If you asked me to pick a piece of contemporary artwork and explain to you what it means in 30 seconds, I wouldn’t be able to. I might not even try.
Not because there is nothing that I could summarise in 30 seconds but because the parts of the artwork that I might choose to describe, the parts that I find integral to understanding it, might not do justice to the history of the piece in front of my eyes.
An average visitor, however, spends up to 30 seconds in front of a piece of art.
I would argue that while you might understand the meaning (or at least some of it) behind Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring or Van Gogh’s Starry Night in that time, contemporary art is becoming increasingly difficult to decipher. Most contemporary artists want to define their style and talk about their past and what has shaped them as artists, they also resist a singular explanation of their artwork.
Moving from abstract art to contemporary, the artist has strayed so far from meaning that they have dissolved the need for meaning itself. They have created a new dialogue, a way for art to communicate more than just what they want to say but what the visitor wants to hear…
The question is, when you look at a piece of art, what part of you are you bringing to it?
I was at Somerset House yesterday and I found myself staring at the images in Lorna Simpson’s Photo Booth with the sounds from her video Corridor serving as a backdrop. Her artwork consists of a cloud of portraits of Black men with fifty drawn by her with ink on paper and fifty found photographs, all framed in the same manner. Just by looking at the painting, it is hard to tell the use of different mediums, it is also impossible to guess that there is a woman in one of the photographs (that is definitely part of the point). Without reading the description of the artwork, it was hard to tell what this multimedia installation was to convey.
What does it say?
It was only when I walked through the whole exhibition that I understood the focus on Black men in Black representation. This quote on one of the walls also clearly outlines the necessity of this work-
Unless we transform images of blackness, of black people, our ways of looking and our ways of being seen, we cannot make radical interventions that will fundamentally alter our situation Bell Hooks
This quote is central to the exhibition. It points to the image of the ‘Black Venus’ itself, which comes from “a dehumanising episode that continues to haunt Western histories of representation”. Black Venus comes from the colonial fascination with Black women and their bodies and the hyper-sexualisation and exoticization of this body. It points clearly to Saartjie (Sara) Baartman, who was one of the first black women known to be subjugated to human sexual trafficking. Named the “Hottentot Venus” by Europeans, her body was publicly examined and exposed inhumanly throughout the duration of her young life. Her experience reinforced the already existing and extremely negative sexual fascination with African women’s bodies by the people of Europe.
The exhibition focuses on this continuous sexualisation of Black women’s bodies and it uses artwork such as Kara Walker’s ‘The Origins of the World’ with ink on paper, Renee Cox’s ‘Hott-en-tot’ which is made with premier black and white resin print as well as fabrics, photographs and films by various contemporary artists. The artwork itself is direct, graphic, and poignant but also uses abstraction making it harder for the visitor to leave with one singular definition or meaning. If you quickly walked through the exhibition, it would be the quotes on the walls that really help you understand the crux of the exhibition.
This inability to decipher an exhibition just with a simple walkthrough is not negative or positive but a quality of contemporary exhibitions that artists are aiming towards. It is the subversion of absolute meaning into an abstract piece of art that rejects any stereotypical gaze cast upon it. This allows curators along with the artists to shine through narratives, creating meaning that cannot be explained in a simple sentence and together create an ability to redefine the future.
If you’re in London, definitely don’t miss this free exhibition!
