Exhibit B and the Misadventures of White Anti-Racism, by Norman Ajari
December 1, 2014
The purpose of this text is not to take a position on Exhibit B,
which I have not seen but seems to me to have elicited sufficient
analysis. I am proposing an examination instead of the discourse of
justification from intellectuals who have appropriated the issue by
taking the side of artist Brett Bailey. Their defence is always the
same: Exhibit B is an anti-racist work that has been
misunderstood. I am going to try to show that this defence is
unsatisfactory because that anti-racism is not convincing. The Exhibit B
affair has revealed the paradox of the anti-racism some intellectuals
profess, which is really just a cheap way of reconciling themselves with
the most violent aspects of Western history without bothering to take
the victims of racism seriously, that is, to think of them as
participants in that history. The issue is then the status of such
anti-racist discourse: Who does it affect? What might its impacts be?
Anti-racist romanticism
The
various descriptions of the form of this exhibit I have read have led me
to conclude that it might be offering us an umpteenth variation on a
major theme in contemporary art (in the broad sense) since Sade, which,
as philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem has shown, has to do with a positive
presentation of evil1.
We can believe that, above all, short of any political discourse, the
exhibition of Black people represents an opportunity to offer the public
what it values and seeks: a transgressive sublimation of humiliation
and historic violence. However, the fact that Africans were often
involved with the wrong side is a godsend for the artist. Discourse
purporting to be anti-racist is therefore couched in artistic grammar
that gets all its breath, all its capacity to affect people and produce
reactions from the now commonplace positive presentation of evil.
This form has consequences, however, as militants such as members of the Brigade Anti-Négrophobie2
have articulated, because the scene of the colonial violence has been
cut off from its anti-colonial response. There is no outcome to the
abjection. The spectator must face the exhibit's violence with no
escape, with no way to answer. By making the colonizer's violent action
against the colonized the ultimate point of their meeting, it
depoliticizes that interaction. Instead of a dialogue, there is a
univocal presentation of the victim's misery. This art form cannot
incite action and political thought but only violent emotions. If we are
to believe the outrageous Jean-Loup Amselle, Exhibit B offers white people an exercise in "repentance," a "ceremony of expiation. 3".
He even goes so far as to take offence over such "self-flagellation" on
the part of Brett Bailey and thus concludes with the embarrassing
paralogism according to which the spectacle of beaten, humiliated and
murdered Black people is no more disturbing than the unpleasant image of
the colonizers. But the spectator does not see any colonizers. As for
the famous "repentance," there is no reason to believe it would be, as
Amselle zealously assumes, the key to reconciliation among the various
components of post-colonial societies.
He reads
this spectacle as the expression of an anti-racist romanticism through
which the artist is exorcising his past by displaying black bodies
before us as though we were taking a ride through the landscape of his
afflicted subjectivity. This morbid ghost train we are on gets its
political weight from a hackneyed process of contemporary art that tries
to make us tourists on that train vicariously sharing the artist's
fears and obsessions as we go by. What we must conclude when reading
Amselle is that the anti-racism of Exhibit B is an ultimately
fairly secondary means of accessing the perpetual display of evil and
the sinister obsessions afoot in the creator's soul. To summarize, the
exhibit has nothing to do with Black people but solely with a personal
encounter with the artist's subjectivity and that of the visitors, whom
Amselle invites to identify with Brett Bailey but not with the Black
people in his exhibit, who are reduced to nothing but a shocking
pretext.
Anti-racism for white people
Historian Pascal Blanchard has also responded to Exhibit B
detractors. As we know, he believes it is necessary today to replay the
spectacle of human zoos to soak them up and so better neutralize their
effects. Regarding Exhibitions at Musée du quai Branly in 2012,
of which Blanchard was one of the curators (feign your surprise here),
Lotte Arndt noted that it portrayed mute, abandoned subjects of a moral
rescue mission4.
It is not surprising that Blanchard runs to the rescue of an artist
who, for comparative purposes, chose a method like the one Blanchard
promoted.
Although
his response in this matter is predictable, Blanchard's words are still
surprising: for example, he posits that human zoos are still not widely
recognized as an inhuman horror on the same level as the Shoah or
colonization and slavery5. Are not those demonstrating against Exhibit B
doing so precisely for such recognition, made perfectly clear, of the
horror of human zoos? That horror does not need support from a
complacent public and to be repeated and replayed ad nauseam to
be understood as a horror. And Blanchard launches zealously into an
inventory of all the humans turned into sideshow freaks for gawkers to
contemplate between the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the Nubians,
the Laplanders and the dwarves. He really wants it all repeated.
But, more than everything else, what revolts both Blanchard and Amselle is the fact that Exhibit B opponents
delegitimize the artist due to the colour of his skin. According to
Blanchard and Amselle, those against the exhibit want a Black monopoly
on the representation of Black people. However, the current discussion
shows that the problem must be approached differently: it invites us to
wonder about the status of anti-racist discourse that grants no active
place to people actually experiencing racism. It is anti-racist
discourse that orders people experiencing racism to be silent when they
demonstrate their disapproval because, ultimately, the white people
engaging in that anti-racist discourse recognize that, as long as they
only talk among themselves, it makes little difference if they borrow
their words from Césaire or Arthur de Gobineau. It is how they react
when Black people invite themselves to their table that concerns us.
However, as for those whom the political message of Exhibit B
must concern in the first place, Black people, that is, they are busy
protesting under the watchful eye of the police instead of
congratulating each other on its success and publicizing it. Therefore,
those who are defending the exhibit must at least have the decency to
admit that it is far from being the success they claim it to be.
With
remarkably audacious demagoguery, Blanchard goes so far as to maintain
that the intention of such a spectacle is identical for everyone and
that we must refrain from dreading the famous measuring stick of
communitarianism. Besides its formulaic nature, the problem of such an
argument is that Exhibit B exclusively addresses the history of
Black people. It is intended to present a series of depictions of Black
people's humiliation. It claims to denounce the contemporary racism
Black people are experiencing. Therefore, it is perfectly reasonable to
acknowledge that Black people who have decided to express their
disagreement with such an exhibit could have a particular legitimacy in
speaking out. The protesters' slogan and sign "Respect our ancestors"
does not mean that only Black people can talk legitimately about Black
people, as the sophistry of the historian and anthropologist would have
us believe, but it means that even artists and intellectuals who call
themselves anti-racists cannot make that claim without acting with some
decency. But their refusal to listen and welcome the words of Black
people is so categorical that we must ask ourselves if the only effect
of such "anti-racism" is to give white intellectuals a chance to
congratulate each other on their open-mindedness and tolerance (at a
distance from those they boast they "tolerate.")
Above all, we are led to believe that the only really anti-racist consequence of Exhibit B
in the public space is the response and mobilizations against it in the
streets. Its sole positive effect is the collective organization of
refusal, which attests to that knowledge of the history of human zoos of
which Blanchard claims to be the custodian, and "awareness," for which
the magnanimous Blanchard credits the actors Brett Bailey hired. They
wanted Black people to be the objects of the exhibit, but perhaps our
intellectuals will learn that when the objects clearly object, the wise
thing to do is shut up and listen to them.
Norman Ajari
Translated from the French by Ian Harvey, Jasper, Ontario, Canada.
1 Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Inesthétique et Mimesis, Paris, Lignes, 2010, p. 110.
3 http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2014/11/23/exhibit-b-l-interdit-racial-de-la-representation_1149135.
4
Lotte Arndt, « Une mission de sauvetage : Exhibitions. L’invention du
sauvage au musée du quai Branly », in : Mouvements, n° 72, Paris, La
Découverte, 2012, p. 130. ( http://www.cairn.info/resume.php?
ID_ARTICLE=MOUV_072_0120).
5 http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/culture/20141128.OBS6468/exhibit-b-ce-spectacle-n-est-pas-raciste-c-est-l- inverse.html.
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