I was recently sent a screencap of a conversation on social media. The point at issue was a writer’s choice of words when describing Australian Aboriginal peoples, amongst others. The writer stated that even if it were possible to return to the “innocence” of the Aborigine, we would, from that point, inevitably begin to re-complicate our life with technology, in order to deal with our environment.
Why? After all, the Aborigines haven’t. The problem lies entirely with our assumption that the way the North-West quartile of the world developed – basically the European nation-states in intense competition from the 15c onward – is some kind of default. Our arrogance in assuming this, and from there piling non-sequitur upon non-sequitur, is expressed in our assuming that the Aborigines’ life is one of “innocence” and totally missing that it is highly sophisticated. Just totally differently from our own brand of “sophistication.” A culture based on fitting into a complicated and dynamic environment puts wisdom before technology, needing nothing more than a woomera to add force to a hunting spear, or a boomerang to scythe into a flock of rising birds. A culture that puts technology before wisdom, well… we’re living in it, and it’s a nightmare.
In an earlier post I mentioned a lightning sketch that the German expressionist Kirchner did of one of the Benin bronze plaques appropriated by a late 19c punitive expedition by a British military force. The assumption normally made in comparing two such works of art is that the European artist has taken the non-European as an example of primitive vigour and is trying to inject an element of that into the staid, conventionally representational artistic culture of Europe. As it happens, I challenged that assumption about Kirchner, but the general point remains about such drawing of inspiration by European artists from non-European art. The sudden intrusion of distorted “African” masks into Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is often cited, more accurately, as an example of this “primitivism.” Quotation marks here are deliberate, because they emphasise the arrogance of assuming an amorphous Africa and a pool of similarly unsophisticated, almost interchangeable cultures.
What has this to do with Sam Nhlengethwa’s It Left him Cold?
This work of art, executed in 1990, is dark and abrasive. Its use of collage distorts proportion and perspective. Is it even “art” – the perpetual question of this web site is what the hell that is anyway – or is it more a political statement? It’s subject matter is the murder in custody of Steve Biko in 1977, and it expresses the ugliness of the oppression that brought about that atrocity.
Do I even have the right to analyse it as art?
In 2020, in a world in crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement speaks. We have no right to “let” it speak, we have no right to “legitimise” it. Its right to speak and its legitimacy are not in our gift. Similarly, Sam Nhlengethwa doesn’t need our permission to put It Left him Cold into view.
Taxonomy Domine 