Sex, Dung & Hip Hop

International Mon 22-03-2010

Sex, Dung & Hip Hop
By Aarti wa Njoroge/AfricanColours.com

Arriving in drizzly London in late February, I had a choice between Chris Ofili at the Tate Britain and Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh at the White chapel Gallery. Since I was taking a friend who had just moved to London from Mumbai, did I show him something more familiar or throw him into the deep end of what makes the UK so multifaceted? Aarti wa Njoroge opts for two decades of the 1998 Turner prize-winning artist’s work.

Chris Ofili (1968- ) does not appear in the index of Laurie Schneider Adams’ Art Across Time, Third Edition. But as I was reading the final chapter, and references to “[testing] the limits of convention and propriety, and [challenging] traditional taboos”, public funding of the arts and use of “body fluids as both subject matter and symbol”, I kept thinking about the current retrospective of Ofili’s works at the Tate Britain in London, England (27 January-16 May 2010).

^{The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili}

I was somewhat surprised – and dismayed – that when referring to zero-tolerant Rudy Giuliani’s “professed outrage at a painting of the Virgin [mother of Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity] with a small lump of dried elephant dung on one breast”, Adams commented that

“the mayor’s rush to judgment¹ exposed his own lack of contextual knowledge, for in parts of Africa – where the artist had been raised [sic] – elephant dung was endowed with magic properties.”²

That Ofili was born in Manchester, England, to Igbo parents and travelled to Africa for the first time in 1992 is well documented. Born in London around the same time as Ofili, I also made my maiden voyage to the subcontinent – in this case – of my roots that year.³

So I wonder how Adams, as an art historian, could have made the error on Ofili’s upbringing. The then New York City mayor had not seen The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), but how much research had she done?

Still, the themes of continuing with the past, breaking with it, of influences, references and media from one culture appearing in another, the themes that form the basis of this chapter of Adams’ book, are all present in Ofili’s solo exhibition at the Tate.

Like most of today’s popular “best of” compilations, there are the classics, the seminal works that continue to inspire. People remember where they were the first time they saw them. Then one travels all the way through to the latest production, so fresh in some cases, one does not yet want to express one’s opinion too quickly. And all the time one questions whether only twenty years’ work justifies a retrospective at all.

Innovation, Continuity, Globalization… and Exploitation?

What struck me are the disparate influences in Ofili’s works.

Although the stories of Ofili bringing back elephant dung from Zimbabwe and later getting supplies from English zoos are, again, well known, he was not the first to incorporate it in his art. “During the 1980s [Black American conceptualist David Hammons] began using decorated elephant dung as part of his [sculptures].”⁴ But winning the Turner Prize has ensured Ofili’s association with the medium.

Move away from the iconic mother of Christ to a contemporary mother who has also lost her son, and you see an image arguably more poignant and relevant to a multicultural Britain struggling to come to terms with the brave new world. No Woman, No Cry (1998) is a portrait of Doreen Lawrence, in whose dung pendant and tears are cameos of her murdered teenage son, Stephen. Her red top, the colour no doubt deliberately chosen, has the same spilt liquid effect of Ofili’s Afromuses series, started in 1995.

Ofili uses his trademark map pins, African beadwork-like, to spell out words on dung pedestals which bring the paintings to the viewer’s eye level, all the more moving in this case. The “No” on each pedestal of No Woman, No Cry could have so many meanings. “No” to stop Doreen from crying, “No” to any more racist murders, “No” to any more institutionalised racism in the police force, to botched investigations.

Showing paintings with present-day figures even a few years after their creation can allow them a new perspective. In the more overtly psychedelic Pimpin’ ain’t easy (1997) is the irony (now) of Tiger Woods flashing a smile under the baseball cap of a well-known sportswear brand accused of its own misdemeanours around the time of the painting. His head, like the others, rests on a woman’s splayed legs, though in this case mostly covered by what could even be a magnified golf ball. No silent dignity here, though. The head of the penis carries a clown’s unexpectedly worried expression.

Pimpin’ ain’t easy is one of several paintings influenced by Ofili moving to Cubitt Studios in 1996, the year I left our office on Gray’s Inn Road, walking distance from the sex and drugs of King’s Cross, Ofili’s new location, for the more salubrious Fleet Street.

^{Blossom by Chris Ofili}

Blossom (1997), against a delicate floral background, lures prospective clients with a voluptuous visible breast, long red nails, lurid pink lipstick and flower in her afro. The blue outlining her curves re-appears in later paintings such as the 2007 Untitled (Afronude) series. Foxy Roxy could be wearing a judge’s wig and shirt, but is flaunting both breasts, pink in contrast with the rest of her body, and has blue eyes.

Artistic innovation means taking people out of their comfort zone, confronting them, and Ofili is not shying away. Does this excuse him? Or should the breasts, buttocks, vaginas and faces (blindfolded in Blind Popcorn (1995), to hide their identities), cut out from pornographic magazines and liberally used in his abstract and later figurative works, have bothered Giuliani at a more general exploitation-of-female-sexuality level?

I recently saw an exhibition of photographs taken by Indian Muslim women who had, for the most part, escaped domestic violence. What would they think of Ofili?

Religion and counter-religion, sexuality and nature

Not all of Ofili’s influences are contemporary, but he reinvents them. He juxtaposes new age religiosity in The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne (William Blake, c1803-05) with twentieth century blaxploitation culture (again with magazine portraits) in 7 Bitches Tossing their Pussies before the Divine Dung (1995).

“I was interested in how Snoop Dogg could sing quite vulgar lyrics with a sweet, smooth West Coast voice – in the coming together of the rough and smooth. I was curious about making older ideas contemporary and new.”⁵

Pimping Ain't Easy by Chris Ofili

^{Pimping Ain't Easy}

At the end of the nineties, Ofili embarked on The Upper Room (1999-2002), a series of Rhesus macaques. Six recurring figures on either side, where only the colour changes, reminds one of Warhol. The last monkey, at the end of the cavernous space, faces the viewer, as one could expect from many places of worship.

The fact that there are thirteen monkeys, holding up chalices, as in the Christian ceremony of communion, evokes the Last Supper from the same Bible. The religious reference purportedly does not end there. This is also about the monkey-headed god Hanuman “who, in Ramayana, the Hindu epic, led an army of monkeys into battle against the demonic Ravan.”6 So is it evil over good or good over evil?

Religion and sexuality feature again in Within Reach. Triple Beam Dreamer’s (2001-2) nubile woman, with a red and green spray emanating from her left breast, eating a banana, could not be more suggestive.

Couples, whether locked in a kiss (Afro Sunrise, 2002-3)⁷ or in an embrace (Afro Love and Unity, 2002), are depicted in abundant landscapes, though without “the sweltering claustrophia of the pavilion in which they were first shown, garish against walls of dark-green felt”.⁸ Was it with tongue in cheek that Ofili chose the colours of Africa for works representing Britain at the 2003 Venice Biennale?

While he was creating retro pieces with dung and resin, Ofili started working on the more delicate Afromuses (1995-2005) and Untitled (1998) series, using the sous verre technique. In the Afromuses diptychs, red-lipped women wear clothes and bead necklaces matching their men’s, their elaborate diadem-supported hairstyles repeated in their men’s beards or hair.

Art work by Chris Ofili

A Gardener (2005), influenced by his new home, Trinidad, includes birds perched on branches or flowers. Form and content fuse. In all these works, the colours are of precious and semi-precious stones.

More erotic poses, whether the 7 brides for 7 bros (2004-6) in pencil, or the Untitled (Afronude) watercolours (2007), larger than the Afromuses, but in the same hazy, bejewelled tones, followed. Stylistically, “[the] nudes and the dotted, pointillist lines are reminiscent of the Matisse of Luxe, Calme et Volupté – another dream of southern paradise lost.”⁹Ofili is again refreshing older ideas. At the same time, he challenges his audience, some of whom may have been anaesthetised on what is aesthetic.

Going back to The Holy Virgin Mary, Professor Michael Davis articulates Ofili’s intention.

“Chris Ofili's collage is "shocking," in that it is deliberately provocative and intends to jolt viewers into an expanded frame of reference, and perhaps even toward illumination. In this sense, it relates to the medieval aesthetic of ugliness in which visual dissonance and distortion were used in art to urge the viewer to move beyond the superficial material plane to a higher level of spiritual contemplation. The mayor's reactions appear to be based on the narrow definition that art should only be beautiful and an equally narrow picture of a Virgin Mary who looks like Ingrid Bergman.”¹⁰

Despite all the colours, curves and textures of Ofili’s the works so far, it is the Blue Riders series with moody, angular indigos in dim light – which require me to move back, forward and around – that intrigue me the most. Iscariot Blues (2006) and Blue Stag (All Fours) (2008-9), no less violent than the earlier works could be interpreted as exploitative, are not easy to look at in more ways than one. Again, religion, sacrifice, the juxtaposition of the artistic and the macabre are all present.

I picked up speed through the huge, flat, vertical tableaux that concluded the exhibition. To understand The Healer (2008), I referred to the catalogue, where Ofili talks of the Poui tree blooming yellow “and then overnight all the flowers can be found on the ground”.¹¹ Without knowing that this is a “[guru] healer who only comes out at night and has to feast on the flowers to continue”, I would have suspected he was regurgitating rather than gorging.

Most of the last room has eerie forms and blocks of colour. While the video of Ofili in Trinidad helps demystify some of the art, maybe I need a trip there myself. For now, I can safely conclude that Ofili will keep educating and provoking his audience.

Having paid a £10 (around US$ 15) entrance fee, I wonder whether it would be possible for such an exhibition to travel to Africa.

Thanks to an education system like the UK’s, Ofili was able to take a fine arts foundation course originally so as to be able to study something else, only to find his vocation.

Thanks to public and private funding of the arts, this artist-by-accident has had access to galleries and grants that have allowed him to open his mind.

I also find it fascinating that so much of Ofili’s art, whether The Upper Room or the figure of Judas in Iscariot Blues, is unplanned. Little of this is available, sustainable or even imaginable in Africa. So much for the globalized world that Laurie Schneider Adams talks about.

¹ ^{Seen by Judith Nesbitt, chief curator of the Tate, as an opportunity to score political points in the year before he was to run for the US Senate. Chris Ofili, edited by Judith Nesbitt, published by Tate Publishing, page 16-17.

2 Chapter 29, Innovation, Continuity and Globalization, Art Across Time, Laurie Schneider Adams, Third Edition, published by McGraw Hill.

3 Unlike him, I reached the epicentre. Ofili’s trip to Zimbabwe would be like my visiting the southern Indian state of Karnataka instead of my grandfathers’ villages in Gujarat, but then, as is the case for much of the African diaspora, “Marcus Garvey’s idea was of going back to Africa not so much as a place but somewhere you mentally can be happy, [a] state of mind.” Chris Ofili, page 154.

4 Ibid, Okwui Enwezor, page 65, note 3.

5 Ofili has “[forged] his own iconography that avows religion and popcorn culture, ethnicity and authenticity, bums and tits”. Ibid, page 21

6 Ibid, Okwui Enwezor, page 73

7 This reminded me of Reggie Pedro’s Fire Love, a romantic depiction of a black couple, with their backs to us, as if they are having a private conversation. Physically, the setting could be anywhere as Pedro’s work is semi-abstract, and so a specific place can be less important than the concept. The fire in the background could be taken to be an African sunset, or a European one.

8 The Times}^{http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article7001855.ece}
^{9 The Telegraph}^{http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3579641/Triumph-of-the-elephant-man.html}
^{10 College Street Journal, Mount Holyoke College, Volume 13, Number 6,}^{http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/csj/991008/madonna.html}
^{11 Chris Ofili, Ekow Eshun interviews, page 97}