Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Binding Trauma

2021; Oxford University Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-8365.12572

1467-8365

Dorothy Price,

Archaeology and Rock Art Studies

Jen Reid standing in front of the plinth designed to support the since-toppled statue of Edward Colston, Bristol, 15 July 2020. Photo: Ben Birchall. At times of global crisis, questions concerning the role and function of art often come to the fore. When Irish sculptor John Cassidy's posthumous statue from 1895 of notorious slaver Edward Colston (1636–1721) was finally toppled from its plinth, dragged to the nearby harbourside and thrown into the water by Black Lives Matter activists in my adopted hometown, the port city of Bristol, on Sunday 7 June 2020, the reverberations were keenly felt around the world (plate 1 ). 1 1 The #BlackLivesMatterBristol demonstration, which led to the toppling of the Colston statue from its plinth, was organized by five students: Yvonne Maina, Sam Little, Liza Bilal, Clayton Wildwoode and Tiffany Lyare. For those willing to listen, debates about the moral bankruptcy of public monuments had been raging for many decades. 2 2 See, for example, Deborah Cherry, ‘Statues in the Square: Hauntings at the Heart of Empire’, Art History, 29: 4, September 2006, 660–697. Why, one might ask, have statues of historical individuals who were active in implementing and upholding palpably unjust systems of racial capitalism premised on white supremacy continued to remain unchallenged? In February last year, this journal published its own intervention, long overdue reflections on decolonizing the discipline of art history in the wake of the widespread student-led #RhodesMustFall campaigns that had originated in South Africa five years earlier calling for the removal of the statues of imperialist businessman Cecil Rhodes from university campuses and buildings. 3 3 See Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, ‘Decolonizing Art History’, Art History, 43: 1, February 2020, 8–66. Significantly, the Hopton Wood stone plinth from which Cassidy's statue was toppled is adorned with other symbols pertaining to Colston, including the dolphin, seen behind Jen Reid in the photograph which opens this editorial. The dolphin is an emblem adopted by the Colston family firmly cementing their ties to the Transatlantic slave economy; it is also a symbol that continues to adorn my own university's coat of arms. Colston's colonial legacies run deeply through the fabric of the city where there is still so much decolonial work to be done. Yet the fall of the statue of Colston and the subsequent symbolic drowning of his effigy in the waters from whence his profits arose were prompted by a far more urgent necessity than scholarly debates on the rights and wrongs of public monuments. Whilst the global pandemic made manifest the injustices of dominant political systems embedded in white colonial matrices of economic power that continue to affect Black and Brown bodies disproportionately and adversely, the brutal murder of Black American citizen George Floyd was a tipping point. On social media, the world watched in horror as footage emerged of a white police officer kneeling on Floyd's neck and squeezing the life out of him in eight minutes and forty-eight seconds. The deeply-etched fault lines of social injustice thrown into sharp relief by COVID-19 fatally exposed the intersections of race, class, gender, poverty and vulnerability that crystallized around Floyd's death. 4 4 Floyd's killing was especially painful coming as it did after a series of relentlessly regular murders of Black citizens including Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Atatiana Jefferson, Stephon Clark, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Travyon Martin, and countless others, some but not all by police, but all within a racially-biased social system rigged against them. For an ongoing ‘index’ of names of those Black American citizens murdered by police in the USA, see Alia Chughtai, Know Their Names: Black People Killed by the Police in the US, 2020; https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2020/know-their-names/index.html. For a critique of the drive to ‘inventory take’ by listing the accumulation of dead Black bodies as one which ‘seems to conform to the logics of accumulation that structure racial capitalism’, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, Minneapolis, 2017, viii. It was this that incited the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Bristol to reclaim their own space and dispense with the city's most potent visible symbol of racial injustice in an act of necessary civil disobedience. As Argentinian scholar Walter D. Mignolo has argued, decoloniality ‘calls for both civil and epistemic disobedience’ in which his readers are urged to ‘delink’ from the colonial order so that they can ‘strive for re-existence’. 5 5 Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Coloniality Is Far from Over, and So Must Be Decoloniality’, Afterall, 43, Spring/Summer 2017, 41. This necessity for civil disobedience is what is at stake in the fiercely-contested physical spaces of civic memorialization across the global north. Shortly after the action against the Colston statue, a spate of colonial sculptures in the US and Europe were either daubed with paint in protest or removed, notably those of King Leopold II (1835–1909) whose twenty-three year reign saw the worst atrocities of colonial rule by the Belgians against the Congolese during the long-nineteenth century. Yet on 22 September 2020 the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport of the UK government issued a letter from its Secretary of State, Oliver Dowden, to a number of publicly-funded national museums and galleries across the country, ‘restating the government's position regarding contested heritage and the removal of historical objects’. The statement included thinly-veiled threats to the funding status of such institutions should they engage in the sanctioned removal of historical objects from public view. Underlined in the letter was a warning that ‘the Government does not support the removal of statues or other similar objects’; ‘as publicly funded bodies’, it stressed, ‘you should not be taking actions motivated by activism or politics’. 6 6 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/letter-from-culture-secretary-on-hm-government-position-on-contested-heritage. Such an explicit government statement exemplifies in concrete terms the operations of what Mignolo identifies as ‘the Colonial Matrix of Power’, one which ‘controls and touches upon all aspects and trajectories of our lives’. 7 7 Mignolo, ‘Coloniality Is Far from Over’, 40. His analysis of the necessity for civil disobedience in relation to the toppling of monuments in the public realm has been central to rethinking the relationships between modernity and coloniality. Mignolo's writing seeks methods for delinking from the formations of knowledge and power that structure contemporary society as an inheritance of colonial pasts. 8 8 See also, for example, Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Durham, NC, 2018. As an academic discipline institutionally formalized within colonial Europe of the late-nineteenth century, art history as practiced in the global north is precisely one such formation. When ‘Decolonizing Art History’ was published in February 2020, we knew the risks involved in a project generated by UK-based art historians working in a discipline constructed wholly within the imperial frameworks of the West and speaking to a predominantly Anglo-American readership. In Autumn 2020, Rafael Cardoso responded by taking us to task for omitting a non-Anglophone perspective. 9 9 Rafael Cardoso, ‘Self-Criticality: Decolonizing Decolonialization’, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 6: 2, Fall 2020; https://editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/self-criticality/rafael-cardoso/. Whilst acknowledging that the editors ‘made an evident effort to balance the composition […] in terms of gender and ethnicity, age and experience, social and cultural origin’, he also observed that ‘the unspoken message is that the network of cultural relationships arising out of the former bonds of empire retain their valency and suffice unto themselves’. His was exactly the form of conversation that we hoped to start with our intervention in order to continue the debate for the discipline at large. 10 10 Indeed, several months after our intervention in Art History, October has recently continued the debate, publishing its own responses to similar questions; see Huey Copeland, Hal Foster, David Joselit and Pamela M. Lee, ‘A Questionnaire on Decolonization’, October, 174, Fall 2020, 3–125. As British-based art historians, the idea that we can decolonize from within is undoubtedly problematic. 11 11 For more on this, see, for example, Audre Lorde, ‘The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House’ (1984), reprinted in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Berkeley, 2007, 110–114. Yet that should not stop us from at least thinking through the demands of decolonial praxis from our position at the heart of the colonial system. Art history today has an urgent need to seek strategies for sustainable, embedded, inclusive, decolonial and anti-racist futures if it is to continue to thrive. Quinn didn't take the opportunity to contextualize his motives by referencing C. L. R. James, or Stuart Hall, or Kehinde Whiley's recent statue of a Black man on horseback in the States, or indeed a whole host of other public artworks or literature by Black, Brown and POC writers or the artists who've similarly attempted to interject our otherwise unheard voices into public and other spaces […]. What Quinn did was to attempt to claim victory and credit for a moment in British history that he has played no part in supporting for the past thirty years of his lucrative career. 13 13 Sutapa Biswas, ‘A Contextualization of My Response to Marc Quinn's Statue of Jen Reid’, Visual Artists South West, 22 July 2020; https://www.vasw.org.uk/editorial/a-contextualization-of-my-response-to-marc-quinns-statue-of-jen-reid. Biswas was far from alone in her condemnation of Quinn, and her voice amplified the protests of those made by many others. For Black British sculptor Thomas J. Price, ‘Quinn effectively colonized that space in Bristol again in a way that sabotaged the process that was going on in the city’. He continued that ‘it was a great image, I agree […]. Quinn could have done it anonymously, but he put himself right at the centre of it’. 14 14 Thomas J. Price cited in Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Sculptor unveils “black everywoman” as UK row over statues and race grows’, The Observer, 19 July 2020; https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/19/sculptor-unveils-black-everywoman-as-uk-row-over-statues-and-race-grows. As a figurative sculptor himself, Price cannot be immune to the problems that inhere to the representational practices of his chosen genre. Any attempt to portray a symbolic ‘everywoman’ in the public realm courts a risk of controversy. 15 15 For more on this controversy, see Ellen Peirson-Hagger, ‘How a Mary Wollstonecraft statue became a feminist battleground’, New Statesman, 12 November 2020; https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2020/11/statue-mary-wollstonecraft-feminist-battleground-maggi-hambling. Given the dearth of positive images of Black women in public spaces, however, Price's monumental sculpture Reaching Out, recently installed in east London, undeniably fulfils a need, and has been positively received to date. 16 16 For reviews of Price's sculpture, see, amongst others: Thorpe, ‘Sculptor unveils “black everywoman”’; Naomi Rea, ‘As the UK Seeks to Diversify Its Public Sculptures, London Unveils a New Monument to the Black “Everywoman”’, Artnet News, 5 August 2020 (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/thomas-price-sculpture-london-1899771); and Nora McGreevy, ‘Amid Reckoning on Public Art, Statue of Black Everywoman Unveiled in London’, Smithsonian Magazine, 7 August 2020 (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sculpture-black-woman-london-thomas-price-public-art-180975497/). The work represents a fictional over-life-sized young Black woman dressed in a t-shirt, jeans and trainers, staring at her mobile phone. The sculptor successfully inserts Black female presence into the public realm without reverting to the fraught specificity of portraiture. 17 17 For more details of the sculpture, and images of it, see https://the-line.org/artist/thomas-j-price/. The success of the work undoubtedly resides in its celebration of the quotidian lives of ordinary citizens rather than in the glorification of the misdeeds of long dead ones. 18 18 Price has spoken about how the figures represented in his work are fictional constructs, amalgams seeking to critique both the value system of portraiture and recognized objective of promoting individual excellence found in most monumental sculpture; he argues that figuration is used as a strategy to bypass many viewers' defences, challenge their expectations, and encourage a wider public engagement. See ‘In Conversation: Thomas J. Price and Courtney J. Martin’, Sculpture Milwaukee, 3 December 2020; https://youtu.be/XAO18a9PTEw. Price, alongside Montserrat-born British sculptor Veronica Ryan, was recently selected to produce one of two new public sculptures for the London Borough of Hackney to be unveiled later this year. The commission was established to show solidarity with the citizens of the Windrush Generation who have been so scandalously let down due to the UK government's draconian immigration policies. Those who arrived on the HMT Windrush from the Caribbean in 1948 to fulfil the post-war labour deficit in Britain were subsequently adversely affected in 2017 by the government's hostile environment legislation against undocumented immigrants. 19 19 For more on this, see Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment, London, 2020. The selection of these two very different artists to respond to such a sensitive commission was extremely astute. Price's work appeals to a need for figurative representation of Black bodies by Black artists in public spaces where there is indisputably a deficit. Yet by engaging in the fraught visual field of figurative visibility, it could be argued that Price affirms the existing structural framework of inequalities that are inherent in a genre that is already over-determined by the many centuries of white male bodies on display. It is within such a debate, however, that Ryan's shift away from the figurative might offer a productive counterpoint to the prevailing discourse surrounding the problems of monumental figurative sculpture in a post-Colston era. I have memories of going to Ridley Road Market with my mother as a child to buy fruit and vegetables, fabrics, and sewing materials. Little did I know, those early experiences would become essential material for my practice as an artist. I remember as a toddler during the 1950s the difficulties my young hopeful parents from Montserrat dealt with, navigating a new country and often inhospitable circumstances. 20 20 Veronica Ryan quoted in a London Borough of Hackney press release, ‘Hackney Council announces artists chosen to create two major new public artworks to honour Windrush Generation’, 22 June 2020; https://news.hackney.gov.uk/hackney-council-artworks-to-honour-windrush-generation/. The associative connections between Ryan's childhood memories, the diasporic trauma of her family's migration from the Caribbean to the UK, her childhood memories of food, and the physical materials of her future sculptural practice, characterize her conceptual approach to sculpture in a way that foregrounds subjectivity without the need to fall into the trap of figuration. A sculpture such as Empty Compartments Full of Dust (1993), for example, consists of a series of conjoined troughs exhibited along the floor. 21 21 The work was included in an exhibition at Camden Art Centre in 1995; see https://archive.camdenartscentre.org/archive/d/compartments-apart-ments. Intimate bodily fragments of human skin, hair, fingernails and other corporeal dust from inside a domestic vacuum cleaner are emptied into each compartment. The work contains traces of, and is a cipher for, human presence without the need to represent a mimetic likeness. Ryan's art is perhaps better understood in psychic terms rather than as formal procedure, where the repetition of form is a symptom of unconscious memory that erupts and punctuates the present. As Margaret Iversen has proposed, ‘a traumatic event causes the psyche to shut down its normal, homeostatic function in order to attend to the urgent task of binding. The job of binding is done compulsively, repetitiously, painfully’. But, Iversen continues, ‘the unbound energy of trauma is unbindable, because the moment when one could have defended against the trauma was missed’. 22 22 Margaret Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, University Park, PA, 2007, 4–5. Repetition becomes both therapeutic and futile, a pathological compulsion in which we all engage, a ritual way of what Rupert Martin in reference to Ryan's work has called ‘structuring an order’. 23 23 Rupert Martin, ‘Veronica Ryan’, in Veronica Ryan, exh. cat., Bristol: Arnolfini, 1987, unpaginated. The binding of trauma is evoked in many of Ryan's works (plate 2 ), including pieces such as Rescue (2018), Coral Polyp IV (2018) and Shak Shak (2018), in all of which fragments of organic matter have been sheathed with medical grade bandage. Yet bandages are a temporary fix; if they become undone too soon the wound may re-open, infection may re-occur, and the original trauma may become more difficult to heal. Pain will replace the pleasure of relief in a never-ending cycle of wounding and healing, pressure and reprieve. Ryan's sculptural praxis addresses the cyclical, dialectical problem – endless repetitions of pleasure and pain, wounding and healing – at the heart of our broken post-colonial system. But it also reveals ways in which both artist and audience might be able, in Mignolo's terms, to ‘delink’ from the colonial stranglehold in order to ‘strive for re-existence’. As he comments, ‘re-existing is something other than resisting. If you resist, you are trapped in the rules of the game others created’. 24 24 Mignolo, ‘Coloniality Is Far from Over’, 41. Ryan's practice never deviates from the compulsion to bind trauma, irrespective of the context in which her sculptures are shown. In the act of binding, of shoring up protection against previous pain, her work suggests a potential way to re-exist; it becomes a metaphor for what might be possible. In her work, Ryan acknowledges the individual pain of multiple historical and personal traumas, and the impossibility of their healing. The most that we can hope for is temporary relief. When we published ‘Decolonizing Art History’, we sought to start a conversation, but not to offer any definitive solutions. This may be troubling to many people, but the binding of trauma is never complete. The journal's year ahead continues to be shaped by the contributions submitted by all of you. As a discipline marked by the sedimentary layers of non-sychnronous time, the decolonial work that we have started may find its effects in different moments. For some it is already ‘way too late’, whilst for others decolonization ‘offers an opportunity to challenge and transform the very nature of art history as a practice of thought’. 25 25 Griselda Pollock and Kamini Vellodi respectively in Grant and Price, ‘Decolonizing Art History’, 51 and 62. This year sees the journal continue to publish a wide variety of differently-inflected methodological approaches to our discipline, as well as strategic interventions that forward the agenda of decolonial thought and anti-racism. As a discipline we have much to unpack, but a good first step is to begin the journey.