artistic representation of the body is somewhat at odds with more established traditions in the art of the region, in which the human body, particularly the
female body, is depicted as an object of considerable beauty and splendor to which is to be admired by the onlooker. Indeed, as Richard J. Powell observes that African artists, more often than not, portray the human subject as both a statue-like artifact and object of sexual desire, contending that ‘since the 1960’s, depictions of the female body by African artists have ‘fused together traditional “feminine” qualities with the themes of omnipotence and physical potentiality’ (1). This description is a world away from the ways in which the body has previously been represented in the works of the Jane Alexander, Osahenye Kainebi and the artist collective MwangiHutter. This paper will examine works by these three artists in order to evaluate the incorporation of the Gothic style in contemporary art and the reasons behind their transformation of the human psyiogamy from a site of beauty and adoration into one of destruction ‘figured in the most violent, absolute, and often repulsive terms’ (2).
Defining the ‘Gothic Body’?
In order to understand how some of the work of these three artists engages with the notion of the ‘Gothic Body’, it is first necessary to get to grips and define exactly what is meant by that most problematic and slippery of terms, ‘Gothic’. The term ‘Gothic’ is originally an architectural descriptor which has since been utilised to characterise particular strands of art, literature, film, culture, fashion and television. The Gothic architectural style flourished from the late 11th century until the early 14th century, with its most celebrated apogee being the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, the Gothic style is characterised by the following features: a use pointed windows and arches; preference for the asymmetrical; structural orientation towards the sky (or other ethereal contexts); use of gargoyles and general excessive use of ‘dark’ ornamentation. Overall, these features function to suggest ‘an over-abundance of imaginative frenzy’ which is entirely at odds with demands for order and simplicity (3). The term ‘Gothic’, as a signifier of this particular style, is itself derived from the name of the Germanic tribe who sacked Rome in 410 AD, ‘the Goths’. Thus, the connection between the two terms lies in the symbolic opposition between, on one hand, ancient Rome – which represents ideas of civilisation, culture, law, and social and political coherency – and on the other the Goths – who embody, barbarism, decline, arbitrariness and an undesirable return to the ‘dark ages’. It is precisely these resonances of asymmetry, entropy and degeneracy that characterise a ‘Gothic body’, which, in other words, is the loss of a cohesive and unwavering bodily identity, and the materialisation of a disorganised, abominable and fluctuating identity in its place. The effect of the process of bodily transfiguration is the evocation of particular anxieties and terrors. Thus, as Catherine Spooner argues, a Gothic body’s capacity to disturb ‘derives from [its] presentation of the body as lacking in wholeness and integrity, as a surface which can be modified or transformed’ (4). It is arguable that following both colonisation and subsequent decolonisation, contact with the western world has been a highly formative experience, for African art in the twentieth century. Indeed, as Susan Vogel contends, ‘African artists select foreign ingredients from the array of choices [presented to them], and insert them into a preexisting matrix in meaningful ways’ (5). This, I would argue, is precisely what has transpired with the interpolation of the Gothic body (which is essentially an Anglo-European tradition) into the contemporary African art scene, thus allowing artists such as Alexander, Kainebi and MwangiHutter: to incorporate Gothic bodies into their work with various employments and effects.
Stunted and Deformed South African Bodies: Jane Alexander
Jane Alexander’s disturbing tableaux Butcher Boys (1985-6) has attracted much global attention since it was first put on display in 1986. Composed of plaster, oil paint and found elements such as bone and horns, the three life-sized monstrous figures that make up Alexander’s piece are, as Chris Spring notes, ‘in a permanent state of mutation: from human to animal and back’ (6). Thus, composed of both human and animal parts, Alexander’s disturbing hybrid bodies are not neither unitary nor singular. Indeed, her use of the horns of different animals for the three figures means that they are not even singular within the context of their own hybridity, thus endowing them with an even more potent capacity to agitate. A view from the figures from the rear reveals that their backs have been split open before being roughly patched up, suggesting bodies that have been painfully put together. Alexander’s preoccupation with the tortured body thereby incarnates anxieties over the arbitrariness of the self: that, as humans, we do not want to think of the self as fragmentary entity that can be taken apart and put back together. Jeffery Jerome Cohen contends that, ‘the monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read [...] Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself’ (7), and this, I would argue, is certainly true of Alexander’s work. Gothic bodies are, in some sense, a recording device for social trauma, that they are formed out of particular cultural moments and thereby cannot help but embody social anxieties. Thus, in the case of Alexander’s monsters, taking into the social and political context of South Africa in the late 1980s, their bodies may indeed be interpreted as ‘a manifestation of the deeply maladjusted apartheid society’ (8): in other words, an artistic representation of fractured communities and the subsequent unjust demonisation of the black citizens of South Africa under the apartheid regime. Indeed, further supporting this interpretation of Alexander’s piece is the assertion made by the author J.M. Coetzee in his Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, that ‘the deformed and stunted relations between human being s that were created under colonialism and exacerbated under what is loosely called apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted [physicalities]’ (9).
The context within which Alexander has positioned her human-animal physiognomies moreover adds to their Gothic effect. The figures are placed on a long wooden bench, as if waiting for a bus, the leftmost figure idly staring into space whilst the other two are transfixed by something that has caught their attention across the road, rendering the scene as both simultaneously both familiar but unfamiliar. As a viewer we wish to disown these monsters and expel them to the realm of the fantastic and the unreal, but, because of the mundane setting of the tableaux, we are forced, against our will, to own then and to accept them as part of our own reality, thus rendering Alexander’s figures as doubly disturbing. Indeed, this relationship between human bodies and the desire to “expel” is perhaps most pronounced in the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s theory of ‘abjection’: a theory which I shall now be applying to two further examples of Gothic bodies in contemporary African art.
Doubled and Divided Bodies: Kaniebi Osahenye
Even in its original, architectural manifestation, the Gothic style is preoccupied with boundaries and their transgression. In particular, this is manifested its destablising of the boundaries between inside and outside. In more recent times, nowhere is this transgression in the boundaries between internality and externality more inextricably tied to issues of the body than in Julia Kristeva’s theory of ‘the abject’, as outlined in her 1982 essay Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. She argues that in order to be a cohesive and stable subject, we attempt to psychologically expel those things deemed ‘improper and unclean’ (10). These things then occupy an intermediate position on the subject/object spectrum as, although they share ‘one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I’ (11), they can never fully be expelled into the realm of the innaimate object, thus even ‘from its place of banishment, 
the abject does not cease challenging its master’. As such, the most common forms of abjection are things that were once part of the human body, but which are now not, such as blood, excerment and semen. Our bodies quite literally expell these things on a regular basis, yet as much as we may want to disown and forget about these bodilily discharges, because they were once part of our bodies we are forced to take akwnoledge and take responsibility for them. However, Kristeva also argues that ‘It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (12). Thus, above anything else, the abject totally destablisises the myth of the human body as a statue-like and impenetrable boundary, which is precisely what endows the abject with its capacity to frighten and disturb. Indeed, this very idea of abjection being tied together with notions of bodily ‘openness’ and penetration, is one such reason why, traditionally, women’s bodies have been considered to be considerably more abject than men’s bodies. Osahenye Kainebi’s Pleasure and Pain series (2003) presents a series of women’s bodies quite literally doubled and divided, with one half painted red and the other in white. Kainebi has applied paint to his canvases with wild, loose, wide brushstrokes of red and dripping trickles of white that flow down his canvases. Arguably, therefore, his figures look as if they are constructed with the two abject substances that women are most traditionally associated with: breast milk and blood. There is moreover, a fervent sense of fluidity about Keiebi’s bodies as, in places, they appear simply to dissolve into the background. For instance, the tortured looking body of Pleasure and Pain II, appears to be missing a right arm, her shoulder instead simply dissolving into a milky fluid which flows down the canvas to join with the breastmilk seeping out her breast. Thus, in this image, the boundary between self the outside world has been utterly obliterated, the result of which is a body that is ‘open’, unstable and agonised. Furthermore, the fact that the series is named Pleasure and Pain is revealing, as it may be the case that it reflects the twin poles of attraction and repulsion – desire and fear – that is elicited by the abject, Gothic body.
The Aggressive Ambiguity of the Sexual Body: MwangiHutter
The violation of physiological and subjective integrity roused by a substance or object entering or leaving the body means that the realm of the abject resides largely in those practices that leave the human body most ‘open’ to the outside world, such as ingestion, excretion and sex. Indeed, the intricate relationship between sexuality and abjection is forgrounded in the work of the artist collective MwangiHutter, which is comprised of Kenyan artist Ingrid Mwangi and her German-born husband Robert Hutter. In particular, their disturbing video installation piece, Splayed (2004) renders the sexualized human body as abject by taking an individual’s inability to police their own flesh boundaries to a very literal level. The piece consists of three realistically positioned plasma screens displaying Ingrid Mwangi’s head and arms outstretched in a Christ-like pose. This, first of all, is disturbing in itself, as it multiplicity of screens used in the installation suggests a body somehow incomplete and suffering from the same simultaneous proliferation, yet separation, of a singular body exhibited by Kainebi’s paintings and Alexander’s sculptures. What is more harrowing, however, is what is shown to the viewer as the video progresses, which is that an unknown pair of hands cuts the oxymoronic phrase ‘MONOGAMOUS POLYGAMY’ across Mwangi’s outstretched arms. Unwilling or unable to stop the act against her own body, Mwangi’s expressionless face reveals no discernable trace of pain or discomfort as the scalpel pierces her flesh, indicating an aggressive ambiguity towards her own body. Indeed, the piece situates the human body as preeminently sexual whist concurrently rendering the body as a social arena in which a tussle between opposing cultural and moral views transpires. However, because of the self-contradictory nature of the words carved into Mwangi’s flesh – the impossibility of remaining monogamous whilst in a situation of polygamy – this outcome of this conflict is left deliberately unresolved, leaving the subject depicted stranded in a body increasingly dissociated, foreign and abject.
Commenting on French performance artist Gina Pane’s celebrated work Sentimental Action (1973) – which, because it depicts the artist in an act of self-harm with a small blade, bears a striking resemblance to MwangiHutter’s later piece – Nicholas Blincoe observes that the penetration of the human skin with a sharp implement ‘has always pulled in two opposite directions, both towards and away from Western civilisation. Tribal cultures have often adopted painful initiation rites […] [and] tattoo parlours of the East Village [of New York City] conjure up a myth of man’s tribal nature through Maori and Celtic-inspired designs’ (13). Thus, once again, abject bodies such as those depicted by Pane and MwangiHutter are shown to be in-dialogue with the Gothic’s inherent preoccupation with anxieties relating to an entropic reversion from civilization to degenerate barbarism. In terms of the Splayed’s engagement with the overarching theme of sexuality, this is significant, because the installation incarnates a fear of excessive sexuality manifested in the threat of the ‘weak-willed’ body’s potential deviation from the codes of the ‘civilised’ practice of sexual monogamy. Indeed, as Blincoe later comments, although the piercing of the human flesh, whether in visual art, body art or in genuine pain initiation rites, has pronounced tribal resonance, at the same it stands as ‘another way to assert a Western identity: a love of liberty and individuality. And the method of asserting this identity is also very Western: drawing attention to the weak and mortal body in order to proclaim the nobility of the mind or the soul’ (14), and this, of course, includes bodily weakness in the face of overwhelming sexual desire.
Conclusion
Although the supposed beauty of the human body has proved an exceedingly enduring, fertile and popular subject matter for African art (as well as art from across the globe) for much of the twentieth into the twenty-first century, it is my contention that this subject matter is not without its limitations and is somewhat restrictive in terms of the issues and concerns it allows artists to explore. On the other hand, the Gothic body, which is seen as disgusting, inflicted and volatile, lends itself to a broader spectrum of thematic enquiry because it is capable of encompassing a wide range of social anxieties including, as outlined above, social oppression and tyranny, a loss of bodily integrity and issues regarding sexual expectations and behavior. Furthermore, it is also worth commenting that, traditionally, Gothic cultural artefacts have featured the colonial body as a disturbing agent, a haunting presence. In other words, owing to Europe’s colonial projects in the nineteenth century, a new brand of ‘darkness’ – of landscape, erotic desire, race and anguish – infiltrates the Gothic genre, resulting in a preoccupation with violence specifically aimed towards the black body and its detrimental ramifications for those involved in this act. Thus, in this sense, it is not surprising that this artistic mode appears so increasingly attractive to the artists of a continent still finding new ways with which to articulate and/or engage with the devastating legacy of a history plagued by the trauma(s) of the slave trade, colonialism and decolonisation.
Christopher Yiannitsaros
References
(1) Richard J. Powell,
Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), p. 147.
(2) Kelly Hurley,
The Gothic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3.
(3) Fred Botting,
Gothic (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 3.
(4) Catherine Spooner,
Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 9.
(5) Susan Vogel,
Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (New York: Centre for African Art, 1994), p. 28.
(6) Chris Spring, Anganza Afrika: African Art Now (London: Laurence King, 2008), p. 26.
(7) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture: Seven Theses’ in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.),
Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 3.
(8) Spring,
Anganza Afrika, p. 27.
(9) J.M. Coetzee,
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 302.
(10) Julia, Kristeva, Leon S. Roudiez (trans.),
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 2.
(11) Ibid., p. 1.
(12) Ibid., p. 4.
(13) http://arh346.blogspot.com/2007/02/gina-panes-sentimental-action-1973.html
(14) Ibid.