a “materialized scene of unprotected female lesh—of female lesh ‘ungen-dered’.” For Spillers, this ungender-ing—which follows the brutalities of enslavement, colonization, and other apparatuses of Necropolitics directed at Blackness—occurs at

the distinction between “the body and the lesh.” Spillers remarks that “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘lesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptual-ization that does not escape conceal-ment under the brush of discourse or the relexes of iconography.”6 In other words, the body falls under the discursive and iconographic domain of the embodied subject, while the lesh is a mass of non-subject physi-cality, anterior to the body and illeg-ible to the grammars of subjecthood and life. Spiller’s conceptualization of lesh refers speciically to Black non-bodies for which the discourse of being and humanity lack terminol-ogy, apprehended by the indescrib-able violence by which Blackness has been rendered unhuman. While Harraway’s cyborg seeks to describe a condition of life in a “post gen-der world,” and even a post-human world, Spillers argues that gender and humanity were never possible for those subject to the violence of captivity and colonialism. Building on this idea in another essay titled Interstices: A Small Drama of Words, Spillers writes that the Black woman is “the principal point of passage between the human and the non-human world.”7 he Black woman therefore bears no gender because she (or they, or any other pronoun) oc-

6 Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17(2), 1987.7 Spillers, Hortense J. “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words.” In Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 152-175.

cupies this terrifying elision between being and non-being that is beyond the discursive space in which gen-der is fashioned. he nguva, in her slippage away from the monikers of normalized discourse, and in her slippage in and out of the human, is a perfect instantiation of this theory. And it is her lesh, her material being of (dis)assemblage and amalgama-tion, that situates her within these liminal realms of nondeterminate subjectivity. Constructed out of a com-plex schema of shapes and motifs, Mutu’s construction of the body through collage is hybridization in practice: the body comes into being through a process of assemblage and disassemblage that speaks to the for-mation of postcolonial existence. he process of collage begins with the act of rupturing: fracturing an environ-ment by tearing something of its original place of existence. his irst function of collage, its function of disassemblage, is in many ways similar to the colonial disruption of space through fracturing and segrega-tion. Frantz Fanon’s theorization of the construction of colonial space is useful in illuminating my point. In his seminal text he Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes “the colonial world is a world cut in two” where



both zones “follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity.”8 In other words, colonialism revolves around a fracturing between the world of the colonized and the world of the colo-nizer, which Fanon describes as “two diferent species” whose experiences are irreconcilable. As Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists point out, the postcolonial being is subse-quently formed through the tortuous oscillation between and within these bifurcated, disjunctive spaces—which are both physical and psycho-logical—producing an impossible aporia. hus, postcoloniality comes into being inside what Bhabha terms a “hird Space of enunciation”9 one that is beyond—or rather in the cut between—the spatial bifurcation of colonialism that Fanon describes. he process of decolonization, and thus the formation of a postcolonial humanity, is grounded in a dialec-tic between the fracturing of space under a colonial regime and the reclamation of said space through the struggle for decolonization. Mutu’s process of collage assemblage here forms a body that is constituted by many things: the nguva is both em-bodied and disembodied, both a sin-gle and multitudinous being—whole but also very visibly fractured, with various material agents becoming legible. Mutu’s collage work is not only an assembling of various materi-als and textures, but also a conjur-

8 Fanon, Frantz. Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1968). 9 Bhabha, Homi K. he Location of Culture (Routledge, 2004).

ing of the various worlds indexed in these source materials. In gazing at Mutu’s collage, we are reminded of magazine pages and car parts and birds, a cacophony (or chorus) of that which is unseen but felt in the signiiers she has assembled. With this web of source material, Mutu’s work refuses the colonial binaries of Self/Other, One/Many, destabilizing the Western proposals of being as an isolated thing in itself. he nguva points to ways of being described by and grounded in mutuality, in the interstices formed by the continuous meeting of diference. In keeping with the work’s ontological proposals of being as an ensemble, the representation of space and environment in Mutu’s work pivots on sharing and relationality. Strikingly, the nguva is represented as simultaneous with and inseparable from her environment. he reeds that waver in the space behind her body are seemingly meshed with her very being. hey replicate the pat-terns and rhythms of the locks on the nguva’s head and her back, building a continuity between her physical presence and the imagined envi-ronment around her. Likewise, the environment itself deies traditional boundaries and conceptualizations of space. Rendered with relatively minimal detail, the only signiiers of any kind of determined ecosystem are the reeds in the backdrop of the

painting. While the reeds do con-note an aqueous environment, Mutu denies us certainty as to whether the nguva is staring at us from below the water or from the vantage of some kind of shoreline. he only other creature in the frame is a small bird nuzzled between the nguva’s head and shoulder. hus, we are met with an environment that is an amalgam of land, air, and water, an undeined space of natural continu-ity. In reading the multiplicity of this environment, Homi Bhabha is again called to mind, speciically his theories of postcolonial person-hood being formed in the interstitial “hird Space” between colonized and postcolonial positions. Bhabha de-scribes this hird Space as “[giving] rise to something diferent, some-thing new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.”10 hough Bhabha’s description of hird Space refers to an ontological hybridity, in Mutu’s work, hird Space theory is also made material and environmental. he ambiguity of the landscape and the nguva’s relationship to it, render spatial categorizations of the land obsolete. As Fanon reminds us when he describes the colonial world as cut in two, the division of space and land is foundational to coloniality. Mutu’s undetermined, hybrid landscape is thus a refusal of colonial ixations on classifying the land, and her repre-sentation of the nguva as both in and

10 Ibid., 211.

of the land subverts colonial ideas of the earth existing as a resource for in-inite human expropriation. hough the painting clearly reckons with colonialism, the environment Mutu envisions feels unblemished by the ravishes of colonial history, staging yet another ambiguity.

Invoking experiences of the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial, Mutu’s Hide ‘n’ Seek oscillates through and rebels against time—disrupting the binaries which these monikers of temporality lay claim to. he nguva, which also igures prominently in other works by Mutu, embodies this simultane-ity of past and future through its formation by technological simulacra that place us clearly in our time. In Hide n’ Seek, time is therefore an as-semblage, a montage-like slippage in and out of past, present, and future that renders these categories obsolete. Time is represented as simultane-ously broken and whole. hough the piece relies heavily on the aesthetics of Afro-futurism, these same aesthet-ics are haunted with a colonial past. Hide ’n’ Seek at once seeks to envision a new future and reckon with an old one, calling upon an understanding of the postcolonial that is necessar-ily informed by a dialectic between both precolonial existence and (post)colonial trauma. he use of modern world materials to envision this folk-loric, mythological igure is a shock-ing representation of reconigured



temporality. In using indexes of the contemporary to build a i gure that is meant to recall a historical lineage of folklore and storytelling, Mutu constructs time as circular rather than linear: it cycles back and forth, rendering obsolete the distinctions between past, present, and future. In Hide ’n’ Seek, time constantly refers back to itself, much in the same way that the postcolonial i gure is formed in the space between colonial past and postcolonial present. h e work thus asks its viewer to imagine and untangle the formation of “the postcolonial subject” through a visual representation of the literal rupturing and piecing together of the African subject and environment.

Mutu’s Hide ’n’ Seek, Kill or Speak, represents postcolonial hybridity through the very essence of its materiality, confronting the viewer with a visualization of a postcolonial i gure that deconstructs the binaries imposed on space, time, and being.

11 Gikandi, Simon. "Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Dif erence." Modernism/modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 455-80.12 Ibid, 468. 13 Ibid, 456.

h rough a process of disassemblage and assemblage, Mutu has conjured up an image of the postcolonial African i gure that is made from both past and future, human and nonhu-man, body and environment. Mutu’s assemblage work is a radical subver-sion of European painters and collage artists like Picasso and Matisse, who appropriated heavily from African aesthetics, philosophies, and theolo-gies. As Simon Gikandi describes, paintings like Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon were reliant on the colo-nial view of Africa not as a real place, but as an abstract concept servicing European fantasies of the primitive, the mystic, and the hyper-sexual.11

African masks could be collected and painted onto the faces of European women simply to represent the idea of sexual promiscuity.12 In Gikani’s words: “when [Picasso] talked about the ‘Negro’, he was talking about the object not the person.”13 But in Mutu’s assemblage, the piecing to-

Wangechi Mutu, Chocolate Nguva, 2015. Painted bronze with marble base.Image credits: h e Studio Museum in Harlem.

gether of diferent worlds repudiates, rather than reproduces the aesthetics of coloniality that have shaped the Western tradition of collage and assemblage. Hide N’ Seek gives rise to a modality of expression that is constantly break-ing free from Western conscripts of being and humanism. Mutu’s collage is a ierce commitment to unsettling the colonial foundations of being itself, a manifesto of hybrid possibility that dares to confront the ontologies we take for granted.


Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 144-65.

———he Location of Culture. Routledge Classics. London ; New York: Routledge, 2004.

Fanon, Frantz, he Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Gikandi, Simon. "Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Diference." Modernism/modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 455-80.

“Hide 'n' Seek, Kill or Speak.” he Studio Museum in Harlem, November 28, 2018. https://studiomuseum.org/collection-item/hide-n-seek-kill-or-speak.

Mbembé, J.-A., and Libby Meintjes. "Necropolitics." Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40. muse.jhu.edu/article/39984.

Moos, David., and Art Gallery of Ontario. Wangechi Mutu: his You Call Civilization? Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2010.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words.” In Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, 152-175. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

———“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17(2), 1987.

“Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey.” Brooklyn Museum: Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. Brooklyn Museum, 2014. https://www.brooklyn-museum.org/exhibitions/wangechi_mutu/.

Bibliography

Zoë Hopkins is a student at Harvard University, Class of 2023, where she studies History of Art and African American Studies.

Questioning the Useful Corpse

32 Questioning the Useful Corpse

Abstract

David Wojnarowicz was a young artist who emerged during the time of the AIDS epidemic in America whose work addresses civil rights and queer identity in American popular culture, particularly focusing on the experiences of societal “outsiders.” h e taboo surrounding AIDS in the public eye and government inaction to stop it were highly personal topics for Wojnarowicz, who witnessed i rsthand the deadly and debilitating results of institutional neglect of the epidemic. During this time, a dominant motif of AIDS-related art, seen in both the work of other queer artists as well as in media portrayals of this community, was the diseased-deformed body or corpse of an AIDS-victim. Scholars such as Lauren DeLand have labeled this trope as the “useful

Aubrienne Krysiewicz-Bell

Representing AIDS in the Work of David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day h is Kid), 1990. Whitney Museum of American Art

As America entered the 1980s and 1990s, few could have

anticipated the profound cultural change that occurred during these decades. he nation witnessed the resurgence of conservative politics, the inal phase of the Cold War, and the onset of the AIDS crisis. Institu-tional inaction and public homopho-bia were rampant during the AIDS crisis, primarily because the virus disproportionately afected commu-nities that Reagan’s “Moral Majority” preferred to ignore: queer people, sex workers, and injection drug users. Government, religious, and business leaders demonized and shunned the epidemic, which proved devastat-ing: over 30,000 individuals had contracted the disease, and almost half of those had died by 1986.1 he irst time President Reagan spoke about AIDS in 1985 was to propose restrictions on funding a cure for the so-called “gay cancer.”2 Other

1 Nicolas Lampert, A People’s Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements, 252.2 bid, 252.3 Ibid, 253.4 Ibid, 256.

politicians went further, proposing that alicted individuals should be forcibly tattooed with a marker or put in concentration camps.3 Not only did this incorrectly stigmatize the queer community, but it also severely thwarted eforts to develop treatment options, support resources, and medical research to ind a cure. Naturally, the queer community re-acted with outrage to this reprehen-sible lack of response. Confronted with government silence, public inaction, and with no vaccine in sight, AIDS activists began to form groups like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to provide care for patients, as well as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power) to protest political injustices.4 However, an extraordi-nary level of creative energy in the art world emerged during this time of turmoil and change.

As artist-activists came to the forefront of this movement, a


corpse”: which they argue was necessary, yet perverse. his paper undertakes an examination of the useful corpse aesthetic in an efort to problematize such representations. Rather, artists such as Wojnarowicz distinguish them-selves from this prevailing artistic trope by conveying the gravity, injustice, and outrage associated with the AIDS crisis without exploiting the aesthetic of AIDS’ victims' decaying bodies. As I will argue, through a juxtaposition of text and images, Wojnarowicz refuses to engage with the perversity of the “useful corpse” trope. Rather, his work seeks to humanize the victims of the AIDS crisis and shift blame from individuals to institutions.

dominant motif of AIDS-related art, seen in both the work of queer artists as well as in media portrayals of this community, became the diseased-de-formed body or corpse of the AIDS-victim. Lauren DeLand, a scholar of modern and contemporary art, calls this trope the “useful corpse,” and explains in her article “Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Useful Corpse” how artists employed this strategy to combat injustice. According to DeLand, the useful corpse has three manifestations: the body presented graphically through various forms of media; the corpse itself staged by the living, and the still-living bodies of those who are about to die gathering in politically charged spaces.5

DeLand asserts that such images not only intend to shift blame from AIDS victims to the powers responsible for perpetuating the epi-demic (politicians, church oicials, and pharmaceutical executives), but they also reveal the disease’s devastat-ing efects in ways living and healthy bodies could not.6 She recognizes that the “useful corpse” was a form of self-abjection of the queer commu-nity, which unfortunately appeared to be the only means of achieving political change and ensuring its survival.7 However, she nonetheless argues that the “useful corpse” was necessary for the AIDS activist move-

5 Lauren DeLand, “Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Useful Corpse: he Terrible Utility of David Wojnarowicz,” 33.6 Ibid, 33.7 Ibid, 34.

ment. Despite being perverse, it con-demned institutional inaction and raised awareness about the horriic realities of the disease. While scholars have assimilated much of AIDS-activist art under the umbrella of the “useful corpse” aesthetic, this is an incomplete picture of the protest art of this time; it not only overshadows unique tactics employed by other art-ists, but also erases the stories of the subjects themselves and places blame on the victims.

One artist who distin-guished himself from this prevailing artistic trope of the “useful corpse” was a young, gay man named David Wojnarowicz. His art addresses civil rights and queer identity in Ameri-can popular culture, particularly fo-cusing on the experiences of societal “outsiders.” he taboo surrounding AIDS in the public eye and govern-ment inaction and unwillingness to stop it were highly personal topics for Wojnarowicz, who witnessed irsthand the deadly and debilitat-ing results of institutional neglect of the epidemic. Not only did he lose countless friends, fellow art-ists, and partners to the disease, but he too ultimately passed away from AIDS-related complications. Wojn-arowicz refuses to employ the “useful corpse,” which exploits the aesthetic of AIDS victims' decaying bodies


and reinforces the prevailing senti-ment that these individuals were to blame. Rather, he conveys the grav-ity, injustice, and outrage associated with the AIDS crisis by juxtaposing text and images to humanize and respectfully pay homage to those with the disease, shifting blame from these individuals to the institutions responsible for their sufering.

In order to fully understand why the “useful corpse” was damag-ing and why Wojnarowicz sought to distance himself from it, we must turn to the stereotypical, negative images of the queer community pro-duced by mainstream media during the crisis. he most common formu-la for portraying alicted individuals was to present shocking before and after photos, demonstrating the de-generating efects that the disease had on the once healthy bodies of those it infected. he press cruelly exploited the contrast between the before and after physical appearances of famous personalities diagnosed with AIDS, including Rock Hudson and Fred-die Mercury, who both ultimately succumbed to complications from the illness.8 In this presentation, these individuals become anonymous slaves to their symptoms, and their bodies become mere canvases for the media to broadcast the apparent con-

8 Ivana Markova and Robert Farr. Representations of Health Illness and Handicap, 2.9 Ibid, 2.10 Lampert, A People’s Art, 259.11 DeLand, “Live Fast,” 36.

sequences of AIDS’ victims' deviant and immoral lifestyles.9

here is a striking similarity between the portraits of people with AIDS using the “useful corpse” strat-egy and the “face of AIDS” narrative circulated by the mainstream media. his trope is merely a relection–and even more dangerously, a reinforce-ment–of what the general public has been told about people with AIDS; the useful corpse ironically sup-ported the damaging propaganda of Reagan’s moral majority that AIDS victims were to blame for the disease. For example, the Museum of Mod-ern Art hosted an exhibit showcasing images from photographer Nicholas Nixon’s project “People with AIDS,” which featured photos of individuals taken over the course of their inal days as the disease ravaged their bod-ies.10 Another photographer, Philip-Lorca Di Corcia, took pictures of his friend, another gay artist, as he laid almost unrecognizable on his death-bed in a hospital.11 Activists also em-ployed this tactic in protest strategies, such as the infamous ‘die-ins’ staged by ACT UP. In such demonstrations, thousands of members would lie down at the epicenters of religious, political, and economic power, such as Wall Street, the White House, the FDA headquarters, and St Patrick’s


Cathedral, transforming these sites into symbolic mass graves.12

Wojnarowicz’s marriage of art and activism difered from that of his contemporaries by shunning the useful corpse in favor of text or other media elements that directly condemned institutional inaction. Artists who engaged with this trope, like Nicholas Nixon, claimed that their representations were an unsen-timental and honest portrayal of the illness’s devastating efects. Many thought that their photographs captured an unparalleled degree of intimacy between the subject, artist, and ultimately the viewer.13 However, this perspective is inherently incom-plete and lawed; onlookers instead bear witness to the increasing alien-ation and self-abandonment of AIDS victims. he useful corpse is a harsh visual tactic, bordering on being a fe-tishistic promotion of AIDS victims’ degenerate bodies. Wojnarowicz took objection to the frightening paral-lels between images circulated by anti-gay organizations and the work of AIDS activists themselves: both, regardless of intent, portrayed people with AIDS as ravaged and debilitated by the disease, not to mention iso-lated, desperate, and helpless in the face of their cruel fate. he implica-tions of other artists ironically suc-cumbing to, instead of ighting, the inaccurate AIDS narrative rendered

12 Ibid, 36.13 Markova and Farr Representations of Health, 114 Ibid, 2.

much activist artwork complicit in the delay and prevention of crucial AIDS-related legislation, research funding, and education.14

Wojnarowicz distinguishes himself from this artistic scene, of-fering a more subtle, implied, and humanistic approach to representing AIDS victims that preserves, rather than erases, their individuality and autonomy. He disarmed or com-pletely omitted the “useful corpse” from his artwork, thus challenging the destructive narrative that homog-enized all people with AIDS to a de-bilitated, helpless archetype reaping the punishments of moral deviance. Not only did this humanize people with AIDS to the general American public, shifting blame from alicted individuals to the institutions that failed them, but it speaks to the queer community directly. As Wojn-arowicz watched his peers die and learned of his own diagnosis, his art served not only as an outlet for his indignation, but also as a mirror to relect the pain and grief he experi-enced as he grappled with this disease on the most personal level. Wojn-arowicz’s work provides a reassuring message to the entire gay community that AIDS-related deaths were not in vain, that the victims are more than a disease, and that there is hope for political and social change if the responsible powers are condemned.


Wojnarowicz’ 1990 multi-media painting, Untitled (One Day his Kid) (ig. 1), ofers an alternative to the bleak proposition of the “use-ful corpse,” which was a destructive necessity for the success of the AIDS activist movement. his piece is an example of an intersection between Wojnarowicz’ visual art and his writ-ing: it juxtaposes a nostalgia-evoking school photo of his childhood self with text in the third person future tense delineating all the challenges and punishments he will face as a gay man in America. hese include, but are not limited to, being subjected to institutional oppression, having suicidal thoughts, facing violent at-tacks, and hearing that his sexuality is a mental disease. Wojnarowicz’s blunt description of the harsh reality of queer life in the time of the AIDS epidemic acts as a scathing condem-nation of American society, which has enabled these phenomena. In order to make his work resonate with viewers, he selects an image of him-self as a child, rather than a “useful corpse” as the image to accompany this powerful activist text. By depict-ing himself, a future AIDS victim, as a child, Wojnarowicz implicitly equates such victims with innocence, purity, and optimism, therefore shift-ing blame onto the external forces that cause him sufering. He reminds viewers that AIDS victims were once exactly like the “normal” American kids that the straight world sought to protect from corruption by queer

culture. By appealing to a sense of shared human compassion within his oppressors, rather than using the already alienated and demonized im-age of an AIDS victim, Wojnarowicz challenges the necessity of the “useful corpse” as a tool for political action. his is not to say that Wojn-arowicz did not include images of the deceased in his work; however, he did so in a way that refused to engage the stereotypical implications of the “useful corpse” as a political tool. In Untitled (Hujar Dead) (ig. 2), Wojn-arowicz took images of his mentor, partner, and fellow artist Peter Hujar on his deathbed, and overlaid these photos with screen printed text. His enraged words are excerpts from a controversial essay he wrote for a 1989 Artists Space exhibition titled “Post Cards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” in which he speciically condemns conservative politicians for supporting legislation that would perpetuate the AIDS epidemic by discouraging safe sex education. What separates this work from other “death portrait” pieces is the fact that the photos themselves are relegated to the status of an obscure backdrop for the true subject of the work: the indignation, desire for retaliation, and anger that Wojnarowicz and the entire queer community feel towards their oppressors. he work derives its power not from exploit-ing a “useful corpse” as a tool for activism, but rather from the other collaged elements surrounding it. Behind the superimposed text, these



images are barely recognizable as a dead body until close examination. h e collaged border, that outlines the poster further distracts from the photos themselves, includes sperm-shaped maps swimming across $20 bills showing the White House–a rebuke of political and economic corruption within the nation. Sym-bolically drawing viewers’ attention away from the AIDS victim’s body to the sins of American institutions is Wojnarowicz’s implicit cue for the public to shift blame from the queer community to their oppressors for the epidemic–a feat which blatant representations of “the useful corpse” could not alone achieve. h e juxtaposition of text and

images in these two works, rather than the useful corpse, becomes the aesthetic tactic that makes them so potent and dif erentiates Wojnarowicz’ style from that of his contemporaries. Wojnarowicz removes the cruelty and despair from the photographs of AIDS victims, instead transferring the violence and suf ering to which their bodies are subjected into enraged language. By taking the disease and misery away from the physical images of AIDS victims, he is severing the link that the useful corpse trope rein-forced between the degenerate body and supposed degenerate activity. h e superi cial reporting of AIDS victims’ physical decay made the

David Wojnarowicz Untitled (Hujar Dead), 1988-1989. Whitney Museum of American Art.


DeLand, Lauren. “Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a Useful Corpse: he Terrible Utility of David Wojnarowicz.” Performance Research: On Abjection, vol. 19, no. 1, 2014, pp. 33–40.

Markova, Ivana, and Robert Farr. Representations of Health, Illness and Handicap. 1995

Lampert, Nicolas. A People?s Art History of the United States : 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements, he New Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/lib/harvard-trial/detail.action?docID=1321275.

Bibliography

Aubrienne Krysiewicz-Bell is a student at Harvard Univer-sity, class of 2023, where she studies neuroscience and art history.

“useful corpse” tactic documentary, blurring the line between art and journalism. Instead, Wojnarowicz saw his canvases as spaces for artistic imagination through which he could amplify his voice in order to con-demn the prevailing messages during the era’s political climate. Not to be overlooked is the deeply personal connection he had with the disease that precipitated the unique passion, empathy, and understanding that motivated his artistic language. hrough these techniques, Wojnarowicz solidiied his place as a unique artistic voice in the AIDS activist movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Although his art did not exploit the prevalent “useful corpse” aesthetic, it was still just as powerful as other political art that did engage with this motif. he real triumph of

15 “Untitled (Hujar Dead).” Whitney.org, https://whitney.org/collection/works/48140

Wojnarowicz’ work is that it commu-nicates the same degree of outrage at the unjust response to the AIDS cri-sis without demeaning the bodies of queer victims to convey his messages. Instead, he humanizes the subjects in his art and illustrated the extent to which American society and institu-tions had failed and oppressed them. Wojnarowicz himself passed away in 1992 from AIDS-related complica-tions, and his ashes were scattered on the lawn in front of the White House.15 his act, which becomes a work of performance art itself, acts as a inal reiteration of the same juxta-position between rage and empathy and the same political indignation that characterized Wojnarowicz’ work.

40 Of ‘Yellow’

Abstract

In 1992, the Singaporean performance artist Lee Wen (1957-2019) made his debut as the Yellow Man in Journey of a Yellow Man #1 (1992), where he pre-sented himself as almost naked and painted from head to toe in a jaundiced shade of yellow. I aim to explore Lee’s performance as a paradoxical cultural model – one that overtly refers to stereotypical tropes, yet attempts to subvert any notion of singularity through his mediated interpretations of bodily ac-tivism. However, I note: if Lee uses an over-exaggerated, hyper-racialised ver-sion of himself as an ironic visual metaphor to confound perceptions within the Orientalist or postcolonial gaze, does he not risk the reframing of himself into the very category that he rejects? In this paper I investigate the underly-ing ambiguity in his subversive mode of presentation and critique its inter-

Of ‘Yellow’

Ashleigh Chow

Performing Orientalisms and Cultural Hybridity in Lee Wen’s Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1 (1992)

Figures 1 (left) and 2 (right). Photographic documentation of Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1 at City of London Polytechnic, Lon-don, 1992. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.

Heralded as one of Singapore’s most “internationally rec-

ognised performance artists,” Lee Wen (1957-2019) is perhaps most well-known for his alter ego Yel-low Man. his jaundiced persona irst appeared in Lee’s performance Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1 (1992) during his time as a student at the City Polytechnic in London. Mark-ing a cultural marriage between the two poles of London and Singapore, the archetypal character investigated Lee’s experience of yellow peril as a member of the postcolonial Asian diaspora living at the centre of the British Empire.1

Prior to the fourteen-minute long improvised performance, Lee Wen painted himself from head to toe in a sickly sheen of mustard yel-low (igs. 1-8).2 hen, to begin, he picked up a set of red chains, draped them around his neck, and then wound them around his arms before attempting to break free from this

1 Lee Wen, Artist’s statement, Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1, City of London Polytechnic (London, 1992).2 Lee Wen, Journey of a Yellow Man, City of London Polytechnic, London, April 1992. Full performance documentations can be accessed at aaa.org.hk/en/collection/lee-wen-archive 3 Wen, Artist’s statement, Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1.

bondage (igs. 1-2). Within seconds of doing so, he entangled himself in the chains again (ig. 3). Wearing only briefs painted in the same dis-tinctive mustard, Lee Wen used this striking yellow body paint to present himself as an object of scrutiny. With the red juxtaposed against his yellow skin, Lee Wen’s rhythmic bodily motions with the chains repeatedly mimicked the poles of restraint and release (igs. 4-5), after which Lee lined the chains parallel to each other on the loor (ig. 6). He then arranged pieces of solid fuel into a circle of ire after lighting them up (igs. 7-8).3 He ended the perfor-mance by lying in the circle of ire and spinning laterally while still on his back, as if presenting himself as a sacriicial ofering (ig. 9).

Lee’s Singaporean back-ground is essential to understand-ing his performance as a mediation between his British viewers and the Yellow Man archetype. Born in


pretive risks, such as essentialising a monolithic ‘yellowness’ or synonymising ‘Asianness.’ From there, I also consider Lee’s enactment of self-exploitation from Singapore’s context of multiculturalism and Homi Bhabha’s concept of a ‘third space.’ hus, I unpack Lee’s framework of hyper-colourisation and reconsider it within its wider postcolonial context, revealing a multitude of nuanced anxieties in his attempt to reconigure designations of identity.

British-colonial Singapore to Singa-porean-Chinese parents, Lee Wen lived through Singapore’s turbulent process of nation-building from a British colony to a constituency of Malaysia (1963-1965). During this time, fraught race relations between Malays and Chinese culminated in the 1964 race riots.4 Cohesion between racial relations became a priority to the newly-formed repub-lic in 1965 and throughout its rapid modernisation since.

As a student in London, Lee Wen was often mistaken as a ‘mainland Chinese’ who did not understand English, despite it being his native language. Journey of a Yel-low Man No. 1 was an overt attempt to tackle this homogenising gaze of all ‘Asian’ people as one united race/nation of the ‘Chinese.’ hus, it rup-tured the post-Enlightenment, Ori-entalist gaze stemming from Linnae-us’ homogenising empiricist theory of the Homo Asiaticus species, which categorised all Asians as physically “yellowish…endowed with black hair and brown eyes” and as emotion-

4 Malaysia was inaugurated in 1963 with the merging of Malaya, Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore. his country was not welcomed by the Philippines and Indonesia, who had disputed over the sovereignty of Sabah. A series of Indonesia-led violent attacks took place around Malaysia, including Singapore. his, and a series of other events, led to racial aggression particularly amongst the Chinese majority and the Malay minority, who were originally from Malaya.5 Elizabeth Brown and George Barganier, Race and Crime: Geographies of Injustice (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018), 74-76.6 Lee Wen, “Performance Art in Context: A Singaporean Perspective” (Masters, Singapore, La Salle College of Arts, 2006), 10-11, https://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/archive/lee-wen-archive-theses/object/performance-art-in-context-a-singapor-ean-perspective-185585.

ally “severe, conceited and stingy.”5 he work also aimed to disrupt the dominance of Chinese ink and wa-tercolour painting in Singaporean art of the late twentieth-century, deliver-ing performance from its status as “a marginalised form of mainstream contemporary art practice.”6

his essay explores Lee Wen’s acid-yellow body beyond conven-tional readings of its hyper-racialisa-tion, instead deining his framework of identity politics as hybrid and indeterminate, resisting synthesis to one model of understanding. I will argue that Lee’s outward exag-geration of ‘yellowness’ dissolves any understanding of a monolithic ‘Singaporeanness’ or ‘Chineseness,’ using the body as a hyperbole to invert notions of cultural and ethnic homogeneity, especially racial ste-reotypes. Conversely, it is precisely this hyperbolised performance of ‘yellowness’ that—while attempting to reconigure ethnocentric designa-tions of identity—could easily be perceived as self-Orientalising. his tension needs to be negotiated within

42 Of ‘Yellow’

the framework of Singapore’s cultural policies, placing the Yellow Man in a broader space of critical discussion at the intersection of discourses on Orientalism, postcolonialism, and multiculturalism.

The Paradox: Self-Orientalism or

Postcolonial Hybridity?

In negotiating the vis-ibility of the racially marked body as a form of cultural criticism, art historian Alice Jim argued that Lee Wen propounded an “explicit body performance,” which relied on the explosive literality of his hyper-racialisation to “[explicate] bod-ies in social relations.”7 While the “explosiveness” of the Yellow Man as a thematic approach at its base level guarantees the legibility of a form of race-based cultural criticism, the ‘explicit’ body is necessarily linked with the complex politics of visibil-ity. While Jim’s argument focuses on the hyperbolic racialisation of Lee’s body and its readings, I interpret how this performed racialisation communicates a fraught, hybrid identity politics.8 By attempting to literally perform what it means to be yellow—scrutinising the humanness of struggle through his own tortured physical presence, yet emphasising the indelible alienness of the Yellow

7 Alice Ming Wai Jim, “Lee Wen: Performing Yellow,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 46 (September 2018): 11-16, https://doi.org/10.1086/700243.8 Ruth Amossy and herese Heidingsfeld, “Stereotypes and Representation in Fic-tion,” Poetics Today 5, no. 4 (1984): 689–695, https://doi.org/10.2307/1772256. 9 Jim, “Lee Wen: Performing Yellow,” 11-46.

Man through dramatized movements and costume—Lee blurs the categor-ical distinctions between human and alien, subject and stereotype, reality and iction. his portrayal of race as performance subverts any simplistic reading of racial subjectivity: while Lee Wen sets up a chromatic frame-work for reading his performance, this same framework problematizes a colour-based/race-based under-standing of one’s identity, efectively disrupting the monolith of a yellow ‘Asianness.’

However, the decision to ex-aggerate the image of an Asian man preconceived as ‘Oriental’ through a body already racially marked is complex, and may nonetheless give rise to interpretations of the artist as the ‘forever foreigner’ or the ‘dirty yellow fellow.’9 Indeed, in posing as an essentialist trope with the inten-tion of subverting it, Lee Wen risks re-framing himself into the very Ori-entalised category that he attempts to dissolve, exacerbating the relative lack of visibility of “yellow” artists in the West.

In the Location of Culture, postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhab-ha argued that to promote a new discursive ambivalence, cultures (and thus identities) must be understood as a product of “hybrid” interactions,


undoing pre-given homogenous ethnic/cultural traits. In doing so, Bhabha’s concept of “hybridity” evades essentialist notions of race, proposing to dissolve epistemological binaries of identity by promoting an “emergence of interstices” between ixed identiications, ofering an al-ternative to any singular understand-ing of identity.10 Additionally, by es-chewing such distinctions of identity, it places the coloniser (in this case, the British) and the colonised (the Singaporean) in a new non-binary relationship, disrupting postcolonial hierarchical structures of power and visibility.11

While essentialism is based on the “belief in invariable and ixed properties which deine the ‘whatness’ of a given identity,” the notion of hybridity is one that is categorically ambivalent, propos-ing a new “transcultural” form from the processes of displacement and disjuncture imbricated in colonial-ism and migration.12 Although recent scholarship interprets the term ‘journey’ in Journey of a Yellow Man to signify the repository of narratives that Yellow Man has come to adopt, Lee explained that in Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1—the irst rendi-

10 Homi K. Bhabha, he Location of Culture, Routledge Classics (London: Rout-ledge, 2004), 70.11 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1st ed (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 1-8.12 Sayegh, Pascal-Yan, “Cultural Hybridity and Modern Binaries: Overcoming the Opposition Between Identity and Otherness?” (“Cultures in Transit” conference, Liverpool, 2008), https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00610753.13 Alice Ming Wai Jim, “Lee Wen: Performing Yellow,” 12.14 Salman Rushdie, he Satanic Verses (London: Viking, 1988), 211.

tion of the series—the term ‘journey’ referred more to the contemporary migratory low of Asian diasporas.13 Lee Wen’s objective of unsettling ethno-nationalist assumptions about diasporic identities therefore aligns with Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, as Lee luctuates between identifying as a Singaporean, a Chinese person, and a postcolonial subject of the British Empire.

Lee Wen’s Yellow Man exposes two ideological narratives: that of the postcolonial subject, and that of the character of generic ‘Chineseness’ in twentieth-century popular culture. In he Satanic Verses, Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie writes about the identity conundrum of the postcolonial, cross-cultural subject, describing “ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pull-ing me this way, and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, com-manding, choose, choose… I refuse to choose.”14 Lee Wen similarly re-enacts the postcolonial individual’s rumination of struggle, replacing Rushdie’s ropes with garish chains. hrough his cyclical embracement and rejection of the chains, Lee Wen enacts the visual imagery of subjuga-tion to portray himself as weak in the

44 Of ‘Yellow’

midst of a perpetual losing struggle. With an emphasis on the body’s physical turmoil, Lee Wen under-scores the conspicuous, repetitive nature of his bodily relationship with the chains. Its constant grappling and moving recreated the artist’s struggles in “social bondage”, denot-ing his own questionable “freedom of individuality, movement, thought, actions, growth and behaviour” – and subjecting it all to the scrutiny of his audience.15

his narrative of turmoil resonates with what the political scientist M.T. Kato calls “decolonisa-tion struggles”.16 Kato argued that a symptom of the “struggles” was the subjection of colonised men as socially vulnerable, and subordi-nated – aligning with the Orientalist emasculated stereotype.17 he feeble, yet masculine characterisation of the Yellow Man seems to draw on the speciic gendering of the Chinese Sick ‘Man’ trope. Historians have noted that the Chinese term 東亞病夫 (dongya bingfu), derived from the European epithet for ‘Sick Man of East Asia’, adopts a speciic masculin-ity when translated into Chinese18—the Chinese term ‘fu’ (夫) is gender-speciic, and refers to the gendered masculine ‘man’ rather than ‘man’ as humanity. hus, by adopting a sickly

15 Wen, Artist’s statement, Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1.16 M. T. Kato, “Burning Asia: Bruce Lee’s Kinetic Narrative of Decolonization,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17, no. 1 (2005): 62–99.17 Ibid. 18 吳政緯, “評楊瑞松，《病夫、黃禍與睡獅－「西方」視野中的中國形象與近代中國國族論述想像》,” 新史學 25, no. 1 (2014): 205–15.

sheen of yellow and jaundiced ex-pression, the short and hunched Lee Wen embodies the general feebleness and emasculation associated with the Sick Chinese Man trope, further exaggerating existing stereotypes.

he prevalence of this strug-gling Chinese male stereotype during this period can be seen through the popularity of the Hong Kong cultural icon of Bruce Lee. In the 1972 ilm Fist of Fury (also known as he Chinese Connection), Bruce Lee politicised the stereotype of the Chinese man as weak and sick, demanding, “I’ll only say this once. We [he Chinese] are not sick men.” By encoding historical and cultural struggles in his character portrayal, Bruce Lee successfully politicised ethnic consciousness and its ste-reotypes, proposing a new ‘type’ of Chinese as martial arts masters. Lee Wen, unlike Bruce Lee, chooses to complicate rather than supplant these narratives of the Yellow Man to his Western audience.

Using his coloured body as a general marker of ethnicity, Lee per-formed and emphasised normative assumptions of ‘Eastern’ racial prac-tices. Using the ire, fuel, and chains, he reconigured the previously empty space to recreate what appears similar to an altar, mimicking the ritualistic


practices of the Asiatic religions of Taoism, Buddhism, and even Hindu-ism. Yet the lack of a central altar-piece diferentiates the arrangement from actual altars, retaining a sense of ambiguity. Lee’s own mediating body may signify the altarpiece, or it may serve to mourn the emptiness of the space. hrough the ambiguity of this altar-like coniguration, Lee invokes a generalized ‘Eastern’ Asiatic religion, referencing not according a precise cultural phenomenon but rather a perceived ritual ‘Asianness’ based on pre-conceived notions of racial or ethnic practice. By perform-ing this generalised phenomenon of ritual, Lee Wen subverts the Orien-talising gaze and instead invokes the speciic cultural dimensions of his in-dividual bodily existence, emphasis-ing his body’s beingness and resisting cultural essentialisation.19 Inverting his own hyperbolic projection of the Yellow Man, the artist thus inhab-its a new ‘liminal’ space beyond the cultural limits of a Chinese or a Singaporean – confounding any demarcated perceptions of a singular ‘Asianness’ or ‘Chineseness’.20

While this ‘liminal,’ ra-

19 C. J. W.-L. Wee, “Body and Communication: he ‘Ordinary’ Art of Tang Da Wu,” heatre Research International 42, no. 3 (October 2017): 286–306, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883317000591.20 Pnina Werbner, “Essentialising Essentialism,” in Debating Cultural Hybrid-ity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Tariq Modood, Homi K. Bhabha, and Pnina Werbner, Critique, Inluence, Change (London: Zed Books, 2015), 228.21 Lee Wen, “Performance Art in Context: A Singaporean Perspective.”22 Ibid. 23 Said, Orientalism.

cialised body efectively embodies the fundamental enigma of the diasporic postcolonial identity, it poses a risk of self-Orientalism in interpretation. Lee Wen acknowledged this ambigu-ity by stating his own “postcolonial, displaced history” as based on “local contexts of an individual’s struggle within the cultural location of Singapore but with view to universal socio-political themes.”21 hus, the caveats posed by ‘mediated’ interpre-tations of bodily activism have to be understood through Lee Wen’s role as a performer of socio-political critique

Spaces of Visibility and the

Western Spectator

Lee Wen materialises and visualises his identity in the form of nakedness to invoke the disori-entation and disconnect that he felt when he moved to London from Singapore.22 In Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism, he argued that Orientalism is not only a liter-ary genre, but also an ideological discourse inextricably tied to the perpetuation of Western power.23 Lee’s emphasis on the Yellow Man’s distinctively ‘Oriental’ traits essen-

46 Of ‘Yellow’

tialises and caricatures himself under the gaze of the Western spectators of the City Polytechnic. In his conspic-uous yellow body paint, Lee activates his space through constant moving, jumping, and swinging, emphasising his own physical diference from the spectators. In presenting himself as vulnerable, he creates an immutable hierarchical space of spectatorship, placing himself under direct scru-tiny. I would argue that this space of viewing re-enacts the similar power structures of hegemonic dominance and suppression that Said had cri-tiqued in the irst place. By purposely misrepresenting the ‘Other,’ Lee Wen constructs an unequal relationship between himself and the spectator. hroughout the performance, the scrutiny imbued in spectatorship exposes Lee Wen as defenseless and vulnerable, with his body as a real-time subject. In this sense, Lee Wen empowers the viewer, allowing them to exert dominance over the strug-gling protagonist. A wide range of emotions are released as the Yellow Man catapults himself to the centre-stage, and he is shown in a contemp-tuous relationship with his chains, repeatedly breaking free but then em-bracing them. he repetition of his

24 Laikwan Pang, “Arendt in Hong Kong,” Cultural Politics 12, no. 2 (July 1, 2016): 155-157, https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3592064.25 Hannah Arendt, he Human Condition, 2nd ed (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1998), 7-8.26 Paula Seraini, “Subversion through Performance: Performance Activism in London,” in he Political Aesthetics of Global Protest he Arab Spring and Beyond, ed. Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 325-33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g0b683.19.

dilemma paired with the hierarchical viewing of the coloniser-colonised relationship poignantly conjures Lee Wen’s ambivalence toward his own postcolonial identity.

To investigate this perform-er-spectator relationship, I will draw on Hannah Arendt’s belief that true political deeds are not ideological products, but acts of making that awaken the viewer to their own histories or the potentialities of their future.24 In his performance, Lee Wen constructed what Arendt would call a ‘space of appearance’ through the transformation of a non-space to one that was highly politicised in its socio-cultural critiques, impos-ing a strong sense of possibility onto his spectators.25 his reconiguration of space—the art studio—into a space of struggle and a religious altar deployed familiar spaces. However, by instituting an environmental shift from its alluded context of a temple, it transgressed assumptions of where the Yellow Man belonged.26 Just as ethnic-based correlations between race and belonging are subverted, this subversion of normative space exposes the spectators as political actors. Sitting between the polarities of the past and the potentials of the


future, the spectators are prompted to rethink the privileged gazes granted to them by Lee Wen and to envision an alternate future without such ethno-nationalist epistemolo-gies.27 In this space of appearance, the visibility of Lee Wen’s own body as a medium conjures the discursive politics of identity, demanding the spectators’ political stance through spatial ambiguity.

As Lee Wen treads care-fully between subverting Orientalist gazes and self-Orientalising himself, contentious debates on the ‘Other’ lurk behind his utopic motive. Ac-cording to Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?, postcolonial subjects come to be identiied as ‘Other’ in art history through the usage of the stereotype, which is deined through a gaze of homogenisation. Rather than being an autonomous subject of art history, the stereotyped body remains an object of study deined by Western academic thought.28 As a result, the Western perspective (in this case, Lee Wen’s spectators) remains crucially superior to that of the ‘Other’ (the stereotyped people of the “yellow race”).29 In this vein, Lee Wen relies

27 Pang, “Arendt in Hong Kong,” 160-65. 28 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Revised Edition, from the ‘History’ Chapter of Critique of Postcolonial Reason,” in Can the Subal-tern Speak? Relections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 21-78.29 Ibid.30 Ibid.31 Lee Wen, “Sustaining Alterity in the Times of R(V)Apid Changes,” in Histories, Practices, Interventions: A Reader in Singapore Contemporary Art, ed. Jefrey Say and Seng Yu Jin (Singapore: Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, 2016), 82–85.

on his spectators’ interpretation and understanding of his performance within the context of a wider art his-tory for himself to ‘speak’ and thus be ‘heard.’ Additionally, as Spivak had argued, the Asian artist histori-cally did not hold political autonomy but relied on the Western viewer to generate artistic meaning. If Spivak was correct, then her argument sug-gests that the spectators held an even greater power than Lee Wen.30 One may question: can the Yellow Man ever be fully assimilated into artistic ‘centres’ without the perception/self-perception of peripherality?

While political, the perfor-mance should also not be assessed ac-cording to any deterministic readings of political meaning or by its capac-ity to catalyse social change. Lee Wen discussed his practice as maintaining a lexible tolerance for uncertainty due to its status as a ““process” based art,” instrumentalizing “test and inquiry involving a time-sensitive open-ended operation.”31 Lee’s practice, as a ‘thinking’ procedure to produce self-knowledge, establishes an incomplete framework for under-standing Singaporean performance

48 Of ‘Yellow’

art, which in its openness of generat-ing knowledge, required improvisa-tion and spontaneous responses. he artist’s role in this case, if successful, was thus to mediate a ‘space of ap-pearance’ to expose cultural para-doxes, introducing a self-awareness of postcoloniality and diaspora—and providing a wider view that enabled both the artist and the spectator to see themselves aesthetically and politically. Perhaps the longevity of the Yellow Man archetype reveals the success of Lee’s endeavor, generating new discussions and a new body of knowledge within Singapore’s still-incomplete framework of art histori-ography.

Singapore, ‘Multiculturalism’ and

the Geopolitical Imagination

he politics of Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1 gain new mean-ing within the context of Singapore’s unique cultural milieu. Between the 1990s and 2000s, Singapore saw itself as a new “Renaissance city” and sought to align itself with the artistic innovations of Euramerica.32 Aiming for synchronicity with the ‘mainstream’ art world, Singapore’s cultural policies attempted to re-cuperate the lack of internationally

32 C.J.W.-L. Wee, “he Singapore Contemporary and Contemporary Art in Singapore,” in Charting houghts, ed. Low Sze Wee and Patrick D. Flores, Essays on Art in Southeast Asia (National Gallery Singapore, 2017), 248-249, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13xpr6k.22. 33 Singapore Tourism Board, ‘Singapore: Where cultures, religions and passions meet’, SG: Passion Made Possible. https://www.visitsingapore.com/editorials/a-kalei-doscope-of-cultures/34 Ibid.

recognised Singaporean artists within artistic ‘centres.’ However, these poli-cies avoided addressing fundamental issues with Singapore’s hierarchical racial categorisations remnant from colonialism.

Although in laying out his theory of hybridity Bhabha claimed to be a vehement critic of ‘multicul-turalism,’ Singapore’s multicultural policies are based on a vision of coexisting identities that are already ‘interstitial’ because of their migra-tory histories, aiming to provide a safe space for “a kaleidoscope of cultures” by embracing diversity.33 However, with all of its current population descended from migrants (if not migrants themselves), every Singaporean citizen must also iden-tify with an ethnic identity, boxed into the Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others (CMIO) categories.34 hese forms of race-based classiications are inextricably tied to the social fabric, and like the vision of a “Renaissance city,” unfortunately have not re-centred the epidermal nature of the colonial gaze.

While Bhabha notes the problems posed by ‘multicultural-ism,’ a model which is evidently embraced by Singaporean cultural


policies, this critique is not the em-phasis of my study. My purpose is rather to reconsider Lee Wen’s work within Singapore’s CMIO racial framework, where ethnic markers are utilised freely and every Singaporean is automatically boxed into an ethnic category in all formal documents. As seen in the Singapore National Pledge:

“We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, lan-guage or religion…”35

his declamation of “one united people” may be problematic in the lens of Bhabha. In critiquing multiculturalism, Bhabha argued that to achieve a cohesion of diferent identities in the modern state, the notion of a unitary identity must be dismantled. hus, in Bhabha’s view, culturally pluralistic societies do not provide a platform for dialogue between those of diferent cultural backgrounds and may potentially

35 Written by the cabinet minister S. Rajaratnam in 1988, every morning the full national pledge has been compulsorily recited with the right ist clenched at the heart in government and aided school assemblies in Singapore, serving as a daily reminder of Singapore’s challenge and goal of overcoming the divisions caused by diferences of race, language and religion. he pledge can be accessed at: https://www.nhb.gov.sg/what-we-do/our-work/community-engagement/education/resources/national-symbols/national-pledge 36 Venka Purushothaman, “Drafting History: Meditation on Location, Institu-tions and Myth-Making in Visual Arts in Postcolonial,” in Charting houghts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia, ed. Low Sze Wee and Patrick D. Flores, Essays on Art in Southeast Asia (National Gallery Singapore, 2017), 331, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13xpr6k.28.37 Benita Parry, “Signs of Our Times: Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s he Location

exacerbate conlicts or racial dis-harmonies. On the other hand, the Singaporean-Indian art historian Venka Purushothaman critiques the lack of a unifying identity in Singa-porean contemporary art, condemn-ing Singapore’s tendency to “his-toricise from without” and calling for the crystallisation of a “national identity” in Singapore’s “globally connected yet locally distanced” society.36 In this manner, the Sin-gaporean art historian’s perspective directly countervails Bhabha, who argued that such ideas of unity are hegemonic and retain the vestiges of asymmetrical power structures and racial supremacy embedded in the postcolonial condition.

Even as Bhabha criticises cultural diference as ethnocen-tric and consequentially produc-ing other subaltern signiications, he ultimately calls for a resistance against the conlation of notions of “community” with “homogenisa-tion” or “polarities.”37 It is diicult to transpose these criticisms into the

50 Of ‘Yellow’

Singaporean identity, as all modern Singaporeans are descended from migrants, with their own original diasporic displacement. Any notion of a monolithic Singaporean identity was thus ruptured further through the processes of colonisation and decolonisation in the twentieth cen-tury.38 Due to the lack of a unifying ethno-historical originary myth held by many countries, racial diversity and subjective experiences form a natural barrier to the fostering of a national identity, instead promoting a hyphenisation of one’s identity, such as ‘Chinese-Singaporean’ or ‘Singaporean-Malay.’39 On a broader scale, Singapore openly embraces cul-tural diversity, ultimately aiming to promote Singapore as an all-encom-passing “in-between”, which at least to an extent, aligns with Bhabha’s notion of a a “third space”, one that espouses categorical ambivalence.40

Each rendition of the Yellow Man is site and culturally-speciic, with the performance in India taking up a shamanistic signiication, and in hailand, a monarchic resonance.41

of Culture,” in he hird Text Reader: On Art, Culture, and heory, ed. Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, and Ziauddin Sardar (London ; New York: Continuum, 2002), 251-253.38 J. R. Clammer, Race and State in Independent Singapore, 1965-1990: he Cultural Politics of Pluralism in a Multiethnic Society (Brookield, Vt: Ashgate, 1998), 32-35.39 Chua Beng Huat, “Multiculturalism in Singapore: An Instrument of Social Control,” Race & Class 44, no. 3 (January 2003): 63–68, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396803044003025.40 Bhabha, he Location of Culture, 70-75. 41 Võ Hồng Chồồng-Đài, “Line, Form, Colour, Action,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 48 (Spring 2019).

In a related register to Purusho-thaman’s advocacy for a ‘national’ identity, Lee Wen allows his audience to crowd around him and looking down in unison at him throughout the performance (ig. 6), reconstruct-ing the uniied colonial gaze in the experience of viewing. His exaggera-tion of the sick man stereotype at the heart of the British Empire served to re-emphasise the Western domi-nant vision of the mythical ‘Orient.’ By reconstructing this hierarchical structure of power relations, Lee Wen draws on the subversive symbolism of his own surveillance and obedi-ence, urging the viewer to relect on their perceived freedom versus Lee Wen’s self-exploitation.

However, struggles in the spectator’s cultural translation inevi-tably arise, and one may wonder if Lee Wen’s process of art production can ever efectively encapsulate his subjective experience for his audi-ences to fully understand. Reading Lee Wen’s exaggeration of racial diference as a self-Orientalized, or as a mere generic experience depicting


52 Of ‘Yellow’

identity tokenisation abroad to an international audience would suggest a level of neglect in understanding Singaporean race relations.42 Counter to such interpretations, a Singapor-ean’s emphasis on his skin colour may not necessarily be intrinsically linked to race-based oppression, but is a key part of the local social fabric. Foregrounded by Singapore’s societal values of multi-ethnicity and multi-religion, this overt use of race is justiied. Bearing in mind that the artist has been conditioned by a society that places a large emphasis on race (and racial cohesion), this contextual understanding is key to provide a robust reading of Lee Wen’s work. Instead, Lee Wen encourages viewers to reconsider their own roles in relation to his personal histories, as his yellowness subtly reveals the potential recognitions or misrecogni-tions of hybridity that are ultimately at stake.43

Conclusion

By performing what it meant to be ‘yellow’, Lee’s presenta-tion of ‘Asianness’ or ‘Chineseness’ framed the Yellow Man within the Orientalist gaze. his exaggerated and monolithic ‘Asianness’ subverted reductionist views of ethnicity or belonging, which I have discussed in

42 Rey Chow, “From Writing Diaspora: Introduction: Leading Questions,” in he Rey Chow Reader, ed. Paul Bowman (Columbia University Press, 2010), 30–47, https://doi.org/10.7312/bowm14994.8.43 Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Consider-ing Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America*,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (June 2003): 5–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/10609160302341.

relation to Bhabha’s theory of cul-tural hybridity and Singapore’s mul-ticultural policies. However, when understanding the tension between his own personal history and his acts of mediation, his performance reveals an act of subversion. While Lee Wen did not set out to efect social revolu-tion, his performance exposed all participants as political actors, who in one way or another perpetuate their own agenda in the larger sphere of identity politics.

As Lee Wen responded to his own ‘Singaporean-Chinese’ post-colonial diasporic identity in 1992, over time as the Yellow Man came to adopt new contexts, one can argue that it mirrored the emergence of Singapore over the past thirty years. Following Singapore’s emergence from its old reputation as a ‘cultural desert’ to the ‘Renaissance City’: with the rise of the cultural depictions of Singaporeans in Crazy Rich Asians, or following the emanation of new local socio-cultural debates pertain-ing to ‘Chinese privilege,’ Lee Wen’s exposé of alterity provided a step-pingstone for pluralistic conceptions of Singaporean identity—distinct and inarticulable to a singular form of understanding.

Almost thirty years on since the Yellow Man was irst conceived,


Lee Wen’s sickly sheen of yellow has found its resonance again. Follow-ing the outbreak of COVID-19 at the end of 2019, reports of racial aggravation towards Asian groups in the United Kingdom have risen, ef-fectively objectifying and homogenis-ing all East Asians as “the virus”.44 In discussing the legacy of the Yellow Man in London, one might ask if the wider public’s comprehension of cultural transmigration will ever be a reality— after all, as revealed through Lee Wen’s seemingly paradoxical model of expression, inadequacies in understanding ultimately exacer-bate and promote Orientalist views. Besides, it also tends to be the poet, intellectual, or artist who sustains ideas of disjuncture in society through their experience of displace-ment and production. But who can truly understand all its paradoxes?45 It is but the artist themselves.

44 Nosheen Iqbal, “Coronavirus Fears Fuel Racism and Hostility, Say British-Chi-nese,” he Guardian, February 1, 2020, sec. Online, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/01/coronavirus-weaponised-way-to-be-openly-racist.45 Jonathan Friedman, “Global Crises, the Struggle for Cultural Identity and In-tellectual Porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans vs. Locals, Ethnics and Nationals in an Era of Dehomogenisation,” in Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, ed. Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, vol. Postcolonial encounters (London: Zed, 1997), 70–89.

54 Of ‘Yellow’

Figures

Figure 3. Photographic documentation of Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1 at City of London Polytechnic, London, 1992. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.





Figure 7. Photographic documenta-tion of Journey of a Yellow Man No. 1 at City of London Polytechnic, London, 1992. Courtesy of Asia Art Archive.



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Bowman, Paul. Beyond Bruce Lee: Chasing the Dragon through Film, Philosophy and Popular Culture. London ; New York: Walllower Press, 2013.

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Chow, Rey. “Brushes with he-Other-as-Face:” In he Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman, 48–55. Columbia University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.7312/bowm14994.9.

———“From Writing Diaspora: Introduction: Leading Questions.” In he Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman, 30–47. Columbia University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.7312/bowm14994.8.

Clammer, J. R. Race and State in Independent Singapore, 1965-1990: he Cultural Politics of Pluralism in a Multiethnic Society. Brookield, Vt: Ashgate, 1998.

Dean, Carolyn, and Dana Leibsohn. “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America*.” Colo-nial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (June 2003): 5–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/10609160302341.

Friedman, Jonathan. “Global Crises, the Struggle for Cultural Identity and Intellectual Porkbarrelling: Cosmopolitans vs. Locals, Ethnics and Nationals in an Era of Dehomogenisation.” In Debating Cultural Hy-bridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, edited by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, Postcolonial encounters:70–89. London: Zed, 1997.

Huat, Chua Beng. “Multiculturalism in Singapore: An Instrument of Social Control.” Race & Class 44, no. 3 (January 2003): 58–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396803044003025.

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Ashleigh Chow is a student at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, Class of 2021 where she studies History of Art..


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60 Reimagining Southaast Asian Postcoloniality

Reimagining Southeast AsianPostcoloniality

Jennifer Yang

Local strategies of photographic representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines

Figure 1. Wimo Ambala Bayang, Sixteenth Force, 2008, c-print mounted on alu-minium, 120 x 120 cm


Abstract

Of the few academic texts that survey and meaningfully analyse the works of contemporary Southeast Asian artists working with photographic media, even fewer have adopted an explicitly postcolonial approach to the subject matter. In order to address this gap in research, this analysis builds upon the writings of Allan Sekula, who envisions the camera as a productive ideological tool, and engages with Ali Behdad’s network theory of Orientalist and neo-Orien-talist photography to understand both the politics and history ofthe camera and the dynamics of contemporary photography in the regional context of Southeast Asia. In particular, the analysis examines works from three emerg-ing artists—Wimo Ambala Bayang from Indonesia, Yee I-Lann from Malay-sia, Wawi Navarroza from the Philippines—and the ways in which they have challenged the conventions and colonial legacy of the photographic image through strategies of appropriation, counterarchiving, and hybridisation. Of-

Figure 2. Wimo Ambala Bayang, Fifteenth Force, 2008, c-print mounted on alu-minium, 120 x 120 cm.

62 Reimagining Southeast Asian Postcoloniality

The development of photography in the contemporary Southeast

Asian art scene is a recent phenomenon, and one that has largely been eclipsed by an interest in Chinese and Indian art in the Western art world.1 At the same time, English-language scholarship has frequently cast aside attempts to meaningfully analyze the legacies of colonialism in Southeast Asia and instead has chosen to focus on the turbulent or failed democratic transitions that apparently characterize the region.2 In an efort to address this double elision of Southeast Asian photography and postcoloniality in Western academia, this analysis will consider works from three contemporary photographers: Wimo Ambala

1 Nora A. Taylor, “he Southeast Asian Art Historian as Ethnographer?”, hird Text 25, no. 4 (2011): 478, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2011.587948.2 Chua Beng Huat, “Southeast Asia in Postcolonial Studies: An Introduction”, Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 3 (2008): 233, DOI: 10.1080/13688790802226637.

Bayang from Indonesia, Yee I-Lann from Malaysia, and Wawi Navarroza from the Philippines. Often satirical and at times self-critical, the works of Bayang, Yee, and Navarroza interrogate concepts of postcolonial nationhood and identity while probing the politics, histories and uses of the camera in Southeast Asia. More precisely, they re-image Southeast Asian postcoloniality through the appropriation and subversion of colonial strategies of photographic representation that have historically scrutinized, typiied and essentialized ‘Southeast Asianness’. In ofering indigenous reimaginings of their socio-political circumstance guided by a self-relexive usage of the photographic medium, these photographers

ten deeply satirical and acutely self-aware, the works of Bayang, I-Lann and Navarroza respond not only to colonial histories and discourses, but also to ongoing processes of decolonisation and the construction of national identity in their respective contexts. Importantly, their manipulation of the photo-graphic medium allows them to re-image and reimagine their socio-political surroundings in ways that resist the rigid conines of Self-Other, East-West and coloniser-colonised dichotomies while asserting autochthonous postco-lonial representation. By closely studying these works, this analysis hopes to bring attention to the ways in which Southeast Asian artists are reclaiming and repurposing the camera to subvert colonial power structures, and to also inspire much-needed research into this growing and rapidly evolving domain of the Southeast Asian art world.


challenge rigid and at times violent binary concepts of East and West, Self and Other, while simultaneously casting themselves as central nodes in complex postcolonial networks of power, representation, and discourse.

his analysis extends upon a rich body of literature located at the intersection between postcolonial studies and photographic theory in which Allan Sekula’s writings are particularly seminal. Informed by a Foucauldian interpretation of power as being co-constitutive with processes of discourse formation, Sekula considered photography to be guided by the twin objectives to aestheticize and taxonomize the photographic referent, and therefore a medium capable of producing and/or reproducing power relations. he function of photographic practice, as Sekula theorizes, is therefore intimately linked to a kind of “instrumental realism” whereby the camera, particularly in colonial contexts, enables “the systematic naming, categorization, and isolation of an otherness thought to be determined by biology...”3 his idea that photography may serve as an ideological tool,

3 Allan Sekula, “he Traic in Photographs”, Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 15-16. DOI: 10.1080/00043249.1981.10792441.4 Ali Behdad, “Orientalism and the Politics of Representation”, Trans-Asia Photography Review 10, no. 2 (2020): 1+. Available at: hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0010.203.5 he understanding of Southeast Asia as a socio-political construct is greatly indebted to the works of both Edward Said and Benedict Anderson and their respec-

producing perception and reinforcing power hierarchies, is foundational to contemporary readings of both colonial and postcolonial photographs. Further developments in the literature that are also relevant include Ali Behdad’s network theory of Orientalist and neo-Orientalist photography from the Middle East, in which he problematizes the binary conceptual structures of East and West, colonized and colonizing, and so on. Rather, Behdad envisions the proliferation of “asymmetric and dispersed relations between discrete objects, speciic actors and entities, and concrete practices and connections” as an alternative means of framing discussions around the politics of postcolonial photographic representation.4 By applying these theoretical viewpoints to studies of contemporary Southeast Asian photography, this analysis hopes to extract new meanings and interpretations from the rich body of work emerging from the region, and to understand such work with reference to ongoing processes of indigenous identity formation in the regional construct that is Southeast Asia.5


Wimo Ambala Bayang

In the Indonesian contemporary art scene, a long-standing ontic divide between art and photography has relegated the medium to the realms of commercial enterprise and personal entertainment.6 To reference James Siegel’s writings, the lingering legacy of the camera in Indonesian memory as a colonial instrument for the dual purposes of “scientiic recording [and] aesthetic rendering,”7 now takes the form of a common association of photography with budaya dokumentasi, or a “culture of documentation.”8

As Karen Strassler has observed, the photograph has primarily functioned as a form of record in both a practical and discursive sense, birthed from a concept of dokumentasi—a Dutch loanword tethered to notions of bureaucracy

tive development of the concepts of “imaginative geographies” and “imagined com-munities. See: Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). And Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: relections on the origin and spread of nationalism (New York: Schocken, 1983).6 Lisa Catt, “Contemporary Indonesian photomedia: An ever-present past”, Pho-tofle, no. 94 (2014): 62. Available at: search-informit-com- au.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=527881892350671;res=IELAPA> ISSN: 0811-0859.7 James T. Siegel, Objects and Objections of Ethnography (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 77.8 Karen Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 16.9 “New Order” refers to the period of Imperial Japanese rule from 1938 to the end of World War Two.10 Strassler, Refracted Visions, 17.

and foreign inluence as well as a post-New Order9 vision of a democratic polity held accountable by the people.10 It is against this milieu, that Ruang Mes 56—the Yogyakarta-based photographic collective of which Wimo Ambala Bayang is a founding member—emerges as a distinct example of contemporary photography that redeploys the camera in ongoing negotiations of Indonesian identity and postcolonial nationhood.

Created as part of an art residency program themed “Landing Soon”, Bayang’s 2008 eleven-photo series, Belanda Sudah Dekat! (he Dutch are Already Near!) ofers insight into the politics of power in representations of the Javanese subject. Depicting an eclectic demographic cross-section of Yogyakarta, which features crossdressers and punks alongside farmworkers and elderly women, Bayang pictorializes the


heterogeneity of the Indonesian population, taking as referent both marginal and mainstream members of the community. Varying degrees of uniformity are visible across all eleven images, expressed in coordinated and, at times, identical or standardized attire, combined with a persistent compositional symmetry in the postures of subject bodies. In Sixteenth Force (ig. 1.), for example, three schoolgirls are shown clad in ankle-length blue-grey skirts, white long-sleeved blouses and hijabs typical of Indonesian upper secondary school (SMA) uniforms—there is little to no variation or hint of idiosyncrasy in their dress, except for the color of their shoes and a plastic watch on one girl’s wrist. In the process of selecting, grouping, and therefore typifying such subjects within a square photographic image to be placed and viewed among others, Bayang replicates colonial strategies of representation or what Brian Wallis has described as “representational colonialism.”11 Rather than attempting to transcend colonial conceptions of the photograph as both a form of empirical documentation and an aesthetic exercise, Bayang instead satirizes this logic by constructing a typological photograph that is punctuated with a degree of

11 Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreo-types”, American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 54-55, DOI: 10.1086/424243.12 “Belanda Sudah Dekat!”, Wimo Ambala Bayang, 2010, wimoambalabayang.

reciprocity. With the camera angle positioned at a low angle, the schoolgirls are framed in the upper third of the composition, each positioned in exaggerated contrapposto stances with one leg cocked on the plinth of what appears to be a colonial statue of a cannon. Bayang thus lends a certain agency and authority to the subjects, who gaze down toward the viewer with stern expressions and an air of vigilance, ampliied comedically by the plastic weapons they wield.

he presence of the water pistols, however, is not merely for comedic relief; as a recurring motif across all 11 images, the weapons stand in as a reminder of the violent history of the colonial era and the New Order, as well as the enduring prevalence of racial microaggressions in postcolonial Indonesia. More overt clues lie in the names given to the individual works—each representing a ‘force’, numbered ordinally in reference to the “Fifth Force”, a militia proposed by Sukarno during the mid-1960s. he title of the series also inverts a commonly used phrase in Javanese vernacular, “Belanda masih jauh”, or “the Dutch are still far”, which is typically preixed by an imperative to ‘relax’ or ‘slow down’.12

Borrowed from the


colonial period of warring between the Dutch and the independence movement, the phrase has come to signify an ethos of laziness within contemporary Indonesian society13 – a mythic stereotype created and conferred upon Javanese identities by mid-19th century Dutch colonial discourses, but also perpetuated through local usage and circulation.14 By reinjecting the inverted phrase with a sense of urgency and casting citizens as mock members of ‘armed’ forces, Bayang reactivates sites of anti-colonial resistance within ordinary spaces, constructing scenes of skirmish in which viewers are positioned as foreign invaders confronting an alien ‘Other’.

Bayang also leaves room for ambiguity in such encounters between the viewer and subject, the supposed Self and Other. his is particularly palpable in Fifteenth Force (ig. 2.), wherein three individuals, dressed in costumes inspired by Japanese tokusatsu ilms, pose theatrically in an empty land lot (pekarangan) bordered by

com/portfolio/belanda- sudah-dekat/.13 See, for example: “Belanda Sudah Dekat! by Wimo Ambala Bayang”, Ruang Mes 56, 2008, mes56.wordpress.com/2008/10/18/belanda-sudah-dekat-by-wimo-ambala-bayang/.=.Or: Tom Allard, “Better to slow down and go with the low.” he Age (Melbourne, Australia), July 24, 2010, 17. link-gale- com.ezproxy2.library.usyd.edu.au/apps/doc/A278217667/AONE?u=usyd&sid=AONE&xid=70f26 “Belanda Masih Jauh”, Chairil Gibran Ramadhan, 2020, jernih.co/solilokui/santuuuybelanda-masih-jauh.14 Syed Hussein Alatas, he Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2013), 62.

banana trees. he image is riddled with optical contradictions: the anonymous, alien-like forms of the subjects appear out of place against a familiar scene of provincial central Java; the tarnished metallic tones of the costumes clash with the fading gradient of the blue sky; and the over-the-top detail of painted armour seems incongruous with the humble façade of a distant residence. Such visual discontinuities produce a sense of disconnect between homeland and inhabitant, complicating visions of Indonesian postcoloniality that centre on the Self-Other dichotomy. Instead, Bayang’s work appreciates the existence of multiple multidirectional vectors of power that collectively sustain legacies of colonial representation and discourse in post-Independence Indonesia. In these self-relexive, often humorous photographs, colonial conlict and violence emerges from nowhere in particular – it is unclear whether the subjects are weaponized against the viewer, or against their own


environment. Bayang therefore parodies an over simplistic image of Indonesian postcoloniality that conlates decolonization with military triumph and territorial independence. Viewers are instead invited to re-evaluate the idea of Indonesian independence and to consider the complex network of actors that guide and inluence representations of Indonesia.

Yee I-Lann

While Bayang’s work draws upon interactions in his hometown Yogyakarta, Yee I-Lann’s 2013 series, Picturing Power, investigates broader themes of Southeast Asian postcoloniality, making little reference to Malay(si)a-speciic iconography or culture. In a series of eight digital collages, Yee re-presents images sourced from the archives of Amsterdam’s ethnographic Tropenmuseum—or, in English, the Museum of the Tropics. Printed in black and white on cotton rag paper, the works vary in size with some reaching 1.8 meters in length. In these large-scale works, objects, unixed from their original source material, are rearranged and suspended in a boundless white void, resembling ghostly dreamscapes. Nalini Mohabir

15 Nalini Mohabir, “Yee I-Lann: Photomontage as counter-mapping”, Cultural Dynamics 31, no. 3 (2019): 263, DOI: 10.1177/0921374019855550.

describes this technique as “speculative photomontage”, that is, the digital manipulation of archival photographs in order to create subversive “conjectural moments” that reassert autochthonous control over representations of both coloniality and postcoloniality.”15

Like Bayang’s series, the political didacticism of the works is voiced in wordy titles. In Wherein one in the name of knowledge, measures everything, gives it a name and publicizes this, thereby claiming it (ig. 3.), images of bodies and the natural landscape are collaged together in a panoramic expanse, reading from left to right in narrative sequence. In the image’s leftmost third, a trio of men, presumably engineers, in Western-style white shirts with ties are hunched over a large table, mapping out a construction project. An open door segues from the interior scene to the landscape outside, which is being surveyed by colonial igures with various measuring instruments. Colonial power here is subtle and administrative, linked to the production of knowledge and disguised by the project of geographical science. As Mohabir, in reference to the recurring motif of European-style furnishing in Yee’s works, suggests, “the violence of these forms of power was/is as ubiquitous


and utilitarian as a table.”16 Although Yee invokes these colonial power dynamics through the photographic medium, she does so self-rel exively, fracturing image within image and disrupting the linearity of western perception, visually manifest in the horizon line of the mountain terrain.17 h e landscape, divided by

16 Mohabir, “Yee I-Lann”, 262.17 Photographer Brook Andrew considers the habitual presence of the horizon line as an “aspect of male conquest and dominance”, projecting a dominant West-ern vision that seeks to universalise and colonise. See, “Brook Andrew: Possessed”, Grazia Gunn, 2015, archive.brookandrew.com/post/130992145106/brook-andrew-possessed.

dashed lines and literally cleaved apart by the bridge, is penetrated by white negative space, which evinces both the threat of erasure, of disappearance into the archive, and the promise of reconstruction and re-temporalization. Indeed, Yee’s work actuates John Roberts’ idea of the archive as “a productive

Figure 3. Yee I-Lann, Wherein one in the name of knowledge, measures every-thing, gives it a name and publicizes this, thereby claim-ing it, 2013, giclée print on cotton rag paper, 63 x 180 cm.

Figure 4. Yee I-Lann, Wherein one nods with politi-cal sympathy and says I un-derstand you better than you understand yourself, I’m just here to help you help yourself, 2013, giclée print on cotton rag paper, 63 x 63 cm


machine for meaning”, never neutral nor randomized, but existing as “intellectually organized forms of rationalization” in continuous motion.18 In reclaiming and reorganizing photography from the archive, Yee engages in a “practice of counterproduction, of counterarchiving, of interruption and reordering of the event.”19 Such subversive play that deconstructs and re-images colonial paradigms allows Yee to cast herself as an agential actor in representations of Southeast Asian history and contemporality.

Yee’s interrogation of the colonial imagination continues in Wherein one nods with political sympathy and says I understand you better than you understand yourself, I’m just here to help you help yourself (see ig. 4.). As suggested by Yee’s co-optation of a colonizing voice in the title and by assembling the crouching igures into the crude form of a mapped nation, not dissimilar to the shape of Peninsular Malaysia, the work probes power imbalances in colonial representations of Southeast Asian bodies. he well-rendered detail of facial features and expressions preserves a degree of individual autonomy, although this diminishes as the faces, some

18 John Roberts, Photography and Its Violations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 113.19 Ibid., 114.20 Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: Chi-cago University Press, 1993), 187.

blurred and translucent, recede into space, collaged into the shape of a igurative nation. At the very front of the image, two orang besar (literally “big people” in both scale and status) are seated in positions of power – a local sultan and a colonial igure clothed in white and wearing a pith helmet, an archetypal feature of European colonial uniforms in tropical climes. Once again, the table as a symbol of colonial violence igures in the foreground with its three bowed legs and the boots of the white man—an obtrusive detail amongst the crowd of people with hidden or bare feet—simultaneously anchoring and propping up the loating mass of bodies in an ironic visualization of the concept of the ‘white man’s burden’ and its role in the ideological construction of nationhood. Rather than simply reproducing ethnographic images of the colonized Other, however, Yee’s constructed photomontage activates what Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins have described as, “a dynamic site at which many gazes or viewpoints intersect.”20 In the only image of the series that features so many subjects (with varying degrees of power)


gazing directly into the lens, Yee accents the multiplicity, diversity, and partiality of looks that inform colonial and postcolonial representations of Southeast Asia. Just as Indo-Malayan colonies developed as gradated power systems involving lower-class colonial subjects, local elites, colonists, and those in-between, contemporary imaginings of the Southeast Asian world continue to be sustained by networks of power relations between objects, actors, and entities. It is this network that Yee animates in her photomontages, inviting viewers to not only consider the politics of their own gaze, but also that of the artist, the archivist, and the photographer.

Wawi Navarroza

A contemporary Filipino photographer working primarily in self-portraiture, Wawi Navarroza recently hosted her irst solo exhibition in 2019—Self-Portraits and the Tropical Gothic” —comprised of eight large-format, framed tableaux vivants teeming with symbols and cultural information. Her extravagant mise-en-scènes—generated through careful lighting techniques and postproduction manipulation—showcase a self-

21 Paul Sharrad, “Echoes and antecedents: Nick Joaquin’s Tropi-cal Gothic”, World Literature Written in English 20, no. 2 (1981): 355, DOI: 10.1080/17449858108588692.

relexive and experimental use of the photographic medium, in which Navarrozza subverts the factuality of the image. Vibrant and lattened in appearance, they condense an immense amount of detail into a singular plane disrupted by digital cut-and-pastes, inducing tensions between authenticity and ictionality that play out across the pictorial surface but also structure Navarroza’s interrogation of Filipino identity. Indeed, her reference to the title of Filipino novelist Nick Joaquin’s book “Tropical Gothic” (1972) links her work to a recurring theme in contemporary Philippine art, which Paul Sharrad, in his analysis of Joaquin’s text, explains as a “certain schizophrenia in the Philippine sense of identity.”21

his notion features particularly strongly in Remember Who You Are (Strange Fruit/he Other Asian, Self-Portrait with Pineapple) (See ig. 5.) wherein Navarroza, adopting the roles of both photographer and muse, poses against a brilliant red backdrop hung against a kitschy loral wallpaper of turquoise and green. Capturing one of the artist’s most dramatic alterations in physical appearance, the work is structured by a sense of ambivalence and slippage in


cultural identity with Navarroza donning an artii cial blonde wig and blue contact lenses. With Navarroza pictured gazing beyond the frame, appearing to sit in contemplation, the image emulates and appropriates the iconography of Catholic saint portraiture. h is act of mimicry allows Navarroza to not only satirize the legacy of the Spanish Catholic imagination in the Philippines, but to also elevate the subaltern Filipino to hagiographic status, imbuing her

22 Ernest Hans Gombrich, h e Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decora-tive Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 156, quoted in David Carrier, A World Art History and Its Objects (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 101.

with a sense of sacrosanctity that has been amplii ed by the presence of ornamental objects and a frame. As Ernest Hans Gombrich writes, “the richer the elements of the frame, the more the center will gain in dignity.”22 Navarroza simultaneously embodies and pictures the stereotyped physiognomy of both Self and Other, occupying a liminal space of in-betweenness that Homi Bhabha claims to represent an “ironic compromise” in a representational

Figure 5. Wawi Navar-roza, Remember Who You Are (Strange Fruit/h e Other Asian, Self- Portrait with Pine-apple), 2019, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper, cold-mounted on acid- free aluminium, with artist’s exhibition frame, 114.3 x 86.36 cm.


strategy that “‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power.”23 In picturing herself as a self-titled ‘Other Asian’, Navarroza asks viewers to think beyond the static categories of Self and Other, ofering an entry point into a more self-critical representation of a hybrid Southeast Asian identity that recognizes its basis in a complex and ongoing history of cultural interchange between the Philippines and its colonizer.

Such strategies of subversion are not only cited in Navarroza’s representation of self but play out also in her elaborate arrangements of objects. For example, Navarroza drapes herself in a deep blue kimono patterned with cranes and peonies—a reference to East Asian inluence and the 1942-45 period of Japanese interregnum in the Philippines. To her left,

23 Homi Bhabha, he Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 122.24 Jim Endersby, Orchid: Cultural History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016), 127, 128.25 A diferent postcolonial reading of the title may associate it with the song writ-ten by Abel Meeropol in 1937 as protest against the lynching of black Americans which was graphically captured in images such as Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the 1930 lynching of homas Shipp and Abram Smith. Although this analysis does not explore such a reading, it comprises another rich and complex ield of postcolo-nial inquiry, generating questions surrounding issues of violence against black bodies, Western visual pleasure, and the camera as an ideological instrument. See, for ex-ample: Mark Sealy, “Violence of the Image”, in Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (London: Lawrence and Wishart Limited, 2019), 106-157.26 Andrea Montanari, “he Stinky King: Western Attitudes toward the Durian in Colonial Southeast Asia”,Food, Culture and Society 20, no. 3 (2017): 395-414. DOI: 10.1080/15528014.2017.1337389.

artiicial lowers—red and yellow heliconia, bird-of-paradise, and purple orchids—frame her proile, feeding into the scenography of a tropical idyll. he orchids in particular, are laden with cultural signiicance; as Jim Endersby describes, they came to symbolize, to the European eye, “the romance and opportunity of empire” and the “humid, exotic, sensual worlds” they were extracted from.24 Navarroza’s symbolic play is most salient in the mutated pineapple she holds, which she names a “Strange Fruit”,25 alluding to the enduring presence of tropical fruit in the Western imagination as an emblem of exotica, arousing both revulsion and fascination.26 Yet, the strangeness of Navarroza’s pineapple is not merely physical, but also a consequence of its lineage. Introduced through Spanish contact as a colonial


crop, transformed into a sartorial signiier of status and foreign exoticism in the form of Piña (pineapple iber) textile,27 and now mass-imported by Europe and northern America from the Philippines,28 the pineapple’s genealogy mirrors the hybrid nature of a constructed Filipino identity. By crowding her self-portraits with these culturally-coded objects, Navarroza accesses an elusive Filipino identity that, as she notes, is embodied in the excessive displays of the Filipino sari-sari (variety) store but also “laced with a Spanish colonial baroque hangover.”29 In a similar manner to the postcolonial genre of Latin American neo-baroque, as theorized by César Salgado, Navarroza’s congested compositions mock and mimic “hegemonic, difusionist, and acculturating” European formats—the baroque style—in order to generate “emancipating, autochthonous, and transculturating” aesthetic

27 Mina Roces, “Dress, Status, and Identity in the Philippines: Pineapple Fibre Cloth and Ilustrado Fashion”, Fashion heory 17, no. 3 (2013), 341-372, DOI: 10.2752/175174113X13597248661828.28 According to 2018 datasets from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the Philippines is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of pineapple alongside Costa Rica and Brazil. See: “FAOSTAT: Crops Data”, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, last updated June 15, 2020, fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QC.29 Quoted from Navarroza’s artist statement on her website. See: “Self Portraits and the Tropical Gothic”, Wawi Navarroza, 2019, wawinavarroza.com/self-portraits-the-tropical-gothic.30 César A. Salgado, “Hybridity in New World Baroque heory”, he Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 316, DOI: 10.2307/541365.

strategies.30 Here, as in Remember Who You Are, slippage in Navarroza’s racial and cultural identity is echoed in the blending of colonial and indigenous stylistic formats. By appropriating a visual language that is intelligible to the West and redeploying it as a means to destabilize colonial binaries and constructions of racialized diference, Navarroza is able to reform and indigenize representations of Southeast Asian identity and postcoloniality.

In the hopes of ofering a cursory glimpse into the diversity of contemporary photography emerging from Southeast Asia, this analysis has closely studied works by three artists from the region – Wimo Ambala Bayang from Indonesia, Yee I-Lann from Malaysia and Wawi Navarroza from the Philippines. It is worth noting in these inal relections that the works and practices of each of these artists not only deal with topical issues around the politics


of postcolonial representation, but also actively contribute to an indigenous reconceptualization of the role and potential of the camera as a discursive instrument in Southeast Asia. In Bayang’s series, a reassertion of local agency is actualized in his satirical parodies of images of colonial warfare as well as the typological tendencies of colonial photographic representation. A similarly subversive act takes place in Yee’s interrogation of the colonial archive and the consequent creation of a dialogic space in which viewers are able to critically engage with colonial past and consider its contemporary legacy. For Navarroza, the appropriation of Western aesthetics and the creation of a hybrid cultural identity through photographic manipulation is key to the unravelling of colonial dichotomies of East-West, Self-Other, and colonizer-colonizing and in reclaiming representational authority. Yet beyond such surveys of the thematic undercurrents and visual strategies of the works of Bayang, Yee and Navarroza, it is also the creation, exhibition, viewership and scholarship of such works that power indigenous representations of Southeast Asian postcoloniality and ongoing processes of decolonization in the region. As contemporary artists such as Bayang, Yee and Navarroza continue to confront

the colonial legacy of the camera in the Southeast Asian context and insert themselves as central actors within postcolonial networks of representation, it becomes all the more essential that their works are studied as part of an expanding global art historical canon.


Jennifer Yang is a student at the University of Sydney, Class of 2022, where she studies a Bachelor of Art History and Interna-tional Relations, as well as a Diploma of Language minoring in Indonesian Studies.

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Abstract

Between the 5th and 8th centuries, monu-mental stone pillars, covered in relief and topped with crosses, dominated the Geor-gian rural landscape. h ese monuments, known as cross pillars, survive only in frag-ments: their function, purpose, and origins remain largely undeciphered. As one of the i rst nations to convert to Christianity, some scholars point to Georgia’s earliest-recorded Christian miracles as the source of the cross pillars. However, I demonstrate that these miracles were clearly inspired by a pre-existing Caucasian belief system – wherein followers worshipped holy trees and forests. h rough tying together Georgia’s religious, literary, and artistic past, this paper argues that the cross pillars were syncretic monu-ments, formed from a combination of new Christian ideologies and existing polytheistic beliefs. I conclude that the local peoples reused polytheistic visual and iconographical vocabularies to understand the new religion, indicating that cross pillars were Christian, stone interpretations of the region’s sacred trees.

Stone Trees and Holy Forests

Calista Blanchard

An Investigation into the Pagan Origins of the Georgian Cross Pillar

Figure 1. Relief on eastern façade of Edzani Sion (6th ce.), Kvemo Kartli, Georgia.

78 Stone Trees and Holy Forests

The stone cross pillars of medieval Georgia are a largely unique

phenomenon. As monolithic monu-ments decorated in relief, scholars tend to add them to the list of early medieval decorative sculpture that grew in popularity from around the ifth century. he physical rem-nants of these crosses – much like our understanding of them – are, however, fragmentary. Extant are a few dozen samples of bases and crosses, with additional pieces of the pillars themselves in varying stages of decomposition. he scarcity of surviving examples is due to the use of local materials, such as limestone, which are easy to carve but suscep-tible to erosion and damage. Despite the lack of any complete models, the original composition of the cross pillars is suggested by a 6th-century relief on the eastern façade of the Edzani Sion church, located in the Kvemo Kartli region (ig. 1). On the façade, the artist has depicted an or-namented pillar with a base, erected on a three-tiered platform, topped with the so-called Bolnisi cross.1 Between the cross and the column stands a row of arched arcades atop a capital, crowned with a semi-circular dome.2 Scholars generally agree that

1 A variant of the cross pattée, as seen in a 5th-century ornament at the Bolnisi Sioni church. 2 We cannot be certain to what degree this is the standard composition of the cross pillar. he architectural structure of the arcades and their placement on the cross pillar varies from fragment to fragment, and most surviving columns do not contain one at all. 3 Tamar Dadiani et al., Medieval Georgian Sculpture, 45-46; Gagoshidze, “Jerusa-lem in Medieval Georgian Art” in Visual Constructs of Jerusalem, 133-134.

this structure evokes the Anastasis Rotunda from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.3 he shaft of the pillar is decorated with symmetrical zig-zags, trisected by vertical lines. hese qualities generally contrast with surviving cross pillars, as the majority prioritize igural relief and few examples of the Anastasis Rotunda have been uncovered. From discovered examples, it is clear that cross pillars existed as open-air struc-tures. Until this point, scholars have rooted cross pillars and their relief in a irmly Christian context. In the process, they have overlooked how the relationship between ornament, tree worship, and Christian conver-sion tactics reveal the monuments’ possible pre-Christian origins and cultic functions. For the purposes of exploring this relationship, attention will be given speciically to a collec-tion of bases and pillars from the 5th – 7th centuries that contain or prioritize ornament.

he Natlismtsemeli, Didi Gomareti and Kataula pillars are late 6th to early 7th century cross pillar fragments, named for the villages in which they were found. Each pillar is notable in that it devotes between one and three of its four sides to


ornament. he decision of which side is represented by igural art, ornamented, or left unadorned is indicated by direction: the primary igural composition would adorn the west-facing side, the east “rear” side would be left unadorned or embel-lished with loral ornament, and the north and south faces could be either igural or strictly ornamental. In their original locations, viewers of the cross pillars would be facing the east when regarding the “front” of the monuments.4 his pattern is similar in the case of all aforementioned pillars. Equally notable for the pur-poses of this research are examples of vegetal relief on surviving bases and fragments of cross pillars. Such ornament is seen on the Pantiani and Ukangori bases, as well as the Bolnisi cross pillar fragment. his speciic collection of 5th to 7th-century cross pillar fragments was chosen because of their inclusion of loral, vegetal designs, and plant-like ornament.

Hitherto, scholars with an interest in early medieval Georgian relief have chosen to focus on and explore the igural compositions on the cross pillars, which gener-

4 Ancient Christian prayer was conducted in the direction of the east, in accor-dance with the belief that the “the sign of the Son of man,” the cross, would appear in the east with the second coming (Matthew 25:27-30)5 Zaza Skhirtladze, “სტელის ფრაგმენტი მცხეთის წმ. ჯვრის ტაძრიდან” [“he Fragment of Stela from the Jvari Church of Mtskheta,”] 325-387.6 K’art’li is a historical region and former kingdom in central Georgia, before the creation of the Kingdom of Georgia in 1008 AD. 7 Kitty Machabeli, “Early Medieval Stelae in Georgia in the Context of East Chris-tian Art,” in Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus, 83-96.

ally depict Christian iconographic programs. Tamar Dadiani, Ekaterine Kvachatadze, and Tamar Khundadze, in their Medieval Georgian Sculpture, devote a chapter to scholarly re-search on the Georgian cross pillars. Alternatively, Zaza Skhirtladze has used the stelae and their inscriptions as documents for the people and do-mestic politics depicted.5 he body of existing stone crosses and their programs have also been cataloged by Kitty Machabelli in her Early Medieval Georgian Stone Crosses. In a separate work, Machabelli also covers the secular aspects of the stone cross pillars and how the social develop-ment of K’art’li, now present-day Georgia,6 afected them aesthetically.7 he signiicant role of Machabelli’s work in the formation of this paper cannot be deemphasized – without her photographic and analytic contri-butions, information regarding the cross pillars would be nearly inacces-sible.

Since Machabelli’s ultimate goal is to examine the creation and development of the unique Christian igural iconography presented on the crosses, she does not give much


attention to the ornamental designs or the origins of the cross pillars themselves, apart from connecting them to wooden crosses placed by Saint Nino, who is credited with converting Georgia to Christianity. hough ornament has been featured consistently in the compositions of the cross pillars, deeper analysis of the ornamentation has largely been ignored, or it has been deemed wholly decorative and secondary to the igural compositions of the stelae.8 As cataloged by Owen Jones in his exhaustive account on histori-cal ornamental styles, ornament has been most traditionally considered an “accessory to architecture.”9 However, as argued by scholars Fahetme Ahani, Irai Etessam, and Seved Islami, it is through ornament that one might identify the “desires, activities, and beliefs” of its creator.10 hus, ornament may play a critical role in deciphering the origins and traditions behind the creation of the cross-pillar phenomenon.

In order to further explore the relationship between Christian-ity and the cross pillar, a discussion on the aforementioned story of Saint Nino and her conversion of Georgia is necessary. he earliest documenta-

8 Ibid, 83-85.9 Owen Jones, he Grammar of Ornament: A Visual Reference of Form and Colour in Architecture and the Decorative Arts, 470.10 Ahani et al., “he Distinction of Ornament and Decoration in Architecture,” 25-26. 11 Ruinus of Aquileia, History of the Church, 397.12 Ibid, 399.13 Capital of K’art’li until the 5th century.

tion of the 4th-century conversion of the kingdom of K’art’li can be found in Ruinus of Aquileia’s early 5th-century History of the Church. In his documentation of one of the world’s irst kingdoms to oicially convert to the Christian faith, Ruinus describes miracles performed by an unnamed “captive woman” – in later sources, this woman is named Nino.11 In one miracle, the woman instructs the newly-converted Georgian king, Mirian, to construct a church; one by one, his workers raise the wooden pillars of the building, but they ind the third pillar could not be lifted above halfway. All night, Nino prayed over the pillar, and in the morning, the wooden pillar was “suspended upright just above its base: not placed upon it, but hanging about one foot in the air.”12 In front of the awe-struck crowd, the pillar then lowered itself onto its base. his is the story of the “Life-giving Pillar.” hough the original pillar has since disappeared, the cathedral where it was housed, Svetitskhoveli (literally the “Life-giving Pillar”) in the city of Mtskheta,13 remains the most important and venerated church in Georgian Orthodoxy. he tale is later developed in Leonti Mroveli’s 11th-


century he Conversion of K’art’li by Nino. In this hagiographical retell-ing, Mroveli expands far beyond the contexts of the original Ruinus text, documenting Saint Nino’s family his-tory, her many miracles, and her life. he Life-giving Pillar, in particular, has drastically changed – the story has become steeped in a more intense Christian rhetoric. he wooden pil-lar, now shining with “true light,” is alleged to have been built from a ce-dar tree in proximity to Jesus’ robe.14 he Pillar has also been imbued with the ability to heal: the blind, para-lyzed, and sick are cured through touching or praying near the pillar. It is in these revisions and additions that the Life-giving Pillar becomes a clear invocation of the “sacred tree,” a motif that has been recorded within numerous Indo-European belief systems as a source of healing and eternal life.

Mroveli’s account of the conversion of Georgia continues to explore the connection between the Life-giving Pillar and the sacred tree. In one chronicle, Mroveli describes a beautiful tree with the ability to heal the sick and mortally wounded. he “former heathens'' – the converted people of K’art’li – cut down the tree at the behest of the bishop and placed it near Svetitskhoveli Cathe-

14 Mroveli, “Conversion of K’art’li by Nino,” in Rewriting Caucasian History: he Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles, 127.15 Ibid, 133-4.16 Ibid, 135.17 Ibid, 136.

dral, where it miraculously stayed fresh for thirty-seven days until being formed into crosses.15 According to the account, crosses of ire appeared from the heavens and moved towards the east and west, which Saint Nino interpreted to the people as signs of where the revered crosses should be placed. After the crosses were placed, Saint Nino went up to the hill in Mtskheta and had a bishop “inscribe a cross” on the stone, which the people then worshipped.16 his story ends with a declaration by Mroveli that the “noble [ones]” of K’art’li, having seen the “unparal-leled miracles and inefable healings,” did not stray from the “holy church, the column of light, and the living cross.”17 Today, the Jvari Church stands on the site of this miracle, looking down on Mtskheta and Sve-titskhoveli Cathedral.

It is evident that the two monuments – the Life-giving Pillar and the Revered Cross – underwent, over time, a kind of transformative conlation. his conlation is ex-plored in another section of Mroveli’s Chronicle. During the reign of King Mirdat (408-410), it is said that the Georgians began to take pieces of wood from the living pillar and make them into crosses. After allowing the further construction of a number


of crosses, Mirdat surrounded the remains of the pillar with stone and topped it with a cross made from the pillar. he speciic imagery used here by Mroveli seems to correspond closely with the representation of the Edzani Sion cross pillar – that is, a stone-brick pillar topped by a cross. Furthermore, Mirdat’s transforma-tion of the living pillar into stone would it with the dates listed for the earliest surviving fragments of cross pillars, as they populated Georgia between the 5th and 8th centuries. he stone pillars that survive from this time vary in relief style, with a noticeable change from primarily symbolic ornamentation of the 5th century toward distinctly Christian igural relief beginning in the 6th cen-tury – in what Machabelli calls “the irst signs of belief in the miraculous power of holy images'' that would eventually become a large part of the Georgian Orthodoxy.18 Towards the later 8th and 9th centuries, ornament is almost entirely excluded. However, it is notable that a signiicant number of early, more decorative stelae, were later appropriated as spolia by local builders in order to fashion architec-tural accents for their churches (igs. 2.1 – 2.5).

If the cross pillar is meant to be a stone invocation of such sacred objects as the Life-giving Pillar and the Revered Cross, then the resulting

18 Machabeli, “Early Medieval Stelae,” 92. 19 Jones, he Grammar of Ornament, 469.20 Viticulture is a signiicant part of Georgian history. As one of the oldest wine

relief compositions would have car-ried some spiritual weight. Although Jones calls ornament an “idealiza-tion [of the] forms of nature,”19 it is clear that the low-relief vegetation on the faces of the Georgian cross pillars were bound with inherent signiicance. Instead of simply acting as secondary decoration, ornament is allowed to occupy valuable surface space on the cross pillars in a way that brings it to the forefront of the overall composition, implying not an idealization but an active invocation of the nature motif.

Most importantly, the designs are used instead of the vast corpus of Christian iconography that the Georgian stone masons would have had access to. What appears to be simple decoration may instead be a purposeful decision to accentuate the natural spatial geography of the cross pillars, further establishing the open-air monuments as environmen-tal entities. Some of the most explicit examples of vegetal imagery have been preserved on the extant bases of non-surviving cross pillars. his is most aptly demonstrated on the Pantiani base from the 6th century, which depicts two angels on oppo-site ends of a miniature intact cross pillar, from which surrounding grape vines and lowers seem to grow (ig. 3).20 Another base from the 5th–6th century Ukangori pillar demon-


strates similar iconography, depict-ing a blooming tree with an ovine or caprine animal to its right (ig. 4). In its original location, the stone tree would have appeared to “sprout” from the real earth where the base would have been situated.

On the larger fragments of cross pillars, this “growth” of plant life is commonly depicted on the adjacent and rear faces of the pillar. he Kataula pillar from the 7th cen-tury dedicates an entire face on the rear side of the pillar to the design of a climbing grape vine (ig. 6). On the 6th–7th century Natlismtsemeli Pillar, the two lateral sides – one of a climbing grape vine and the other of a rhomboidal net (ig. 7.2)– are used to accentuate the primary compo-sitional narrative of the Hunting of Saint Eustace, presented on the face of the pillar (igs. 7.1). Finally, the collection of 6th–7th century Didi Gomareti cross pillars found together is marked by two examples of this iconography (ig. 8.1): one has the ornament of a sprouting iris (ig. 8.2), while the other dedicates a side of the pillar to a collection of vine-scrolls (ig. 8.3). his brief summary of the clearest examples of nature-like relief on the Georgian cross pillars only begins to address the amount of ornament truly present on these monuments. Some cross pillars carry examples of Georgian knotwork,

regions in the world, evidence of wine production has been found as far back as the 6th millennium BC. he grape vine appears as a symbol of Georgian identity, as well as a manifestation of the Georgian landscape, where grape vines are found.

a form of ornament that parallels pagan Celtic designs and demands further research (igs. 9.1, 9.2). With the inclusion of spolia (as the orna-mented parts of the cross pillar were most frequently appropriated), there is a clear association between natural imagery, vegetal ornament, and the cross pillar stelae.

Although natural imagery can hold signiicant symbolic mean-ing in Christian art, there is evidence that scenes on the cross pillars were preigured by earlier, pagan interpre-tations. Due to the scarcity of extant pagan artifacts, attention will be focused on a series of pre-Christian bronze belt buckles (igs. 10.1-10.3). Similar to the cross pillars, these buckles were excavated across Geor-gia, indicating they had a widespread presence. Forged between the 1st and 4th centuries, the belt buck-les all have similar compositions: a highly stylized central igure of a deer, horse, or ram, surrounded by a collection of vines, birds, and dogs, and bordered by a repeating pattern of ornament. he barking dogs, ap-pearing in the top left of each buckle, indicate that the scenes are depict-ing a hunt. he birds present in two of the buckles are reminiscent of peafowl or peahens, which suggests a fascination with the bird that pre-cedes the 6th-century Gantiadi and Bolnisi cross pillars (ig 9.1). Across


Figures 2.1 – 2.5 (top to bottom). Collection of examples of spolia, taken from K. Machabelli, Early Medieval Stone Crosses. Georgia.


Figure 3. h e Pantiani base (6th-7th ce.), Pantiani, Georgia.

Figure 4. h e Ukangori base (5th ce.), Ukang-ori, Georgia.

Figure 5. h e Ukangori capital (6th ce.), Ukangori, Georgia.


all belt buckles, the central igure is marked by two unusual low-relief coils on the fore and hindquarter of the animal. Most interestingly, these coils also appear on the ruminant igures of the cross pillars, some three to four centuries later. his phenomenon is most clearly repre-sented on the Ukangori base (ig. 4), and the Ukangori capital, which depicts a fragment of a resting deer or horse (ig. 5). he presence of a sitting deer on the Nagvarevi cross can be more clearly deciphered due to the appearance of a circle on the right of the weathered pillar (ig. 11). hese sunken coils could be used to articulate the presence of muscula-ture, or possibly be a stylistic motif commonly associated with ruminants in early irst-millennium Georgia. he presence of these symbols within both metalwork and relief, despite the signiicant technical diference in their conception, suggests a shared culture of visual motifs between Christian and pagan Georgia. Ad-ditionally, the importance of hunting compositions on the buckles is paral-leled by the presence of Saint George and Saint Eustace across many of the cross pillars.21 As noted by Nina Iamanidze, the cult of the equestrian saints lourished in early Christian Georgia, perhaps acting as a substitu-tion for “the veneration of ancient heroes” from their pagan past.22 As I will later discuss, the hunt

21 See: Brdadzori, Khozhorni, Natlismtsemeli, and Dmanisi Sion cross pillars. 22 Iamanidze, “he Dragon-Slayer Horseman from its Origins to the Seljuks,” 98.

indeed plays a signiicant role in pre-Christian Georgian cosmology. Symbolically, natural imagery could thus serve both a pagan and a Chris-tian context, giving regional artists few reasons to abandon the artistic themes and visual vocabularies that they already understood. Although a full analysis of pre-Christian Geor-gian art is outside the scope of this paper, these few examples serve to demonstrate that pagan motifs re-mained in-use after the Christianiza-tion of Georgia, surviving despite the area’s new, radically diferent material culture and belief system.

Evidently, there are two notable efects produced by the Georgian artists’ uses of natural im-agery on their cross pillars. First, they indicate the existence of an impor-tant tradition of visual culture that precedes the fourth century Chris-tianization of Georgia. Second, and perhaps most critically, they work to root the cross pillar in a distinctly natural sphere. If ornament, as Ahani et al. propose, might ofer insight into the intentions of an artist, then there is no intention clearer than the association between cross pillars and the lora and fauna of their surround-ing landscapes. Furthermore, as their placement alongside roads and in ields indicates, stone cross pillars were meant to function in nature, outside of domestic and ecclesiastical spaces. his choice of location might


have bridged the divide between the expanding Christian faith and exist-ing nature religions, and would have beneitted the cross pillars’ reception as cult objects.

As a result, the importance of open-air placement in regard to cross pillars should not be deempha-sized. Returning to he Conversion of K’art’li by Nino, it is clear that the open-air, free standing motif is not only bound to the original miracle of the Life-giving Pillar and the Revered Cross. he theme of paganism in relation to Saint Nino’s miracles appears in both the Mroveli and Ruinus Chronicles. Speciically, in Mroveli’s account, Saint Nino reaches K’art’li and inds the people there worshipping “ire, stones, and wood as god.”23 he people, not yet converted, worship “idols,” notably, a bronze statue of a man, with jewels for eyes and golden armor.24 he pagan gods, one named Armazi and another Zaden, share names with the mountains at Mtskheta, where they are said to have been placed before Saint Nino’s miracle toppled them; speciically, it was “on that moun-tain [that] formerly idols had been erected.”25 he narrative choice to replace those idols with a Christian

23 Mroveli, “Conversion of K’art’li by Nino,” 97. 24 Ibid, 98.25 Ibid, 373.26 To quote Georges Charachidzé: “he mountain Georgians … preserved a rich and well-organized religious system to the beginning of the twentieth century, with diferentiated cults that continued to be productive [due to the persistence of ] a priestly class with an orally-transmitted body of knowledge.” In Religions and Myths of the Georgians of the Mountains.

cult object – as when Saint Nino places her Revered Cross in the same spot – indicates a baptism, or adop-tion, of the role that paganism played in pre-Christian Georgian society. Although brief, this description of pagan Georgian rituals evidences a relationship between open-air, natu-ral spaces and a religious tradition that preceded Nino’s conversion.

To discuss pre-Christian religious systems, one must ac-knowledge the inherent problems in doing so. Simply put, it is rare for a Caucasian or Indo-European pagan religion to survive for two thousand years without evolution or interfer-ence – if not from Christianity, then certainly from surrounding cultures. his is especially true for the Cau-casus, a highly contested region that has always acted as a melting pot of diferent religions and folk beliefs. As a result, modern understandings of Georgian mythology are patchwork, composed of historical accounts from foreign travelers and contemporary interviews with religious groups whose folk beliefs survived in isola-tion from living deep in the moun-tains.26 hough historical accounts can be problematic – often due to the Christian, “civilized” lens of the


Figure 6. Sketch depiction of each side of the Kataula pillar (7th ce.), Kataula, Georgia. Taken from K. Machabelli, Early Medieval Georgian Stone Crosses.

Figure 7.1 (above right). Front face of the Natlismtsemeli pillar (6th-7th ce.), Natlismt-semeli, Georgia.

Figure 7.2 (above left). Sketch depiction of each side of Natlismtsemeli pillar (6th-7th ce.), pillar. Taken from K. Machabelli, Early Medieval Georgian Stone Crosses.

Figure 8.1 (left). Didi Goma-reti pillars together (6th-7th ce.), Didi Gomareti, Georgia.


Figure 8.2. Didi Gomareti pillar with image of an iris.

Figure 8.3. Didi Gomareti pillar with the image of vine scrolls.

Figure 9.1. Example of Georgian knotwork be-neath a peacock on the Bolnisi pillar (6th-7th ce.), Bolnisi, Georgia.

Figure 9.2. Fragment of King Doniert’s Stone (9th ce.), East Cornwall, England.


visiting author – they ofer valu-able insight into local belief systems that still functioned up until Soviet forces entered the region in the 20th century.

As it was often the moun-tains that saved pieces of these faiths, it was also the mountains that had a hand in creating them. Perhaps due to being a region with some of the most varied and dramatic geological features in the world, Georgian – and simultaneously Caucasian – mythol-ogy is embedded with a distinct natural quality. According to the separate research of Alexander Mika-beridze and Georges Charachidzé, Georgian paganism was comprised of a shamanistic, polytheistic belief sys-tem, characterized by oral tradition, nature divinities, and ritual sacriice. Followers believed the universe was divided into three vertical layers – the “middle world,” or earth; the highest world, the home of the gods;

However, even in the mountainous regions of the Caucasus, local beliefs have seen at least partial dilution by Christian missionary and trans-regional inluence. hese beliefs are usually syncretic. For example, Saint George, the Christian patron saint of Georgia, is often conlated as a deity in these pagan communities. For the Ossetians, he is one of the most worshipped divine igures, “Uastyrdzhi,” patron of men and travelers. Alternatively, Saint Elijah is called “Uatsilla,” god of rain. In the northern region of Pkhovi, Saint George is called Giorgi, and is associated closely with ancient local war and storm gods. See: Richard Foltz, “Scythian Neo-Paganism in the Cauca-sus: he Ossetian Uatsdiin as a ‘Nature Religion’ in Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 321; Kevin Tuite, “Lightening, Sacriice, and Possession in the Traditional Religions of the Caucasus” in Anthropos, 487.27 Historical Dictionary of Georgia, ed. Alexander Mikaberidze, 1st ed. (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2007), s.v.“Cosmology,” 242-243.28 John Colarusso, Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Cir-cassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, andUbykhs, 102; M. Berman et al., Georgia hrough Earth, Fire, Air and Water, 45.

and an underworld, the home of monsters. hese layers were connect-ed by an axis mundi that is usually identiied as a World Tree, or Tree of Life; it is in some versions a tower, chain, or pillar.27 he World Tree as interchangeable with a pillar could be one explanation for the unique narrative presented by the miracle of the Life-giving Pillar, suggesting that it and thus later cross pillars, might have had roots in a pre-Christian cosmological belief. However, the appearance of a world tree is hardly unique to Georgian paganism.28 A more favorable argument is presented when one inspects the nature cults formed by its followers.

he abundance of wild spac-es in the Caucasus is clearly relected in the myths and legends of the region. Speciic deities are consid-ered the patrons of each realm in the natural sphere – the gods Mindort-batoni and Ochopintre, who rule the


domains of fruitful lands and wild forests, respectively, demand that those who use their spaces ask per-mission.29 As a result of this depen-dence on nature, a signiicant part of the religion is based on a specialized pantheon of the hunt, which Chara-chidzé takes care to document from its surviving followers in Svaneti. Of the most important of these deities is Dali, a female goddess of nature, animals, and the hunt. Along with many of the igures in the legends, she lives deep in the mountains and rules the forest and its creatures. Her cult was particularly widespread throughout the mountainous regions of Georgia.

he signiicance of Dali and Ochopintre’s domains within Georgian mythology is of particu-lar interest when compared to the conversion story of King Mirian.30 According to Ruinus, King Mirian’s wife urged him to convert to Chris-tianity, but he rejected her for some time. One day, the king went on a hunt in the woods and was separated from his companions, and suddenly the forest turned pitch black. After wandering in the darkness, he began to call on the diferent gods, and the darkness only parted when he

29 Historical Dictionary of Georgia, ed. Alexander Mikaberidze, 1st ed. (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2007), s.v.“Ochopintre,” 242-243.30 Ruinus of Aquileia, History of the Church, 398; Mroveli, “Conversion of K’art’li by Nino,” 119-121.31 Historical Dictionary of Georgia, ed. Alexander Mikaberidze, 1st ed. (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2007), s.v.“Ochopintre,” 243.

prayed on the Christian God to save him. It was after this moment that King Mirian decided to convert and later made Christianity the oicial religion of the kingdom. Similar to the narrative of Saint Nino toppling the pagan idols and replacing them with her Revered Cross, we see here an adaptation of former polytheistic beliefs in favor of the new Chris-tian faith. Before the conversion, Ochopintre and Dali were consid-ered the masters of the wild; As a result, the fate of persons entering the forest were believed to be under their jurisdiction.31 For King Marian, a follower of the Georgian pantheon, to acknowledge the eminence of God over the Georgian forests is an important example of Christianity functionally appropriating the core of the local mythology.

Although the conversion of K’art’li has diluted the lowland pre-Christian religions or converted them altogether, certain regions still ofer insight through select groups of surviving pagan worshippers. One such region is Pshavi, where mul-tiple local groups still practice ritual animal sacriice and shrine worship. It is in this area that one village wor-ships their patron deity in a sacred


Figure 10.1 (left). Bronze belt buckle of a stag (1st-2nd ce.)

Figure 10.2 (middle left). Bronze belt buckle of a ram (3rd-4th ce.), Imereti, Geor-gia. (3rd-4th ce.), Imereti, Georgia.

Figure 10.3 (bottom left). Bronze belt buckle of a stag (3rd-4th ce.), Racha, Georgia.

Figure 11 (above). Resting deer, detail of the Nagvarevi cross (6th ce.), Nagvarevi, Georgia.


oak grove.32 Only ifty miles north of Mtskheta, the village’s proxim-ity to where the Life-giving Pillar miracle was performed suggests that Mtskheta may have once engaged in similar rituals before the arrival of Saint Nino. In another ethnic region of the Georgian Caucasus, the Ossetians follow a form of neopagan-ism that, like Georgian mythology, strongly associates its deities with natural phenomena. As a result, wor-ship and prayer is performed outside, and Ossetians gather at hand-built shrines created in the image of their natural surroundings.33 Although these pre-Christian faiths have survived long enough to advocate for nature-worship in the region, only so much knowledge of Georgian mythology can be garnered from the folk Christianity that largely exists in the lowlands.

In turn, it is prudent to look to the highlands, pre-Soviet intrusion, in order to more fully understand what Emma Leeming calls “the ancient currents of faith practices” – speciically within groups like the Ossetians, Circassians, and

32 William Dunbar, “Beer and Blood Sacriices: Meet the Caucasus Pagans Who Worship Ancient Deities.”33 Richard Foltz, “Scythian Neo-Paganism in the Caucasus: he Ossetian Uatsdiin as a ‘Nature Religion,’” 326.34 Emma L. Leeming, “he Unknown Factors: Evidence from the Cave Monaster-ies and the Signiicance ofGeorgian Vernacular Religion as a Relic of Earlier Ritual Practices,” 180.35 Hahn, “Heilige Haine und Bäume bei den Völkern des Kaukasus,” 811.36 As observed in Hahn, Dunbar, Foltz, and Tuite, suspending or hanging items from trees and tree branches (i.e.weapons, armor, candles, remnants of cloth, and coins) was a cultic function of

the Vainakh, as it was through these peoples that Georgian beliefs were adapted, assimilated, and perpetu-ated.34 What all these religions have in common, along with almost all Caucasian belief systems, is a de-pendence on the natural realm: a sentiment that commonly seems to manifest itself through the worship of sacred trees.

he existence of tree cults in the Caucasus has been partially cataloged by German scholar Carl von Hahn, whose 1891 article cata-logs historical – as well as personal – experiences with tree worship in the Caucasus.35 Hahn begins his work with an overview of past documents that airm the existence of tree wor-ship in the region. Perhaps the oldest literary mention of a Georgian tree cult can be found in Apollonius Rho-dius’ 3rd century BC epic, the tale of Jason and the Argonauts. In the story, the Golden Fleece is located in the region of Colchis – an exonym for the land where Georgia meets the Black Sea – hung from a tree in a sacred grove of Ares.36 Shortly after, Hahn quotes Byzantine scholar


Procopius, who in the 6th century remarked on the “barbara simplici-tate arbo – res in Deorum colentes numero.”37 From travel descriptions of journeys to the Circassians, Svans, Ossetians, and Abkhazians, Hahn formulates an argument for a cult in which trees are venerated and sacred groves are used as worship and sacri-ice sites to local pantheons.

In one deinitive example of tree worship, Hahn references a scholar who tells of a sacred tree in a river valley that was said to cure sickness.38 According to the source’s account, the ill traveled from both near and far to bring oferings to the tree; before departure, the pilgrims would take a piece of the tree’s wood and wrap it with a shred of fabric. hat fabric and wood would then be hung from their neck, while the excess would be ofered to the tree as sacriice and tied to its branches.39 his interaction indicates that trees did not only function as pagan altar spaces or conduits for the gods, but that they could function as sacred objects independently. Here, one might recall the story of the Life-giving Pillar, where Mroveli describes how the people of K’art’li went on pilgrimages to Mtskheta, so they

sacred trees and could act as aform of ritual sacriice “to” the tree.37 he “barbarian simplicity of the tree – the number [of which] honoring the Gods.” 38 Hahn, “Heilige Haine und Bäume," 811.39 Ibid, 811.40 Pamela R. Frese and S.J.M Gray, “Trees”, Vol. 15, 26. Cited in Cusack, he Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations, 8-9.

might fashion crosses from the wood of the sacred pillar. In her book, he Sacred Tree, Carole Cusack notes that nature worshippers would use the wood of sacred trees to produce “ritual objects, including statues, amulets, and various receptacles.”40 his activity certainly invokes the same ritualistic energy of Hahn’s tree worshippers, as well as that of Georgia’s early Christians. Clearly, the parallels between pagan and Christian worship practices are not insigniicant.

For the purposes of this paper, attention should be directed to a passage in which Hahn briely describes how Christian missionaries interacted with pagan grove worship:

Als das Christentum sich … bei den tscherkessischen Stämmen Eingang verschafte, waren die Missionare klug genug, nicht auf einmal schrof vorzugehen und die heidnischen Hei-ligtümer zu zerstören, sondern sie stellten das Kreuz … in jenen Hainen auf. So gewöhnte sich das Volk allmählich daran, an den Stellen, wo es früher seine Opfer dargebracht und zu seinen heidnischen Göt-


tern gebetet hatte, das Kreuze anzubeten.Der Bau von Kirchen mochte … als überlüssig erscheinen, da man gewohnt war, den natürlichen grünen Dom des Waldes mit seinem geheimnis-vollen Dunkel als Heiligtum zu betrachten. Das ist den auch der Grund, warum wir im Lande der Tscherkessen aufallend wenig Überreste christlicher Tempel vorinden, obgleich sie notorisch viele Jahrhunderte lang Christen waren.41

his section of Hahn’s article is strik-ingly reminiscent of the conversions of K’art’li and King Mirian. Rather than destroying these holy spaces – the sacred groves, the forests, or the places where idols stood – early Christianity efectively adopted them, turning once-pagan spaces into deinitively Christian ones. However, this adoption goes both ways. Christianity may have incor-

41 As Christianity … entered the Circassian tribes, the missionaries were wise enough to not suddenly act harshly and destroy the pagan sanctuaries, but to place the cross … in those groves. So, the people gradually got used to worshipping the cross in the places where they had once made their sacriices and prayed to their pagan gods.

he building of churches might have seemed superluous … since the people were accustomed to regard the natural green cathedral of the forest with its mysterious darkness as a sanctuary. hat is the reason why we ind strikingly few remains of Christian temples in the land of the Circassians, although they were noto-riously Christians for many centuries. Cited in Hahn, 811.42 G. N. Chubinashvili, Khandisi, Tb., 1978, 9, cited in Tamar Dadiani et al., Medieval Georgian Sculpture, 45.

porated the former belief systems of the lowland region, but those former pagan beliefs also had an efect on how locals perceived Christianity. As Hahn’s quoted passage demon-strates, the placement of the cross inside sacred groves did conform the local tribes to the Christian faith, but it also rid them of any interest in churches. As a result, local nature-worship was conlated with the new monotheistic religion, forming a hybrid, folk Christianity that has sur-vived to this day. his syncretism is critical when considering the possible func-tions of cross pillars in early medieval Georgia. As previously mentioned, the open-air cross pillars were located in nature, outside of urban spaces; leading Giorgi N. Chubinashvili to theorize that they may have func-tioned as substitutes for churches.42 his is additionally supported by the prevalence of vegetal ornament in early stelae, which roots the pillars in a pastoral context. I would like to propose that, not unlike the place-


ment of crosses in sacred groves, the cross pillars may have represented a Christianized, stone relection of the region’s sacred trees. While it is unlikely that this representation was a direct invoca-tion of pagan ideologies, it is entirely possible that the early creators of these monuments were relying on traditions and visual cultures rooted in pre-Christian belief: a visual vocabulary they associated with the divine. Certainly, the cross pillars were wholly Christian monuments in function. However, their association with nature, and possible cultic func-tions as stand-ins for prayer sites, match closely with Hahn’s syncretic description of Circassians worship-ping the Christian God in the “green cathedral” of nature. hough the irst cross pillars likely started as wood structures – much like the Life-giv-ing Pillar – their eventual conversion to stone would have paralleled the trend in stelae from ornamental to igural. As local masons assimilated themselves further into the visual languages of Christian art, the low-ering ornament of early cross pillars became secondary to igural com-positions, a change that would have certainly relected a weakening of the relationship between Christian belief and pagan tradition.

In addition to possibly relying on pagan visual cultures, the replacement of sacred trees with cross pillars could have functioned

43 Mircea Eliade, he Sacred and the Profane: he Nature of Religion, 12.

as a conversion tool. Not unlike missionaries setting up crosses in the sacred Circassian groves, the nature-based, tree-like quality of the cross pillars as axis mundi could have made them identiiable by the pagan populations as venerable monu-ments. hough the local populations associated living trees with divinity, the fact that the cross pillars were stone and not wood would have been inconsequential. After all, as Mircea Eliade argued, “the sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree; they are worshiped because they are hierophanies,” or manifesta-tions of the sacred.43 In other words, the materials used in the invocation of a sacred object were irrelevant; a sacred tree is not sacred because it is a tree – nor does it cease being a tree because it is sacred – instead, that tree derives its sanctity from how its worshippers allow that sacred quality to be revealed. Since it is the wor-shipper who deeply desires the sacred to exist, that sacred quality can manifest in whatever has come to be identiied with a supernatural reality. For the pagan, the spiritual efect of approaching the holy tree and that of approaching the holy pillar would have been indistinguishable. Far away from churches and cities, both the tree and pillar existed under the natural cathedral of the sky, of the stars, and of the forests.

Although the cosmology may have changed, the omnipresence


of the divine remained the same, and the faith to believe in it did not wa-ver. It may have helped that the pillar is a logical abstraction of the tree, but the ritualism of worship – whether praying to an oak covered in grape vines, or to a stone cross inscribed with them – is inherent. As the cre-ators of the cross pillars were using their former, pagan, vocabularies to understand a new faith, it is reason-able that those vocabularies would have resonated with locals who identiied them with the sacred, and who were yet to convert. While the prevalence of cross pillars would fade by the ninth century, their growing popularity as cult objects beginning in the ifth century complements the increasing conversion of K’art’li’s population to Christianity.

he cross pillars of Georgia may be a distinctly Christian arti-fact in legacy, but it is their origins that remain most mysterious and fascinating. heir unusual composi-tion – that of a pillar topped by a cross – is reason enough to doubt they have a fully-Christian origin, as it is a construction that would not be seen elsewhere until the advent of the calvary cross in 15th century France. he understood importance of trees in Georgian cosmology and Cauca-sian religions is a strong explanation for the creation of the cross pillars, which were richly associated with nature and organic iconography. Furthermore, their possible parallels in the Armenian Khachkar, which appeared in the 9th century follow-

ing liberation from Arab rule, sug-gests that cross stelae are not merely limited to the northern region, but instead span the entire Caucasus. his possible parallel, as well as that of the Celtic High Crosses, certainly encourages future research in the subject of pagan inluence on Chris-tian monumental art.

Ultimately, it is because these conversion tactics were suc-cessful that tracing the origins of the cross pillar is a diicult task. Only through folk beliefs, artistic traditions, and hotspots of surviv-ing paganism is it possible to link the creation of the cross pillars to pre-Christian inspiration. However, the argument that can be fashioned regardless of fragmented theologies reveals a picture of faith founded on tradition in the early medieval Caucasus. hough the introduction of Christianity would fundamentally change the people of K’art’li, it is clear that paganism has lived on in their sacred sites, their art, and in their mountains.


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