Aimé Mpane’s Nude: A Body that Questions

1 The Act of Nudity

Few subjects have proven so central to the western artistic cannon as the nude. I am referring here to the idealized nude, the particular form of nudity that Kenneth Clark famously defined in opposition to nakedness:

To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word “nude,” on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body reformed.^[11]

Many scholars have since taken issue with Clark’s arguments, pointing to their limitations.^[12] But the fact remains that the “vague image… of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body” remains fixed in the public imagination. Think of Polykleitos’s Doryphoros, Michelangelo’s David, Canova’s Perseus, Rinehart’s Leander—given the focus of my paper, I am referring only to examples of the male nude. Chiseled figures with youthful and unblemished bodies, unattired athletes standing in contrapposto: these are part and parcel of the “classical tradition.” Such bodies are specimens of artistic achievement that, according to received wisdom, speak to generalized conceptions of human perfection that derive from Ancient Greece, the supposed birthplace of western democracy and civilization.^[13] Washington D.C. might not boast as many classical nudes as other western capitals. But so powerful and ubiquitous is the nude in the historical consciousness of the west that D.C.’s scarcity of bared bodies hardly matters: many (perhaps even most) of Mpane’s American viewers had Clark’s “vague image” of the ideal nude in their minds already when they entered the artist’s 2009 gallery space.

However, as Mpane notes, that “vague image” is neither static nor abstract. Nudity is an act—a conscious decision. In a Smithsonian gallery space, displaying a nude sculpture is an intentional choice to engage with longstanding artistic traditions. In the Congo, displaying the unattired body is something else, namely an act of protest.^[14] Nude draws these two forms of display together in a way that reveals something important: the idealized, classicizing nude is ultimately an enactment of imperialist ideology. Witness how Clark himself explains the origin of the term: “the word [nude] was forced into our vocabulary by critics of the early eighteenth century to persuade the artless islanders that, in countries where painting and sculpture were practiced and valued as they should be, the naked human body was the central subject of art.”^[15]

We can push this discussion of imperialist ideology further. The same critics to which Clark alludes, writing when Neoclassicism was ascendant in the west, had a preferred medium when it came to sculpted bodies: marble. Marble’s color was a privileged signifier, especially among American Neoclassicists.^[16] For them, white stone served as a sign of aesthetic and moral purity. There is a definite racial dimension to this logic.^[17] Insisting on the edifying value of marble was, with regard to sculpted nudes, a way of making the White body into an aesthetic and moral paradigm, a “universal good” in art.^[18] This elevation of the White body occurred not simply because white stone stood in for white skin—though marble certainly did blur the line between whiteness as virtue and Whiteness as race—but also because the preference for marble suppressed the possibility of representing Black and other racial identities. As one scholar has explained, “For if Black bodies were cloaked in white marble, then the most obvious and arguably primary signifier of race, skin color/complexion, was obliterated and contained.”^[19]

Mpane effectively removed the cloak of white marble when he created Nude. He used plywood, gluing a number of planks together to form the block that he then shaped from memory, using his adze primarily. This choice of medium invites us to reflect on ideas of status, value, and privilege.^[20] Plywood, a medium not normally associated with “high” art, is less expensive and less esteemed than fine stone. Likewise, the adze is a tool that has greater purchase in African carving traditions than in the celebrated sculpting schools of Europe and America.^[21] And of course, the body Mpane rendered is not white. Nor is it White. Mpane is quite clear on the matter: Nude is a sculpture of a Black man.^[22]

Along those same lines, we should note a few other characteristics of Mpane’s figure. Look at the facial features. Many spectators would read them as indicative of African descent. Then there are the figure’s genitals. In my experience as an art history professor, I have had a few brave students ask why classicizing nudes “all have such small penises.”^[23] Comparatively speaking, though, the question does not apply to Mpane’s Nude. Here again, we run up against social conceptions of Black bodies. We run up against the legacy of colonial imagery in ethnographic “science,” which posits a connection between the genitalia of Black bodies and a deviant, atavistic, or animalistic sexuality.^[24] And we run up against colonialism’s representational strategies, which align cultural—even sculptural—conceptions of Whiteness with higher forms of human evolution and connect Blackness with base categories of sub-human existence (see fig. 3). Once more, the situation is quite clear; signifiers of race, far from being obliterated and contained, are present and palpable in Mpane’s figure.

3

Illustrated racial hierarchy chart that features the Apollo Belvedere at the apex from Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History, Philadelphia 1854, 458

Nude has the type of youthful, athletic physique familiar from the classical tradition. He stands in a pose that recalls canonical precedent, but the signifiers of race raise timely issues: they make explicit the all-too-often hidden assumptions that interweave the celebrated history of nudity in western art with cultural values ascribed to White skin.^[25] We begin to see here the insight of Milbourne’s assertion: “More than a witness to history, [Nude] stands raw and demanding change.”^[26]

That demand is made to and of the work’s spectators—this is a point that needs to be stressed. Lit from above (as it was in the Artists in Dialogue exhibition), with strong shadows emphasizing the figure’s facial features, Nude has as a corporeal presence that cannot be ignored. The figure stands confidently with a forceful yet relaxed poise. His head turns slightly to the left. His arm is propped prominently on his hip. There is a subtle twist in his torso, and his body conveys a sense of reserved energy and depth. Nude also returns the viewer’s gaze; this suggests an embodied presence, a mental and emotional life. That impression of a psyche—dare I say a soul—is especially meaningful given the palpable indicators of race and ethnicity in the figure. Mpane’s sculpture asserts that which colonialism and its lingering representational strategies deny when depicting bodies of color: humanity. It is the beauty of human beings, Africans in particular, that Mpane puts on a pedestal here.^[27] What the work demands is acknowledgement of that humanity. To put it in slightly more philosophical terms, Nude resonates with a deeply felt ethical experience: encountering another person, seeing something of the rich internal life of the Other, implores the viewing subject to see another self, another human being that deserves respect, kindness, and care.^[28]

That being said, Nude also invites spectators to participate in a different type of looking. Consider the surface of the figure (fig. 4). Writers in the Neoclassical era praised the smooth, uninterrupted exteriors of antique marbles, connecting them to values of beauty and decorum.^[29] Mpane by contrast left his wood unpolished, abraded, and scarred. This surface activity compels viewers to move closer, invade what we might call Nude’s personal space, and participate in a topographical study of the figure’s form. In that moment, the eye moves over and through the external marks. It follows the course of Mpane’s adze and other tools, into the gouges, the gashes, the scratches in the wood, ravaging Nude’s body. To borrow slightly from the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the eye is hateful.^[30] Mpane’s own words are even more revealing.

4

Aimé Mpane, Nude, 2006 – 2008, detail

For the African body [Nude], I proceeded by gluing several layers of wood… as if it were the layers of our history that we discover as an archaeologist, and by leaving the surface marked by the lines of wood rasp, it is to put stress on the skin. Because of the pigmentation, the color of our skin, we are immediately labeled. [This] is also a way of talking about our traumatic memory that we carry within us via the collective unconscious.^[31]

Nude stands—and this is especially true for those spectators who occupy a position of privilege within a society that has long struggled with systemic racism and inequality—in a type of discursive place characterized by tension and oscillation. The power of the figure’s body language is such that beholders react to the sculpture’s emotive character, but the power of the surface is such that the eye wants to peer across the figure’s terrain, bore into it, destabilize the whole, and tear the body into patterns of form, texture, and shape. Under close examination, in other words, Nude no longer exists as an embodied subject, as somebody. Perception becomes superficial—skin-deep. The gaze reads Nude as something. And the experience of looking at the figure begins to recall themes and insights from postcolonial theory.^[32]

One might invoke the insights of Homi Bhabha at this moment: “Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole White body.”^[33] Fanon’s poetic descriptions of a violent gaze and racist speech in Black Skin, White Masks are even more poignant: “The Black man has to confront a myth—a deep-rooted myth. The Black man is unaware of it as long as he lives among his own people; but at the first White gaze, he feels the weight of his melanin.”^[34]

“Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!” “Ssh! You’ll make him angry. Don’t pay attention to him monsieur, he doesn’t realize that you’re just as civilized as we are.”^[35]

2 Fanon’s Final Prayer

There is more to be said about Black Skin, White Masks in relation to Mpane’s Nude. Fanon’s text is a powerful exploration—an evisceration, really—of colonialism, racism, and their impact on the human mind. As one might expect, psychiatry being Fanon’s field of expertise, the book is deeply critical of Eurocentric and essentialist trends in early twentieth-century psychoanalytic practice. For similar reasons, the author also engages with the proponents of Negritude. Fanon opposes discussions that center on universal conceptions of the “Negro spirit” or “African personality.”^[36] As he maintains, “what we call the Black soul is a construction by White folks.”^[37]

Fanon’s discussion of the “Black soul” strikes a chord with Foucault’s famous pronouncement, “the soul is the prison of the body.”^[38] The connection is more than a matter of coincidence. Fanon describes the body as the object of power operations that define racial identities in colonial societies. Notice how he frames the project of his book:

The analysis we are undertaking is psychological. It remains, nevertheless, evident that for us the true disalienation of the Black man implies a brutal awareness of the social and economic realities. The inferiority complex can be ascribed to a double process:

First economic.

Then, internalization or rather, epidermalization [emphasis added] of this inferiority.^[39]

Fanon’s point is preceptive. Colonialism works to establish, reify, and amplify systems of inequality. The colonizer reigns supreme over colonial subjects that have to be, that for the sake of the system itself, must be affirmed and reaffirmed as inferior, less than human. As Fanon explains, one of the many tragedies of this situation is that it makes believers of those who suffer its effects most. This is where colonialism’s representational strategies come into play (see fig. 3 again). Visual images, textual descriptions, pseudo-scientific discourses: together, these different facets of cultural production shape how actual living and breathing individuals interpret their bodies, as well as the bodies of others.^[40] “Blackness” as construed in colonial and racist systems—the “myth of the spontaneous and cosmic Negro”^[41]—is written on the body of color. It defines that body. It imprisons that body by perpetuating a type of looking, a gaze that intensifies power hierarchies. “‘His body is black; his tongue is black; his soul must be black too.’ The White man practices this logic daily. The Black man is the symbol of evil and ugliness.”^[42] “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of not existing. Sin is black as virtue is white. All those White men, fingering their guns, can’t be wrong. I am guilty. I don’t know what of, but I know I’m a wretch.”^[43]

As is plainly evident, Fanon is quite explicit when it comes to the violence involved in colonial representations of Black bodies. He speaks of “an arsenal of racial stereotypes”^[44] that reside in the collective unconscious (at least in the west) and deny the humanity of Black people. Here again, the body becomes the target of a cruel gaze. Consider some of Fanon’s more evocative prose: “Look! A Negro! … I am an object among other objects.”^[45] Or: “The White gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed.”^[46]

This last quotation aligns so precisely with the experience of looking closely at Nude’s surface that it is almost startling. Spectators who notice the scored “skin” of Mpane’s figure study the sculpture by scrutinizing its various physical properties. Exposed joints in the wood blocks. Patterned motifs of slightly different color. A woven texture of marks, traces left by an adze, wood rasp, or other tools. The process is one of dissection and fragmentation. In these moments, Nude does not evoke a powerful sense of embodied subjectivity. It is an “object among other objects.”^[47] Only when the spell breaks, when spectators step back to take in the figure as a whole, does the compelling image of a nude Black man come into focus again.

The effect of that oscillation—viewers moving close then back, the sculpture registering differently from the respective vantage points—is poignant. Suddenly, and with blinding realization, the style of visual investigation that draws spectators close—the type of scrutiny that is entrenched within the museum as a cultural institution, as well as the discipline of art history, with its celebrated series of nude marble bodies— becomes an analogue for the dissecting power of the “White gaze.” Similarly, when spectators encounter Nude as an embodied presence, the experience resonates with the ethical dimensions of Black Skin, White Masks. I am referring to the mute appeal that issues from Mpane’s standing figure, with its eloquent body language. From this perspective, Nude registers a degree of humanity that demands acknowledgement, that calls to spectators from a place that colonialism and its representational strategies seek to obscure. Fanon’s language is especially pertinent once again: “Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body, suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost….”^[48]

At their core, Black Skin, White Masks and Nude share important ethical convictions. Fanon is a deeply critical and perceptive accuser of the colonial enterprise, but what he ultimately seeks is the freedom of both parties—Black and White—from the violent and oppressive social systems that lock individuals into race-based categories of identity. “The Black man is not. No more than the White man. Both have to move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born.”^[49] Mpane, too, values this type of communication. Speaking to me over email, the artist explained that he admires Fanon’s book. Black Skin, White Masks, “reminds us… to think of humanity as one…. Because this is how it is possible to forgive and move from caring for oneself to caring for the world.”^[50]

By placing Nude in an exhibition that centers on the theme of dialogue, Mpane engaged his spectators as interlocutors. Nude lays bare the violent operations of a racist gaze—a gaze that is so pervasive, so deeply engrained in the fabric of American culture and history that it is able to masquerade as normal.^[51] At the same time, Nude confronts beholders with a moral imperative that echoes Fanon’s thinking. The sculpture urges its audience to view with suspicion all the negative associations that have been ascribed to Black bodies, distrust the “inhuman voices” of the past, and “endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.”^[52] In this respect, the work points to a hard truth: the struggles Fanon and others faced in the anticolonial period continue to prevade this post/neocolonial era. Speaking of the pain inflicted on colonized bodies, Mpane himself states, “Today that pain, or rather the echo of that pain, has become screaming. For decades we’ve tried to hide it, but I try to dig into it, question it and present it as questioning.”^[53] And in that respect, we should view Nude as effectively embodying the last lines of Fanon’s book: “My final prayer: / O my body, always make me a man who questions!”^[54]

3 Coda

One of the most fascinating elements of the 2009 Artists in Dialogue exhibition was the placement of Nude (fig. 5). The sculpture commanded a good deal of floor space on its own, but it also looked through an open doorway to the central figure of Mpane’s installation, Congo, Shadow of a Shadow. The dialogue between the two works— Nude and Congo, Shadow of a Shadow—deserves a moment of reflection, in large part because it allows us to continue exploring the parallels between Mpane’s art and Fanon’s writings.

5

Aimé Mpane, Nude, 2006 – 2008, as installed in the Artists in Dialogue exhibition of the National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, 2009

Congo, Shadow of a Shadow (fig. 6) is made of spectral bodies, bodies that operate at the limits of representation, in the gray area between form and content. The central figure is a construction of 4,652 matchsticks. Mourning, its head downcast, it stands before and emerges from a grave marked, “Congo… 1885.” This is an explicit allusion to the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, where King Leopold of Belgium—the monarch of a small and recently-established European territory, envious of the growing empires around him—used his wealth and ruthless diplomatic skill to exploit international rivalries in the scramble for African colonies. When the conference concluded, he was sovereign ruler of the Congo Free State, a newly created political entity whose purpose—at least from Leopold’s perspective—was profit, the production of ivory and wild rubber. In spite of the king’s humanitarian posturing, horrendous policies in the pursuit of economic gains became the rule of the day. Forced labor in inhumane conditions, maiming and mutilation, arbitrary executions, and mass killings were common tactics of state-sponsored terror. Eventually, international pressure forced the Belgian parliament to take possession of the Congo in 1908, but Leopold’s tactics have had a lasting influence. The post-1908 colonial period, the upheavals surrounding independence in 1960, and the subsequent rise of Joseph Désiré Mobutu, who held power from 1965 until his death in 1997— these chapters of Congolese history run red.

6

Aimé Mpane, Congo, Shadow of the Shadow, 2005, as installed in the Artists in Dialogue exhibition of the National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, 2009. Mixed media installation, 335.3 × 530.9 × 365.8 cm. National Museum of African Art, Washington DC

Material is obviously important in Mpane’s installation, as is the idea of a constructed body that stands in relation to historical trauma. As the artist explained,

In Congo, Shadow of a Shadow, I want to give a lesson based on what is going on. I choose the materials because of their function. Matchsticks because they can generate fire…. The first element humankind discovered was fire to heat, to cook, etc. With time, fire served multiple causes, including destructive means: firearms, burning, and killing. Through the medium, I want to pass on an idea of construction. That medium can exploit curves, straight lines, transparency, weightlessness, deconstruction, and light. And especially, to make something from nothing.^[55]

Interestingly, and unlike Nude, the power of Congo, Shadow of a Shadow stems from the fact that the installation does not engage viewers in terms of solid corporality. The work communicates through “transparency, weightlessness… and light.” We can speak of the central figure as having a haunting materiality and as a type of shadow: fragile, fleeting, elusive—but there all the same.^[56] The permeability of Mpane’s matchstick figure thus creates an interesting play between the “here and now” of its form and the historical circumstances marked, “Congo… 1885.” As we can already begin to understand, Mpane uses the idea of shadows as a way of engaging with the issues of memory and temporality.^[57] His work invites viewers to “step into” the matchstick figure’s position: to consider the colonial past, confront the reality of neo-colonialism in the present, and reflect on the future possibilities of life in the Congo.^[58]

In addition to the matchstick figure, whose projected shadow looms over the dark scene, two wooden silhouettes lay on the floor. One is of a pregnant woman. The other is a child. Each rest on a pair of shoes. These silhouettes—another play on the idea of shadows—mark absent bodies.^[59] They are traces of bodies from the past, lost bodies, traces of death and murder. The shoes are a particularly powerful reference to the realities of violence. In the Congo, the threat of rebels and warring gangs, of community raids, murder, rape, and abduction are lived experiences. Often times the shoes of the victims are all that remain after these attacks.^[60]

As markers of dead, nameless individuals, what these silhouettes evoke is a lingering sensation of loss and suffering, and in this respect, the ellipsis of “Congo… 1885” begins to take on new meaning. That seemingly simple bit of punctuation quickly becomes an abyss, the open-endedness of the omission it signifies suggesting the multitude of nameless, all-but-forgotten victims that stretch from the beginning of the colonial period to the contemporary era. It is worth noting that by 2005, the year Mpane created this installation, the concentration of war-related fatalities in the Congo was the highest the world had seen since World War II. Many of the victims were not soldiers. Hence the specific forms of Mpane silhouettes: a pregnant woman and a child.^[61]

Viewers who step through the door—the “gate”^[62]—and enter the installation space immediately enter into a dialogue with brutal chapters of Congolese history. The emotive force conjured by the work’s ethereal figures challenges years of ingrained colonial discourse and imperialist ideology—what Adam Hochschild refers to as the “politics of forgetting.”^[63] Congo, Shadow of a Shadow conveys the exigency of the colonial situation, which continues to impact the present. As a result, the work also recalls Fanon’s ethical understanding of temporality. “Every human problem cries out to be considered on the basis of time, the ideal being that the present always serves to build the future. And this future is not that of the cosmos, but very much the future of my century, my country, and my existence.”^[64]

Note the urgency of Fanon’s words. The need to build a better future in the present is emphatic: “[T]hat is my reason for living. The future must be a construction supported by man in the present. This future edifice is linked to the present insofar as I consider the present something to be overtaken.”^[65] Fanon’s insistence and ambition resonate with the figural arrangements of Congo, Shadow of a Shadow. The materiality of wooden slats and the psychology of mourning connect the physical if elusive presence of the matchstick body to the grave that denotes the Congo’s colonial past.^[66] The wooden silhouettes extend the theme of death to the present as well, while the looming shadow on the wall—the least tangible, least fixed form in the installation, the one most subject to change—communicates the moral weight of a future that remains open. For many in America, the shadow of a cross that also appears on the wall might recall the idea of perpetual hope, but the grim reminders of violent death in this installation leave no room for doubt: the future of the Congo is under threat by the realities of its present circumstances and the lingering influence of its colonial past.

Light factors into this temporal dynamic as well. The installation’s spotlight simultaneously throws a looming shadow onto the wall and makes the matchstick figure glow. The glow recalls Mpane’s meditations on fire: it emphasizes the beauty of the present construction while also suggesting that at any moment a spark might send the whole structure up in flames. The question then is what to do with the present: enhance the beauty and construct a better future or continue the destructive course that has ravaged the Congo since 1885. As Mpane explains, “I like matchsticks because of their symbolism: they can produce fire, which in turn brings good and bad things to people…. It gives me pleasure to build something beautiful and humane….It hurts me so much to know that in Africa, many people destroy instead of construct.”^[67] Fanon conveys a related sentiment, his words delivering a poetic force equal to that of Mpane’s installation: “How can we possibly not hear that voice again tumbling down the steps of History: ‘It’s no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it.’”^[68]

By positioning Nude so that the figure seemingly looks through the doorway at the matchstick body in Congo, Shadow of a Shadow, Mpane effectively extended Nude’s frame of reference. The artist’s investigations into social conceptions of Black bodies and the history of nudity in western art lead to the issue of colonialism. This fact lends another dimension to Nude’s protest as well as the promise it adumbrates. The figure stands exposed, compels an acknowledgement of colonialism’s continued impact on human life, and calls for change. It prefigures “the ‘ideal’ or the utopian vision of an African man (it is not the case today). It is the expression of what a man wants to be, a man in ‘majesty’.”^[69] To put it another way—and to borrow from Fanon once more—Nude demands that we “wake up, put on our thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty.”^[70]

I would like to thank Shannen Hill for her support at the crucial early stages of the project. I would also like to thank Emily Fenichel, who read a complete draft of the article manuscript; Steven Mansbach and Joshua Shannon, for their sage advice; and several individuals who were incredibly generous in helping me acquire images for publication: these individuals include Haley Steinhilber, Amy Staples and Karen Milbourne of the National Museum of African Art and Irene Fung of the Haines Gallery, San Francisco. Andrew Eschelbacher deserves special mention in this note of acknowledgment. Andrew has been part of this project from the very beginning, first as a sounding board for ideas, later as a thoughtful interlocutor and reader, and always as a good friend. Finally, I would like to thank the editors and anonymous readers of this journal for their insightful comments and Aimé Mpane, who kindly discussed his work with me.