Joyce Treasure

This article responds to Fons Americanus by Kara Walker to critically demonstrate the importance of studying visual representations using Michael Foucault’s concepts of discourse. The essay will critically highlight using discourse analysis to examine the powers of knowledge by following a visual sociological framework. The central focus seeks to demonstrate how Walker’s work contests the ‘racialized regime of representation’ and Eurocentric hegemony within her practice. Drawing upon semiotics (Bal, and Bryson, 1991), ideology (Freeden, 2003, Gramsci’s hegemony (Connell, 2005) and simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1994) to examine what is meant by ‘racialized regime of representation’ (Hall, et al, 2013: 237) so has to understand how the West’s first encounter of black people has resulted in disparaging, violent visual representation.

Racialized regime of Representation

To introduce tools to question and analyse text, Stuart Hall et al, introduce the term ‘racialized regime of representation’ (2013, p.237) to describe traces of racial stereotyping of black people found in popular visual representation. For example, cartoons, illustrations and caricatures with reductive essentialised depictions of ‘black types’ (2013, p.249). From a period of slavery through to abolition, the black body was negatively reduced to the signifier of their physical difference. Such as (fig.1) - fuzzy hair, thick red lips, broad nose (Hall, et al, 2013. The term signifier here points to the sign. Sign relates to semiotic, which is the study of signs (Chandler, 2007). The sign, in this context, being African American or enslaved Africans. The sign is defined by its part, the signifier and the signified. The distinction between the two, as defined by Barthes (fig.2), is the content of the signifier is always material such as sound, object and material (negative stereotypes), whereas the signified is not material but a mental representation. Thus the caractured negro is reduced to a negative myth. (Hall, et al, 2013).  

In contrast to this reductive obedient, good-natured negro an alternative substitute was the abasement savage, rapist (fig.4), aggressive or hyper-sexualised and deviant negro (Rogin, M, 1985).

Foucault tells us that discourse is about the production of knowledge through language. Discourse never contains just one statement, one action or one source. Different texts lead to different forms of behaviours within institutions that operate within society. When they come together on the same topic that contains the same style, the same strategy, this discursive information informs a particular way of thinking about issues, which informs political ideologies. (McHoul, et al 2015). Using this analysis we can see how these ‘racialised regimes of representation’ reflective of history, the social context that preserve the dominant power of knowledge through denigration. That power of knowledge is regulated through certain social practices. In this case through visual representation that informs ideologies. 

Ideology
To further examine ideology we turn to (1965), they argued that Germany philosophers, in their attempt to contest ideas, merely failed to come to terms with the real world. In response to this sublimation and morality that concealed reality, Marx and Engels asserted that the ideas of the ruling class were ruling ideas. Thus creating an ideological Illusion as a tool used by the ruling class, through the state, employed to reign, hegemonise and reproduce “history” according to
their investments. This sifting through of interests produced an ideology - allowing them with this ideology to present them as truths. Claims that dominated universal rationality (Freeden, 2003). This ideological illusion is an important component to be able to recognise the Eurocentric Weltanschauung - their view of the world.  Authorised under this ideological canopy, society is presented with visual tenets to legitimise the violent disregard towards black people. Sealy argues that Western photography has been employed as a mechanism to generate Eurocentric and violent visual beliefs. Beliefs that have become the dominant discourse that he demands we must challenge (2019).  It is, therefore, imperative that art is made by marginalised groups if we are to challenge what Gramsci identified as “cultural hegemony” (Lears, 1985). Expanding on Marx's and Engel’s, Gramsci's used the concept of cultural hegemony to explain the control or domination of a culturally diverse society. This culture is manipulated by the ruling class. Gramsci argued that the ruling class do not hold on to their dominance through a moral impressive performance, rather they must seek to secure an agreement with the subordinate groups to sustain the structure of society, thereby creating its cultural hegemony. 

This notion that the relationship between knowledge and power is confined to a class interests, as defined by Marx and Engels, Foucault rejected. He argued there were other social factors in operation such as race, gender and sexuality ((McHoul, et al 2015).). As discussed, in the semiotic approach, these 'racialised regimes of representation', are recognised because language functions and visual representation function has a sign. Africa produced a rapid and growing increase of popular negative representation using these essentialised stereotypes (Hall, et al, 2013 citing Mackensie, 1986).  Discourse analysis asks us to consider the historical location given any particular time to look at how people communicate (Hook, 2007). The essay employs Hall’s term ‘racialized regime of representation’ as a historical and geographical point of reference to contextualise its history and demonstrate the importance of the marginalised discourse.  In Fons Americanus, a monumental art installation by Kara Walker, we can examine how she seeks to question this dominant visual representation.

Walker tells us:

‘My work has always been a time machine looking backwards across decades and centuries to arrive at some understanding of my “place” in the contemporary moment.’ 

Kara Walker Walker, (2019)

The Tate describes Kara Walker as an artist whose work examines notions of race, identity, sexuality and violence. (Walker, 2019) In Fons, Americanus (fig. 5) Walker has created a monumental, public sculpture in the form of a four-tiered fountain. The fountain questions how we remember history, inviting the viewer to question the hidden relations of power within its historical epoch. Following discourse analysis, the work pushes beyond the dominant narrative, asking us to question how we remember the past through our public statues and memorials. (Walker, 2019).

Utilising a Foucauldian analysis we must consider concepts, as separate, but related. These add up to independent questions about not just discourse, power and the subject, but their location to one another, and the historical fragility of them all. (McHoul, et al 2015, p. 10). Focusing on this it is important therefore to briefly understand Walker's historical background to contextualise who she is and how that relates to her work. Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California. At the age of thirteen, her father, also an artist, moved the family to the small town of Stone Mountain, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. It is important to note that Stone Mountain is the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and the location for the yearly Klan rallies in the early ’80s. It was here that the children in her new community ostracised her for being too “white” due to her accent or too “black” for the European American children. With no racially neutral ground on which she could stand, she withdrew into the realms of surveillance. Walker likens her role as “uncertain”, always discovering exactly what part she might play in the uninvited drama (Shaw, 2004). Walker, therefore, is an outsider. This positions her discourse on the edge of what Foucault called the dominant narrative. We can not look at her work alone and need to examine the political discourse that co-exists."Separate, but related". 

The political - Data analysis

While the importance of Walker's exhibition is to be celebrated, we must also acknowledge Kara Walker is the first black woman to headline in the Tate Britain’s Turbine Hall.  A study published in the journal PLoS One suggests insignificant progress has been made with regards to black representation in the arts. More than 40,000 works of art in 18 leading U.S. museums’ showed that 85% of artists exhibited are White. Overall, white men dominated by 75.7%. White women (10.8 %), Asian men (7.5%), Hispanic men (2.6%). All groups represented in terms of gender and ethnicity were less than 1% (Solly, 2019), despite the fact that WOC accounts for 20% of the US society (Chalabi, 2019). In the UK a report carried out with Arts Council England shows BME workforce representation within National Portfolio Organisation (NPOs) 12% and Major Partner Museums (MPMs) 5% over 21 organisations. The proportions continue to be significantly lower than the 16% BME representation within the total working-age population of England. Artists in receipt of grants, show there has been a small change in the percentage of total Grants for the Arts awards from 2015/16 to 2017/18 of 9% to 11% BME (Equality, Diversity and the Creative Case, 2019). If discourse is about the production of knowledge and art institutions, such as the Tate in their 2016-2017 report declare that they “continued to excel during a period of great change”, given its declaration and the data, who does this exceptional “change” refer to? 

By exhibiting a significant monumental installation by an artist of colour whose work explicitly reminds the viewer of its colonial ‘racialised regimes of representation’ on such a huge scale, 13 metre high to be precise, it suggests a small commitment to their report, but hardly exceptional. What role are institutions prepared to play? These are all rhetorical questions of course. Bidisha, writer for the Guardian asks, "is it fair that “artist of colour [are] expected to continually “tackle” racism and misogyny, diversity and inclusion, slavery, colonialism, oppression and the suffering self” (2019) if institutions continue to maintain the same power structure? The figures here do show a slight improvement, yet the pace, as demonstrated, is slow. Mona Chalabi describes the ratio of the painting in major gallery collections as 5.5 to 1. To elaborate, the Tate still has 5.5 men for every 1 woman in their collection (2019). This figure does not account for artworks by women of colour. Juxtaposed against the data, Fons Americanus functions as a memorial that questions knowledge and power, that sits on the same structures of power.  

Walker’s Fons Americanus is based on the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace. The installation sits in the Tate's prominent Turbine hall. A wretched colonial display of transatlantic histories depicted in a painful confrontation. Drawing the viewer to the explicit violent past imposed on enslaved African subjects of the British Empire. The use of water deals with issues around the transatlantic slave trade, but it also deals with migration and black people trying to cross borders (Brinkhurst-Cuff, 2019). It forces us to question our current monuments (Walker, K. 2019), their historic white supremacy boastings, that brand themselves irrefutably into our brains. Reminding us to recall that Rhodes Must Fall (Chaudhuri, 2016). and the importance of confronting Britain’s imperial legacies. The fountain presents hidden meanings, metaphors of the Black Atlantic. Pointing towards Paul Gilroy’s writings on how culture between Africa, America, Caribbean, Britain is not specific to one location, but tied together all at once via the Atlantic that has shaped the development of Black identity and culture in America and Europe (Gilroy, 1993). Walker's use of caricatures is, to some extent, reflective of those negatively used in the past history, as discussed earlier. However, Walker subverts those similar ‘racialised regimes of representation’ as a grimacing mockery, as if to reclaim from the immorality of Empire, Walker’s own visual discourse.   

Walking around the fountain each sculptural figure contains a visual, cultural, historical and literary source. Including J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship1840 (fig.6), originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying Typhoon Coming On (Boime, 1990). Drawing parallels between past atrocities to the current political discourse surrounding migrant bodies lost at sea (Tondo, 2019). 

Reaffirming Foucault’s argument that discourse never consists of just one statement or one action and that they recur across a range of texts within different institutions within society (McHoul, 2015).

Kneeling down on one knee as if pleading, Governor Sir William Young, a slave merchant in the Carribean, is presented posturing in shame. Walker has sculpted this man's colonial “power”, and reduced it to a fragile position. Governor Sir William Young postures to The Captain (fig.7), who is a compound of important Black leaders that rebelled against European colonial violence. By doing so,  one might denotate a semiotic signifier of the distinctive kneeling negro (fig.3) with shackled legs and arms, hands raised earnestly; a visual sign of a colonial emblem used to campaign against the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Designed and widely distributed by Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery firm. An extremely popular image circulated in Britain and the USA. Decorative objects that featured the beseeched black figure appeared on many objects from Chinaware to cufflinks (Trodd, 2013).  Walker here, therefore, disrupts that discursive discourse by flipping the script, so to speak, whereupon imbuing a Black discourse with Black agency. Historically, Walker reminds us that riots and revolutions led by the maroons continuously threatened the economic strength of men like Young. Nonetheless, agency is often appointed to White abolitionists, most notably, William Wilberforce (James, 2001).

Maintaining similar subversive textures, at the top of the fountain Venus (fig.9) soars triumphantly – except her clothes are ripped off, her breasts bare  and her throat slit, spurting water like blood to fill up the fountain. (Walker, 2019) Referencing ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies’ by British artist Thomas Stothard (1755–1834). Published in History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 1801. The book portrays Venus as an African woman (fig.10) who stands on an opened shell, encircled by white cherubs. Triton, the Greek god and messenger of the sea, accompanies her carrying the British flag triumphantly guiding the procession across the sea. The illustration acted as a form of propaganda to promote and romanticise the transatlantic slave trade (Walker, 2019). What Baudrillard would identify as a ‘simulacrum’ (Baudrillard, 1994). In other words an altered sense of reality. The idea that the slave trade was a good and pleasant industry. A play on illusions and fantasy. Baudrillard's analysis focussed on contemporary media and technology.  Used here to demonstrate or to argue that the process simulacra in its visual genesis, be it fantastica, such as Stothards Venus; pleading and docile as in Wedgwood’s kneeling negro; or DW Griffith’s deviant pathological rapist, found in The Birth of a Nation, they are all ‘racialised regimes of representation’ presented as fact to make us believe that white supremacy is real when in fact it is all a sequence of hyper-real simulation to conceal reality. 

Walker’s use of the ‘carnivalesque’ to flip the script to satirically address an otherwise depressing wicked history does not pose to independently resolve, teach or tackle such serious issues, unaided. This analysis shows that the responsibility is arguably collective. Such important questions require further discursive accounts if we are to accept that the dominant discourse and such negative racialised regimes of representation maintained knowledge and power, not barring the same regimes, as they are necessary for comparison. But clearly more discourse from the very people who are marginalised - due to the very script that maintains power that excludes - is essential.

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