![]() ![]() I retain here the original title as translated from the French in which the designated term négresse is used rather than the more politically correct femme noire (black woman).īenoist’s Portrait of a Negress was painted six years after the French had (temporarily) abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies and just two years before Napoleon was to reinstate it. Of all the art works appropriated, the only one that is most significant to Beyoncé’s strategic manipulation of the bodily presence and absence of black women is Marie Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress (1800), a highly complex painting with many things happening in it across the realms of politics, race, gender, class, and strategies of looking and being looked at. Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819. It is Jay-Z who is shown in front of this painting and, at one brief moment, is caught gazing up at the black Hercules who constitutes the focal point of the drama and symbolizes black people as both survivors and saviours. He is energetic and heroic in his display of a muscular back. The most visible black figure is located at the apex of the composition. This gargantuan canvas contains three black men among the human debris who are used emblematically by the artist to relay the story of a human tragedy. For example, at one of several intervals of the repeated refrain ‘I can’t believe we made it,’ the camera pans across Théodore Géricault’s epic painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819). Although the majority of the paintings and sculptures found in the Louvre are devoid of black bodies, there are a few works in which a black presence is clear and exploited accordingly. Where the empowerment and critique of black bodies is concerned, there are a couple of critical juxtapositions highlighted in the ‘Apeshit’ video that are worth mentioning. They are playing on a recent trend by several contemporary black artists, such as the African-American portrait painter, Kehinde Wiley, to strategically mine aspects of European art and art history as a means to harness a bold and confident insertion and assertion of a black presence, insistence on global recognition, and commercial gain. They are not the first, however, to draw from Western art and art history or to use recognizable art locations to make a statement about access and power. Courtesy: the artistsīy packaging and selling their version of blackness, black bodies, and black culture, the Carters have asserted their right (and, by extension, the right of all black people) to do so while at the same time exploiting to their advantage the very culture that has, for so long, excluded people like them. Perhaps most important and timely is that ‘Apeshit’ is a video that begs contemplation in the context of recent incidents (the case in April of two black men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks for ‘trespassing’ while waiting for a business meeting comes to mind) in which the presence of black bodies in public spaces has raised paranoid fears among some white people about dark bodies and their claim to those spaces.īeyoncé and Jay-Z, ‘Apeshit’, 2018, film still. It’s about arrival and survival through declaration of one’s hard-earned position in society. It is about establishing a new order in which black bodies seize and command cultural and physical spaces from which they have traditionally been excluded and are typically marginalized. ![]() To be sure, ‘Apeshit’ is all about bodies – an orchestrated contrast of energetically writhing and animated black physiques set against frozen white forms of the past. The video is an unapologetic visual and sonic manifesto about spaces, power, and control. ‘Apeshit’ is an arresting, and I would even go so far as to say brilliant video for what it does and does not do for what it reveals and conceals for the ways in which it meaningfully appropriates, exploits, and reinterprets Western paintings and sculptures as a way to chart and celebrate the Carters’s public and commercial success, and black bodies in an artistic canon inextricably linked to histories of colonialism. The video begins with fragments and close-ups of European paintings from the Louvre, a hallowed cultural space where masterpieces of European culture and civilization are housed, where imperial and colonial might through conquest and acquisition are put on grand display. For Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z, the measured exploitation of these things through high art and popular culture is best witnessed in ‘Apeshit,’ a track and accompanying 6-minute video from their first joint album called Everything is Love. Spanning the terrain from high art to popular culture and everything in-between, the complexity of race, gender, and culture continues to dog us. ![]()
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