Skin Crafts: Affect, Violence and Materiality in Global Contemporary Art 9781350122956, 9781350290464, 9781350123007, 9781350122970

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Skin Crafts

Also by Julia Skelly and published by Bloomsbury Radical Decadence

Skin Crafts Affect, Violence and Materiality in Global Contemporary Art Julia Skelly

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Julia Skelly, 2022 Julia Skelly has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Adriana Brioso Cover image © Amy France All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-2295-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-2297-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-2298-7 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For A.B.

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Contents List of Plates List of Figures Introduction 1 2 3 4 5

Narco-violence, femicide and gore capitalism: Teresa Margolles’s piercing textile works Facing slavery and survival: Lubaina Himid’s overpainted ceramics ‘A skin for a skin’: Sherry Farrell Racette’s textile paintings Festering wounds and stitched scars in works by Rebecca Belmore and Nadia Myre Concrete and caresses: The case of Doris Salcedo

viii ix 1

33 65 95 121 155

Afterword

183

Bibliography Index

189 207

Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Ni Haifeng, Self-Portrait as Part of the Porcelain Export Trade, 2000 Hella Jongerius, Chicle Delft Jug, 2009 Bob White, Between Skin and Cloth #1, 2004 Beccy Ridsdel, from the Art and Craft series, 2016 Liz Collins, The Walking Wounded, 2011 Sherry Farrell Racette, Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses, 1990 Rebecca Belmore, Fringe, 2008 Nadia Myre, Meditations on Red #3, 2013

Figures 0.1 Cranio-facial injury: A French soldier with a skin graft to the bridge of the nose, following plastic surgery: in profile, 1916 0.2 Ulcer being healed by skin grafts 0.3 Illustration showing the result of subcutaneous injection, 1881 0.4 Delineations of cutaneous diseases: Exhibiting the characteristic appearances of the principal genera and species comprised in the classification of Dr. Willan; and completing the series of engravings begun by that author [Thomas Bateman] 0.5 Back and buttocks of a woman suffering from a disease affecting the skin. Watercolour by C. D’Alton, c. 1850 0.6 Atlas of the diseases of the skin by H. Radcliffe Crocker 1.1 Installation view of Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread, 2015, curated by Patrice Giasson 1.2 Installation view of Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread, 2015, curated by Patrice Giasson 1.3 Installation view of Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread, 2015, curated by Patrice Giasson 1.4 Frida Kahlo, A Few Small Nips (Unos cuantos piquetitos), 1935 2.1 Lubaina Himid, detail from Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007 2.2 Lubaina Himid, detail from the installation Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007 2.3 Lubaina Himid, Vomiting Toff from Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007 2.4 William Hogarth, Francis Matthew Schutz in His Bed, c. 1755–60 3.1 Sherry Farrell Racette, Hudson’s Bay Company Coat of Arms, 2008 3.2 Sherry Farrell Racette, A Skin for a Skin, 2008 3.3 Sherry Farrell Racette, A Skin for a Skin, 2008 4.1 Rebecca Belmore, still from The Named and the Unnamed (video of Vigil), 2002

2 3 5

12 12 13 41 42 43 54 68 70 75 76 98 99 112 122

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Figures

4.2 Rebecca Belmore, still from The Named and the Unnamed (video of Vigil), 2002 4.3 Nadia Myre, Scar Stitch from the Scarscapes series, 2010 4.4 Nadia Myre, single canvas from The Scar Project series, 2005–13 5.1 Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios, 1993 5.2 Doris Salcedo, A Flor de Piel, 2011–12 A.1 Kezna Dalz, Art = Power, 2021

122 125 126 156 157 186

Introduction

In his 2008 article ‘The Wound and the First World War: “Cartesian” Surgeries to Embodied Being in Psychoanalysis, Electrification and Skin Grafting’, Tom Slevin considers various kinds of traumas – physical and psychological – that soldiers experienced during the Great War. As a scholar concerned with skin, Slevin foregrounds how the skin is both fragile and resilient, and how dramatic injuries (wounds) on the face in particular impact an individual’s sense of subjectivity as well as their mental health.1 Trauma to the skin is inextricably bound up with trauma to the psyche, and this is true whether in the context of war or in the contexts of femicide, racial violence or self-harm, all of which will be discussed to some degree in Skin Crafts. As I’m sure is obvious, the title of this book is a play on ‘skin grafts’, a kind of surgery used to facilitate healing, even with inevitable scarring, in various parts of the body, including but not limited to the face (Figures 0.1 and 0.2).2 There will be many references to wounds, scars, sutures, threads and healing (or lack thereof) in the following chapters. All of these terms appear frequently in both scholarship on skin and scholarship on contemporary art concerned with violence and trauma. I will be investigating how skin studies, a relatively new field of study that builds on the insights of body studies, might serve to illuminate the political and affective power of artworks explicitly concerned with violence that employ craft materials such as textiles, beads and clay.3 Skin studies, as Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey have suggested, considers skin not only as an object of study ‘but as a point of departure for a different way of thinking’.4 Thinking about, or through, the skin demands attention not only to how the skin signifies in terms of race, social class and pathology but also to how this particular organ as semiotic system speaks directly to both the vulnerability and resilience of human beings in the context of violence and trauma. Wounds can

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Figure 0.1  Cranio-facial injury: A French soldier with a skin graft to the bridge of the nose, following plastic surgery: in profile, 1916. Photograph. Credit: Wellcome Collection.

not only result in death, but they can also heal, transforming into scars that function as indexes of physical and psychological damage. In turn, I engage with critical craft studies, including scholarship that examines feminist, queer and Indigenous artists, to demonstrate the overlaps and links between craft materials and the skin as a vulnerable kind of armour that can be split, torn and cut.5 Skin Crafts thus puts into dialogue skin studies and critical craft studies in order to explore how craft materials in contemporary art by female artists of colour have repeatedly acted as material metaphors for the violated skin.6 The artists whose work I examine in the following chapters are primarily female artists of colour who were either born in countries not usually discussed in ‘Western’ art history (Mexico, Zanzibar, Colombia), and thus are sometimes included in studies of ‘global contemporary art’, or are Indigenous artists living and working on stolen Indigenous territories now known as Canada who have exhibited in ‘global’ or ‘international’ contexts. All of the artists I discuss in this book are concerned with violence, both historical and contemporary.7

Introduction

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Figure 0.2  Ulcer being healed by skin grafts. Credit: St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives and Museum.

Skin (studies) and art (history): Not-so-strange bedfellows Mechthild Fend, an art historian who has foregrounded skin in her scholarship for many years, has repeatedly shown the intersections between medical literature and art literature that began in the seventeenth century at the same time that skin was becoming increasingly medicalized. Fend argues that ‘From an art historical perspective, looking at skin means looking at surfaces of images, and keeping the materiality of skin as surface and part of the body in play. And it also entails factoring in the materiality of the fabricated surfaces of images.’8 In her examination of skin in French art and medicine between 1650 and 1850, Fend demonstrates the ways that skin has functioned as both an object of study and as a surface or medium for art and book making.9 Many contemporary artists have harnessed the symbolic and affective power of skin to speak to the vulnerability of bodies aggressed by violence. For instance, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has created artworks with everyday objects and materials, including skin, to index the political violence

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in her home country. Salcedo’s series Atrabiliarios (1992–3; Figure 5.1) involves carving small rectangular holes into gallery walls; shoes that once belonged to the victims of violence are subsequently placed in these alcoves. The holes are then sealed with semi-translucent vellum (animal skin), both concealing and revealing the shoes to viewers. The title of the series is an old Castilian word meaning melancholia or mourning. The shoes appear to belong to adults, but they recall the children’s shoes in Holocaust museums. Shoes as everyday objects that have touched the feet of murder victims index the absent bodies. In these quiet, exacting works, the shoes are visible, but only barely, through the vellum. The shoes once belonged to women in Colombia who have died violently or who have been disappeared by the Colombian government. The vellum functions as a reminder of the fragility and vulnerability of every body. In her discussion of Salcedo’s work, Jill Bennett quotes Salcedo as stating: ‘In a country like Colombia, life is constantly interrupted by acts of violence. There is a reality which is intrusive … life imposes upon you this awareness of the other. Violence, horror, forces you to notice the Other, to see others’ suffering.’10 In Salcedo’s series, the shoes do not function as sexual fetish objects; we cannot access them fully, and therefore we cannot consume them with impunity. Rather, they are present as affectively charged fragments; symbols of femininity, perhaps, but more to the point, they are transformed in Salcedo’s work into symbols of gender-based violence and ‘feminicidal violence’, which Marcela Lagarde y do los Ríos has defined as ‘the culmination of many forms of gender violence against women that represent an attack on their human rights and that lead them to various forms of violent death’.11 She adds, ‘Feminicidal violence flourishes under the hegemony of a patriarchal culture that legitimates despotism, authoritarianism, and the cruel, sexist – macho, misogynist, homophobic, and lesbophobic – treatment reinforced by classism, racism, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination.’12 In Skin Crafts I set out to demonstrate how skin in the work of contemporary female artists functions as a powerful sign, medium and symbol for racial difference and racial violence, as well as gendered bodies and gender-based violence. I want to suggest that thinking about skin that has been ripped and torn and cut through acts of violence demands an empathetic response from viewers, going beyond aesthetics to an ethically grounded engagement with art, whether that engagement stops when the viewer leaves the gallery or extends into the viewer’s day-to-day life, their scholarship or their activism. Although Fend is concerned with historical visual culture and medical literature, her sustained engagement with skin is productive for understanding

Introduction

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why so many contemporary artists have engaged with skin in their work. In her book Fleshing Out Surfaces, Fend observes, The skin’s capacity to be the human body’s surface and to also form its outer appearance makes it comparable to images, whether photographs or film, or the media considered in this book: paintings, prints and drawings. It is a surface to be looked at, and a ground on to which images can be painted, drawn, incised or projected. This makes skin a very specific object, a privileged surface to be represented in film or other visual media. Skin variously blends with the ground of the image, its surface, or its crafted texture. It is the shared quality of skin and the visual image that gives imitations or reproductions of skin a self-referential quality.13

As Fend notes, the skin has both functioned as a surface in art and literature, and has frequently been depicted in art and medical literature, often, though certainly not always, in terms of racial difference and pathologies, including illness and addiction (Figure 0.3).14 The skin itself, of course, has long functioned as a canvas, for instance, in the case of tattoos, long considered a sign of social deviance.15 In her book Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (2011), feminist art historian Marsha Meskimmon examines multiple artworks that employ human skin as a primary material but in different ways. For instance, Meskimmon discusses Donald Rodney’s In the House of My Father (1996–7),

Figure 0.3  Illustration showing the result of subcutaneous injection, 1881. Engraving. From Drugs that enslave: the opium, morphine, chloral and hashisch habits by H. H. Kane. Credit: Wellcome Collection.

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which is also the cover image of her book. Rodney’s work combines various media, including photography and skin. The final art object is a large colour photograph (on paper, mounted on aluminium) showing Rodney’s upturned palm, on which rests a tiny ‘house’ made from fragments of his own skin, delicately pinned together. It is a moving depiction; a man’s open hand cradling a fragile house, the imaged skin-to-skin contact inviting a corollary imagined kinaesthetic response from its viewers. The title suggests the intimacy of familial lineage and the memory of home, whilst the translucency of the walls of the house remind us of the permeability of flesh, its easily wounded porosity meeting its sensuous surface qualities in an erotic, tactile exchange.16

As an exercise in working with unexpected materials in miniature, Rodney’s work is impressive on a purely technical, and material, basis. However, as Meskimmon suggests, the work is much more sophisticated and affectively charged than can be known from the photograph alone. Meskimmon’s insightful analysis continues: The context of the photograph’s production and first installation are significant to the question of the permeability of the skin threshold and the ability of the work to materialise the corporeal processes of inter-subjectivity. In the House of My Father was exhibited in Rodney’s last major show, Nine Nights in Eldorado (1997), an exhibition dedicated to Rodney’s father, one of the many AfroCaribbean immigrants to arrive in Britain at the end of the 1950s. The artist further referenced his family in the show by entitling the small skin house itself (shown as an object in a glass case) as Mother, Sister, Father, Brother. The skin fragments used to fabricate the ‘house’ were taken from skin grafts Rodney had during the latter stages of treatment for sickle-cell anaemia, a disease particularly associated with the African diaspora, and that which claimed his life in 1998. … Rodney’s failing flesh and the skin of his fashioned ‘home’ mark the synergistic threshold of intercorporeal subjectivity, always and already embedded with/in the world.17

This extraordinarily poignant work would not function in the same way without the tiny house made out of Rodney’s skin, which indexes his body, his illness, his family and his racial subject position, which, although not the sole point of his work, would have made him vulnerable to racism and violence in Britain.18 As Desmond Cole writes in his book The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power (2020), which is concerned with Cole’s experiences as a Black man in Canada, The Canadian government and its institutions are the products of a white supremacist ideology that claims this land as the property of a white European

Introduction

7

colonial government. To maintain its stolen land, the government is engaged in an ongoing, centuries-long genocide of Indigenous peoples. … White supremacy is a hierarchy, with whiteness at the top … Black people, whom British and French colonists brought to this land in chains four centuries ago, are at the bottom of the ladder. We are the scapegoats. Whiteness is constantly defined and reproduced through anti-blackness.19

Cole refers to the ‘endless violence against Black people’,20 and states that ‘our safety depends on anticipating racial violence’.21 As Cole’s title suggests, the Black skin is the body part, the sign, the fetish that has most often been used to identify, categorize, exploit and obliterate Blackness and Black individuals. Critical whiteness scholars remind us that whiteness is indeed a race, it is just the race that is rarely named.22 An anecdote from Cole’s childhood brings this home when he recalls how his white friends would unselfconsciously ask for the ‘skin colour’ pencil when they were drawing, underscoring that a ‘particular cream colour’ had long been normalized as the ideal and indeed ‘supreme’ skin colour.23 It is not only Black individuals who are marginalized by this form of discursive violence, which has proven psychological consequences including depression, shame and self-loathing.24 People of colour have long had their skin turned into a sign or symbol of otherness, difference and inferiority. As discussed in Chapter 4, the racist phrase ‘red skin’ functions as a slur towards Indigenous peoples.25 Pablo Picasso, for example, used it when he was belatedly recounting the inspiration for his painting Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a modernist painting that enacts explicit representational violence on its white sex workers by violently fragmenting their bodies into separate planes. This act of fragmentation, combined with the fact that Picasso famously appropriated African masks and placed them on the faces of two of the white sex workers, functions to racialize the white women as nonwhite (or less-than-white) and simultaneously link African women with white sex workers, as Sander Gilman has shown, two of the most sexually pathologized groups of women in the nineteenth century.26 It is not insignificant that in his account of going to the ethnographic museum in Paris for inspiration, Picasso uses racist language to refer to Indigenous peoples, as it shows, I argue, that Picasso had internalized both anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. As quoted in Anne Anlin Cheng’s book Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (2011), Picasso remarked to a journalist in 1937 (after denying the influence of African art up to that point): ‘When I went to the old Trocadéro, it was disgusting … But … I stayed. I stayed … All alone in that awful museum, with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to

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me that day.’27 As Anlin Cheng elegantly puts it, ‘This mythic birth of modern art thus also suggests a moment in which Modernism encounters, and is sickened, by its own imperial origins. What Picasso “smells” in the musty ethnographic museum may be nothing less than the residue of imperial violence.’28 As historians concerned with empire have shown, European colonialism and imperialism re-mapped the world and was founded upon the exploitation and carving up of land; in a related vein, it often involved the exploitation and carving up of women of colour (physically, psychologically, emotionally, symbolically) as well.29 Colonization also involved collecting practices, including, but not limited to, the collecting of ceramic objects. Stacey Sloboda explores this phenomenon in her book Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2014), and she demonstrates the various ways that ceramic objects produced in Asia and collected by the British were both gendered as feminine and viewed as exotic objects related closely to the Asian female or feminized body.30 As with the phrase ‘red skin’ the racist and inaccurate linguistic sign of ‘yellow skin’ has functioned to frame Asian individuals as other, exotic and, at times, threatening. The discursive construct of ‘yellow skin’ is related to the materiality of Asian ceramics, or ‘chinoiserie’, wherein Asian bodies are similarly viewed as exotic (and erotic) commodities. This discursive and material transformation of Asian subjects into ‘Oriental’ objects is, of course, part of the Orientalizing fantasy of white Europeans in the context of imperialism and (neo-)colonialism. Anlin Cheng considers this harmful discourse and identifies it more precisely as a process of ‘Ornamentalism’, a term that she did not coin but which she ‘revives’ in order to critically examine the ways the ‘yellow woman’ has been objectified and exploited in visual and material culture. According to Anlin Cheng, ‘Culturally encrusted and ontologically implicated by representations, the yellow woman is persistently sexualized yet barred from sexuality, simultaneously made and unmade by the aesthetic project.’31 Importantly, she remarks that Ornamentalism has surfaced among art historians and those engaged in aesthetic philosophy to refer to the deployment of ornament for decorative purposes, especially when done in excess, but I wish to recall it precisely because of what has gone completely unheard in its previous iterations: its suggestive and almost homophonic entanglement with Said’s deployment of Orientalism.32

The chinoiserie ceramic object and the Asian woman have long overlapped and been viewed as, almost, interchangeable in Western literature and visual culture. This discourse has had material consequences on living Asian women, as I discuss below. Sloboda has examined the cross-cultural exchanges that

Introduction

9

occurred as a result of British taste for Asian ceramic objects (or ‘china’). She observes that ‘Chinoiserie was a decorative style that emerged as a product of networks of commercial trade and artistic exchange within and between Europe and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’33 Significantly, the porcelain objects travelled some of the same trade routes as tea, spices and Indian cotton, and this trade was occurring at the same time as the transatlantic slave trade.34 In other words, bodies, addictive substances (such as tea, coffee, sugar and rum) and decorative objects were all crossing the oceans concurrently in the contexts of European imperialism and global capitalism.35 As Meskimmon has observed, ‘The ships commemorated by plates manufactured in Liverpool carried European immigrants as passengers and African slaves as cargo, the latter stored in the hold alongside internationally-sourced commodities such as sugar, tea and the ‘china’ from which these would be consumed.’36 According to Sloboda, Asian ceramic objects signified both the ‘exotic’ and ‘erotic’, as well as ‘sexual excess’.37 This sexual excess tainted different individuals depending on the context: at times, it was white European women who were linked to sexual excess because of their predilection for chinoiserie, and at other times both Asian men and Asian women were sexualized by their association with ceramic objects.38 As Sloboda observes, ‘Synonymous with beautiful fragility, porcelain seemed an ideal contemporary metaphor for women’s bodies.’39 The whiteness of these porcelain objects could easily signify white women’s bodies specifically, but the perceived exoticism and eroticism of the objects, and the perceived exoticism and eroticism of Asian individuals served to conflate china with Asian women and, at times, Asian men. Chinese artist Ni Haifeng (b. 1964) has engaged critically with this history in his photographic series Self-Portrait as Part of the Porcelain Export Trade (2000; Plate 1). One of the photographs represents Haifeng’s headless torso in a gesture of violent cropping. The artist is cut off at the chin and just above his pubis, thus effectively emasculating or castrating himself. His nudity also, perhaps, enacts an ‘effeminization’.40 There is a tattoo-like colour image of a ship depicted on his chest, and on his stomach there is text taken from an inventory of porcelain objects. Meskimmon notes that the artist’s source materials were texts on the eighteenth-century Dutch trade in ‘china’.41 Under the image of the ship on Haifeng’s chest there is a number (224, referring to the entry in an inventory of possessions), a reference to a specific object (‘punchbowl’) and a measurement (‘DIAMETER 11 ½″’). The text on Haifeng’s stomach begins with the words ‘The band of decoration at the rim’ and continues to refer to a ‘wavy line’ and other decorative elements. The difficulty of reading the text forces the viewer of

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the photograph to scrutinize the words (and therefore Haifeng’s skin), reading downwards until reaching the lower edge of the photograph which is cut off just above the artist’s pelvis. The ship, a symbol of transatlantic trade, combined with a description of a porcelain punch bowl written onto a body with brown skin, captured in a photograph that frustrates the viewer’s desire to consume the words in order to understand their meaning, and leading the viewer to the very edge of seeing the artist’s pubic area, forces viewers to consider the intersecting colonial histories of the porcelain trade and Orientalizing imagery that renders the Asian subject as both exotic and erotic for the white Western consumer. Significantly, Haifeng is currently based in the Netherlands, and the eighteenth-century trade in chinoiserie was one that anticipated globalization’s cross-cultural exchanges, mapping trade routes among the Netherlands, China and the British Empire. The text flows over the artist’s belly button and onto his pubic area, which is below the bottom edge of the photograph. In this work Haifeng turns his body into a porcelain object with a ship design, at the same time transforming his skin into the parchment of an inventory book. The title makes explicit that Haifeng is alluding to the history of objectifying Asian individuals as erotic and exotic curiosities and commodities for European consumption through collecting and viewing practices, and by cutting off his head in the photograph, he renders himself anonymous, even while referring to the practice of self-portraiture in the title. In this photograph, as in historical images and textual representations of Asian subjects, Haifeng’s material body is what matters, not his identity, agency or interiority. It is the surface that matters.42 The image of a ship and the text are ‘tattooed’ on Haifeng’s skin, evoking Adolf Loos’s tattoo panic in ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), in which he argued that ornament (including tattoos) was the domain of the ‘primitive’. As Anlin Cheng insightfully comments in her critique of Loos, Loos’s emphasis on architecture’s ‘skin’ origin … proves to be something of a theoretical conundrum for him. Although he takes his ideas about the primacy of cladding … from the German historian and architect Gottfried Semper, who made the initial connection between skin and textile in architectural theory (Semper believed that textile was the primary stimulus for all figuration in both architecture and art and who considered tattoos and human, bodily adornment to be the first arts), Loos will depart radically from his teacher when he develops an allergy to primitive arts, especially the tattoo.43

Anlin Cheng goes on to note that for Loos, ‘The march of progress is thus equated with the suppression and erasure of erotic material excess, deemed to be

Introduction

11

the exclusive and natural domains of sexual and savage primitives.’44 In drawing attention to the surface of his body, namely his brown skin, and by inscribing it with images, texts and patterns, Haifeng re-enacts what has long been done to the Asian body: objectified, emptied of subjectivity, exoticized, eroticized and, as is often done with objects that have served their purpose, discarded.45 This series of photographs illuminates the ways that decoration and ornament have traditionally been associated with excess (and, indeed, feminized excess) and how collecting has been associated with a particularly gendered excessiveness.46 Haifeng engages critically with the belief that brown skin signifies ‘material excess’,47 creating tattooed images and text that can be scrubbed off, leaving only brown skin behind, which is still frequently marked out and scarred by the ‘shattering white gaze’.48 Meskimmon productively examines Haifeng’s series of photographs against Scottish artist Christine Borland’s installation English Family China at Liverpool’s Tate Gallery in 1998. English Family China ‘consisted of five “family conversation pieces”, decorated “bone china” skulls arranged in various small, familial groups’.49 The skulls are painted with blue images of ships; blue-andwhite porcelain was popular in eighteenth-century England due in large part to not only Liverpool’s thriving porcelain industry but also the influence of Asian ceramics. Iconographically, Borland’s skulls fit into the Vanitas or memento mori tradition of European art, popular in the seventeenth century, particularly in the Netherlands.50 Borland creates a link between these porcelain skulls and eighteenth-century ceramic objects produced in Asia and the Netherlands and transported to England, suggesting the violence enacted by imperial trade and colonization. This history of production and transnational trade lies at the surface of Hella Jongerius’s chicle Delft jug (2009; Plate 2), a ‘Delft blue and white’ that appears to be encroached upon by chicle (natural latex) from the top-down. Significantly, chicle is a ‘rubber-like material harvested in Mexican rainforests’.51 Reading this material symbolically, it looks strikingly similar to some of the skin diseases recorded in medical art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Figures 0.4–0.6).52 Pushing this iconographical reading further, if we read the chicle as a kind of skin disease (and the jug itself as white, European or American skin) that is colonizing or invading the body, and consider the geographical origins of chicle, we can interpret this work (going beyond Jongerius’s intentions related to material research and experimentation) in terms of fears of Mexican immigrants, who have been perceived, particularly by some Americans, as a dangerous source of contagion and pollution (in Mary Douglas’s sense of the

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Figure 0.4  Delineations of cutaneous diseases: Exhibiting the characteristic appearances of the principal genera and species comprised in the classification of Dr. Willan; and completing the series of engravings begun by that author [Thomas Bateman]. Credit: Wellcome Collection.

Figure 0.5  Back and buttocks of a woman suffering from a disease affecting the skin. Watercolour by C. D’Alton, c. 1850. Credit: Wellcome Collection.

Introduction

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Figure 0.6  Atlas of the diseases of the skin by H. Radcliffe Crocker. Credit: Wellcome Collection.

word) who threaten the borders of the United States with crime and disease. Delft ceramics were, and are, produced in the Netherlands, though the patterns are sometimes mistaken for those produced in Asia. Meskimmon argues that ‘Taken together, Borland’s English Family China and Haifeng’s Self-Portrait as Part of the Porcelain Export Trade are an eloquent dialogue between two economies – the capitalist economy that sustained European imperialism and the corporeal economy that underpinned its success.’53 This corporeal economy was the trade in African slaves, and Liverpool was central to England’s slave trade, as African diasporic artist Lubaina Himid makes explicit in many of her works, some of which I discuss in Chapter 2.54 Borland’s and Haifeng’s works therefore point to historical, colonial violence including, but not limited to, slavery and exploitative labour practices, but as Meskimmon importantly notes, these works form ‘an active part of a dialogue between the historical past and the living present, a figurative passage between the images, objects and ideas that circulate viscerally as the legacy of European power’.55 I would add that it is impossible to look at Haifeng’s photograph in 2021, with its self-imposed

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representational violence (cutting off his head, hands and legs; or put another way, the acts of decapitation and dismemberment)56 and not see connections between the image and the fact that hate crime against Asian, Asian-American and Asian-Canadian individuals has increased to an atrocious degree since the Covid-19 pandemic began. This has resulted directly from anti-Asian rhetoric related to the pandemic, but as many commentators have noted, anti-Asian hate is not new. In the early months of 2021, there was a rash of violent acts against people of Asian descent, including but not limited to Asian elders, in Canada, the United States and Europe. This anti-Asian hate reached a horrifying pitch with the murder of six women of Asian descent by a white supremacist in Atlanta in March 2021. It is not insignificant that both the murderer and the American media linked these women with sex work. The women’s names are: Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Sun Cha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan and Daoyou Feng.

Skin/textiles/violence In the edited collection The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (2018), several chapters underscore the material and symbolic connections between textiles and skin. The volume as a whole speaks to what film scholar Laura Marks calls ‘haptic visuality’, which I discuss further in Chapter 4.57 For Marks, haptic visuality can be engendered by film, paintings or photographs, and alludes to the viewing experience where the eye ‘touches’ the texture of the image, illuminating the way that the eye can rove over an image, touching it, which points to the embodied experience of viewing, bringing to the fore the skin and moving beyond the ocularcentrism of most scholarship on film, as well as other forms of visual culture. For the editors of The Erotic Cloth, it is absolutely fundamental to understanding the power and erotics of textiles that we consider the haptic, not just the optical, experience of engaging with cloth. As Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle remark in their introduction, The fundamental relationship between cloth and the body has been discussed in depth since the late twentieth century, mainly with a focus on the sociopolitical and narrative particularities of textiles. With the emergence of Haptic studies, the connection between the surface of the skin and the surface of cloth has been considered in the discussion of the sense of touch … The Erotic Cloth specifically seeks to discover the ways in which the qualities of cloth that seduce, conceal,

Introduction

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and reveal have been explored and exploited in art, design, cinema, politics, and dance.58

Millar and Kettle refer to skin several times in their introduction: ‘Our fingers tell us how the final cloth will drape and fold, falling and stretching like skin’;59 ‘The fur-lined fabric becomes a second-skin’;60 and they refer to the ‘interconnectedness of cloth/skin/body’ in the 1982 film Blade Runner.61 Importantly for Skin Crafts, they also illuminate how engagement with cloth can effectively signify or symbolize violence: ‘The violence of cutting, cutting up, and cutting out’ textiles is described.62 In the introduction, they include images of artworks that speak directly to the overlap and intersection of cloth and skin, quite literally in Bob White’s acrylic on calico painting Between Cloth and Skin (2004; Plate 3), in which a femme-looking figure’s body seems to be covered by a yellow-print cloth, but the blurriness of the figure’s contours against a bloodred ground creates the effect of cloth transforming into skin, or vice versa.63 As I discuss at length in Chapter 4 on Indigenous artists Rebecca Belmore and Nadia Myre, the colour red is highly suggestive and symbolic in artworks concerned with violence that employ craft materials. The suggestion of violence is made explicit in Sarah Sudhoff ’s archival pigment print At the Hour of Our Death: Suicide with Shotgun, Male, 60 Years Old (1) (2011), which is a close-up shot of a textured yellow material with what appears to be a red blood stain. This is in fact a photograph of a bloody couch that Sudhoff took after a man died by suicide. Millar and Kettle remark that the ‘abject cloth with its stains, marks, and rips, is the body in absentia’.64 In Sudhoff ’s work, the blood stain indexes an act of violence, just as in Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’s Tela bordada (2012, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), which I discuss in Chapter 1, the blood stains on a white sheet index the murder of a Guatemalan woman by her male partner. Ultimately, I want to demonstrate in this book that craft materials (not only cloth, thread, beads and ceramics but also rose petals and concrete) have frequently been employed by contemporary female artists of colour to create art that engages with different kinds of violence that are directed specifically at the most vulnerable individuals: people of colour, women, queer and trans individuals, sex workers. I argue throughout the book that one of the primary reasons that contemporary female artists of colour have used craft materials in work concerned with violence is because of both the specific material properties of these media, their symbolic power (red beads and red cloth both quickly and universally can symbolize blood and torn skin), and their histories of being used

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by and associated with female artists and non-Western artists of colour. Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei underscores how the fragility of ceramics can signify as surface or skin that documents history in his conceptual performance Colored Vases (2006, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). For this work, he took fiftyone ancient Chinese urns from the Han Dynasty (the Neolithic Age, 5000–3000 bce) and added bright colours to the top of the ceramics, allowing the objects to drip dry. The vibrant colours are in stark contrast to the urns’ original earthy tones. Many viewers regarded this as an act of destruction, erasure of history or vandalism to ancient artefacts.65 Ai’s stated intention was to critique the Chinese Cultural Revolution and to highlight, perhaps ironically, the disregard for historical craftsmanship. The original urns, which exhibited various shades of brown, were overpainted (to use Lubaina Himid’s term for her work on ceramic artworks), and thus transformed, creating new ‘skins’ that no longer signified as historical artefacts but were now works of ‘global contemporary art’ that have been purchased and thus legitimized by a range of American institutions such as the SFMOMA. British artist Beccy Ridsdel has also engaged with the properties of ceramics in an untitled work from her 2016 series Art and Craft (Plate 4). Here it is not so much the fragility of ceramics that is at play as the malleability: hardness that mimics the peeling back of skin to reveal the floral pattern underneath the white surface. The inclusion of forceps brings this piece into the material culture of medicine. Fend’s discussion of the medicalization of skin and the relationship between art and medicine is therefore useful for analysing Ridsdel’s work: ‘In the practices of artistic anatomy, the skin’s role remains especially ambivalent, as it hides immediate access to the interior while being the medium and instrument of its revelation’.66 Reading the ceramic work semiotically, the whiteness of the surface (signifying white skin) combined with the ‘feminine’ floral decoration turns the plate into a female body. While the surface skin is decorated as though with a floral tattoo, the forceps that peel the ‘skin’ back reveal another plate (the interior of the body), and the triangular shape that results suggests gynaecological connotations or, read another way, the peeling back of facial skin that occurs in a post-mortem autopsy. There is therefore a kind of medical violence to a feminized body in this work. Ridsdel has said of this series: ‘The installation takes the form of an observation of a surgical experiment in progress. The “surgeon” is dissecting the craft object to see what is within. He finds craft through and through.’67 The surgeon’s disappointment is implied in this statement, pointing to the hierarchy of art and craft, where craft is always gendered feminine and

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always found wanting. The whiteness of the top layer of glaze suggests, of course, whiteness and white skin, and the floral layer suggests the laying bare of a woman’s interior, with the flowers connoting not only femininity but also female genitalia. As Fend and other scholars such as Angela Rosenthal have demonstrated, women have long been associated with the surface of the body and face, whereas masculine subjects have been associated with interiority, agency, intellect and rich inner lives.68 This work, while suggesting invasive medical intervention, points to feminine interiority or, perhaps, the perceived lack of female depth. What lies beneath, after all, is just more decorative surface. According to Fend, Skin, the body’s tegument, is often conceived as a veil (and vice versa), the physical or symbolic removal of which results in the revelation of an ‘inner truth’ or essence. The removal of the veil stands in for an act of knowledge production that tends to establish what is often a gendered hierarchy between inside and outside that values interiority at the cost of outer appearance.69

The pink floral motif signifies traditional or stereotypical white femininity, making the work not so much subversive of gender identity, as pointing to expectations of what women’s ‘inner truth’ should or will ‘look’ like. The feminization of this ‘body’ also points to the way that craft has long been gendered feminine, and thus relegated to the margins of art history. Significantly, Fend has noted the material links between textiles and skin in the context of eighteenth-century medical discourse: ‘When textile metaphors … were first introduced into the realm of medicine to describe the substance of the human body they seemed to have an affinity with one particular organ: skin.’70 American artist and fashion designer Liz Collins’s textile banner The Walking Wounded (2011; Plate 5), which was deployed in a performance that was part of Allison Smith’s Cries of San Francisco (2011), is a powerful showcase for textiles as signifiers not only for skin but more specifically wounded skin, and a particular kind of violence, namely, self-harm. I will note briefly that I became interested in writing about skin as a result of my own self-harm behaviours. As Jane Kilby has written in a poignant essay, ‘Whatever else it may be, self-harm is a naked appeal. The act of self-harm renders skin a deeply eloquent form of testimony, where a plea is made for social recognition. Indeed, the signature cuts and scars of self-harmed skin do nothing less than “scream out” for this reckoning.’71 She adds later in her text: ‘It is the flow of blood and the materiality of scarred skin that becomes the guarantee of the existence for the woman who cuts. Here, then, the reciprocity between testifying to past trauma and survival

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cuts deep.’72 The importance of Collins’s The Walking Wounded is at the very least twofold: she brings the ostensibly shameful act of self-harm out into the open as part of a public performance, and she shows how textiles can function to engender a relational art project that both shows how effectively textiles can signify and symbolize wounded skin (in the colours Collins uses and the way she engages with the materiality of textiles such as satin), and how self-harm does not have to be a shameful secret if it is recognized as a common coping strategy for trauma. Collins’s banner has a white satin ground (signifying white skin) and she used maroon, dark pink and brown thread to mimic different kinds of wounds and different stages of healing. The text on the banner reads: ‘Walking Wounded; Wear your heart on your sleeve! Custom wounds grafted right to your clothing! Bring your favorite garment to be wounded with knitting for a small fee! Light weight or knit fabrics only! Wound options: slashes $7 each single multiple in rows sores $5-$20 each oozing mass scattered cluster.’ Collins turns self-harm wounds into commodities and something to covet; wounds to reveal, rather than conceal in shame; they become red badges of courage to be worn on one’s sleeve, speaking not only to trauma, perhaps, but also coping and survival, as Kilby suggests. Some psychoanalysts have discussed skin picking as a mode of coping with a perceived lack of security; the skin picking draws attention to an individual’s skin as container, or armour, against the world.73 Julia Bryan-Wilson discusses Collins’s banner in her book Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017), observing, Against the paeans to handcrafted textile objects as a savior, then, there is a more distressing side. Some artists have plumbed this more negative cast, turning to textiles as they relate to affective constriction, isolation, difficulty, failure, obsession, shame, trauma, pain. In 2011 artist and fashion designer Liz Collins (who with her Knitting Nation series has been at the forefront of textile performance) set up a hand-cranked knitting machine on a city street as part of Allison Smith’s broader project The Cries of San Francisco and offered, for a fee, a selection of wounds that people could have inserted into their clothes. With The Walking Wounded, Collins explored what it meant to perform both labor and commerce, functioning as a vendor of on-the-spot interventions that disrupted the integrity of the garments while also customizing them. Cutting open and then immediately mending these sutures, Collins grafted ‘sores’ and ‘slashes’ into sweaters and shirts, making gashes dripping with red threads, slits, oozing masses, and blooming tumors. This range of options was spelled out on the accompanying fabric banner. As Collins indicates, if we examine how bodies

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and performance shape textiles, it is just as important to consider how textiles shape – discipline, entrain, confine – bodies. Clothes are a social membrane that tells others who we are, and Collins’s intervention, however playful, made visible wounds both psychic and the physical that would otherwise be covered.74

Many scholars have examined clothes as a ‘second skin’ that communicates things about the wearer. Terence Turner has referred to clothing as ‘the social skin’.75 If we consider the skin as a semiotic system, desired and undesired marks alike function to communicate things about the person wearing that skin, although as with any semiotic system, the signs can be misinterpreted due to biases and cultural beliefs informed by racism, classicism and sexism, as well as shame-based beliefs related to the ‘ideal’ or normative skin as white, pure and perfectly smooth (without scars or imperfections of any kind). Kristine Stiles has shown how destruction in contemporary art, particularly performance art, has effectively communicated ideas about, and experiences of, trauma. In the introduction to her book Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma (2016), Stiles quotes Ai Weiwei as observing, ‘The world belongs to animals … willing to live with us’, but only in ‘trust … When trust disintegrates, the world will crumble, and nothing can thrive’. Ai adds, ‘Any animal that considers itself of a higher order,’ as humans usually do, ‘should, by duty, protect weaker animals.’76 Building on this plea for social responsibility and ethical co-habitation in the world, Stiles notes ‘animals’ remarkable capacity for understanding and empathy’,77 and I wonder if we might not use this insight to illuminate Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios, which I discuss further in Chapter 5. In employing vellum to conceal/reveal the shoes of people who have died violently in Colombia, Salcedo brings together animal skin and objects made out of animal skin that symbolize gender-based violence and corporeal (as well as social) vulnerability. The vellum itself speaks to the killing of animals and the scraping of their skin. In combining the human shoes and animal skins, Salcedo points to the shared vulnerability of animals and humans, at the same time unveiling the violence of those in power, the predators, who prey on the weak. Stiles considers the ‘ethics of human/animal interaction along a continuum of life and death’,78 but in contemporary artworks concerned with violence, we are being asked to consider the ethics of human/human interaction along a continuum of life and death, where the powerful prey on the vulnerable, whether that vulnerability is the result of race, gender, sexuality or social status. Many of the works that I discuss in Skin Crafts fit into the category of ‘destruction art’, a term coined by Stiles ‘to identify the presentational works that

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situate the body in the center of the question of destruction and survival’.79 She argues that destruction art is not an ‘art movement’, and it certainly does not have a singular aesthetic. Rather, ‘it is a response to the “genocidal mentality” ’.80 Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos has described feminicide as ‘the ensemble of violations of women’s human rights, which contain the crimes against and the disappearance of women’, and she strongly asserts that feminicide ‘is genocide against women’ that ‘occurs when the historical conditions generate social practices that allow for violent attempts against the integrity, health, liberties, and lives of girls and women’.81 The ongoing epidemic of feminicide (or femicide, the term I use in the rest of this book) is a central issue in Chapter 1, which examines Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’s textile artworks. While her work has been concerned with death since the 1990s, her more recent works have been particularly focused on the phenomenon of femicide in Mexico, as well as other global contexts such as Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua and Brazil.82 While Margolles has not produced any textile artworks concerned specifically with Canada, when her work was exhibited in Montreal in 2017, the curators, to their credit, were quick to draw parallels between the epidemic of femicide in Mexico and the epidemic of violence towards Indigenous women and girls in the territories now known as Canada. This specific phenomenon is addressed in Chapter 3, in which I discuss Métis artist Sherry Farrell Racette’s art historical scholarship as well as her paintings that depict various kinds of textiles (blankets and dresses), and in Chapter 4, wherein I examine the work of Indigenous artists Rebecca Belmore and Nadia Myre, both of whom have repeatedly produced artworks employing traditional Indigenous materials including beads and fibre. It is significant for the artists discussed in this book that ‘craft’ has long been marginalized and denigrated in Western art history not only as ‘women’s work’ but also because of its association with the creative production of non-Western individuals, including African and Indigenous artists. As a result, craft materials such as textiles, beads and ceramics are particularly potent for political, feminist artists of colour who are creating work concerned with both historical and contemporary violence. Turner prize winner Lubaina Himid, for example, who I discuss in Chapter 2, deliberately employs used (or ‘found’) ceramic objects in many of her installations that address Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, painting over them with images of Black subjects’ faces, creating palimpsest objects in order to interrogate British collective amnesia. Himid was born in Zanzibar and now lives and works in Britain, and as a diasporic artist, she has drawn repeatedly on the rich history of African art, including textiles, to create powerful political artworks that are concerned not only with historical

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violence that occurred in the contexts of imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade but also in ongoing violence – representational, discursive and material – towards Black people in present-day Britain. In Concerning Consequences, Stiles states, ‘I want to propose that destruction art is the visual corollary to the discourse of the survivor: it bears witness to the tenuous conditionality of survival – survival itself being the fundamental challenge posed by humanity in the twentieth century and to humanity in the twenty-first century. … Destruction art is about open wounds.’83 As I will be arguing in the following chapters, the artists discussed in Skin Crafts cannot heal those wounds literally or even figuratively. Rather than arguing that these artworks can indeed lead to healing, I want to propose that works by Salcedo, Margolles, Himid, Belmore, Myre and Farrell Racette open space for the possibility of an empathetic and ethical response in viewers that may or may not lead to action. I am not so cynical that I deny art can lead to activism, nor am I so optimistic that I believe that art will always lead to empathy and ethical acts. That is up to each individual viewer.

Global contemporary art, or art history and the ‘global turn’ In today’s ‘global art world’, the phrase ‘global contemporary art’ suggests an artist who was born in a non-Western location and who has achieved international recognition by way of important exhibitions in certain art world milieux: the Venice Biennial, famous art fairs such as Art Basel (Basel, Switzerland; Miami, Florida; Hong Kong) and documenta (Kassel, Germany), or at galleries in New York, Berlin, Zurich and London.84 For the purposes of this book, ‘global contemporary art’ functions as a semiotic sign that indicates my desire to foreground the work of female artists of colour. As noted previously, all of the female artists of colour whose work I discuss were either born in ‘non-Western’ locations such as Mexico (Teresa Margolles), Zanzibar (Lubaina Himid) and Colombia (Doris Salcedo), or they are Indigenous artists living on stolen, unceded Indigenous land (Sherry Farrell Racette, Rebecca Belmore and Nadia Myre). All of the artists I have named have exhibited internationally to some degree; that is, their work has been shown in exhibitions around the world. Three of the artists – Salcedo85 (1993), Belmore (2005), and Margolles (2009) – have participated in the Venice Biennale, representing Colombia, Canada and Mexico, respectively. Myre has also exhibited in Venice (as part of the show Volume 0 at the Zuecca Project), among other international locales (Vienna, Glasgow), and her work is in the collections of the Canadian Embassies in New York, London, Paris and

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Greece. Her work was also included in the 2010 exhibition Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. African diasporic artist Himid is famously the first Black artist to ever win the Turner prize.86 Farrell Racette, as a researcher, curator and artist, has participated in many exhibitions and workshops in locales such as Santa Fe, New Mexico.87 Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist, has become internationally recognized, participating in workshops around the world, including the Art and Resistance residency in Chiapas, Mexico, organized by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in 2013. Belmore performed a work concerned with Canadian nationalism at LA FOMMA, an Indigenous women’s theatre centre located in the colonial town of San Cristóbal de Las Casas.88 However, as Charlotte Townsend-Gault has noted, her ‘first allegiance’ is to her own community, ‘as both source and audience’.89 Townsend-Gault warns against interpreting Belmore’s professional success as one that is dependent on her move from the ‘local to the global’.90 In the context of the ‘contemporary global art world’, exhibiting locally (e.g. in Canada) is not enough to be considered a successful (global) contemporary artist; international exhibitions bestow the stamp of legitimacy on artists.91 For ‘non-Western’ or ‘global’ artists such as Margolles, the label of success depends on their exhibiting outside of their home country. As Arlene Dávila has argued, ‘Latin American art’ is a category of art that has ‘national privilege’ only if the Latin American art in question has been accepted (exhibited, purchased) by the primarily white art world.92 In other words, even with the ‘global turn’ in art history and art collecting, it is still primarily white critics, curators and collectors who determine who fits into the category or canon of ‘global contemporary art’.93 Dávila observes: Pan-American visual art exchanges between the US and Latin America … [were] congealed in art markets from the 1970s onward, when major auction houses … began to hold regular Latin American art auctions. Major exhibitions followed, making Latin American art a fashionable subject for [white] collectors, institutional spaces, and stakeholders devoted to its study, promotion, and marketing across the United States and beyond.94

This resulted in the ‘so-called Hispanic arts boom of the 1990s’,95 of which both Margolles and Salcedo were a part. In the introduction to the edited volume Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (2014), Aruna D’Souza suggests that this global turn is crucial for the discipline of art history (as well as for artists) because it broadens the scope of

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artists who receive serious attention in exhibitions, classrooms and academic publications.96 She proposes that ‘a global art history troubles, even explodes, the very concepts on which the discipline is based by forcing us to see differently, to recognize the unrecognizable, to authorize the formerly unacknowledged’.97 Despite the problems inherent in the global art world and global art market,98 the phrase ‘global contemporary art’ now has cachet and the power to draw attention to artists included in that category. In this book I am therefore using that semiotic sign that signifies not just contemporary art production but art production worthy of attention, in order to build on the scholarship already written about Margolles, Himid, Farrell Racette, Belmore, Myre and Salcedo to bring even more attention to their work, as, despite the global turn in art history, female artists of colour are still collected, exhibited, taught and written about less than their white male contemporaries.99 As Ruth E. Iskin has remarked in an essay that considers the possibility of alternative contemporary canons, For many scholars and practitioners, the term ‘canon’ has come to acquire a negative connotation because of its systematic exclusion and under-representation of artists who are not Western white males – that is, artists of both genders working outside of the so-called Western world (by now a cultural more than strictly geographical designation), as well as women artists and artists of color in the West.100

It is also significant, and bears repeating, that women of colour are the most vulnerable to violence in literally every global context we could name.101 Thus, in a book concerned with art and violence, it made sense to me to focus on the work of contemporary female artists of colour from a range of global contexts who are producing art that is concerned primarily with violence against women of colour. The artists discussed in this book are working against different kinds of violence including ongoing colonial violence, discursive violence, representational violence, intimate violence, and gender-based violence (femicide). If 2020 taught me anything, it is that the female artists of colour, the female writers of colour, the female activists of colour, and the female curators of colour cannot be the only ones to be doing the socially responsible, ethical work to engender radical social change.102 As a white feminist, the very least I can do is bring further attention to female artists of colour who are creating brilliant, challenging, powerful, political artworks.103 Central to the following chapters is my belief, in line with Silvia Federici’s thesis, that the current epidemic of violence against women – including trans women, women of colour and white women – is a contemporary and renewed enactment of the witch-hunt. Federici’s book Witches, Witch-Hunting and

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Women (2018) is a foundational text for the discussions that follow, and I cite Federici in most of my chapters. Her point that violence against women is a global phenomenon, rather than one limited to the ‘global south’, for example, is a key thread that runs throughout Skin Crafts. Federici proposes that We are witnessing an escalation of violence against women, especially Afrodescendent and Native American women, because ‘globalization’ is a process of political recolonization intended to give capital uncontested control over the world’s natural wealth and human labor, and this cannot be achieved without attacking women, who are directly responsible for the reproduction of their communities. Not surprisingly, violence against women has been more intense in those parts of the world (sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia) that are richer in natural resources and are now marked up for commercial ventures, and where the anticolonial struggle has been strongest.

As will be evident in the following chapters, I am primarily concerned in this book with violence against women, especially – though not exclusively – violence against women of colour. Chapter 1 examines narco-violence and femicide in Mexico; Chapter 2 not only considers violence against Black women (and men) in the context of transatlantic slavery but also nods to the ripple effects of slavery, namely ongoing anti-Black racism in Britain and other global contexts; Chapters 3 and 4 address violence against Indigenous women in Canada, a territory that was literally founded upon the genocide of Indigenous peoples; and Chapter 5 examines the murder and disappearance of people (particularly women) in Colombia. Each c­hapter – except Chapter 4, which discusses Indigenous artists Rebecca Belmore and Nadia Myre – is a sustained study of a single artist, focusing on only a few works in order to demonstrate how craft materials function symbolically and affectively to unveil and battle against gender-based and racial violence. As this book’s cover image – a photograph taken by Amy France on 14 March 2021 at a vigil for Sarah Everard at Clapham Common – demands, we must work urgently and bravely as intersectional feminists from around the globe to end violence against women.

Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to Ni Haifeng, Bob White, Liz Collins, Beccy Ridsdel, Hella Jongerius and Amy France for generously giving me permission to reproduce their artworks.

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Notes 1 Tom Slevin, ‘The Wound and the First World War: “Cartesian” Surgeries to Embodied Being in Psychoanalysis, Electrification and Skin Grafting’, Body & Society, vol. 14 (June 2008): 39–61. 2 Emma Chambers, ‘Fragmented Identities: Reading Subjectivity in Henry Tonk’s Surgical Portraits’, Art History, vol. 32, no. 3 (June 2009): 579–607. 3 In her discussion of plastic surgery, Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst refers to the ‘skin-textile’. Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, Surface Imaginations: Cosmetic Surgery, Photography and Skin (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). 4 Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, ‘Introduction: Dermographies’, in Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (eds), Thinking through the Skin (London: Routledge, 2001), 1. 5 Useful texts in the field of critical craft studies include Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Maria Elena Buszak (ed.), Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Catherine Dormor, A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). For more of a literature review, see the introduction in Julia Skelly, Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 6 For literature reviews of the field of skin studies, see Kevin Siena and Jonathan Reinarz, ‘Scratching the Surface: An Introduction’, in Kevin Siena and Jonathan Reinarz (eds), A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface (London: Routledge, 2013), 1–15; Marc Lafrance, ‘Skin Studies: Past, Present and Future,’ Body & Society, vol. 24, nos. 1/2 (2018): 3–32. For an historical approach to skin, see Nina G. Jablonski, Skin: A Natural History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). 7 For an older study of violence and art, see John Fraser, Violence in the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Fraser focuses primarily on films, criticism and novels of the 1960s. 8 Mechthild Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 6. 9 See Megan Rosenbloom, Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). 10 Salcedo quoted in Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 53–4. 11 Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, ‘Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide: Theoretical, Political, and Legal Construction’, in Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano (eds), Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xxi.

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12 Ibid. 13 Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces, 9. 14 See Mechthild Fend, ‘Portraying Skin Disease: Robert Carswell’s Dermatological Watercolours’, in Jonathan Reinarz and Kevin Siena (eds), A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface (London: Routledge, 2013), 147–64; Julia Skelly, ‘Skin and Scars: Probing the Visual Culture of Addiction’, Body & Society, vol. 24, nos. 1/2 (2018): 193–209. See also Sander Gilman, ‘The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality’, in Kymberly N. Pinder (ed.), Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History (London: Routledge, 2002), 119–38. 15 Gemma Angel, ‘Atavistic Marks and Risky Practices: The Tattoo in Medico-Legal Debate, 1850–1950’, in Jonathan Reinarz and Kevin Siena (eds), A Medical History of Skin: Scratching the Surface (London: Routledge, 2013), 165–79. 16 Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 38. 17 Ibid., 38–9. 18 Meskimmon links Rodney’s skin with Britain’s problem with race when she writes, ‘If the threshold of Rodney’s skin was marked by the scars of Britain’s colonial past and its legacy of racism, it also bore his parents’ hope for the future as they came to the UK and raised a new generation of Black Britons.’ Ibid., 40. 19 Desmond Cole, The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2020), 8. 20 Ibid., 9. 21 Ibid., 11. 22 Ruth Frankenberg, ‘The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness’, in Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, and Irene J. Nexica (eds), The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 72–96. See also Richard Dyer, ‘The Matter of Whiteness’, in White (London: Routledge, 1997), 1–40. 23 Cole, The Skin We’re In, 14. 24 See, for example, Alexandra Kelebay, ‘“History Could Be Taught by Means of Dolls …”: Race, Doll-Play, and the History of Black Female Slavery in Canada,’ in Charmaine Nelson (ed.), Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (Concord, ON: Captus, 2019), 82–96. See also Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), especially ­chapter 2: ‘From Dispossession to Radical Self-Possession: Racism and Depression’, 113–53; Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 25 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 26 Gilman, ‘The Hottentot and the Prostitute’.

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27 Pablo Picasso quoted in Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17. 28 Ibid., 19. Anlin Cheng adds pointedly: If art history has told us that Modernism meant that objects dismissed by nineteenth-century Europeans as ‘curios’ and ‘fetishes’ had suddenly become crucial to the twentieth-century artists searching for new form …, here Picasso’s account opens up the space for remembering the cultural, mercantile, and political violence that enables the processes through which these stranded objects were initially infused with magic and then transformed into corpses. What struck Picasso with such psychical force may be less the objects than the histories that made those objects ‘objects’. 29 See Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham (eds), Art and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Geoff Quilley, Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain, 1768–1829 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 30 Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in EighteenthCentury Britain (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2014), 108. 31 Anne Anlin Cheng, ‘Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 44 (Spring 2018): 415. 32 Ibid., 429 n.11. 33 Sloboda, Chinoiserie, 3. 34 See Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (London: Routledge, 2000); Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 35 See Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 36 Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 53–4. 37 Sloboda, Chinoiserie, 13. 38 Ibid., 109. 39 Ibid., 112. 40 See Revathi Krishnaswamy, Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). 41 Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 53. 42 See Guliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 43 Cheng, Second Skin, 24. 44 Ibid.

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45 See Shuqin Cui, Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016). 46 See Eric Weichel, ‘“Every Other Place it Could be Placed with Advantage”: Ladiesin-Waiting at the British Court and the “Excessive” Display of Ceramics as Art Objects, 1689–1740’, in Julia Skelly (ed.), The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 41–61. 47 For more on this, see Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 48 Anlin Cheng, building on Frantz Fanon, in ‘Ornamentalism’, 415. 49 Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 53. 50 See Jeremy Biles, ‘For the Love of God: Excess, Ambivalence, and Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull’, in Julia Skelly (ed.), The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 225–76. 51 Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 105. 52 See Fend, ‘Portraying Skin Disease’, 148, 159, 164. 53 Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 53. Emphasis in original. 54 See Celeste-Marie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid and Hannah Durkin, Inside the Invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). 55 Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 54. 56 It is also interesting to note the similar cropping strategies used by Haifeng in his photograph and by the medical artist in Figure 0.6. The curves of Jongerius’s chicle Delft jug also echo the curves of the women depicted in Figures 0.4 and 0.5, demonstrating why ceramic objects were frequently gendered feminine in the eighteenth century. 57 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 151. Considering the haptic is also central to Giuliani Bruno’s project in Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014). As Bruno suggests, When we touch a surface, we experience immersion and inversion fully, and reciprocity is a quality of this touch. There is a haptic rule of thumb: when we touch something or someone, we are, inevitably, touched in return. When we look we are not necessarily being looked at, but when we touch, by the very nature of pressing our hand or any part of our body on a subject or object, we cannot escape the contact. Touch is never unidirectional, a one-way street. It always enables an affective return. (19) 58 Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle, ‘Introduction’, in Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle (eds), The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 2. 59 Ibid.

Introduction

29

60 Ibid., 5. 61 Ibid., 16. 62 Ibid., 13. 63 In a fascinating chapter, Susanna Burghartz discusses early modern travel books that documented (and sometimes imagined) the dress of individuals and groups from various global contexts. Burghartz shows the ways the costume books reified racial hierarchies related to the perceived advanced civilization of Europe. In this classificatory system, nakedness was associated with the ostensible ‘savagery’ of non-Europeans of colour. Interestingly, Burghartz reads some of the illustrations against the grain and beyond the artists’ intentions, when she discusses representations in which the tattooed skin of Indigenous individuals appears texturally similar to the clothing of white European individuals, thus destabilizing anticipated significations of difference and otherness. For example, regarding an engraving produced in 1591, which depicts a European man and an Indigenous chief or king in Florida (America), Burghartz notes, Particularly interesting is the effect of the tattoos on the king’s arms, torso and legs: the Indigenous chief appears almost clothed and thus imply through texture – clothing on the one hand, tattooed skin on the other – the equality between the two leaders (especially in contrast to the naked, smooth skin of the [Indigenous] kin’s subjects, visible in the background) … The slit’s in the [white] captain’s suit appear primarily as pattern, while the [white] soldier’s slashed clothing recalls wounds. The texture of skin and fabric thus plays with approximation and difference. Susanna Burghartz, ‘The Fabric of Early Globalization: Skin, Fur and Cloth in the de Bry’s Travel Accounts, 1590–1630’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (London: Routledge, 2020), 22. 64 Millar and Kettle, ‘Introduction,’ 16. 65 Ai Weiwei has become one of the most famous global contemporary artists working today. This is discussed in Wenny Teo, ‘The Elephant in the Church: Ai Weiwei, the Media Circus and the Global Canon’, in Ruth E. Iskin (ed.), Re-Envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (London: Routledge, 2017), 88–104. Teo makes a compelling case for asking ourselves why certain ‘global contemporary artists’ are accepted, celebrated and canonized by the ‘Western’ art world. In the case of Ai Weiwei, Teo suggests that it may be at least in part that his anti-China activism makes his work palatable and legible for Western audiences, particularly American audiences. 66 Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces, 6. 67 Quoted in Erika Kindsfather, ‘Horror on the Margins: Embodying Otherness in Craft Media’, CANVAS: McGill’s Journal of Art History and Communication Studies, vol. 17 (Spring 2018): 58.

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68 See Angela Rosenthal, ‘Visceral Culture: Blushing and Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture’, Art History, vol. 27, no. 4 (September 2004): 563–92. 69 Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces, 6. 70 Ibid., 44–5. 71 Jane Kilby, ‘Carved in Skin: Bearing Witness to Self-Harm’, in Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (eds), Thinking through the Skin (London: Routledge, 2001), 124. 72 Ibid., 128. 73 See Marc Lafrance, ‘Skin and Self: Cultural Theory and Anglo-American Psychoanalysis’, Body & Society, vol. 15 (September 2009): 3–24. 74 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 270. 75 Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, ‘Introduction: Dressing Global Bodies’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (London: Routledge, 2020), 5. See Terence Turner, ‘The Social Skin’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2:2 (2012): 486–504, reprinted from the original 1980 publication. 76 Kristine Stiles, Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1. 77 Ibid., 13. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 30. 80 Ibid. 81 Lagarde y de los Ríos, ‘Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide’, xv–xvi. 82 See Patrice Giasson (ed.), Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread (Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2015). 83 Stiles, Concerning Consequences, 31. 84 Teresa Margolles’s gallery, for instance, is based in Zurich. For more on this, see Claudette Lauzon, ‘Reluctant Nomads: Biennial Culture and Its Discontents’, RACAR, vol. 26, no. 2 (2011): 15–30. 85 Peggy Phelan, Art and Feminism, ed. Helena Reckitt (London: Phaidon, 2001), 196. 86 Christine Checinska, ‘Crafting Difference: Art, Cloth and the African Diasporas’, in Jessica Hemmings (ed.), Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 144–67. 87 Cynthia Chavez Lamar Sherry Farrell Racette (eds) with Lara Evans, Art in Our Lives: Native Women Artists in Dialogue (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School for Advanced Research Press, 2010). 88 Ellyn Walker, ‘Resistance as Resilience in the Work of Rebecca Belmore’, in Heather Davis (ed.), Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 135.

Introduction

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89 Charlotte Townsend-Gault, ‘Rebecca Belmore and James Luna on Location at Venice: The Allegorical Indian Redux’, Art History, vol. 29, no. 4 (September 2006): 722. 90 Ibid. 91 For a consideration of the local/global binary in relation to historical women artists, see Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, ‘Local Places/Global Spaces: New Narratives of Women’s Art in the Nineteenth Century’, in Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (eds), Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 1–14. 92 Arlene Dávila, Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 9. 93 A notable exception is the highly respected Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019). His posthumous exhibition Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America opened at the New Museum in early 2021. See Okwui Enwezor, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (London: Phaidon, 2020). 94 Dávila, Latinx Art, 10. 95 Ibid., 7. 96 Historical approaches to the global are also becoming the norm. See, for example, Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (London: Routledge, 2020). 97 Aruna D’Souza, ‘Introduction’, in Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza (eds), Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), xxi. 98 See Ruth E. Iskin, ‘Introduction: Re-Envisioning the Canon: Are Pluriversal Canons Possible?’, in Ruth E. Iskin (ed.), Re-Envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World (London: Routledge, 2017), 1–41. Iskin’s book underscores the fluidity of the phrase ‘global contemporary art’ and ‘global art world,’ as the essays cover expected artists such as Ai Weiwei (born in Beijing, China), Takashi Murakami (born in Itabashi City, Tokyo, Japan) and El Anatsui (born in Ghana and based in Nigeria), but also Claude Cahun, Jean-Michel Basquiat (who Dávila notes had a Puerto Rican mother, thus positioning him as both a Black and Latinx artist) and Sheila Hicks. 99 Of the six artists who I focus on in this book, Salcedo has received the most attention in academic scholarship and has been exhibited the most, resulting in several exhibition catalogues. See, for example, Nancy Princenthal, Carlos Basualdo and Andreas Huyssen, Doris Salcedo (London: Phaidon, 2000); Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Lori Cole, ‘At the Site of State Violence: Doris Salcedo’s and Julieta Hanona’s Memorial Aesthetics’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, vol. 15 (2011): 87–93; Edward Bacal, ‘The Concrete and the Abstract: On Doris Salcedo, Teresa Margolles and Santiago Sierra’s Tenuous Bodies’, parallax, vol. 21, no. 3 (2015): 259–70; Mary Schneider Enriquez (with contributions

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by Doris Salcedo and Narayan Khandekar), Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning (Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 2016). 100 Iskin, ‘Introduction: Re-Envisioning the Canon’, 1. 101 Claudette Lauzon, ‘What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore’s Memorial to Missing Women’, in Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux and Christine Ross (eds), Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 155–79; Stephanie G. Anderson, ‘Stitching through Silence: Walking with Our Sisters, Honoring the Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada’, Textile: Cloth and Culture, vol. 14, no. 1 (2016): 84–97; Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano (eds), Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Halifax: Fernwood, 2017); Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Colour (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017); Allison Hargreaves, Violence against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2017). 102 See Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot (New York: Viking, 2020). 103 In her phenomenal text Gender, artWork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), Angela Dimitrikaki underscores the fact that women’s art is gendered labour, and she considers issues related to globalization, global capital, affective labour, care and migration, to name only a few. See especially ­chapter 3, ‘Travel as (Gendered) Work: Global Space, Mobility and the “Woman Artist” ’, 107–49. See also Angela Dimitrakaki, ‘The Spectacle and Its Others: Labor, Conflict, and Art in the Age of Global Capital’, in Jonathan Harris (ed.), Globalization and Contemporary Art (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 191–211; and Angela Dimitrakaki, ‘Gendering the Multitude: Feminist Politics, Globalization and Art History’, in Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy C. Rowe (eds), Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 15–43.

1

Narco-violence, femicide and gore capitalism: Teresa Margolles’s piercing textile works

Teresa Margolles was born in Culiacán, Sinaloa, in northern Mexico, a location often referred to as Mexico’s ‘Narco Capital’, in 1963.1 She began her artistic career as one of the founding members of the SEMEFO collective in 1990, and has been working as an independent artist since 1998.2 She won the Artes Mundi prize in Cardiff in 2012, three years after being selected to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale.3 In this chapter, I examine Margolles’s textile works in the context of what Sayak Valencia has called ‘gore capitalism’, in order to demonstrate what the artist’s textiles unveil: namely, that women are being murdered daily because of intersecting fears of women’s economic independence and women’s material freedoms, such as the freedom to travel, work and access abortions (depending on the locale), in the ongoing age of global capitalism.4 In this phase of globalization, money is more important than life. Valencia employs the term ‘gore capitalism’ to refer to ‘the reinterpretation of the hegemonic global economy in (geographic) border spaces’. She continues: We take the term ‘gore’ from a genre of films characterized by extreme, brutal violence. Thus, ‘gore capitalism’ refers to the undisguised and unjustified bloodshed that is the price the Third World pays for adhering to the increasingly demanding logic of capitalism. It also refers to the many instances of dismembering and disembowelment, often tied up with organized crime, gender and the predatory uses of bodies. In general, this term posits these incredibly brutal kinds of violence as tools of necroempowerment.5

Some of Margolles’s textiles, specifically those produced for her Venice biennale exhibition at the Mexican pavilion in 2009, are concerned with so-called narcoviolence, which often involves ‘collateral damage’, that is, the murder of civilians, particularly women. Other textile works, such as Tela bordada (Embroidered

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Fabric) (2012, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa)6 and the collaborative textiles created for the 2015 exhibition We Have a Common Thread, are primarily (though not exclusively) concerned with the murder of women of colour. Importantly, Valencia writes that she is ‘interested in following the multiple threads that give rise to the capitalist practices underpinned by the extreme and ultra-specialized forms of violence – practices that in certain geopolitical locales have become established as everyday forms of violence used to obtain recognition and economic legitimacy’.7 I propose that like Valencia, who sets out to develop ‘a discourse with the explanatory power to help us interpret the reality produced by gore capitalism’ in order to unveil ‘the vulnerability of the human body … in how it is mutilated and desecrated’,8 Margolles desires to illuminate, if not explain, the material realities of gore capitalism that are being wreaked upon the bodies of women. The artist very deliberately employs textiles to demonstrate the vulnerability of the human body, particularly the bodies of women of colour, who are the prime objects of violence globally. I argue, with Valencia, that gore capitalism is not restricted to the ‘Third World’,9 by which Valencia means the ‘global South’ or ‘non-Western’ locales such as Latin America, but rather that gore capitalism has taken root around the world (including in the ‘global North’) as the logical and brutal extension of global capitalism, and that capitalism cannibalizes on marginalized subjects, particularly women and people of colour, in order to keep churning out profits.10

Thinking about skin In her book-length study of Margolles’s body of work, Julia Banwell has previously demonstrated how skin as material and metaphor is woven throughout the Mexican artist’s photographs and installations, even when (perhaps especially when) the body is absent. I want to begin this chapter with a series of passages from Banwell’s text as a foundation for my subsequent discussion. Of Margolles’s 2006 installation 127 cuerpos (127 Corpses), for which the artist took 127 autopsy threads from corpses’ post-mortem surgeries and knotted them together, creating a thirty-five-metre-long string that stretches across gallery spaces, Banwell notes that each thread fragment signifies one dead individual from different morgues in Mexico. She remarks that the threads are stained to varying degrees with dried blood and other bodily residues that also provide material evidence of the bodies they have stitched. The human body



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is absent, but brought into close proximity to the spectator by this material with which s/he has come into contact. There is a greater level of violence implicit in using this particular material than, for example, the water used to wash corpses: the thread has been attached to a needle which pierced and altered dead skin, aggressively modifying its form to close the violated skin cavity, and is stained with blood and other bodily-traces.11

As Banwell astutely observes, Although the threads have been used as part of post-mortem processes of investigation, their act of violation of the fragile skin boundary shadows the damage that can be done by bullets or blades whose consequence is the ending of life. Knotted together, they symbolically connect individual human bodies via their metaphorical substitution of these absent forms.12

Although this work is not, strictly speaking, a textile, it is comprised of the basic materials (threads) that could be made into a textile. Margolles’s 127 Corpses and her related work 36 Corpses (2010) function as material evidence of the reduction of a person’s life to a single blood-stained thread that has pierced the person’s dead body in a post-mortem autopsy. As anthropologist Nina Joblonski has observed, ‘In addition to providing a boundary layer between the body and the environment, the skin has taken on the new roles of social canvas and embodied metaphor in our recent evolutionary past. Our skin reflects our age, our ancestry, our state of health, our cultural identity.’13 Importantly for my purposes here, Joblonski adds that skin metaphors are so common because they ‘so closely associate our skin with the essence of our being. They induce empathy because of the unambiguous association of the skin with a vulnerable self.’14 Marc Lafrance has argued in his article ‘Skin Studies: Past, Present and Future’ (2018) that skin is a suggestive site of investigation because of its simultaneous resilience and vulnerability.15 I argue throughout Skin Crafts that insights from the field of skin studies are useful for art historians who are concerned with violence and the vulnerable subject in art and visual culture. More specifically, I am arguing that contemporary artists employing textiles and other craft materials are drawing on the specific capabilities of these media to signify the vulnerability and resilience of skin, with an emphasis in this chapter on vulnerability, violation and the failure to recover from material violence to the skin. The autopsy suture threads that Margolles used in 127 Corpses and 36 Corpses bring to mind the body of Frankenstein’s monster, with his ‘sutured skin’.16 In their book Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), Jack Halberstam examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816) for what it says

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about skin and female monstrosity, both themes that are central to my present discussion. Indeed, scholarship that demonstrates how women – particularly women of colour and sex workers – have been rendered monstrous through discourse, including visual culture, is crucial for Skin Crafts as a whole, as one strategy of gore capitalism and witch-hunting is to turn women into monsters so that they are perceived as threats that must be obliterated. According to Claudette Lauzon, The historical construction of non-normative female bodies as sites of contamination and containment has been usefully theorized by Margrit Shildrick through the deployment of the trope of the ‘monstrous body’. For Shildrick, monstrous bodies – women (particularly pregnant women), racialized others, and the sick or disabled – pose a risk to ‘the normative construct of the self ’s clean and proper body’, a risk that is constituted by ‘the failure of the monstrous body to observe a material and metaphorical cordon sanitaire, its failure to wholly occupy the place of the other’.17

According to this framework, those individuals who are most vulnerable to violence are discursively framed as dangerous (i.e. monstrous) in order to justify that violence. Readers will know that trans women, and particularly trans women of colour who are sex workers, are also extremely vulnerable to discursive violence that renders them monstrous and the material violence that is inextricably bound up with the discourse of feminine monstrosity.18 In Skin Shows, Halberstam considers the ways that Frankenstein, as a Gothic novel, speaks to fears about, among other things, femininity, the female body and ‘feminine sexual response’.19 Of the moment when Victor Frankenstein destroys the female monster, Halberstam writes, The reduction of the female monster to pulp gives us a very literal metaphor for the threat of female monstrosity as opposed to the threat figured by male monstrosity. The pulp that Frankenstein scatters about his laboratory floor is the female monster, is female monstrosity. … The power of the male monster is that it does precisely become human and so it makes humanity intrinsic to a particular kind of monstrosity and vice versa. The female monster cannot be human because it is always only an object, a thing, ‘unfinished’.20

Halberstam’s reference to the ‘pulp that Frankenstein scatters on his laboratory floor’ loses its fictional distance when we consider how horrifyingly close this description is to how the remains of female murder victims are discarded in Mexico and other locales around the world. Often dismembered, disfigured and rendered anonymous by the destruction of face and body, the victims of femicide



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are frequently reduced to literal pulp, functioning as material evidence of how those very women were objectified and dehumanized in life and again through violent death. My objective in bringing Frankenstein into the fray is not only to underscore the material consequences (violent death) that occur when women are rendered monstrous but also to note that in this chapter I am working with the following metaphors: if Frankenstein is globalization, then Frankenstein’s monster (who also murders a woman in Shelley’s novel) is gore capitalism. Within this framework, the suture threads of Margolles’s 127 Corpses function not only as metonymic stand-ins for dead individuals; they also symbolize the ways that gore capitalism grinds women down to pulp, leaving only bloody threads behind. Banwell has analysed Margolles’s artworks and their relationship to not only skin but also textiles, borders and boundaries, which are related to the cordon sanitaire noted by Shildrick in the above quotation. As Banwell has written, ‘The pattern left in the skin by the lines of stitches [on a post-autopsy corpse] visually resembles the spikes of barbed wire that mark the border line that divides political territories’, and this border has been described as ‘una herida abierta’ (an open wound). The Mexico-US border parallels with the skin as corporeal boundary. Both geopolitical and skin borders are permeable. In the case of geopolitical borders, the human transit from one side to the other moves through the space marking the crossing which, depending on the level of security, may be indicated by a wall, a fence, a roadside checkpoint. The border of the skin may also be transcended, for example by autopsy or surgical needle and thread, by absorption or leaking of substances, or by a tattooist’s needle and ink.21

In the remainder of this chapter, I build on Banwell’s insights about skin, wounds and boundaries to analyse Margolles’s textile works through the lens of critical craft studies on the one hand, and skin studies on the other, in order to argue for the affective and political power of these particular works. Although I discuss narco-violence (violence in Mexico related to the drug trade), I am primarily concerned in this chapter with femicide, the murder of women because they are women. Mexican feminist politician Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos prefers the term ‘feminicide’ to describe all kinds of violence towards women, but I will be using the term ‘femicide’ here to highlight Margolles’s focus on violent death.22 With Marxist feminist scholar Silvia Federici, I beg other feminists to continue fighting femicide with whatever tools are at hand with a renewed sense of urgency. In her crucial text Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (2018), Federici argues,

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Skin Crafts While violence against women has been normalized as a structural aspect of familial and gender relations, what has developed during the past several decades exceeds the norm. Exemplary is the case of the murders of Ciudad Juarez, a city across the Mexican border from El, Paso, Texas, where in the last twenty years hundreds of women have disappeared, their tortured bodies often found abandoned in public spaces. This is not an isolated case. Kidnappings and murders of women are a daily reality today in Latin America.23

Like Federici, I believe that the epidemic of femicide in Mexico, Canada, the United States and other global contexts in our contemporary moment is a modern-day witch-hunt informed by unbridled misogyny, misogynoire, racism and transphobia, which are the symptoms of rage, hatred and fear felt towards women in the context of globalization, global capitalism and women’s increased financial independence.24

Re-thinking excess Although Margolles’s death-related artworks have usually been described as either minimalist or post-minimalist because of how her spare installations employing materials such as vapour, cement and string encourage a phenomenological approach to embodied spectatorship, in this chapter I consider Margolles’s textile works through the lens of excess. I am not the first to discuss Margolles’s work in terms of excess. In the exhibition catalogue for What Else Could We Talk About?, Margolles’s contribution to the 2009 Venice Biennale, Mariana Botey labels works that Margolles produced as part of the anarchist art collective SEMEFO in the 1990s as ‘extreme and excessive’. The work she is specifically referring to here is Dermis (1996), which was comprised of a set of couches and sofas covered in horse’s entrails. Amy Sara Carroll, on the other hand, has remarked that ‘Death and femininity, in Margolles’s solo transitional pieces [after leaving the art collective SEMEFO], operate as excesses that haunt the expanding circles that constitute the works’ publics’.25 Where my analysis departs from Botey’s and Carroll’s is my concern with the specificities of textiles and the ways that textiles have been discursively constructed as excessive in the context of Western art history. I also want to engage more critically with the concept of ‘excess’ than either Botey or Carroll do in their respective texts. Excess is culturally contingent; it is constructed. In what follows, I want to think through what the concept of ‘excess’ unveils in and around Margolles’s works that employ thread and cloth.



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In Margolles’s piercing textile works, the softness of fabric comes into tension with the brutality of violence against vulnerable bodies. As feminist scholars such as Janice Helland and Bridget Elliott (2002) have shown, textiles have long been denigrated and marginalized, dismissed not only as ‘feminine’ but also as excessive or ‘in excess’ according to the gendered hierarchies of Western art history.26 The use of textiles in art related to violence is therefore symbolically powerful on multiple levels. Textiles have historically been denigrated as ‘women’s work’, but they have also functioned as sites of community, coping and self-care in a range of geographical and cultural contexts. In her art practice, Margolles often uses textiles to bear material traces of violence, whether drug-related violence, suicide or femicide. Margolles’s first engagement with textiles appears to have been Dermis (1995), a hospital sheet bearing the bloody silhouettes of two human figures. (She also produced a series entitled Dermis/Derm in 1996 while she was still collaborating with the art collective SEMEFO.)27 According to Rubén Gallo, the silhouettes of Dermis belong to two gay men who had died by suicide together.28 Like much of her early work, Margolles collected the sheet from the morgue in Mexico City. Her work Lienzo (The Shroud) (1999–2000) consists of a blanket that is nine metres long and has the imprint of the bodily fluids of nine corpses.29 Margolles’s 2009 exhibition for the Venice Biennale, What Else Could We Talk About?, is, significantly, comprised of many textiles, all of which Margolles and groups of volunteers used to clean up scenes of narco-violence. I propose to consider violence as touch in excess or excessive touch: I am particularly concerned with touch that erases and obliterates the bodies of vulnerable women, specifically Indigenous women and other women of colour. In Margolles’s video Women Embroidering Next to Lake Atitlàn (2012), a group of Mayan female activists are shown embroidering brightly coloured images onto a stained white sheet.30 The names of the Indigenous women who participated are Lucy Andrea Lopez, Silvia Menchu, Bonifacia Cocom Tambriz, Maria Josefina Tuy Churunel, Marcelina Cumes, Rosamelia Cocolajay, Alba Cocolajay and Cristina Lopez. The sheet is stained with blood that resulted from a man murdering his female partner in Guatemala City. A high percentage of women who experience intimate violence, including murder, in Guatemala are of Indigenous heritage and live in rural areas or on the urban periphery.31 The Indigenous artists embroidered a range of symbols, including birds, flowers and candles, on the stained sheet, and there are small women of colour in the top two corners (one in the upper left and two in the upper right) and the bottom left corner. In the bottom right corner of the cloth there is a yellow candle and

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dark blue flower. There are also a sun and a waxing crescent (or sickle) moon in the upper row of symbols. A dark candle was chosen as the symbol for the very centre of the cloth. It is possible to read the textile with the iconographical methodology developed by Erwin Panofsky, considering the meaning of the symbols in Latin American visual culture, and then reading them in relation to each other in order to arrive at a hidden or buried meaning that may or may not correspond with what the Indigenous female artists intended.32 As my frequent use of words such as ‘signify’ and ‘index’ indicates, I believe that semiotics can be a useful methodology for analysing textiles; iconography can also be very productive in reading textile artworks for meaning in relation to materials. The flowers are traditional symbols of femininity, while birds symbolize flight of the soul after death.33 The candles can be seen as votive candles burning at an altar or at a vigil in memory of the woman who was murdered.34 These are symbols related not only to mourning and grief but also to rebirth, transcendence and transformation. If I look at the sheet as a Rorschach Test, the symmetrical blood stain – the result of folding the cloth in half – becomes a butterfly, or perhaps a moth, with the tips of its wings almost touching the upper edge of the cloth and exceeding the bottom edge. There is also a small head above embroidered symbols and a section of abdomen below the embroideries, where the rest of the thorax would be. The blood-stain butterfly – a well-known symbol of metamorphosis, resurrection and, in some cultures, the soul – when put in dialogue with the embroidered symbols, results in an artwork that tells a story about women of colour who are murdered, mourned, memorialized and who live on in art and memory. The textile is thus an artwork that speaks not only of violence but also of grief, endurance and transformation. Once it was embroidered, the bloody cloth was titled Tela bordada; when it is displayed, it is hung on the wall like a painting or tapestry. In the video, while the Indigenous women embroider, they discuss domestic violence in Guatemala and around the world, pointing to the intersubjective nature of collective crafting and the potential for radical social change when women speak openly about intimate violence. The collaborative crafting that resulted in Tela bordada anticipated the 2015 exhibition We Have a Common Thread, which was organized by Neuberger Museum of Art Purchase College, State University of New York, and curated by Patrice Giasson (Figures 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3). For that exhibition, Margolles collaborated with embroiderers from Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Brazil, Mexico and the United States, who shared her concerns about violence, particularly against women, although the Harlem embroiderers (who are



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Figure 1.1  Installation view of Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread, curated by Patrice Giasson. Neuberger Museum of Art, 11 July to 11 October 2015. The textile was previously stained with blood from the body of a woman murdered in Managua, Nicaragua, and it was embroidered by Atlántida Espinoza, Conny Gutiérrez, Xiomara Gutiérrez and Susana Pérez. The title of the artwork is When Most of Us Were Sandinistas, 2014. 59 × 41 inches. Photo: Rafael Burillo.

associated with the Harlem Needle Arts Cultural Arts Institute) produced a textile specifically to memorialize Eric Garner, an African American man who was murdered with a chokehold by police (Figure 1.3).35 Following discussions with the embroiderers, whose words about the project are transcribed in the exhibition catalogue for We Have a Common Thread, Margolles provided each group with fabrics that had been stained with the micro-debris of sites where people had suffered violent deaths. With the exception of Eric Garner, the embroiderers were not given a great deal of information about the victims who inspired the textile works. This speaks, perhaps, to the anonymity of many victims of violence in Mexico and other parts of the world. Giasson describes these collaborative embroideries as ‘stained screens’, an interesting phrase36 that might be illuminated by Amelia Jones’s comment that ‘the televisual delivers bodies and subjects, through the tangible texture of its intimate screen – collapsing the very distance through which, paradoxically, the cinematic imaginary signifier does its suturing work’.37 The television screen and the textile might seem like they exist on opposite ends of the material spectrum;

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Figure 1.2  Installation view of Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread, curated by Patrice Giasson. Neuberger Museum of Art, 11 July to 11 October 2015. The fabric was previously stained with blood from the body of a woman murdered in Recife, Brazil. It was created with the participation of women from the Social Center Dom João Costa: Marluce Pedro de Araujo, Maria Gracas Guimares de Lima, Edinai Maria da Silva, Ezilda Rodrigues da Silva, Josefa Helena da Silva, Josilene Maria da Silva, Zumeira Deca da Silva, Rositania da Silva Santos and Jocileide Benedita de Souza. The title of the artwork is Gerlaine GG Om Pào Com Molho: Unknown Identities, 2014. 89 × 96 inches. Photo: Rafael Burillo.

however, both have their own textures, their own weaves, their own modes of storytelling. Significantly, Giasson incorporated screens into the installation of We Have a Common Thread, so viewers could watch the embroiderers work. Note also Jones’s use of the term ‘suturing’ here to discuss the televisual screen. This textile, but also surgical, metaphor is highly significant for Margolles’s work, particularly her works that employ threads that have been used to suture the skin of post-autopsy corpses in the morgue, such as 127 Corpses. Giasson notes that during a conversation he had with Margolles in Harlem in 2015, Margolles noted that ‘the art of closing up bodies after an autopsy was reminiscent of the practice and ritual of sewing’.38 Further to this, Margolles’s body of work has repeatedly been described as ‘collapsing’ the distance between living subject and death via material traces of dead bodies.39 In fact, Giasson has observed, ‘While talking about the display, Margolles expressed her desire that the visitors have the freedom to touch the work, as the weavers touched it while working on it.



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Figure 1.3  Installation view of Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread, curated by Patrice Giasson. Neuberger Museum of Art, 11 July to 11 October 2015. In the foreground is a mixed media on stained textile produced by an imprint technique on the spot in Staten Island where Eric Garner was murdered by police. Created by members of the Harlem Needle Arts cultural arts institute: Sahara Briscoe, Laura R. Gadson and Jerry Grant, under the direction of Michelle Bishop. The title of the artwork is american Juju for the Tapestry of Truth, 2015. 66 × 98 inches. Photo: Rafael Burillo.

Her request was meant to reduce the distance between the viewer and the textile, and to initiate the possibility of a relational identification.’40 In working with dirty and blood-soaked textiles, Margolles illuminates the powerful and contradictory symbolism of textiles: not simply ‘excessive’, nor safely ‘domestic’, textiles reveal a range of different affects and a range of different kinds of touch. It is not insignificant that of all her materials, Margolles’s textiles are the works that have, to date, received the least extended scholarly attention. Furthermore, Amy Sara Carroll has noted that the ‘gendered dimensions of Margolles’s work’ is rarely if ever considered, despite the fact that in an interview with Carroll in 2000 Margolles stated, ‘Of course, my status as a woman in relation to what’s been termed an all-male aesthetic [that is, post-minimalism] has affected my artistic practice. Of course, my status as a woman in the world affects the ways in which I work.’41 The truth that textiles have been, and continue to be, gendered as feminine is surely related to the fact that both Margolles’s gender and her use of textiles have not been centred in most of the scholarship written about her art.

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Margolles’s textile works unveil the material violence of everyday life for women of colour. To be more specific, the physical, material, murderous violence that is enacted upon women of colour is what Margolles’s textiles soak up and index. Her textile works are always collaborative. Sometimes, as with the textile works that were included in her 2009 Venice Biennale show, What Else Could We Talk About?, Margolles went to scenes of drug-related violence with groups of volunteers and cleaned up the sites, soaking up blood and mud and other debris from the streets of northern Mexico. These textiles were then exhibited and deployed in a number of different ways in Venice; for example, in Recovered Blood (2009), textiles were steamed and the violence-related fluids were turned into vapour, thus touching the skin and entering the bodies of viewers, and subsequently hung in the Mexican Pavilion.42 In her exhibition We Have a Common Thread (2015), Margolles, who had previously been known for works that centred upon the corpse, using the morgue of Mexico City as a source of her materials, commissioned groups of embroiderers in six different global contexts to embroider stained fabrics.43 Although when these textiles were exhibited it was Margolles’s name that was front and centre, the exhibition catalogue names the embroiderers, quotes them and reproduces photographs of them creating the artworks. These collaborative textiles are, I suggest, part of a project associated with both violence and the use of textiles to demonstrate radical care. As craft scholar Janis Jefferies has remarked, ‘To craft is to care.’44 Further to this, to think about murdered women (and men) of colour, to grieve, to talk about, to lament, to feel anger, to be willing to do what one can to lean on to the power of good in the face of ongoing human evil: these are all acts of affective labour. Craft historians have demonstrated again and again how textiles have intersected with affective labour, usually through the hands of women. Quilting bees, slave quilts, suffrage banners, funeral shrouds: textiles have served affective and political purposes, and Margolles’s collaborative textiles are part of this legacy.45 According to Valentina Locatelli, ‘In the first half of the twentieth century, national art institutions and academies throughout Latin America were often not accessible to women, and women’s participation in the arts was long limited to the field of popular and folk arts and crafts, that is, to “hobbies” which were considered compatible with domestic work.’46 One of the remarkable things about Margolles’s textile works is that she herself is not the primary embroiderer; she is usually using ‘found’ textiles like sheets from the morgue or cloths to clean up crime scenes. For the Venice textiles, she employed large pieces of cloth to absorb blood from the streets of Mexico, but the traces on the cloth signify not



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the ‘hand of the artist’ but the death of an unnamed victim. This distances her, one could argue, from the criticism and art history that would locate her as a ‘craft artist’ or a ‘textile artist’. Yet it is significant that she uses textiles in so many of her violence-related works. The textiles signify skin and absorb skin fragments at the same time. Margolles uses textiles to remind us of the vulnerability of bodies, of skin, of people, of lives lost. Instead of literally representing violent crimes and dead bodies in her textile works, she uses threads and cloth as standins for violated bodies, forcing viewers to acknowledge the material realities for women of colour living inside gore capitalism.

What Else Could We Talk About? (2009): Narcoviolence, excess and dirty textiles Margolles is part of what has been called the globalization of Mexican art that has been occurring in the post-1994, post-NAFTA art world.47 Her work was included in the 2006–7 exhibition Frontera 450+ at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art; her installation employed clothing of victims of violent death, and could be considered part of her textile oeuvre. As Caroline A. Jones has demonstrated, annual biennials have played a central role in the so-called globalization of contemporary art.48 In 2009 Cuauhtémoc Medina curated a show of Margolles’s work for the 53rd Venice Biennale, a show that represented Margolles’s artistic transition from the morgue to public space, as much of the exhibit involved blood, mud, glass and other debris found at crime scenes. Like many of her earlier works, the works included in Margolles’s exhibit at the Mexican Pavilion were concerned with the drug trade and so-called ‘narcoviolence’ in Mexico.49 The textile works included in What Else Could We Talk About? are not textile artworks in the traditional sense.50 That is, unlike the textiles produced for the 2015 exhibition We Have a Common Thread, the textiles in the Venice show were, for the most part, not embroidered. The exception was Narcomessages, which I discuss below. It is worth pausing here to query: What, if anything, is excessive about the textile works included in What Else Could We Talk About? Although the curators of Margolles’s Venice exhibition frequently refer to excess in their catalogue essays, her textile works do not prove the modernist accusation that textiles are innately excessive.51 Rather, Margolles’s textiles, her ‘impregnated fabrics’, show the excessiveness of violence, the excessiveness of violent touch, that literally ruptures the skin of human beings so that blood overflows the

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boundaries of the body and runs in the streets. Feminist art historian Rosemary Betterton has noted the discursive relationship between ‘sexualized femininity, murderous pathology’ and ‘bodily excess’,52 and in her book Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992), Elisabeth Bronfen shows the relationship that has been constructed historically between women, death and excess.53 Although the textiles in the Venice show were primarily soaking up the blood of victims of drug violence (some of whom were surely women), Margolles’s later collaborative textiles of 2012 and 2015 contain blood stains that resulted from acts of femicide. Blood is not only abject (as per Kristeva), it is excessive, and it is (or at least can be) material evidence of excessive, violent touch. Margolles’s textile works, then, are excessive not only in Bataille’s sense of ‘base materiality’54 (referring to bodily fluids rather than fabric) but also in exposing the excessiveness of touch that breaks skin. In the Venice exhibition, Margolles was concerned with the idea of contagion: not simply the threat of disease but the threat of moral taint, the transfer of violence and death and foreignness via miasma containing mud and bodily fluids. Medina discusses this aspect of Margolles’s work and the threat of the ‘unclean’. Dirty textiles are particularly associated with the threat of the dirty or unruly woman. As architecture scholar Gülsüm Baydar has written about British artist Tracey Emin’s controversial work My Bed (1998), ‘Disgust is one of the most obvious feelings evoked at the sight of dirty stockings and underwear, stained sheets, and cigarette butts. These are objects of excess, which the clean body needs to get rid of in order to maintain a sense of “I”.’ She adds that fear of excess and dirt is ‘an obvious manifestation of society’s intolerance for dirt and disorder as threats to the imagined integrity of the self ’.55 The dirty sheets in Emin’s My Bed signify very differently than the stained sheet of Tela bordada and the muddy cloths of Margolles’s Venice exhibition. Emin’s soiled bedclothes fit what Jenni Sorkin calls the ‘self-stain’, a term that does not apply to any of Margolles’s textile works.56 However, I would argue that in both the global South and the global North, unruly women are discursively re-presented as dirty, and thus are perceived as threatening to the social order. Thus the ‘unclean’ or ‘dirty’ individual, because they are seen as threatening, is also vulnerable to violence that is meant to erase them and thereby restore a kind of hegemonic social order.57 In the exhibition catalogue for What Else Could We Talk About?, the fabrics are repeatedly described as being ‘impregnated’ with blood, a discursive gesture that not only feminizes the muddy, bloody textiles but also frames them in relation to the pregnant body, which Margrit Shildrick has considered in terms of the monstrous body and Mary Russo has discussed as an archetype of the



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‘female grotesque’.58 Prior to the Venice Biennale, Margolles and her team of volunteers used textiles to clean up sites of narco-violence in northern Mexico in the spring and summer of 2009; the cloths were subsequently soaked and steamed in Venice, releasing the material traces of drug violence into the air and onto the skin of art lovers in Italy, a kind of narco-violence miasma. The performance work Cleaning (2009) involved individuals hired for the purpose of cleaning the floors of the Mexican Pavilion with a mixture of water and blood collected at crime scenes in Mexico. The photographs in the exhibition catalogue show men cleaning the floors with mops; the action took place at least once a day during the biennale. For Narcomessages (2009), Margolles took cloths that had been used to clean up execution sites at the northern border of Mexico and had ‘narcomessages’ embroidered into them with gold threads. The work was a ‘joint activity’, that is, a collaborative process, in which the fabrics were progressively embroidered during the biennale, involving people moving through the streets of Venice. The embroidered phrases were taken from warning messages that were left at scenes of drug violence to send a message. The phrases included ‘See, hear and silence’, ‘Until all your children fall’, ‘Thus finish the rats’ and ‘So that they learn to respect’. These embroidered cloths were eventually hung on the walls of the Mexican Pavilion like valuable tapestries. In Medina’s contribution to the exhibition catalogue, ‘Materialist Spectrality’, he states, ‘This invasion [of narco-violence], propelled by the commissions and invitations of the world cultural circuit, functioned as a debased analogy of the globalization process.’59 He goes on to describe the process of Margolles’s textile works: The blood and dirt, after drying into lengths of fabric, is re-humidified and thus brought back in [to] the exhibition room. … The phrases that buzz around the killings are ‘tatooed’ [sic] onto the walls or embroidered in gold thread over the blood-soaked fabrics, setting up a friction between luxury, greed and the peculiar moral code supposedly ratified by every assassination.60

Of the miasma, imagined or real, of these works, Medina remarks that we are left ‘with trash under the skin’.61 In a subsequent catalogue essay, ‘Toward a Critique of Sacrificial Reason: Necropolitics and Radical Aesthetics in Mexico’, Mariana Botey observes that some of Margolles’s works appear to be arguing for a register of poetic production dispersed in the social body and woven through the threads – in the specific case of our ­examples – of an imaginary cathexis at work in the idea of Mexico, a manifestation of a figure of

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Skin Crafts aesthetics that returns in fluctuations (rotations), and that exceeds and overflows the dichotomy of rationality-irrationality on which modernity grounds itself.62

Here Botey brings together various relevant thematic threads – the ‘excessiveness’ of Margolles’s project, the materiality and rich metaphorical-ness of textiles and the need for a norm to exceed if something, or someone, is to be discursively framed as excessive.

Textiles, touch and violence As Jessica Hemmings has observed, While touch is central to our understanding of textiles, writing and reading about textiles tend to be considered, in an academic context, to make a greater contribution to our understanding of cloth. ‘Reading’ the textile, rather than ‘feeling’ the textile, means the textile is judged against a value system that does not always respond to its strengths.63

Many textile scholars have identified the haptic nature of textiles as a strength. In Claire Pajaczkowska’s chapter ‘Tension, Time and Tenderness: Indexical Traces of Touch in Textiles’ (2010), there is a glaring lack of engagement with violent touch. Nonetheless, her text is useful because she sets out to establish a semiotics of textiles, looking to this methodology to illuminate the affective work that textiles do. Pajaczkowska proposes that semiotics is a useful methodology for examining textiles, because it can explain why the trace of the hand within representation is capable of signifying memories of profoundly affective states. The semiotics of ‘the textile’ is needed in order to show how the specifically material meaning in textiles is founded on embodied knowledge and affect, and that these exist as indexical traces of the touch, handling and holding that are the presence of an absence of the body.64

It is worth noting here that this could be said for both textiles and violence: bruises, cuts and other wounds on the skin are indexical traces of excessive, violent touch. It is also worth noting that Margolles has stated that she ‘work[s]‌with emotion, not reason’. She goes on to explain that while the initial impact of much of her work is shock, what’s important is that after death the works keep ‘talking, even in different languages. [They] keep reminding



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me: Death is not pretty, and it sucks to be dead’.65 The language of textiles is one that is usually associated with domesticity, but Margolles’s textile works undermine this association, finding and using her textiles in public spaces such as the morgue and the street. This concern with undermining the domestic has been identified by Marci R. McMahon as a characteristic of many female Mexican artists and writers. She argues that these authors and artists enact ‘domestic negotiations’ that both ‘challenge and reinforce geographical, racial, gendered, and national borders’.66 While McMahon does not discuss Margolles, her phrase ‘domestic negotiations’ illustrates the way that Margolles rejects the domestic associations of textiles, while employing blood-stained textiles to illuminate that the domestic is not always a safe space for women. Pajaczkowska remarks, ‘One reason for the relative absence of textiles from the semiotic field is the paradoxical status of cloth as simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible … I have suggested that cloth and its component element, thread, have a cultural position that has endowed them with both an excessive materiality and an almost irrational immateriality’.67 As is often the case in discussions of textiles, Pajaczkowska does not elaborate here on the ostensible excessiveness of cloth. She does, however, note that ‘the individual body is usually covered in cloth, which is for most of the time in contact with the surface of the skin’, making explicit the almost constant touch between skin and textiles in our dayto-day lives.68 There is, as mentioned, an interesting blind spot when it comes to violent touch in Pajaczkowska’s text. This is apparent, for instance, when she writes, The absorbent quality of cloth is also part of its capacity to signify as iconic, seen in the way that stains which indicate the capillary action of fibres retain the meaning of mark-making. The body as topos of conflict between nature and culture is, traditionally, prevented from staining fabric. There are many examples of the capacity of textile to signify through its use as symbol. Because textile absorbs liquid, it can be dyed to hold colour.69

Despite a reference to the ‘capillary action of fibres’ and the ‘body as topos of conflict’, there is an erasure of violent touch and (blood) stains as indexes of violence. Violence, theorized as excessive touch, is touch in excess, touch that bruises and breaks skin. Pajaczkowska notes the way that the ‘stitch pierces, punctuates, penetrates, as it unites separate edges, and within a single gesture it combines both aspects of the paradox of destruction and creation’.70 She also notes that

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the ‘temporality of the tactile, haptic quality of the textile as sign depends on a paradox of presence and absence’.71 Margolles’s textiles function as memories of violence; their stains index the presence, and then the absence, of the person who has been murdered. Near the end of her article, Pajaczkowska discusses tenderness as an affect that might productively be considered in relation to textiles, arguing that the ‘meaning of tenderness is experienced as a property of the textile itself ’, and that this ‘semiotic quality is responsible for the attribution of a protective agency to cloth and textiles’.72 If we consider Margolles’s textile works, the idea of cloth and textiles as having a ‘protective agency’ becomes an empty claim, even a dangerous and infuriating one, as cloth cannot protect vulnerable individuals from violence. Margolles has identified Georges Bataille’s writings on excess as a source of inspiration for her work.73 This opens up another route for considering her textiles through the theoretical framework of excess. However, from the perspective of this feminist art historian, there is not much of value in Bataille’s text Visions of Excess. He is clearly concerned with dirt (or filth), with the human body, death and base materialism, so that we might draw on him to theorize Margolles’s artworks because of her use of bodily fluids such as blood and dirt and debris from crime scenes. His work is also full of references to violence, making at least some of his writings relevant for my purposes here.74 Although Bataille was by trade a librarian, in 1929 he helped found an art review entitled Documents with a group of rebel surrealists and conservative art historians. In his essays he developed something like a theory of bodies and matter (or perhaps materiality), which led to Andre Breton calling him an ‘excremental philosopher’. Breton accused Bataille of being not an intellectual but an obsessive, identifying his interests as pathological. Bataille’s ‘theory of baseness’ positioned filth (and stains) as something worth considering because of its centrality to human life; not something to be swept under the carpet, but that which illuminates lived realities, drives and desires.75 In a discussion of Dali’s The Lugubrious Game (1929), he singles out the shitstained shorts of the man in the lower right corner, opening the text with the statement, ‘Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. Thus abandoning certain investigations is out of the question. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one’s rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.’76 What strikes me as relevant in this text is the intrusion of violence written onto the body of a young girl in Bataille’s visual analysis of Dali’s painting. As if out of the blue, Bataille introduces a ‘charming little girl whose soul would be Dali’s



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abominable mirror’.77 He goes on to state, ‘The tongue of this little girl is not a tongue but a she-rat. And if she still appears admirably beautiful, it is, as they say, because black blood is beautiful, flowing on the hide of the cow or on the throat of a woman.’78 This sudden, and unnecessary, turn to violence, and more specifically violence against a woman, is not, I argue, a case of clear inspiration for Margolles’s work but rather evidence of the sheer ubiquity of violence against women in theory as well as in lived culture. This passage, then, serves to flesh out the theoretical framework I am employing to analyse Margolles’s textile works. Rather than simplistically proposing that ‘black blood is beautiful’, and therefore functioning as nothing more than a kind of paint on cloth, Margolles uses blood-stained textiles to unveil the viciousness and misogyny of theory and culture, which has had serious material consequences for women, and particularly women of colour, around the globe, including violent death. I propose that Margolles’s own ‘visions of excess’ are specifically concerned with the absolute excessiveness of femicide in terms of both violence and numbers. Jill Bennett has argued in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (2005) that a politics of testimony ‘requires of art not a faithful translation of testimony; rather, it calls upon art to exploit its own unique capacities to contribute actively to this politics’.79 Building on Bennett, I argue that Margolles is embracing the ‘unique capacities’ of cloth – to absorb, to stain, to invite touch, to touch (or move, affectively speaking) – in order to contribute to a politics of testimony specifically concerned with violence against women. Textiles as skin and skin as textiles run throughout Margolles’s body of work. Anne Anlin Cheng has observed, ‘The racial fetish, metonymized as animal or Papuan skin in Loos’s work, provides the pivot on which Modernist aesthetic values turn: essence versus veneer, plainness versus excess, utility versus waste, taste versus vulgarity. Yet, as we have started to see, the pivot – the haunting skin – is itself already contaminated.’80 I contend that when we look closely at Margolles’s textiles, what we see is the ‘haunting skin’ of murdered women of colour. Margolles’s textile works are stained/tainted by blood, but there are no bodies represented. In this way, her works can be compared to the feminist art of the 1980s and 1990s that eschewed the body in attempts to avoid accusations of essentialism on the one hand, while deliberately refusing the viewer’s access to the female form, whether naked or clothed, on the other.81 This strategy is remarkable precisely because Margolles was known for her use of dead bodies in her early work, whether those bodies were photographed or fragmented, as in Lengua (Tongue) (2000), an actual pierced tongue that Margolles had removed from the dead body of a male heroin addict.82

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When I teach Margolles’s work, many of my students are horrified – and often angry and/or in tears – when I show them Margolles’s early death-works, such as the photograph Self-Portrait in the Morgue (1998), which depicts Margolles in a white lab coat, looking directly at the viewer, and holding a small, reddish-brown corpse, possibly the dead body of a child in her hands, which are covered in black, rubber gloves. Margolles seems to hold the corpse out to us in her outstretched arms, a kind of macabre and clinical Pietà, but my students always have a range of ethical questions: Whose body is that? How did they die? Why don’t we know the name of the person? Who granted Margolles permission to re-present this individual in this way? They are visibly distressed by this work, which centres Margolles’s agency and subjectivity (symbolically but also formally), while dehumanizing an individual who appears to have died prematurely and perhaps in a brutal way (perhaps by burning). This kind of work spectacularizes the dead body, which functions to de-humanize the individual who has died while also turning them into a site of, if not entertainment, then of visuality where the artist and viewer have power over them post-mortem. In her turn to textiles, Margolles not only ceased to represent dead bodies in her works (photographic or otherwise), she adopted a feminist strategy that refuses to give the viewer access to the violated female body.83 A significant rhetorical shift occurred in Margolles’s work when she moved from photographs of dead bodies and fragmented body parts to works where she uses thread and cloth to stand in for, and signify, violated skin. Skin colour is erased with this gesture, as are any signs on the skin of life, violence, identity, gender and so on. In Tela bordada, the bloody sheet stands in for the murdered woman’s skin. The colourful, embroidered designs function as decorative, symbolic tattoos on dead, violated, bloody, metonymic skin, recalling Julia Banwell’s allusion to the way that the tattoo artist’s needle pierces skin, thus pointing up the porousness and permeability of skin as a border or boundary.84 Lisa Newman has argued that ‘the materiality of blood makes explicit the socio-cultural value of the body through an intersubjective corporeal exchange with the audience, in that they allow for the assertion of agency and validation of the marginalized social citizen through provoking a shared perception of the body in crisis’.85 I want to complicate this point by noting once again that the blood absorbed by Margolles’s textile works is from dead bodies, most often of women of colour, particularly vulnerable individuals whose lived experiences were vastly different from most of the gallery goers who view Margolles’s work in cities such as Venice and Montreal. There is perhaps, then, not so much an



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intersubjective exchange between anonymous victim and viewer, as a failure to occupy the subject position of the victims because of the gulf between lived experiences. Furthermore, Newman’s point about blood in Margolles’s work signifying the ‘agency and validation of the marginalized social citizen’ fails to hold up. These works do not illuminate the victims’ agency, nor do they validate them. The victims are usually unnamed – a fact that Margolles has been criticized for – and these works do not offer closure. Rather, I want to argue in a more pragmatic fashion that the bloodied textiles in Margolles’s oeuvre index violence as excessive touch and the extravagant vulnerability of skin that is not white, bringing awareness to the fact that there is an ongoing global epidemic of femicide. As Rebecca Zorach has noted in her book on excess in the French Renaissance, ‘Blood signifies both violent death and the continued life of generations – in warrior blood, menstrual blood, medical blood: it is characterized by purity and impurity.’86 Zorach’s observation that blood and its symbolism have always been central to European culture is not a straightforward corollary for Margolles’s work. Nonetheless, the dual meaning of blood – death and also re-birth – is in fact relevant for the Mexican view of death. Janice Helland discusses this subject in an article about Frida Kahlo’s work.87 It is worth noting here, albeit briefly, that Kahlo, like Margolles, was well aware of violence towards women in her country. In fact, her painting A Few Small Nips (1935; Figure 1.4), which depicts the aftermath of a man murdering his female partner, might be said to be a direct antecedent to Margolles’s Tela bordada (2012). Kahlo’s painting was famously based on an actual event that she read about in a newspaper. A man murdered his wife or girlfriend, and in court, he stated that he had only given her ‘a few small nips’. In Kahlo’s work, a naked woman, wearing one black, high heel shoe on her right foot, has been violently stabbed with a knife. Her body is covered in slash marks and blood, and the blood also covers the white sheet that she is laying on, as well as the floor and the picture’s frame. Margolles’s Tela bordada also references, and indeed indexes, an actual act of femicide, with the white sheet itself becoming an artwork once the Indigenous activists in Guatemala had lovingly embroidered colourful images into the sheet and through the blood stains. The contemporary work of art removes the spectacle of a murdered woman’s body, and centres the stained, embroidered textile object as not only a stand-in for the murdered woman’s skin but also a symbol of Indigenous women’s resistance against gender-based violence through the political acts of care, conversation and crafting.

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Figure 1.4  Frida Kahlo, A Few Small Nips (Unos cuantos piquetitos), 1935. © 2021 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./SOCAN. © ARS, NY. Photo credit: Schalkwijk/Art Resource, NY.

Conclusion: On impurity and impunity As I have argued throughout this chapter, one of the threads that links all of Teresa Margolles’s textile works is that they are dirty and stained. Anthropologist Mary Douglas describes dirt as ‘matter out of place’, and Margolles’s textiles force us to think about those individuals who are deemed ‘out of place’ and therefore are vulnerable to violence and displacement.88 I use the term ‘force’ throughout this chapter advisedly, because there is something forceful and aggressive about Margolles’s textile artworks, despite the fact that textiles are usually associated with softness, gentleness, femininity and domesticity.89 Margolles’s textiles are affectively effective in large part because they undermine these associations: they draw attention to violent touch against female bodies; they index domestic violence rather than signifying safe domesticity. Their message, if that is the right word, is excessive in that it exceeds what textiles are ‘supposed’ to signify: docile femininity, unobtrusive materials, habits and hobbies and habitats. The textile-as-skin and skin-as-textile are both fragile



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and resilient; as borders and boundaries they are permeable, changeable and vulnerable. Margolles’s collaborative textiles are stained and dirty and bloody. The dirt, blood and stains force viewers to face and acknowledge the lived realities of vulnerable individuals, particularly women of colour, sex workers, and trans women all of whom are frequently painted as ‘dirty’ in discourse. In her book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016), Alexis Shotwell writes, Concepts and practices of purity and impurity, in relation to dirt as well as other things understood as dirty, tell us something about how people understand the world they live in, and thus how they can imagine the world becoming. In other words, purity practices are also productive normative formulations – they make a claim that a certain way of being is aspired to, good, or to be pursued.90

The author adds, ‘To be against purity is, again, not to be for pollution, harm, sickness, or premature death. It is to be against the rhetorical or conceptual attempt to delineate and delimit the world into something separable, disentangled, and homogenous.’91 Discursively framing a woman as dirty is a particular kind of epistemic violence; actual dirt can be cleaned off, while discursive dirt is often impossible to scrub away. As I frequently tell my students, the term ‘slut’ originally referred to a woman who was bad at domestic cleaning. Material violence results in wounds, scars and sometimes death. Wounds and scars on the skin may index excessive touch. Although scars are wounds that have healed, they also often signify affective, psychological wounds that may never heal. Excessive, violent touch, as Margolles’s textile works show us, can destroy bodies, subjectivities and psyches. Margolles’s ‘textile turn’ eschewed the murdered female body as spectacle, instead using craft materials to signify violated skin and violent death. In Margolles’s gothic textile works, the threads, sutures, wounds, scars and blood, both material and metaphorical, function to unveil the fact that the monsters were never women of colour; rather, the monsters are globalization, gore capitalism and the men who murder women with impunity.92

Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to Hana Gruendler and Costanza Caraffa for inviting me to participate in the Excess between Materiality and Irrepresentability

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symposium at the Max Planck Institute in Florence where I presented parts of this chapter. I would also like to thank Patrice Giasson for generously providing installation shots of Margolles’s 2015 exhibition We Have a Common Thread.

Notes 1 Amy Sara Carroll, REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), 132. 2 Julia Banwell, Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015), 1. 3 Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain permission to reproduce photographs of Margolles’s works in this chapter. Where possible, I will provide sources where the images can be viewed. 4 According to Alice Driver, Women [in Mexico] are confined to certain societal roles that also dictate how and when they should inhabit public space. The media and other cultural producers often turn to images of naked, raped, mutilated bodies, as if a confession could be extracted from the body in that manner. The demands placed on the female body in assessing and confining perceived sexuality in both life and death are evident in the discourse on feminicide. Alice Driver, More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 9. 5 Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (Cambridge: Semiotext[e]‌, 2018), 19–20. This argument is closely aligned with Silvia Federica’s discussion in her chapter ‘Globalization, Capital Accumulation, and Violence Against Women: An International and Historical Perspective’, in Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018), 24–34. I do not think it is a coincidence that these books were both published in 2018, two years into Trump’s presidency. As Federici writes, ‘The attack on women comes above all from capital’s need to destroy what it cannot control and degrade what it most needs for its reproduction. This is the body of women’ (88). 6 A photograph of this work can be viewed in the following articles, both of which are available online: Julia Skelly, ‘Translating Stained Fabrics into Conceptual Textile Art: The Globalization of Teresa Margolles’, Revista de Estudios Globales & Arte Contemporáneo (2019): 319–41; and Julia Skelly, ‘Hard Touch: Gore Capitalism and Teresa Margolles’s Soft Interventions’, Revista De Historia, Teoría Y Critica De Arte, vol. 6 (2020): 24–41.



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7 Valencia, Gore Capitalism, 21–2. 8 Ibid., 21, 22. 9 Ibid., 19. Significantly, Valencia writes, In this book, we argue against positioning oneself in a benevolent hierarchy that would stereotype the Third World as a precarious and vulnerable reality exclusively found in the global South; the vulnerability and precarity are real to a large extent, but only insofar as they are a result of the demands and requirements exported from the economic centers and major world powers and distributed by globalization through media. To conceive of the Third World as a geopolitically immutable space – without any possibility for action, empowerment, or the creation of its own discursive frame – is a clear indication of the disdain implicit in a colonialist position. … Thus, without neglecting our differences, we seek the creation of our own discourses that nurture a transfeminism that confronts and questions our contemporary situation, a situation that is invariably circumscribed by the logic of gore capitalism. (10–12) Emphasis in the original. 10 Jack Halberstam has noted that cannibalism in horror movies has frequently been interpreted as exemplifying ‘the practices associated with the capitalist family’, and more broadly, the ‘modes of production and consumption’ that define capitalism as a system in which ‘people have the right to live off other people’. Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 147. The last quotation belongs to horror critic Robin Wood, quoted in Halberstam. It is worth noting that both Halberstam and Valencia are using horror films to talk about material violence. 11 Banwell, Teresa Margolles, 91–2. 12 Ibid., 92. Emphasis added. 13 Nina G. Jablonski, Skin: A Natural History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 9. 14 Ibid., 11. 15 Marc Lafrance, ‘Skin Studies: Past, Present and Future’, Body & Society, vol. 20, no. 10 (2018): 3–32. 16 Halberstam, Skin Shows, 29. 17 Claudette Lauzon, ‘What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore’s Memorial to Missing Women’, in Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux and Christine Ross (eds), Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 162. See also Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002). 18 I want to highlight one of Margolles’s important 2016 photographic series, which was included in the 2017 Mundos exhibition. In the series Pistas de Baile (Dance

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Floors) each colour photograph represents a trans woman sex worker standing on the remains of dance floors of demolished nightclubs in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The dance clubs had been destroyed as part of an urbanization project that resulted in the displacement of many sex workers, who were subsequently forced to find other spaces to work, often becoming more isolated and thus more vulnerable to violence. The women in these photographs are dressed-up and pose with evident confidence, taking up space with their bodies and returning the artist’s/viewer’s gaze. A woman named La Gata was one of the subjects of this series, and like the other women, she collaborated closely with Margolles. Late in 2016, a few months before the opening of Mundos, La Gata was murdered in Ciudad Juárez. As the curators of Mundos note in the exhibition catalogue, there is a high rate of hate crime towards trans women in Latin America, and ‘death is a constant risk’. Emeren García and John Zeppetelli, Teresa Margolles: Mundos (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain, 2017), 14, 79. 19 Halberstam, Skin Shows, 29. 20 Ibid., 51. 21 Banwell, Teresa Margolles, 89. Emphasis added. 22 Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, ‘Preface: Feminist Keys for Understanding Femicide: Theoretical, Political, and Legal Construction’, in Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano (eds), Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xv. 23 Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, 49. 24 Many scholars writing about femicide in Mexico have highlighted the phenomenon of maquiladoras, factories where many Mexican women work, as a possible reason for the epidemic of gender-based violence. As Kate Bonansinga has observed, The maquiladoras enticed workers from all around Mexico to the border, many young women relocated to Juarez, primarily from rural communities. Because they were separated from their families and other systems of support and were unfamiliar with urban life, they were vulnerable to crime. Many were kidnapped, raped, and killed as they left work. These femicides continue at the time of this writing, though they no longer have the attention of the mass media, now dominated by the drug wars. Family members of the victims have posted pink crosses throughout the city as symbols of resistance. Kate Bonansinga, Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the U.S./Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 124. See also Lisa Vinebaum, ‘Performing Globalization in the Textile Industry: Anne Wilson and Mandy Cano Villalobos’, in Janis Jefferies, Diana Wood Conroy and Hazel Clark (eds), The Handbook of Textile Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 169–85. Regarding a pertinent textile artwork, Vinebaum writes,



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Initiated in 2008, Cano Villalobos’s ongoing series of sewing performances, Voces (Voices) memorializes the hundreds of feminicidios, or murdered women in Ciudad Juarez, located in the border state of Chihuahua, Mexico, just south of El Paso, Texas. Many of the victims are garment workers who labour in northern Mexico’s free trade zones, and Voces seeks to raise awareness about the violent impact of export and apparel manufacturing on those living in Mexico’s border region. (176) According to Vinebaum, Scholars and human rights advocates attribute feminicidios to a complex web of interconnected factors including misogyny, gender discrimination, and a backlash against changing socio-economic roles for Mexican women; drug trafficking and high crimes rates in the border region; and American immigration policy and the militarization of the border zone … numerous authors assert that the murders are inextricably connected to trade deregulation, and specifically, to the maquiladora industry in the free trade zones of Ciudad Juarez. (178) 25 Amy Sara Carroll, ‘Muerte Sin Fin: Teresa Margolles’s Gendered States of Exception’, TDR, vol. 54, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 110. Emphasis added. 26 Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland, ‘Introduction’, in Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland (eds), Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880–1935: The Gender of Ornament (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 5. See also Janis Jefferies, ‘Contemporary Textiles: The Art Fabric’, in Nadine Monem (ed.), Contemporary Textiles: The Fabric of Fine Art (London: Black Dog, 2008), 46. For more on textiles and excess, see Julia Skelly, Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 27 Dermis/Derm consisted of corpse imprints made by using a white sheet that would keep the bloody trace of a body part. The technique was later used to create imprints of a full body. The artist later proceeded with the making of ‘collective imprints’, where several bodies appeared in a single work. ‘Her work Lienzo (The Shroud) (1999–2000) consists of a blanket nine meters long (nearly thirty feet) that holds the bodily fluids of nine corpses.’ Patrice Giasson, ‘Introduction: Images on Stains: Violence and Creation in Teresa Margolles’s Textiles’, in Patrice Giasson (ed.), Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread (Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2015), 14. 28 Rubén Gallo, New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 117. Dermis … consists of the impression left by corpses on white sheets. During one of her routine visits to the morgue, Margolles stumbled upon two young men, lying side by side, covered in blood: Gay lovers who had taken their lives in a double suicide. She put a white sheet over the bodies to create a ghostly imprint of the men’s silhouettes, and then placed the imprint on a

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Gallo’s use of the terms ‘indexical’ and ‘referent’ points to the possibility of reading textiles employing semiotics as a methodology, which Claire Pajaczkowska also discusses in her chapter ‘Tension, Time and Tenderness: Indexical Traces of Touch in Textiles’. 29 Giasson, ‘Introduction’, 15. 30 García and Zeppetelli, Mundos, 30–1. 31 Giasson, ‘Introduction’, 12. 32 Luisa Elena Alcala and Jonathan Brown (eds), Painting in Latin America 1550–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 33 For a discussion of Latin American altar paintings, see Nancy Deffebach, ‘Grain of Memory: Izquierdo’s Paintings of Altars to the Virgin of Sorrows’, in Maria Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo, Challenging Visions in Modern Mexican Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 149–60. 34 For more on vigils, see Chapters 4 and 5. 35 ‘United States: Testimonies from the Harlem Embroiderers, New York City, April 2015’, in Patrice Giasson (ed.), Teresa Margolles: We Have a Common Thread (Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2015), 86–7. 36 Giasson, ‘Introduction’, 11. 37 Amelia Jones, ‘Televisual Flesh: The Body, the Screen, the Subject’, in Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux and Christine Ross (eds), Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 314. Emphasis in the original. 38 Giasson, ‘Introduction’, 16. 39 See, for example, Edward Bacal, ‘Pervasive Death: Teresa Margolles and the Space of the Corpse’, Human Remains & Violence, vol. 4, no. 1 (2018): 25–40. 40 Giasson, ‘Introduction’, 15. Emphasis added. 41 Carroll, ‘Muerte Sin Fin’, 107 n.10. 42 For photographs of some of the Venice textiles, see https://bienaldevenecia.mx/en/ biennale-arte/2009/ 43 The textiles from this exhibition can be viewed here: https://wsimag.com/ art/16643-we-have-a-common-thread 44 See Janis Jefferies, ‘Loving Attention: An Outburst of Craft in Contemporary Art’, in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.), Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 222–40. 45 On quilts in the context of slavery, see Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret History of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (New York: Random House, 1999).



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46 Valentina Locatelli, ‘Contemporary Mexican Women Artists without Restraint’, in Without Restraint: Works by Mexican Women Artists from the Daros Latinamerica Collection (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 2016), 23. 47 Carroll, REMEX, 130. 48 Caroline A. Jones, The Global Work of Art: World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 49 See Beto O’Rourke and Susie Byrd, Dealing Death and Drugs: The Big Business of Dope in the U.S. and Mexico: An Argument for Ending the Prohibition of Marijuana (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011); Miguel L. Rojas-Sotelo, ‘Narcoaesthetics in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States: Death Narco, Narco Nations, Border States, Narcochingadazo?’ Latin American Perspectives, vol. 41, no. 2 (March 2014): 215–31. 50 Ana Garduño has written about the reception of Margolles’s exhibition in Venice in the context of anxieties about Mexican nationalism. Garduño is a curator and art historian at El Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información de Artes Plásticas (CENIDIAP, part of Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes) in Mexico City. Her chapter ‘Damage Control: Teresa Margolles, the Mexican Government, and the 2009 Venice Biennial Mexican Pavilion’ is part of a proposed book project. 51 See Mariana Botey, ‘Toward a Critique of Sacrificial Reason: Necropolitics and Radical Aesthetics in Mexico’, in Teresa Margolles: What Else Could We Talk About? (Barcelona: RM Verlag, 2009), 136. 52 Rosemary Betterton, ‘Body Horror? Food (and Sex and Death) in Women’s Art’, in An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (London: Routledge, 1996), 132. 53 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 183. Bronfen writes, ‘Because “death” and “femininity” belong to the same paradigm, namely that of alterity, their rhetorical conjunction points to moments of excess as redundancy; i.e. to emphasis or precision in definition through the admission of superfluity.’ 54 According to Jeremy Biles’s reading of Bataille, Bataille’s distinctive account [or theory] aligns the profane with the world of utility, order, and instrumental reason, all of which underwrite the durability of the individual subject. Indeed, the overriding interest in the world of the profane is the lastingness of the self, and the deferral (and even the denial) of death through labor and the social structures that check our most excessive passions and passionate excesses. The sacred, by contrast, is a realm of excess, surpassing and transgressing the prohibitions of everyday social order. Bataille ties the sacred to unreason, chaos, play, and sacrifice, unrestricted by the goal-oriented, self-preserving projects of the profane world.

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Jeremy Biles, ‘For the Love of God: Excess, Ambivalence, and Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull’, in Julia Skelly (ed.), The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 230. From a feminist perspective, Bataille’s vision of excess is dangerously nonchalant about violence enacted upon the female body, and overlooks the material consequences of excess when it is physically written onto women’s bodies. 55 Gülsüm Baydar, ‘Bedrooms in Excess: Feminist Strategies Used by Tracey Emin and Semiha Berksoy’, Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 33, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2012): 32. 56 ‘Stains elicit shame: … These are all examples of the staining one inflicts upon oneself – the self-stain. The self-stain renders the body uncontrollable: both capable and culpable of transmission, transgression and impurity, exceeding the acceptable, surpassing the boundaries of the skin’. Jenni Sorkin, ‘Stain: On Cloth, Stigma, and Shame’, in Jessica Hemmings (ed.), The Textile Reader (London: Berg, 2012), 60. Emphasis added. 57 For more on this see Julia Skelly, Wasted Looks: Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), and Skelly, Radical Decadence, especially ­chapter 3. 58 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994), 1. 59 Cuauhtémoc Medina, ‘Materialist Spectrality’, in Teresa Margoles: What Else Could We Talk About? (Barcelona: RM Verlag, 2009), 19–20. 60 Ibid., 23. 61 Ibid., 25. 62 Botey, ‘Toward a Critique of Sacrificial Reason’, 132. 63 Jessica Hemmings, ‘Introduction’, in Jessica Hemmings (ed.), The Textile Reader (London: Berg, 2012), 3. 64 Claire Pajaczkowska, ‘Tension, Time and Tenderness: Indexical Traces of Touch in Textiles’, in Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock (eds), Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 134. 65 Teresa Margolles, ‘Santiago Sierra’, Bomb, issue no. 86 (Winter 2003/4): 64. 66 Marci R. McMahon, Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art (London: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 3. 67 Pajaczkowska, ‘Tension, Time and Tenderness’, 135. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 141. 70 Pajaczkowska, ‘Tension, Time and Tenderness’, 143. 71 Ibid., 141. 72 Ibid., 144. 73 Carroll, ‘Muerte Sin Fin’, 104.



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74 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 14. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. 75 Ibid., xvi. 76 Ibid., 24. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 3. 80 Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33. 81 See Christine Ross, ‘The Paradoxical Bodies of Contemporary Art’, in Amelia Jones (ed.), A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 378–400. 82 Margolles apparently received permission from the young man’s family to use his tongue in this fashion. The artist remunerated the family by paying for the man’s funeral arrangements. For more on the problematic ethics of some of Margolles’s works, see Julia Banwell, ‘Agency and Otherness in Teresa Margolles’s Aesthetic of Death’, Other Modernities, vol. 10, no. 4 (2010): 49; and Carroll, REMEX, 130. 83 For an insightful discussion on the ethical dangers of showing the dead individual in photographs, see Andrea D. Fitzpatrick, ‘Reconsidering the Dead in Andres Serrano’s The Morgue: Identity, Agency, Subjectivity’, RACAR, vol. 33, nos. 1/2 (2008): 28–42. 84 Banwell, Teresa Margolles, 89. 85 Lisa Newman, ‘Blood for Money: The Value of the Bleeding Body in the Performances of Michael Mayhew, Ron Athey, and Teresa Margolles’, Theatre Annual, vol. 66 (2013), 21. 86 Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 33. 87 Janice Helland, ‘Culture, Politics, and Identity in the Paintings of Frida Kahlo’, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds), The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 396–407. 88 See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, [1966] 2001). 89 Baydar, ‘Bedrooms in Excess’, 30. See also Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: I.B. Tauris, [1984] 2010). 90 Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 13–14. 91 Ibid., 15.

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92 According to Halberstam, ‘Gothic, in a way, refers to an ornamental excess (think of Gothic architecture – gargoyles and crazy loops and spirals), a rhetorical extravagance that produces, quite simply, too much.’ Halberstam, Skin Shows, 1. I use the term ‘gothic’ here in relation to Margolles’s works not because of her use of ornamental excess but rather to evoke the sense of ‘too much’ violence and, perhaps, ‘too much’ affect as well.

2

Facing slavery and survival: Lubaina Himid’s overpainted ceramics

We are making ourselves more visible by making positive images of black women, we are reclaiming history, linking national economics with colonialism and racism, with slavery, starvation and lynchings.1

Crafting visibility The transatlantic slave trade was an early form of gore capitalism that resulted in a large African diaspora in Britain and other parts of the world.2 African diasporic artist Lubaina Himid was born in Zanzibar (an island off the east coast of Africa) and currently lives and works in Preston (the UK). Himid won the Turner Prize in 2017, the first Black female artist to do so. Himid’s work often engages with the history of slavery, and scholarship on the artist frequently discusses her interest in textiles.3 Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service (2007) and the Jelly Mould Pavilion projects (2010/17) illuminate the various ways in which ceramic objects have also played a crucial role in her artistic practice.4 Both projects also point to Himid’s interest in everyday objects as symbolic containers for history, emotions and lived experiences, revealing that objects have ‘social lives’. As Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff have shown, objects accumulate layers of often contradictory meanings over time.5 Deborah Cherry notes that in 1989, when Himid’s work The Ballad of the Wing was reassembled at a museum in Stoke-on-Trent in the heart of the pottery-making district of Britain, a specific everyday object, a small brown teapot with a ‘Made in Britain’ label, displayed with a mound of sugar cubes, evoked a ‘commonplace daily activity’, the stirring of sugar into Britain’s so-called ‘national beverage’. But as Cherry notes, situated among a number of other resonant objects, the teapot and sugar ‘came to have a much greater semiotic

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charge, recalling the global trading of peoples and commodities (a sugar trade founded on slavery and the slave trade, an imperial tea trade supported by South Asian plantations)’.6 The substances of colonial trade, including tea, sugar, alcohol, tobacco and opium, have material companions, many of them made out of ceramic: teacups, teapots, sugar containers, glasses, ashtrays and pipes.7 Himid chose some of these material companions for her 2007 series Swallow Hard, a title that references not only the act of eating but also the affective act of ‘swallowing hard’, which has connotations of both fear and sorrow. The title illuminates the historical, physical and affective threads that the work weaves together, and evokes the embodied acts of choking down fear, fighting back tears and being forced to swallow a range of injustices. In fact, the title alludes to the eighteenth-century slave ship Swallow, which was built in Lancaster in 1751.8 For Swallow Hard, Himid appropriated a range of ceramic objects – plates, jugs and tureens – to create an extensive dinner service that subverted the elitism and imperial power of the Judges’ Lodgings in Lancaster, and imbues the objects with decolonial, anti-racist significations. As Jane Beckett has remarked, discussing an earlier work, Himid harnesses the power of an ‘everyday object … both in its true grandeur and oddity and as a form that can condense into itself other associations’.9 In this chapter I argue that Himid employs found ceramic objects that she frequently paints over with images of Black subjects’ faces in order to render the Black subject visible and to battle the wilful blindness to slavery and anti-Black racism in both histories of Britain and the contemporary moment.

Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service (2007) In 2007, to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in Britain (1807), Lancashire Museums commissioned Himid to create a series of works that would unveil the hidden histories of the slave trade and the legacies of colonial violence in Lancaster. Himid’s response to the commission, Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, is comprised of a one hundred-piece dinner service that was temporarily displayed in the Judges’ Lodgings, a Georgian building that was constructed around 1625, making it Lancaster’s oldest townhouse. The townhouse was initially home to Thomas Covell, mayor of Lancaster and ‘notorious witch hunter’.10 Between 1776 and 1972 the building became a residence for judges attending sessions at the Assize Court at nearby Lancaster Castle. The Assize Court heard both civil and criminal cases, but was concerned



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mostly with criminal jurisdiction. The Judges’ Lodgings structure was converted into a museum in 1975. The site therefore has a layered official history of legal, civic and museological uses. Often erased from this official history is the central role that slavery played in Lancaster’s socioeconomic fabric during the first two hundred years of the building’s existence. According to Celeste-Marie Bernier, with Swallow Hard, Himid was interrogating Britain’s attempts to eradicate the memory of transatlantic slavery by celebrating hagiographical histories of white abolitionism. A determination to memorialize parliamentary emancipatory legislation at the start of the twenty-first century colluded with white willful national amnesia by working to obscure, cover up, sanitize, and invisibilize histories not only of European slaveholding but of African diasporic artistry and activism.11

For her 2007 installation, Himid purchased all of the ceramic objects herself in Lancaster, Whitehaven and Preston. Employing found ceramics – some, especially the nineteenth-century jugs, are of high quality, while most of the small plates are twentieth-century rubbish – Himid engaged in critical acts of what she calls ‘overpainting’, creating domestic objects that now have literal and figurative layers of histories, representations and ownership. The domestic objects that Himid curated for the project included plates, jugs and tureens, and her paintings on the ceramics depict buildings, maps and ships, as well as white aristocrats and Black slaves. In what follows I focus on Himid’s ceramic objects that represent white and Black subjects, in order to theorize the political, decolonial and art historical work that Himid is enacting through her appropriated ceramic objects. Because she deliberately represents white bodies and Black faces (rather than Black bodies), I want to investigate the ways that Himid avoids, in her words, ‘repeat[ing] the trauma’. I argue that in overpainting Black faces on objects associated with trade, cross-cultural exchange and otherness (in the British context ceramics, even when made in the Netherlands, were associated with the ‘exotic’ East12), Himid is not simply making the ‘invisible visible’ as some scholars have argued, she is very deliberately representing the Black face – the site of identity, subjectivity, interiority and intellect in Western culture and Western portraiture – as a sign of survival and resilience (Figure 2.1). In her book Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (2012), Catherine Molineux explores the ways that the representation of Black subjects buttressed British imperialism and white British identity. Being well-versed in this history, Himid superimposes the Black face on

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Figure 2.1  Lubaina Himid, detail from Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007. Photograph: Judges Lodgings, Lancaster.

found, previously used ceramics to create a material palimpsest that rejects the erasure of Black subjectivity and Black identity through both discursive and material violence. With Swallow Hard, Himid critiqued British imperialism, ongoing anti-Black racism and the problematics of public institutions such as the museum from inside the house, or more precisely, from inside the Judges’ Lodgings. Swallow Hard materially exists, and indeed functions, as one of the many steps that Himid has taken and continues to take towards dismantling the ‘master’s house’.13 The fact that Himid chose to critically engage with ceramic objects is not surprising, given the transnational trade of ceramics that paralleled and intersected with the transatlantic slave trade. Some of the found ceramics are decorated with the ‘blue willow’ transfer ware design, as noted by Bernier. She quotes Joseph J. Portanova, who has written, ‘The Willow Pattern is an image produced by British engravers in the late eighteenth century and derived from Chinese models. It is at best an imitation or distillation, at worst a distortion of Chinese culture.’14 Bernier adds, ‘Himid found this exceptionally popular



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and mass-produced design ideally suited to her interrogation of white British imperialism and racism on the grounds that it is itself steeped in racist fictions of another culture.’15 In a related vein, ceramic scholar Stacey Sloboda has observed, Merchants and their cultural and political allies were among the chief supporters of imperialist policies, and they were also the group responsible for introducing and circulating the commodities that made imperialism acceptable and appealing to a wider British public. Chinoiserie was an important part of this process. … [O]‌bjects from imperial trade were frequently used as an indicator of taste and politeness. That this use is in complete contradiction to some of the previously discussed critical stances on chinoiserie as a signifier of vulgarity, effeminacy, and foreign excess points to the high degree of semiotic malleability of such objects, whose meanings were highly dependent on context.16

In Swallow Hard, Himid exploits the ongoing ‘semiotic malleability’ of ceramic objects, appropriating them in order to enact a decolonial project that encompasses slavery, anti-Black racism, representation, British art history and the museum as an institution that can both harm and provide opportunities for self-critique. Himid herself describes Swallow Hard as an intervention into the museum space. Scholars such as Moira Vincentelli have noted that women have long been associated with ceramics, in part because of the gendered, domestic significations of porcelain, and ‘women’s association with fine china’ has been discursively used to ‘define femininity by the consumption and care of pretty objects’.17 Vincentelli’s assertion is complicated by the fact that her statement and many studies of ceramics are concerned exclusively with white upper-class women as consumers. In Swallow Hard, Himid centres the Black collector and Black subject by not only overpainting Black men and women’s faces on ceramic objects but also calling attention to the process of finding, appropriating and transforming these domestic objects as a Black feminist artist. Significantly, the Black subjects depicted on the ceramics are clothed in ‘African patterned’ textiles.18 This artistic gesture functions to position African art and clothing as a sign of cultural identity, and also points to Himid’s celebration of African textiles in the contemporary context as evidence of cultural survival. As Bernier has remarked, Himid ‘unflinchingly names and shames the white racist injustices perpetuated against Black bodies that have been invisibilized as sites of unspeakable and unseeable atrocities in a white racist imaginary’.19 Swallow Hard was the result of Himid psychologically and affectively wrestling with Lancaster’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and its racist ripple

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Figure 2.2  Lubaina Himid, detail from the installation Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007. Photograph: Judges Lodgings, Lancaster.

effects on the city. The Judges’ Lodgings Museum in Lancaster was chosen as the highly symbolic site for the installation, and many of the ceramics were displayed on the Gillow mahogany dining room table, constructing an imaginary dinner party (Figure 2.2). Robert Gillow began making furniture around 1727, and the company catered to the upper middle classes and the landed gentry. Not surprisingly, mahogany played an important role in the establishment, development and subsequent abolition of the slave trade. In Himid’s own words, ‘the main dining room display [of Swallow Hard] covered every inch of an eighteen-foot Caribbean mahogany table made by Gillow, the famous Lancaster furniture maker-slave-ship owner’.20 In the Judges’ Lodgings Museum, the Gillow furniture was displayed in Regency period place settings. The long, oval table was located in a room with portraits and landscape paintings hung on the white walls. Inevitably, then, the overpainted ceramic objects were in dialogue with the oil paintings, addressing not only issues of race, class and gender but also the art/craft hierarchy, and the perceived differences between paintings that hang on the wall and ‘craft’ objects that are usually thought of as functional, or



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displayed as ‘lesser’ objects that are not the stuff of ‘radical originality’ but are rather associated with usefulness, manual (not intellectual) skill and ‘adherence to traditional form’.21 The Swallow Hard installation was separated into two parts. In the kitchen, ceramic objects were placed on the sideboard, mantelpiece and windowsills.22 The kitchen has obvious connotations of labour (both paid and unpaid), sweat, domesticity, femininity and servitude. The dining room, on the other hand, is a domestic space associated with eating, conversation, laughter, masculinity and (homo-)sociality, and with Swallow Hard the dining room of the Judges’ Lodgings was transformed into an exhibition space for ceramic objects of various qualities that Himid overpainted with images of buildings, white traders, slave ships, Black servant-slaves, plants, maps and trade goods. As Bernier has written in her book Stick to the Skin (2019), a comparative study of contemporary African American and Black British art, Clearly, a whole world of unwritten and unimaged African diasporic experience lies behind euphemistic seventeenth- and eighteenth-century references to Black women and men as ‘servants’ rather than enslaved property. Any in-depth examination of the eighteenth-century British aristocratic portrait trade in Black women, men, and children confirm their subjection to systems of stereotyping, marginalization, and commodification.23

While all of Himid’s overpainted images were strategically chosen and could be analysed at length, I wish to focus on the representations of white and Black human subjects because of the major role that portraiture has played in crafting the binary of white subject and Black ‘object’.24 Bernier has stated, building on Catherine Molineux’s work, ‘As [Molineux] argues, and as the visual archive confirms, “imperial mastery” and “imperial violence” went hand in hand, enacting physical, psychological, social, historical, and political abuses on Black bodies, histories and memories in official archives and art historical records.’25 According to Himid, ‘there are … hidden texts inside the tureens and jugs giving the names of the slave servants painted on the outside. No one ever sees these at all.’26 These hidden texts demand an active, physical engagement with the ceramic objects. This strategy of naming the Black subjects and simultaneously concealing their names relates to Himid’s belief in the importance of names that is underscored by her installation of one hundred monumental cut-out Black figures, Naming the Money (2004), as well as her 2017 exhibition Naming the Un-named.27 As Jean Rhys wrote in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, ‘names matter’, and Himid knows this to be true for people of colour both living and

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dead.28 Wide Sargasso Sea is the retelling of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre (which was initially published under the name Currer Bell) from the perspective of Rochester’s first wife, Antoinette, a Creole heiress from the West Indies. In Brontë’s novel the wife is a mad woman in the attic, faceless and voiceless. Rochester calls her ‘Bertha’, but in Rhys’s novel the ‘mad wife’ states that Rochester refused to call her Antoinette, an act of discursive violence that erased her subjectivity and agency. Antoinette’s wealth has resulted from the unpaid labour of slaves, so she is complicit in the system of gore capitalism that Himid critically illuminates in her work. Literary scholar Andrea Ashworth notes how Antoinette’s story is a retelling of her own life. The character observes at one point, ‘There is always the other side’, as ‘a web of devastating tales about her family, her race, her sexuality, her sanity, her self, is woven about her’.29 Himid’s body of work is dedicated to telling the ‘other side’ of Britain’s history in order to centre the lives and subjectivities of African slaves and Black subjects, and she is hyper-aware of how slavery has left an indelible mark on Britain and on the Black individuals who live there in this historical moment. Himid has remarked that she chose to paint Black faces on jugs and tureens, rather than on plates, because the jugs signify containment, and therefore a kind of protection, rather than confinement or imprisonment. As she told Jane Beckett, ‘The White [subject] is there to be covered in food and eaten off; is painted on plates. [The] Black [subject] is there to contain; is painted on jugs and tureens.’30 There is ambiguity in Himid’s statement: Are the Black subjects depicted in this way in order to signify their containment, and their buttressing, of white ‘masters’, or is the containment offered by the tureens for them? Does the containment that Himid alludes to allow for a safety that slaves were not permitted? Himid clarifies her intention when she states, ‘You could not eat off the ceramics with black people’s faces; they are “contained” rather than displayed.’31 She added to this point in 2014 when she remarked that no Black faces appear on plates in the installation, which was ‘a deliberate protective measure to ensure “that we are never covering them with food or the smears of leftovers” ’.32 In Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (2000), Judy Attfield examines the concept of containment through the lens of ‘the ecology of personal possessions’. She explores ‘the figure of “containment” as the embodiment of both order and clutter, contextualised in the place and space of the home – one of the most ubiquitous physical manifestations of sociality and one of the few geographical areas over which individuals have some measure of control, however circumscribed’.33 Himid has referred to African diasporic art practice existing despite ‘cramped living conditions’,34 and of course the home



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is a complicated space in the context of slavery, being severely circumscribed and not necessarily a place of safety. For Black female slaves the white home was a place not of rest but of unpaid labour and possible violence and sexual violation. As art historian Charmaine Nelson reminds us, ‘Within Trans Atlantic Slavery, to be invisible to one’s master or mistress could signal deprivation and lack in terms of food, clothing, housing and other necessities of life.’ She adds, ‘at the same time, to be the visual target of white mastery meant the threat of exploitation, vengeance, abuse, torture or execution’.35 Many slavery scholars have pointed to the rampant abuse of Black female slaves in a range of global contexts; having homes did not prevent these abuses, and as Cora Kaplan has shown, Mary Prince’s slave narrative, The History of Mary Prince (1831), was remarkable because it ‘situates the abuse of slavery in Britain itself, dramatically reducing for its readers geopolitical and emotional distance between the metropole and slave colony, locating slavery’s refugees and their problems at empire’s own doorstep’.36 One of these imperial doorsteps led up to the Judges’ Lodgings in Lancaster. This space was historically associated with power and wealth, occupied by white British men, many of whom contributed to and benefited from the slave trade in various ways. The issue of containment, then, when considered in relation to the home on the one hand and in relation to Himid’s work and slavery on the other, shows that containment can certainly mean order and control, as Attfield notes, but it can also signify danger and violence. Domestic space is not always safe space, but with her tureens with Black faces painted on them, Himid offers a scenario where the Black subject is not consumed or exploited, but is rather an individual with a face and a name, as a space of greater safety. Himid has commented, ‘On every tureen the faces of the unknown and unnamed black slave servants ask to be remembered.’37 The ‘faciality’ of Himid’s ceramic, domestic objects depicting Black subjects is in deliberate opposition to the problematic hypervisibility (and perceived hyper-exploitability) of the Black body in Western culture and Western art, as discussed by art historians such as Marcus Wood and Charmaine Nelson.38 Kimberly Juanita Brown has explored the ‘generational lineage of black pain, literally “written on the back” of black female subjectivity’.39 Likewise, Christina Sharpe has theorized ‘monstrous intimacies’ as those insidious ‘horrors enacted on the black body’, those ‘known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, circulated, and transmitted, that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous’.40 I want to suggest that, drawing on traditions of portraiture and other forms of Western art, Himid is asserting

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that the Black face can challenge the white viewer in a way that the represented Black body cannot because of its histories of commodification, exploitation and fragmentation. In their strange book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (1987), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write, Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in two, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels.41

If we complicate the authors’ normalization of the white face as that which is the exterior to a person who speaks, thinks and feels, we can draw on their text to engage critically with how the face signifies holistic subjectivity in art and culture: that is, a face signifies a person who speaks, thinks and feels; a subject who exists in the world linguistically, psychologically and affectively. As is so often the case, here, whiteness is the norm, and race is not named but rather assumed to be a privileged non-race. Himid’s Black faces look back at the viewer, and demand acknowledgement as beings who speak, think and feel. Later in the same text, Deleuze and Guattari observe that ‘the face is a horror story’.42 Although there are many contexts in which this statement is sadly apt, the context of transatlantic slavery is certainly one of them. But rather than representing her Black subjects as suffering, wounded or dead, Himid chooses instead to depict them as alive, or as alive as a face on a jug could be said to be. This strategy of refusing to repeat the image of the suffering Black body is a thread that runs throughout Himid’s body of work, including the Jelly Mould Pavilion, which I discuss later in this chapter, and this refusal performs important discursive acts that contribute to the visual culture of the living, thriving Black subject. Turning to Himid’s representations of white subjects painted on ceramic plates, it becomes quickly apparent that here Himid is not concerned with crafting holistic subjectivity, which has rarely been denied to white upper-class men. Rather, she is drawing on eighteenth-century British artworks – satirical and otherwise – in order to lampoon the white male Briton who has had so much power for so long. One of Himid’s plates depicts a white man projectile vomiting (Figure 2.3). As Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah Durkin observe regarding a related plate, ‘Himid’s lavishly dressed and grotesquely caricatural eighteenth-century white male figure vomits yellow debris – symbolically



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Figure 2.3  Lubaina Himid, Vomiting Toff from Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service, 2007. Photograph: Judges Lodgings, Lancaster.

suggestive not only of shackles but of monetary currency in gold coins – directly above her caption, which reads, “SICKENED BY ABOLITION”.’43 Vomiting Toff clearly references eighteenth-century graphic satire by James Gillray and possibly also William Hogarth’s remarkable portrait Francis Matthew Schutz in His Bed (c. 1755–60), which portrays the third cousin of Frederick, Prince of Wales, in a sumptuous bed vomiting into a chamber pot (Figure 2.4; Norfolk Museum Services).44 Significantly, the painting was at some point overpainted to make it look like Schutz was innocently reading a newspaper. When the painting was acquired by Norwich Castle in 1990, extensive analysis was undertaken, and two sets of retouches were discovered; one dated from the first half of the nineteenth century and the other was from the early twentieth century. Significant overpainting of the central area had been carried out around the mid-nineteenth century. When the painting was cleaned and the overpainting removed, it was revealed that Hogarth had originally depicted Schutz vomiting, rather than reading a periodical. A nineteenth-century label on the back of the painting informs the viewer that Schutz’s wife Susan, who had become tired

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Figure 2.4  William Hogarth, Francis Matthew Schutz in His Bed, c. 1755–60. Oil on canvas. Norfolk Museums Service.

of her husband’s ‘vice of intemperance’ and ‘under the hope of reforming him’, had commissioned Hogarth to paint him suffering from the consequences of over-consumption. The label also tells us that Schutz’s nineteenth-century descendants thought the painting was ‘disrespectful to his memory’, so they had the work overpainted. While the unknown nineteenth-century artist attempted to change history with a few strokes of the brush, Himid’s overpainting shows us that while the material events of history cannot be changed, paint can be employed to both critique and unveil white supremacy and to provide new ways of thinking about the past as well as the future. Nonetheless, if we consider the materiality of these ceramic objects – their fragility, their tendency to break if handled roughly – we are reminded, surely, that the Black faces that cover the jugs and tureens are easily breakable, just like human skin. In this work, a broken ceramic object is also a broken face, if not a broken body, and a slightly different reading of the work than is usually offered points up the thin line between wholeness and fragmentation; this line is corporeal and temporal, psychological and affective, material and metaphorical.



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Himid demonstrates that while her overpainting is a political act related to giving Black subjects agency and subjectivity, the ceramic objects that she has very deliberately chosen to paint illuminate the ongoing vulnerability of Black subjects in Britain to anti-Black racism and violence, both discursive and material. As the epigraph for this chapter suggests, her works draw a direct line between this contemporary violence and the historical slave trade.

Jelly Mould Pavilion (2010/17) According to Bernier and Durkin, ‘Himid asks a powerful question that remains unanswered in histories of African diasporic visual arts practices: can an active harnessing of the everyday through the gathering and re-using of ordinary things actually make a difference to how audiences relate to artworks about the legacy of transatlantic slavery and Black women’s lives?’45 It is worth underscoring the fact that Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilion installation (2010) and public artwork of that same title (2017) are based on an everyday object, namely the jelly mould, a ceramic container that is filled in order to mould a soft, gelatinous food for consumption. The object signifies both cooking and craft, traditional domains of ‘women’s work’, and Himid’s choice of this particular object recalls the political employment of craft materials by other Black feminist artists such as Faith Ringgold, ‘a painter who works in the quilt medium’.46 When the jelly is finished, the mould is emptied out. There is space here, I suggest, to consider the mould in both material and metaphorical terms in order to illuminate the political work that Himid is setting out to do with this project, both in Liverpool (2010) and in Folkestone (2017). In his book on British maritime visual culture, Geoff Quilley asserts, ‘owing to the selective and extempore nature of collective memory, surrogation “rarely if ever succeeds”, and it involves instead the failure, suppression, translation and attempted erasure of memory. Cultural self-definition through the appeal to collective memory is necessarily founded upon forgetting’.47 Surrogation – a psychological phenomenon that involves one idea or construct evolving to replace the original idea or construct – seems to offer a productive way of reading Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilion as empty containers that are intended to fill lacunae in collective memory but without the certainty of success. As I will argue, the public art iteration of Jelly Mould Pavilion in Folkstone (2017) and its reception also reveal the role that failure plays, paradoxically, in illuminating the importance and urgency of Himid’s memory project. In a later section of this chapter I discuss the full-scale pavilion

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built on the Folkestone beach, arguing that it ultimately fails to create a new collective memory of slavery. However, the project’s afterlife as a digital image and, more precisely, some of the comments that have been written online about the pavilion’s (perceived) failure rip the veil away from the willed blindness that is ongoing in Britain when it comes to slavery and the slave trade that was carried out on Liverpool’s docks and Folkestone’s beaches. Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilion haunts the British collective consciousness, and as Deborah Cherry succinctly puts it, ‘Haunting is … a spatial practice. Ghosts haunt places.’48

Monuments and memory In much of her work, Himid is concerned with the ways that national monuments in public spaces construct and concretize history. Himid has created a range of works dealing with the legacies of slavery and the official histories of the UK that erase the suffering, as well as the triumphs, of Black individuals. Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilion was originally a collaboration with the Liverpool Museums Service (2010). The project was an imagined competition among African architects to commemorate the contributions of people of the African diaspora to Liverpool. Slavery scholar Marcus Wood notes that by 1750, Liverpool was moving ‘towards world domination of the Atlantic slave trade’.49 Like other port cities in Britain, Liverpool has its own specific history of slavery, which Himid was critically engaging with when she developed the jelly mould project. A full-scale version of the Jelly Mould Pavilion was built in 2017 as a temporary work of public art for the Folkestone Triennial.50 The pavilion was situated on the beach in the port town of Folkestone, which, like Liverpool, played a specific role in the transatlantic slave trade. The site, then, is a crucial part of the jelly mould pavilion’s intended impact. In what follows I discuss the shifting significations of the Jelly Mould Pavilion as it transitioned from an imagined competition to an in situ work of public art, and I argue that online comments about the 2017 Jelly Mould Pavilion demonstrate a troubling combination of sexism and wilful ‘historical amnesia’ in relation to Britain’s complicity in the transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on Rosalyn Deutsche’s scholarship regarding public art and spatial politics, I want to suggest that Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilion and its digital afterlife illuminate the problematics of trying to cater to ‘too many’ publics at once by creating a ‘soft’ work when what is called for is a difficult one. As Jennifer Doyle reminds us in Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013), ‘Usually the critic’s mandate is to resolve difficulty when we encounter it,



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to write as if that difficulty doesn’t exist for us, even as we produce that difficulty as a noble, productive challenge, worth confronting and working through.’ She goes on to propose that rather than erasing the labour of interpretation and instead of writing as if the critic’s or art historian’s aim is to resolve difficulty, scholars might show why difficulty is important, ‘especially where [it] can’t be resolved’.51 Alan Rice has noted the impossibility of achieving closure with what he believes are successful works of public art created to memorialize African slaves. He contends ‘that the most effective memorials are testament to [a]‌futuredirected vision which refuses the conservative (and often state-sponsored) desire for a politically reactionary closure and looks to ask far more multidirectional questions than it supplies didactic answers’.52 When I suggest that the Folkestone pavilion is ‘soft’ I do not intend it as a critique of Himid’s work itself but rather as a nod to the difficulties that artists producing political public art face given the fact that there is no monolithic public but rather a range of publics interacting with any given work of public art. The fact that the Jelly Mould Pavilion was intended as a comment on Folkestone’s history of slave trading complicates this fact even more, as white viewers likely had very different responses to the piece than Black viewers. Himid’s own words about the pavilion in a YouTube video also underscore the difficulties of an artist attempting to produce political public art while also (perhaps) trying not to rock the boat too intensely. Lastly, there is the problem faced by much public art, namely the lack of contextual information with which to read the work as political. Based on what I have read and viewed, there does not seem to have been any label or other mode of knowledge circulation explaining the historical background behind the pavilion. As a work of public art, without this information, it becomes ‘simply’ a shelter from the sun, an innocent, apolitical seat on the beach with a view of the sea. Not insignificantly, Miwon Kwon has pointed to shelter-as-shade and seating as two ‘uses’ that have typically been identified with the art-as-public-spaces model of public art, ‘which function as street furniture, architectural constructions, or landscaped environments’. This model contrasts with the art-in-the-public-interest model (though the two models are not necessarily mutually exclusive), which ‘are distinguished for foregrounding social issues and political activism, and/or for engaging “community” collaborations’.53 I suggest that Himid’s Folkestone pavilion was intended as art-in-the-public-interest, but ultimately fits more comfortably in the art-as-public-spaces category. As Jane Beckett has observed, the sea has long been central in Himid’s artistic practice, including her early paintings produced during an artist’s residency at

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St Ives.54 According to Himid, the sea has various levels of meaning for her, not the least of which is its relationship to the transatlantic slave trade. She remarks that the sea, for her, signifies the drowning of slaves, a regular occurrence most famously captured in J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon Coming On (1840, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). It goes without saying that Himid’s 2017 Jelly Mould Pavilion is a site-specific work and that the sea is very much part of the work and, indeed, the work it sets out to do. I am not convinced that the work successfully does what Himid intended to do, but the ‘social life’ of the project, which includes its digital afterlife, does something critical: it shows how much work there is still left to be done in terms of bringing visibility to Black individuals who suffered during and because of the transatlantic slave trade.

Himid’s spatial politics Deutsche has demonstrated the challenges of producing public art, focusing on the American context. Still, her work is valuable for engaging critically with terms such as ‘public’ that are often taken for granted in discussions about public art. In her important book Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (1996), Deutsche remarks that ‘Exclusions are justified, naturalized, and hidden by representing social space as a substantial unity that must be protected from conflict, heterogeneity, and particularity.’ She goes on to add that her book ‘takes account of specific exclusions in urban-aesthetic discourses to expose the authoritarian strategies that construct unitary images of social space. In the end, I contend that conflict, far from the ruin of democratic public space, is the condition of its existence’.55 Building on Deutsche’s arguments, I want to suggest that in working with ‘official’ institutions in Liverpool and Folkestone – museums and the Folkestone Triennial, respectively – Himid had to negotiate her desire to illuminate the exclusions related to slavery in the official histories of Britain, while making her project ‘palatable’ to a range of publics, some of which are still resistant to seeing the histories that Himid is attempting to excavate. I propose that while the Liverpool iteration of the Jelly Mould Pavilion project is successful in intervening in a range of spaces and demanding mobility and engagement from her audiences, the Folkestone pavilion lacks the critical element of ‘conflict’ that Deutsche calls for in her book. The Liverpool pavilion project was developed with ‘expectations of addressing a much larger and broader audience’56 than would normally enter Liverpool’s slavery museum.



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As I will show, Himid seems to have felt that she needed to consider multiple publics with her Folkestone pavilion, perhaps because of the site chosen – a former amusement and entertainment area – but also in the context of the Folkestone Triennial. The Folkestone pavilion is wordless and silent in a way that the Liverpool jelly mould project was not, and this silence allowed for continued blindness to Britain’s participation in the slave trade. A Twitter comment, written on 2 September 2017 in response to Simon Martin’s tweet regarding ‘Lubaina Himid’s wonderful Jelly Mould Pavilion – a subtle meditation on the history of colonialism and sugar plantations’, points to a desire to read the pavilion as a site of love rather than mourning. The commentator wrote, ‘It’s beautiful. I get the message but is [sic] also makes me think of a little wedding chapel. The world could do with a little love right now.’57 As Deutsche reminds us, Henri Lefebvre’s phrase ‘the production of space’ signifies the fact that ‘the organization of the city and of space in general is neither natural nor uniformly advantageous. Space is, rather, political, inseparable from the conflictual and uneven social relations that structure specific societies at specific historical moments.’58 This was certainly true for Liverpool during the transatlantic slave trade, and one of the strengths of Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilion project in Liverpool is that it showed how space continues to be produced differently for people based on race, class and gender. To quote Deutsche once more, public art that is successfully ‘radical’ must ‘employ spatial tactics developed in postmodern art – site-specificity, institutional critique, critiques of representation – to reveal the social relations that constitute both aesthetic and urban spaces’.59

Liverpool According to Marcus Wood, If the memory of slavery inhabits one location in Britain it is Liverpool. By the early nineteenth century the physical presence of the city itself was configured by Fuseli as a metropolis composed of blood and chains: ‘the principal streets of the town may be said to have been marked out by the chains, and the walls of the houses cemented by the blood of Africans!’60

Wood also notes that it was because of Liverpool’s domination of the British slave trade that the Liverpool docklands were seen as the most fitting site for the second English slavery museum, the Transatlantic Slavery gallery of the Museums and Galleries of Merseyside. The gallery opened in 1992.61

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Eighteen years later, Himid collaborated with the Liverpool Museums organization to display a set of jelly mould pavilion maquettes (ceramic jelly moulds placed on their sides and painted with patterns and Black figures) throughout the city (Figure 2.4). As with Swallow Hard, Himid only painted Black subjects’ faces on the flat base of the moulds. In a conversation with Jane Beckett, which was published in Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (2013), Himid described the project as thirty or so nineteenth-century ceramic sweet jelly moulds painted on the outside, with African patterns and portraits of African men and women, [that] sit on a long table as maquettes for a potential public monument. Each is surrounded by tiny figures to help a sense of scale. Around the walls of the room, which looks out over the Mersey, are photographs, drawings and prints depicting the city of Liverpool with a range of these jelly mould pavilions, dotted about in their potential locations. Several more jelly moulds located in other sites across the museums service and across the city are the outriders, each on a simple plinth presented as part of the competition to decide on a temporary decorative space to commemorate the contribution of several generations of Africans to the health, wealth and architectural splendor of the city.62

The maquettes, which were made from Victorian ceramic jelly moulds that Himid had collected over many years, first appeared in Liverpool in six locations, including the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Lady Lever Art Gallery and Sudley House in 2010. Many of the empty jelly moulds are overpainted with Black faces, rather than Black bodies, thus enacting a similar symbolic gesture as the jugs and tureens in Swallow Hard. The empty containers signify containment, and thus protection, for Himid’s imagined Black subjects, and the emptiness of the moulds also evokes the act of filling voids and lacunae (in history books, in the British popular imagination) with histories that centre the Black subject, rather than erasing them completely or depicting them as abject suffering objects. These ceramic objects, then, can be read using Quilley’s theoretical framework of surrogation: the empty containers create new ideas about Black subjects that can potentially replace old ideas and beliefs. The pavilions were on display in Liverpool from 27 March 2010 until 6 June 2010. Eventually, there were thirty maquettes on display around the city. The project was then displayed at the Leeds Art Gallery in 2011 after Himid had received the Northern Art Prize (People’s Choice). The maquettes of ‘proposed’ jelly mould pavilions that were displayed throughout Liverpool effectively created a public art ‘trail’, a kind of public intervention that Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace



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discusses in her examination of the efficacy of Slave Trails for the rewriting of histories in slave ports with special reference to Bristol. Her investigation of such ‘embodied practices for understanding history’ as ‘present day walkers evoke absent historical players’63 is relevant for the Liverpool Jelly Mould Pavilion competition. According to Kowaleski-Wallace, Through their dialogue with the ghosts of the past, walkers can also be seen as performers. … As walkers traverse modern city streets, they participate in the making of another historical reality … then walkers move toward an alternative political reality, one in which they both recognise the need for redress and become aware of the need for social action.64

In Liverpool, viewers of the jelly mould pavilions became active participants: mobile and mobilized. Viewers were invited to imagine which pavilion they ‘might choose to celebrate the contribution made by people of the black diaspora to the fabulously rich cacophony of vistas and the amazing wealth at the heart of Liverpool’s history’. The project was not a planned tour of Liverpool (though it was described as a ‘city-wide trail’) but more like a treasure hunt. A long list of ‘official’ sites in Liverpool were provided online as possible locations for the pavilions; these included Albert Dock, Blackburn House Car Park, Otterspool Promenade and Lime Street Station. Viewer-participants had to be willing to walk around the city and actively look for the pavilions. A further layer of the project demanded that participants choose their favourite pavilion, while imagining ‘a competition with entries by architects from 52 African countries including Tanzania, Mali, Nigeria Senegal and Mozambique, all commissioned to design a Pavilion for Liverpool’. So unlike a ‘Slavery Trail’, as discussed by Kowaleski-Wallace, this was a project highlighting the often hidden contributions made to the ‘history, culture and rich fabric’ of Liverpool by people of the African diaspora. With this walking of a ‘memorial landscape’,65 there was also serious yet playful attention paid to the present and future of the Black diaspora in Britain.

Folkstone A full-scale version of a jelly mould pavilion was commissioned for the Folkestone Triennial in 2017, and it was built as a temporary, ephemeral structure on the beach. The physical site was important, and Himid has noted as much, given Folkestone’s status as a port town; because of its location, Folkestone played a major role in the British slave trade and the trade of products produced by

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African slaves. The fact that the pavilion was built on the beach – usually a site associated with leisure, at least for certain groups of people – also recalls Rosalyn Deutsche’s assertion that ‘the organization of the city and of space in general is neither natural nor uniformly advantageous’.66 For some the beach signifies leisure; for others the beach was a site of enslavement, fear and death. Other than the size and the site, the primary difference between the Liverpool moulds and the Folkestone pavilion is that the latter has no overpainted images of Black subjects’ faces. After the pavilion was constructed with materials such as metal and foam – a physically arduous task – it was transported to Himid’s Preston studio where she painted the outside and inside of the mould using pastel colours such as pink and turquoise. The imagery on the exterior of the pavilion’s upper part may be conch shells, which Himid has depicted in other works; the artist told Celeste-Marie Bernier that conch shells have a great deal of symbolic power, as they were used to buy African slaves.67 The conch shell also has negative space at its centre, and so may signify absence and emptiness, a repeated void that could be symbolic of the historical amnesia in Britain when it comes to slavery. Both the jelly mould and the shapes on the pavilion’s exterior are empty spaces that can be filled and re-filled. In a two-minute YouTube video, Himid discusses the Folkestone pavilion, stating: it has many layers: it’s a place to contemplate … it’s a place to shelter; but it’s a place also that reminds you of other beaches, other beaches where Africans were held before they were shipped; it’s a place where refugees arrive; going from one place to another; to Europe. But it’s also a reminder for people in Folkestone of an old fairground that was here. And I suppose a kind of nostalgic look at childhood: too many sweets and just having a good time on the beach.

This is something of a gloss of the work; in interviews, Himid is usually vocal about not only the suffering of slaves but also the ongoing marginalization of Black female artists in Britain.68 Her comments in the video point to the problem of addressing multiple publics: to acknowledge and bring attention to the difficult histories of Britain, while at the same time catering to those viewers – both locals and tourists – who just want to have a nice day at the beach and not be faced with other people’s suffering. The pavilion is located near the Folkestone boardwalk and looks out over the former ‘Rotunda’ site, which was until recently filled with amusement arcades and a roller coaster, and where the sugar of cotton candy was an everyday substance of consumption. Charmaine Nelson has noted the importance of Black female slave labour in the production of sugar:



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The engine of much of tropical plantation slavery … was monocrop agricultural production fuelled by the labour of mainly black male and female slaves. … [research] on women fieldworkers in Jamaica has revealed, ‘In 1832, sugar employed 49.5 per cent of the slave work force. The majority of those workers were women, the ratio being 920 males to 1,000 females.’69

Although there are no Black bodies depicted in or on Folkestone’s Jelly Mould Pavilion, the public art work is haunted by the ghosts of African slaves, both male and female, who produced sugar for Britain through unpaid labour and who experienced extreme forms of suffering and exploitation.70 As I previously argued about Swallow Hard, the lack of represented Black bodies is notable given the hypervisibility of the slave body in historical visual culture, and the ‘repeating [slave] body’ in contemporary visual culture.71 I have to wonder, however, how the Jelly Mould Pavilion in Folkestone would have hit viewers if Himid had depicted the face of a Black subject on the interior of the pavilion. The reception of Himid’s pavilion says a great deal about the current state of Britain’s collective consciousness when it comes to race. Skye Sherwin wrote in her Folkestone Triennial review published in the Guardian, Folkestone’s dramatic landscape and mottled past make it a one-off, and the triennial will always be hardwired to its setting. Yet it’s difficult not to yearn for the odd moment when the show might go off-message with work that puts art before local context, confident that the audience will be game enough to follow. That’s not to say this year doesn’t have its share of unexpected delights, such as in the 18th-century Baptist graveyard where composer Emily Peasgood’s song recordings commemorate its dead. Or Turner prize nominee Lubaina Himid’s pavilion on the shingle in the shape of a vintage jelly mould. With its milkshake pink and white diamond decor a lightly worn reference to sugar and the slave trade, its pleasures are bittersweet.72

I would counter, however, that this is exactly the problem with Himid’s Folkestone pavilion: it does not challenge its viewers, and its sickly sweet colour scheme suggests a tentativeness that is unusual in Himid’s work. The reference to sugar and the slave trade is ‘lightly worn’ if it’s perceived at all, pointing to the problematic of creating political public art that is meant to be gentle rather than probing. In an article about sugar and blood in the context of slavery, Carl Pasa writes, ‘Even in death, the slave continues to meddle and disrupt, leading a strange and troubling afterlife.’73 In the final section of this chapter, I contend that the digital afterlife of Himid’s pavilion reveals the ongoing resistance to

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acknowledging Britain’s complicity in the transatlantic slave trade, and thus the importance of Himid’s body of work.

Conclusion: A tangled web – The pavilion’s digital afterlife The internet is notoriously the domain of racist trolls. Reading only a few comments posted about Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilion proves this to be the case. The fact that Himid is a Black woman who won the Turner Prize in 2017, soon after the Jelly Mould Pavilion was constructed in Folkestone, is inextricably tied with the apparently poisonous feelings that some commentators have had in response to the pavilion. Jennifer Doyle notes, The work of defending artists against accusations launched by people who hate the idea of the work (or of the queer, feminist, antiracist, migrant artist) has derailed us into declaring that their work has no real-world impact. Most of our defenses of these practices minimize the challenge of these works and the anger that the work can provoke. But we’ve been shown again and again that this kind of response to the discourse of controversy does nothing to quell scandal, to calm the nerves of extremists and reactionary politicians. If anything, we bear our throats with the exclamation ‘But it’s only art’.74

Rather than defending Himid’s pavilion as being ‘only art’, I want to show how the work’s digital afterlife has continued to do important critical work by inspiring at least a few trolls to reveal their true colours; that is, the pavilion, even without a didactic label, rooted out some individuals’ sexism and racism and unwillingness to deal with Britain’s unsavoury history as a country that traded human beings. Without the internet’s many comment sections, we would not have the following empirical evidence of ongoing willed amnesia, bigotry and loathing of political public art. In the comments section for a YouTube video of employees at Aden Hynes Sculpture Studios painstakingly building the Jelly Mould Pavilion in their studio and then constructing it on the Folkestone beach, one commentator wrote, ‘Ha ha. Woman “creates” something amazing. Men completely make and install structure. Woman then takes complete recognition. MGTOW is Freedom!’75 It is worth noting that one of the designers at the Aden Hynes Sculpture Studios was a woman, and Google has informed me that MGTOW stands for ‘Men Going Their Own Way’, a group likely associated with the so-called ‘Men’s Rights Movement’. Another commentator wrote,



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Sorry guys this isn’t a sculpture … It’s Architecture. It has a function, it’s functional like a spoon or toilet. No matter the beauty, how conceptual or socially significant. It’s just not a piece of Art. It’s [sic] function here appears to be lecturing us and society on so-called historical injustice, aimed primarily at your average white guy. Note the ones lecturing us only go so far back in history and context, then it stops. If they went farther back, everyone would be indicted, not just European males, and we can’t have that can we? For history is made up of many winners and losers, and the guilt you are made to feel would be diluted amongst the many if truth be told.

There are obviously at least two things going on in this comment: the first is the refusal to see Himid’s pavilion as sculpture – that is, public art – choosing rather to position it as functional, ‘like a toilet’, thus placing it in the category of applied arts or craft. The second thing to note is the defensiveness of ‘the average white guy’ faced with the difficult histories of Britain. Likewise, another commenter wrote, ‘Who exactly is supposed to get the Turner Prize for this? Lubaina should at least come to the studio and sweep up for you.’ I want to point out the use of Himid’s first name here; this may seem like a small thing to flag but the use of female artists’ first names in scholarship and media is rampant, and suggests an over-familiar, false intimacy that is lacking in scholarship on male artists. The commenter’s use of ‘Lubaina’ strikes a snide and condescending tone. Further to this, the suggestion that a Black female artist should undertake unpaid labour for white men (and one woman) is shocking, given the fact that Jelly Mould Pavilion is concerned with the legacies of slavery in Britain. Finally, ‘Newslover’, in response to a short online article about Himid’s pavilion, wrote on 18 December 2017, quoting the judges who awarded Himid the Turner prize: ‘Uncompromising tackling of issues including colonial history and how racism persists today.’ Dear Gods, what patronizing drivel. These luvvies really need to get a life. This is a stupid upturned jelly mould. It is pathetic, and not exactly something that future generations will admire. It will rust away, just like their other ‘artistic’ endeavours, and will be an eyesore. All those monstrosities which have been placed on public land, as if they owned it all. Well, they don’t own this town; Folkestone belongs to us all.76

Beyond the obvious distance set up between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which possibly has racial connotations, this comment supports Rosalyn Deutsche’s insight about just how problematic the word ‘public’ is in the context of site-specific art, while also revealing an antipathy towards (public) art in general. As Deutsche notes, ‘the singular public space is a phantom because its claim to be fully inclusive

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has always been an illusion’.77 Newslover’s comment also, I would suggest, demonstrates a deep-seated defensiveness towards the idea that racism persists in Britain in the twenty-first century. As Deutsche writes, ‘The perception of coherent space cannot be separated from a sense of what threatens that space, of what it would like to exclude.’78 In Blind Memory, Marcus Wood states, Ignorance is a central theme in this study. The word here carries two primary senses: the familiar one, ‘ignorance’ as ‘a want of knowledge (special or general)’ (OED, 1A); and ‘ignorance’ strictly in the sense of what has been deliberately ignored or left unseen. In the latter sense, the act of ignoring conforms to a state of willed blindness: ‘to refuse to take notice of … to shut one’s eyes to’ (OED, ignore, 3). Art which describes or responds to trauma and mass murder always embodies paradox.79

What the digital afterlife of Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilion allows us to see clearly is the ugly truth that willed blindness, what Alan Rice and Johanna C. Kardux call ‘historical amnesia’,80 is ongoing, not just in Britain but throughout the global North, when it comes to issues of race and histories of racial genocide. The internet is a tangled web of global communities, some of which are loath to look directly at the suffering of Black individuals, both past and present. Himid’s many works that employ and deploy ceramic objects have materialized the intertwined vulnerability and resilience of Black subjects and Black artists, while also unveiling the stubbornness, and brittleness, of Britain’s official histories regarding slavery and race. Fragile ceramic tureens and jelly moulds that signify Black skin point to the potential of that skin to be broken, but both Black skin and British history are porous, permeable and, ultimately, susceptible to change.

Notes 1 Lubaina Himid quoted in Celeste-Marie Bernier, Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art, 1965–2015 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 41–2. 2 On gore capitalism, see the previous chapter and Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (Cambridge: Semiotext[e]‌, 2018). 3 See, for example, Alan Rice, ‘The Cotton that Connects, the Cloth That Binds: Manchester’s Civil War, Abe’s Statue, and Lubaina Himid’s Transnational Polemic’, Atlantic Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (October 2007): 285–303; ‘A Post-Slavery Reading of Cotton: Lubaina Himid in conversation with Sabine Broeck and Alice



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Schmid’, in Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 190–205; Christine Checinska, ‘Lubaina Himid: Artist, Activist, Collaborator’, in Sarah-Joy Ford (ed.), Cut Cloth: Contemporary Textiles and Feminism (Manchester: PO, 2017), 88–94; Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah Durkin, ‘Introduction: “Inside the Invisible”: African Diasporic Artists Visualise Transatlantic Slavery’, in Celeste-Marie Bernier and Hannah Durkin (eds), Visualizing Slavery: Art Across the African Diaspora (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 1–13. 4 Following Himid’s Turner win in 2017, more scholarship was published about the artist. Her first solo exhibition in the United States resulted in the catalogue: Natalie Bell (ed.), Lubaina Himid: Work from Underneath (New York: New Museum, 2019), and scholars who have been writing about Himid for years collaborated on a book-length study of her work. See CelesteMarie Bernier, Alan Rice, Lubaina Himid and Hannah Durkin, Inside the Invisible: Memorialising Slavery and Freedom in the Life and Works of Lubaina Himid (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). 5 See Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. See also Julia Skelly, ‘Object Lessons: The Social Life of Temperance Banners’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, vol. 14, no. 3 (2016): 268–93. 6 Deborah Cherry, ‘Troubling Presence: Body, Sound and Space in Installation Art of the mid-1990s’, RACAR, vol. 25, nos. 1/2 (1998): 24. 7 For more on the relationship between tea and the British empire, see Romita Ray, ‘Storm in a Teacup?: Visualising Tea Consumption in the British Empire’, in Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham (eds), Art and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 205–22, and Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). On sugar see Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). On opium see Curtis Marez, ‘The Other Addict: Reflections on Colonialism and Oscar Wilde’s Opium Smoke Screen’, ELH, vol. 64, no.1 (Spring 1997): 257–87, and Julia Skelly, ‘The Paradox of Excess: Oscar Wilde, Caricature, and Consumption’, in Julia Skelly (ed.), The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 137–60. 8 Bernier, Stick to the Skin, 50. 9 Jane Beckett, ‘Lubaina Himid’s Plan B: Close-up Magic and Tricky Allusions’, in Gill Perry (ed.), Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 163. 10 This fact is significant in relation to my concern with modern-day violence against women and people of colour as contemporary manifestations of witch-hunting. As Silvia Federici has written,

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Skin Crafts A study of the witch hunt makes us reassess the entrenched belief that at some historical point capitalist development was a carrier of social progress, which in the past has led many ‘revolutionaries’ to bemoan the absence of a ‘genuine capitalist accumulation’ in much of the former colonial world. But if my reading of the witch hunt is correct, then a different understanding becomes possible, whereby the African slaves, the expropriated peasants of Africa and Latin America become the kin of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European witches, who, like them, saw their common lands taken away, experienced the hunger produced by the move to cash crops, and saw their resistance persecuted as a sign of a diabolical pact.

Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018), 12. 11 Bernier, Stick to the Skin, 50. 12 See Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in EighteenthCentury Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). 13 See Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110–13. 14 Quoted in Bernier, Stick to the Skin, 50. 15 Ibid., 50–2. 16 Sloboda, Chinoiserie, 78. 17 Moira Vincentelli, Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 254. 18 Bernier and Durkin, ‘Introduction: “Inside the Invisible” ’, 2. 19 Bernier, Stick to the Skin, 42. 20 Himid quoted in ‘Diasporic Unwrappings’, Lubaina Himid in conversation with Jane Beckett in Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy C. Rowe (eds), Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 192. 21 Elissa Auther, Sting, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv–xvi. See also Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), especially xiii–xx. 22 ‘Diasporic Unwrappings’, 192. 23 Bernier, Stick to the Skin, 10. 24 See Angela Rosenthal, ‘Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture’, Art History, vol. 27, no. 4 (September 2004): 563–92. 25 Bernier, Stick to the Skin, 10. 26 Himid quoted in ‘Diasporic Unwrappings’, 192. 27 Himid donated Naming the Money to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, so that the installation would not ‘circulate in art world systems of financial exchange’. Bernier, Stick to the Skin, 50.



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28 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York, [1966] 2000), 147. 29 Andrea Ashworth, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York, [1966] 2000), xvi. 30 Himid quoted in ‘Diasporic Unwrappings’, 193. 31 Ibid., 194. 32 Himid quoted in Bernier and Durkin, ‘Introduction: “Inside the Invisible” ’, 2. 33 Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 152. 34 Himid quoted in Bernier, Stick to the Skin, 48. 35 Charmaine Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (London: Routledge, 2010), 181. 36 Cora Kaplan, ‘Imagining Empire: History, Fantasy and Literature’, in Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 204 (191–211). 37 Lubaina Himid’s official website, last accessed 18 October 2019. 38 See Wood, Blind Memory; Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art. 39 Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 5. 40 Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. 41 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Year Zero: Faciality’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 167. Even more problematically, they later write, ‘ “Primitives” may have the most human of heads, the most beautiful and the most spiritual, but they have no face and need none. The reason is simple. The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes’ (176). Women, apparently, don’t have or need faces either. 42 Ibid., 168. 43 Bernier and Durkin, ‘Introduction: “Inside the Invisible” ’, 1. 44 For a discussion of Hogarth’s representations of alcohol consumption, see Julia Skelly, Wasted Looks: Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), ­chapter 1. On Hogarth’s representation of Black subjects, see Molineux, ‘Hogarth’s Atlantic London’, in Faces of Perfect Ebony, 178–218. 45 Bernier and Durkin, ‘Introduction: “Inside the Invisible” ’, 7. 46 Auther, Sting, Felt, Thread, 103. 47 Geoff Quilley, Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain, 1768–1829 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 83. 48 Deborah Cherry, ‘Statues in the Square: Hauntings at the Heart of Empire’, Art History, vol. 29, no. 4 (September 2006): 693.

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49 Wood, Blind Memory, 16. 50 For photographs of the exterior and interior of the pavilion, see: https://www. creativefolkestone.org.uk/artists/lubaina-himid/ 51 Jennifer Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (London: Duke University Press, 2013), xii. 52 Alan Rice, ‘Tracing Slavery and Abolition’s Routes and Viewing Inside the Invisible: The Monumental Landscape and the African Atlantic’, Atlantic Studies, vol. 8, no. 2 (2011): 271. 53 Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (London: MIT Press, 2002), 60. 54 Beckett, ‘Lubaina Himid’s Plan B’, 156–77. 55 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (London: MIT Press, 1996), xiii. 56 Kwon, One Place after Another, 69. 57 https://mobile.twitter.com/simonmartin_art/status/903930802894983168?lang=en; last accessed 13 May 2019. 58 Deutsche, Evictions, xv–xvi. 59 Ibid., xvii. 60 Wood, Blind Memory, 295–6. 61 Ibid., 296. 62 ‘Diasporic Unwrappings’, 208. 63 Alan Rice and Johanna C. Kardux, ‘Confronting the Ghostly Legacies of Slavery: The Politics of Black Bodies, Embodied Memories and Memorial Landscapes’, Atlantic Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (2012): 252–3. 64 Quoted in ibid., 253. See Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, The British Slave Trade and Public Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 65 Rice and Kardux, ‘Confronting the Ghostly Legacies of Slavery’. 66 Deutsche, Evictions, xiv. 67 Bernier, Stick to the Skin, 50. 68 See ‘Diasporic Unwrappings’. 69 Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art, 42. 70 The material in this book is at one level a catalogue of emotional usurpation. The images reproduced mimic the experience of being a slave below deck on the middle passage, on the auction block, in a sugar or cotton field, waiting at table. Yet for each slave the experience is unrepeatable, irreducible and unreproduceable: all human suffering exists beyond the vulgarity of the simulacrum. Slavery caused a mass of suffering which the victims might never understand themselves let alone be able to, or wish to, communicate. Wood, Blind Memory, 8.



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71 Brown, The Repeating Body. 72 Skye Sherwin, ‘Folkestone Triennial Review – Beached Bungalows and Giant Jelly Mould Pavilions’, The Guardian, 1 September 2017. https://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2017/sep/01/folkestone-triennial-review-antony-gormley-bobroberta-smith-jelly-mould-kent-seaside; last accessed 13 May 2019. 73 Carl Pasa, ‘‘Stained with Spots of Human Blood’: Sugar, Abolition and Cannibalism’, Atlantic Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (October 2007): 225–43 (240). 74 Doyle, Hold It against Me, xvi. 75 YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV0r_8Egxrs, 6 December 2017. 2017 Turner Prize Winner, Lubaina Himid – Jelly Mould Pavilion by Aden Hynes Sculpture Studios; last accessed 13 May 2019. 76 https://www.kentonline.co.uk/whats-on/news/turner-prize-winner-lubaina-himidfolkestone-triennial-preview-136507/; last accessed 13 May 2019. 77 Deutsche, Evictions, xxiii. 78 Ibid., 278. 79 Wood, Blind Memory, 7. 80 Rice and Kardux, ‘Confronting the Ghostly Legacies of Slavery’, 256.

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3

‘A skin for a skin’: Sherry Farrell Racette’s textile paintings

The next two chapters look closely at artworks produced by female Indigenous artists working and living in the territory now known as Canada. The intention is to read these works in relation to the sociopolitical context within which they were produced in order to demonstrate that violence against women of colour is an epidemic not only in the global South but in the global North as well. I consider these artists through the framework of global contemporary art guided by Aruna D’Souza’s assertion that the ‘global turn’ in art history demands attention to artists who have not received the same amount of rigorous scholarly attention as white, male ‘Western’ artists.1 Historical Indigenous artists have long been positioned as ‘non-Western’ artists, even when they lived in the West, an act of discursive othering that functioned to marginalize their work. The term ‘global’, on the other hand, has increasing symbolic power in the commercial art world and the discipline of art history. In Skin Crafts I have been employing the construct of ‘global artists’ very broadly to signify female artists of colour who live and work in geographical spaces other than those that have been focused on in traditional Western art history, namely, Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United States. Approaching Indigenous female artists as global contemporary artists locates their work as relevant not only for their ‘local’ contexts but also for other global contexts such as Latin America where women of colour, including Indigenous women, are extremely vulnerable to material violence. In what follows, I examine paintings by Métis artist and scholar Sherry Farrell Racette that do not represent or index acts of violence but that are fundamentally informed by intergenerational trauma resulting from colonialism and the ongoing colonial violence that Indigenous women experience on a daily basis. Her paintings are important for Skin Crafts because she depicts Indigenous skin and Indigenous textiles in order to unveil Indigenous resilience in the face of violence.

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Attending to violence, skin, textiles and affect, I offer a feminist settler-colonial reading of Farrell Racette’s Indigenous-feminist textile paintings. However, first I want to acknowledge some of the problematics of white feminism that have been identified by Indigenous scholars and activists. Verna St. Denis lays out several of the criticisms that have been directed towards white feminism. She notes, for example, that some Indigenous women contest the feminist claim that male domination is universal, adding that this ‘claim further asserts that there are fundamental differences between Aboriginal and Euro-western cultures in regards to gender relations’.2 St Denis also cites the critique by some Indigenous scholars that ‘the concept of equality is neither relevant nor necessary for Aboriginal women in Aboriginal societies; rather these are concepts imposed by the colonizers, including feminists’.3 Finally, she notes that some Indigenous women ‘argue that colonization, racism and economic disparity are more pressing concerns than achieving gender equality’.4 In identifying Farrell Racette’s body of work, including both her artistic practice and scholarship, as an Indigenous-feminist project, I acknowledge and attend to her concerns not only with gender-based violence and misogyny but also colonial violence and anti-Indigenous racism.5 One of my methodological strategies in this chapter is to frequently quote Farrell Racette’s own words; fortunately she has published widely on the topic of Indigenous art, both historical and contemporary. This is the first academic text to undertake an extended analysis of Farrell Racette’s artworks as well as her wide-ranging scholarship. Farrell Racette’s paintings have not received the rigorous scholarly attention they deserve. I argue that one of the reasons this lacuna in art-historical scholarship has occurred is that much of her art practice employs ‘craft’ materials, including beadwork, embroidery and textiles. As I will argue, Farrell Racette’s paintings bring together European and Indigenous media to interrogate both Canadian (art) history and the art/craft hierarchy.

Painted textiles/textile paintings In 1990, Farrell Racette (Timiskaming First Nation in north-western Quebec) produced a gouache and watercolour painting on paper entitled Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses (Plate 6).6 It is not insignificant that Farrell Racette identifies as both a painter and a textile artist. Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses brings these two art forms together, while many of her multimedia works incorporate cloth in a myriad of ways. The title also points



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to a project of resistance in ‘taking back’ clothing that signifies tradition and cultural identity. Farrell Racette herself has repeatedly attended to the important work of Indigenous artists working with ‘traditional materials’, including fibre and beads.7 In 2018, Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses was chosen as one of over 160 artworks by Indigenous female artists to be part of Resilience, the National Billboard Exhibition Project, a series of billboards positioned along highways across Canada, from Victoria to St. John’s. This metamorphosis of media – a painting depicting textiles transformed into a billboard that was part of a political project concerned with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women of Canada – invites an extended consideration of how Farrell Racette’s interdisciplinary practice as both artist and art historian functions in relation to colonial violence and Indigenous resilience. The Resilience billboard project received media attention across Canada during the summer of 2018, but has yet to be thoroughly discussed in arthistorical scholarship. This chapter sets out to demonstrate that Farrell Racette’s scholarship and art practice exist as inextricably linked modes of political activism in Canada, a settler society that has violently and repeatedly tried to erase Indigenous peoples through genocidal policies and strategies such as residential schools.8 Further to this, Farrell Racette’s work is relevant for considering the resilience of Indigenous women around the globe who face horrific rates of violence.9 As many Indigenous scholars have pointed out, violence towards Indigenous women is a direct result of settler colonialism, and it has the desired effect of destabilizing Indigenous communities. Further to this, gender-based violence upholds the settler state. Indigenous women in Canada make up 1 per cent of the population, but they comprise roughly 25 per cent of the women who experience domestic violence, including violent death.10 Glen Sean Coulthard has argued that the Canadian government’s ‘politics of recognition’, which has replaced the explicit violence of colonial domination, continues the settler-colonial power imbalance, but in more insidious forms.11 Farrell Racette’s scholarship and art practice are therefore still urgent calls for resistance, not just from Indigenous peoples but also from white settler individuals who must become willing to be unsettled by her work and her words.12 Importantly for my purposes here, Julia Bryan-Wilson, drawing on Roland Barthes, has noted the etymological link between ‘texts’ and ‘textiles’ (from the Latin texere: to weave) as ‘at once interwoven and unfinished’.13 This insight is useful for the following discussion, as I examine Farrell Racette’s paintings that depict textiles – specifically dresses and blankets – in relation to her art-historical texts in order to critically engage with her Métis-feminist

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Figure 3.1  Sherry Farrell Racette, Hudson’s Bay Company Coat of Arms, 2008. Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

project. Her texts and textiles are, as Barthes observed, interwoven, and her decolonizing work is unfinished and ongoing. In this chapter I focus on three paintings by Farrell Racette: Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses, and the companion paintings Hudson’s Bay Company Coat of Arms (Figure 3.1) and A Skin for a Skin (Figure 3.2), which both depict the Hudson’s Bay Company multicoloured stripe blanket as their backgrounds. These painted works are not craft, which has been defined as the skilled, hand-made production of functional objects using materials such as thread, beads and clay.14 However, the discursive construct of craft is still crucial for the theorizing of Farrell Racette’s works as hybrid objects that combine – in form and content – painting and textiles. I propose that in painting textiles, Farrell Racette is producing hybrid artworks that combine traditional Indigenous materials (textiles) and a European medium (painting). This hybridity was characteristic of post-contact Métis clothing and other cultural products, which combined traditional Indigenous craftwork with European materials (such as silk and beads), design (floral decoration) and forms (Euro-Victorian styles of clothing and painting). According to Cheryl Troupe, ‘Métis artistic expression is influenced by their unique social and



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Figure 3.2  Sherry Farrell Racette, A Skin for a Skin, 2008. Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

cultural traditions, which blended European and First Nations customs, beliefs and values.’15 Homi Bhabha has described hybridity as ‘camouflage, as a contesting, antagonistic agency … which is a space in-between the rules of engagement’.16 I suggest that Farrell Racette, in depicting textiles in paintings, is not simply embracing painting as a superior medium as per the art/craft hierarchy; I contend, rather, that she is engaging in a meta-critique of painting, one that reveals the failure of painting to adequately replace (and represent) the powerful materiality (and agency) of objects such as dresses made by Métis women. If this uniquely Métis-feminist gambit does not precisely upend the Western art/ craft hierarchy, it does work towards illuminating the fallacy that painting’s mimesis is innately superior to craft’s affective objecthood, while simultaneously contributing to the increasingly accepted knowledge that the art/craft hierarchy is a Euro-patriarchal discursive construct that has marginalized female artists and artists of colour. Farrell Racette’s paintings also contribute to Indigenous epistemologies related to the power of objects made by Métis women with thread and other traditional materials.

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Farrell Racette’s textile paintings unveil the fact that painting as a medium is merely a simulacrum that can never fully capture the cultural importance and personal significance of textiles in Indigenous cultures and communities. Her hybrid artworks are not simply a combination of media; they are political statements about violent contact between cultures, the importance of dress and the complicated, sometimes deadly, relationships Indigenous peoples have had with specific kinds of textiles, namely blankets. In this vein, I also wish to argue that although none of these paintings explicitly depict violence or violent acts, they can be productively read through a framework that attends to both historical and contemporary colonial violence against Indigenous women, which includes the discursive violence of erasing Indigenous female artists from settler art history written by white scholars. In choosing not to represent scenes of violence, Farrell Racette does not ignore histories of violence, abuse and intergenerational trauma but rather illuminates the resilience and survival that is engendered in the face of violence by Indigenous peoples through various means, including dress and artistic production. Allison Hargreaves writes in Violence against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance (2017), ‘Violence against Indigenous women is an ongoing crisis with roots deep in Canada’s colonial history.’17 In early June 2019, the Canadian federal government released the final report on the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which had been launched in September 2016. The final report determined that ‘specific colonial and patriarchal policies … displaced [Indigenous] women from their traditional roles in communities and governance and diminished their status in society, leaving them vulnerable to violence’.18 Farrell Racette’s artistic practice and scholarship, though not always explicitly related to violence against Indigenous women, is nonetheless undergirded by this context, illuminating both the ongoing violence and persistent resilience experienced by Indigenous women. As Farrell Racette has remarked, ‘Resilience is the capacity to recover and cope with adversity. Resistance is a struggle against oppression.’19 The paintings discussed in this chapter are productive for illuminating the tangled histories of colonial violence and Indigenous resilience.

Indigenous ‘craft’ is Indigenous art In his article ‘Settler-Colonial Art History: A Proposition in Two Parts’ (2014), Damian Skinner states, ‘Settler-colonial art history will pay attention to craft



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(and other forms of visual culture), thus upending the hierarchy of genres that continues to hold for art history in general.’20 As white feminist art historians such as Rozsika Parker, Griselda Pollock and Elissa Auther have demonstrated, craft, textiles and embroidery have long been denigrated and dismissed within the confines of Western art history, justified by the so-called art/craft hierarchy.21 According to Skinner, ‘Settler-colonial art history cannot ignore craft because of the ways in which art history in settler societies is challenged by indigenous art and the genres of objects that require attention.’22 The history of Indigenous art production in Canada is fraught, not least because historical Indigenous artists were producing work within the context of the Canadian government’s genocidal programme intended to eliminate Indigenous peoples, which was enacted through various policies, such as residential schools, where Indigenous children were punished for speaking Indigenous languages23 and where sexual, emotional and physical abuse was rampant.24 In the art-historical context, nineteenth-century Indigenous creative production, including basketry, beading and weaving, was categorized as artefact or craft rather than fine art, and while this work was extensively collected by white collectors, the objects were usually placed in anthropological and ethnographic museums rather than ‘fine art’ institutions.25 Carmen Robertson has noted that the designation of Indigenous artistic production as artefacts and craft does ‘not relate to Indigenous ways of knowing or Indigenous aesthetics, and, in fact, such classifications have the effect of diminishing the artistic achievements of these artists and the caliber of their work’.26 The justification given by white settler collectors and anthropologists for collecting Indigenous art objects was frequently that Indigenous individuals were dying out and their cultural products would eventually disappear. This ‘salvage paradigm’ was supported by the concept of the ‘Vanishing Indian’ that was both a mythology and an actual agenda on the part of the Canadian government, which sought to literally obliterate the ‘Indian problem’.27 Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indigenous artists recognized a market for their artworks, often incorporating Western desires and tastes; this led to their work eventually becoming tainted by the stigma of ‘souvenir art’ and hybridity.28 Ruth B. Phillips has undermined this stigma by showing the formal innovation and cultural value of ‘souvenir art’. She has also argued in favour of visual culture as a scholarly category in the context of modern Indigenous art production, remarking, I work, first of all, from an assumption that historians of twentieth-century art, like other academic practitioners, need to seek more pluralist understandings

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of their objects of study, and that these understandings need to incorporate the responses of aboriginal people to the representations of their cultures that were featured in this art … It is impossible, however, to recover a sense of the Native presence in early twentieth-century art history if we limit ourselves to the fine arts. An empty space gapes in accounts of the history of Native art during most of the modernist century; in standard accounts, the production of ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ art is perceived to end in the reservation period, while a contemporary [Indigenous] art employing Western fine art media did not begin until the early 1960s.29

According to Phillips, Indigenous individuals who wanted to participate in mainstream ‘fine art’ practices often could not do so because of economic and racial barriers that prevented them from attending professional art schools. One consequence of these obstacles is that museum collections do not hold examples of paintings or sculptures made by Indigenous artists during the first half of the twentieth century. Phillips concludes that the Indigenous artist ‘has been written out’ of Western modern art history. She contends, A partial solution to this dilemma lies in the recent movement in art history towards a redefinition of its field of study as ‘visual culture’. In an essay on the interdisciplinary emphasis in recent art-historical work, W.J.T. Mitchell asks whether ‘art history [should] expand its horizon, not just beyond the sphere of the “work of art”, but also beyond images and visual objects to the visual practices, the ways of seeing and being seen, that make up the world of human visuality’. As we have seen, in the case at hand the question is more basic still: How can we understand Native people either as subjects or as objects within modernist/antimodernist debates if we don’t address these more generalized ‘ways of seeing and being seen’? Working across disciplines in this way, as feminist art historians point out, acts as a strategy of defamiliarization that fosters the interrogation of long-standing assumptions about art.30

Phillips’s statement is particularly significant for Indigenous creative production, because material culture such as beadwork, basketry and textiles has long been left out of the category of ‘fine art’ and indeed the discipline and study of Western art history, which has resulted in not only many female artists being left out of the canon but Indigenous artists as well. Farrell Racette’s body of work, both textual and artistic, is also dedicated to redressing the gaps and biases in Canadian art history, and Western art history more generally, illuminating the ways that Indigenous producers have been deliberately ‘vanished’ from the history of art. As Farrell Racette writes in her powerful article ‘ “I Want to Call Their Names in Resistance”: Writing Aboriginal



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Women into Canadian Art History, 1880–1970’, ‘Until very recently, Aboriginal women have been written out of Canadian art history, or rather art history has been written around us. How do we write ourselves in? It falls far beyond simple forgetfulness, an oversight, a neglecting of the obvious.’31 In her article Farrell Racette resists the historical anonymity of female Indigenous creative producers, developing new art-historical methodologies for recuperating as many names as possible, for example, employing social media to ‘call’ for names that have not been recorded in official Canadian art histories. In a related way, her paintings that depict Indigenous female subjects rebel against the deliberate erasure of Indigenous women by using her own artistic (and, I would add, affective) labour to illuminate the affective and physical labours of both historical and contemporary Indigenous women. As I noted in the previous chapter, names matter, and the title of Farrell Racette’s article – ‘I Want to Call Their Names in Resistance’ – indicates her belief that names are important not only in art history but also in the ‘official’ histories of Canada. One male scholar wrote in 1960 that although many Métis women married European fur traders, ‘for the most part they lack even a name in their husbands’ journals. But it is not always so. Sometimes we come across one who stands out, living and real, among the museumlike [sic] figures’.32 This revealing statement, positioning Métis women as museum-like figures akin to Indigenous ‘artefacts’ in anthropological museums, is resonant for Farrell Racette’s painting Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses, which is a subtle but trenchant critique of colonial collecting and archiving practices. This painting, and other paintings by Farrell Racette depicting Indigenous women, also undermines the lack of agency and subjectivity suggested by the male historian’s racist and sexist statement quoted above.

The power of dress and redress Yet is there not also power in the act of dressing.33

Dress in Indigenous art is frequently political.34 In her article ‘Tuft Life: Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art’, Farrell Racette quotes Algonquin artist Nadia Myre as stating, ‘Beading is political, whether it’s simply the personal contributions to an age-old continuum or consciously reworking loaded imagery. I really do see beading as an act of silent resistance.’35 The same is true for Indigenous clothing. In the context of Indigenous visual culture, Farrell Racette’s paintings and larger artistic practice position cloth and clothing as hyper-political

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art forms that contribute(d) to individual and collective Indigenous identities. Emma LaRocque reminds us, however, that not all Indigenous women will find dresses resonant as a symbol of resilience and resistance because of their associations with gendered expectations, biological determinism and European colonialism.36 Nonetheless, Farrell Racette’s comments about Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses demonstrate her belief that Indigenous dresses are powerful, political objects: When I was working on my first research grant I traveled to museums throughout Europe. I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of indigenous cultural material from across the globe that could be found in these museums. There were bones, preserved heads, clothing and sacred objects sitting on shelves, stacked in drawers, and piled in warehouses. As I returned home, I felt sad to leave all those beautiful things behind. When I got back the first thing people would ask was ‘Did you bring them back?’ It was difficult to explain to the older people why I couldn’t bring those things back. I couldn’t explain it to myself. Although we have talked to different politicians and administrators about repatriation, the issues of housing, education and racism always seem to take priority. One day when I was feeling very frustrated I thought, ‘The only way we’re ever going to get that stuff back is if the women just go there and get it’. So in my imagination I created a wonderful scenario where our female ancestors fly across the ocean, invade the museums and take back our possessions. In Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses the women have blasted open the doors of the museum, thrown their trade cloth dresses away and have taken their traditional dresses back. I felt much better after I finished. By painting it I took something back. There is one Algonquin/Mohawk dress, the purple one, that I always put in my paintings now. I have painted it three times and every time I paint it I feel like I’m taking it back. Pretty soon it’s going to be hanging in my closet.37

Farrell Racette’s statement illuminates the colonial violence inherent in Western museums’ collecting practices. Furthermore, viewed as a meta-critique, this artwork unveils the failure of European and Canadian painting that depicts Indigenous textiles to adequately re-present culturally, spiritually and personally significant textile objects such as dresses. And yet, for Farrell Racette, the act of painting this work was an act of resistance as well as an act of re-possession and repatriation. The fact that the Indigenous women are taking back their dresses – an act of agency38 and resistance – from a museum signals Farrell Racette’s institutional critique of the museum, which, as Ruth B. Phillips has shown, was and is a colonial institution that has enacted material and discursive violence upon Indigenous individuals and their artistic products.39



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As Farrell Racette has suggested, ‘Perhaps the work of Indigenous artists best illustrates our troubled relationships with museums – the spaces we negotiate to see and touch the objects of our material heritage – and the authoritative voices who have defined, analyzed and categorized the objects within them.’40 Nineteenth-century colonial practices of collecting, often enacted in the name of the ‘salvage paradigm’, resulted in Indigenous artworks and spiritual objects being categorized as artefacts and displayed, often incorrectly, in ethnographic and anthropological museums.41 These collecting practices have also resulted in the ubiquitous ‘Maker unknown’ label attached to the vast majority of objects created by Indigenous artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are seventeen Indigenous women represented in Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses; they fill the foreground, middle ground and background. The smallest figure, the furthest back, is exiting a large stone structure with columns, which identify the building as a generic neoclassical42 Western fine art museum, but in fact Farrell Racette seems to be specifically critiquing anthropological and ethnographic museums in this painting. Each female figure wears a colourful, decorative dress. This detail is helpful in identifying possible significations of the dresses imaged and imagined by Farrell Racette. As Cheryl Troupe has remarked, in the nineteenth century, the ‘colour of most Métis women’s clothing was dark’, but women ‘also produced an assortment of bright and decorative clothing for festive occasions’.43 It is possible to speculate, then, that some of the Métis dresses that Farrell Racette viewed in the museum archives and depicted in this work were specifically created for special occasions. A remarkable detail in this painting is the white cross that one of the Indigenous female subjects in the foreground wears around her neck. This woman is depicted wearing a particularly colourful dress, primarily of blue material, with a pink collar and multicoloured stripes on the skirt. According to Troupe, ‘By the end of the nineteenth century, Métis women, particularly those who adhered to Catholicism, abandoned the brighter colours of their grandmothers and adopted more conservative attire.’44 She adds, ‘The increasing importance of Catholic devotion among the Métis can also be seen in the large crucifixes worn by women.’45 The cross in Farrell Racette’s painting is a visual sign signifying contact between Indigenous peoples and European missionaries. Although the negative consequences of missionaries’ influence upon Indigenous peoples is invisible in this painting, it is nonetheless signified by the cross, a symbol that evokes not only religion but also oppression, abuse, residential schools and the loss of Indigenous languages and traditional spiritual beliefs. Not insignificantly, ‘silk thread was first made available to Métis students at boarding and residential

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schools’.46 It is worth considering then, in the context of Indigenous clothing, the complex relationships among thread, trauma and resilience. Métis clothing as visual or material culture, Farrell Racette argues, is an important archive that is often separated from its histories and can contain the traces of trauma in its fibres. In an essay on Indigenous research methodologies, Farrell Racette recalls, A few years ago, while viewing an exhibition, I came upon a disconsolate young Indigenous women [sic] weeping before a dress. She kept saying, ‘It shouldn’t be here. It shouldn’t be here’. She had no previous knowledge of the dress; her distress was spontaneous. Later, the curator told me the dress had a disturbing story, and shouldn’t have entered the museum collection. Somehow the dress communicated its pain. A heightened sensitivity to objects and stories is entangled within Indigenous methods; whether it is love stitched into beadwork, bravery honored or a wrenching story of trauma and loss.47

The serenity on the women’s faces in Farrell Racette’s painting suggests affective resistance to – rather than acceptance of – the violence of colonial collecting practices and other abuses. Glen Sean Coulthard has challenged ‘the ways in which Canadian reconciliation politics tends to uncritically represent Indigenous expressions of anger and resentment as “negative emotions” that threaten to impede the realization of reconciliation in the lives of Indigenous peoples and communities on the one hand, and between Indigenous nations and Canada on the other’. He continues, ‘I argue that in the context of ongoing settler-colonial injustice, Indigenous peoples’ anger and resentment can indicate a sign of moral protest and political outrage that we ought to at least take seriously, if not embrace as a sign of our critical consciousness.’48 The Indigenous women in Farrell Racette’s painting emanate calm and serenity, but that does not mean that the work is unrelated to anger as a guiding force or as a potentially transformative affect. Indeed, Farrell Racette’s comments about the painting suggest her own feelings of anger and sadness. The second life of the painting, chosen as one of more than 160 artworks by female Indigenous artists that were placed on billboards along Canadian highways in the summer of 2018, demonstrates that the painting speaks to those who are enraged and sickened by the ongoing violence against Indigenous women in Canada. The painting was adopted as part of a political project guided by what Coulthard calls ‘reactive emotions’ (such as anger and sadness) that are being harnessed to engender awareness and social change. However, as Farrell Racette herself has observed, ‘The arts can play a key role in the process of decolonization and the unraveling of those ideas, but change



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is not easy.’49 Her statement acknowledges not only that art can be a powerful catalyst for change but also the fact that Indigenous peoples are fighting an uphill battle given the rampant anti-Indigenous racism that is deeply rooted in Canada’s history.

From painting to billboard: Resilience, the National Billboard Exhibition Project (2018) From 1 June until 1 August 2018, the work of fifty female Indigenous artists from multiple generations was shown on 160 billboards and large-scale posters across Canada. Farrell Racette’s 1990 painting Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses was one of the artworks selected. Resilience, the National Billboard Exhibition Project, which was initially proposed by Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (a Winnipeg-based non-profit organization) and curated by Mohawk scholar Lee-Ann Martin, originated as a direct response to one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s ‘Calls to Action’.50 The project was billed as a ‘public celebration and commemoration of the work of Indigenous women artists’, and it was an ambitious and calculated occupation of public space on a grand scale.51 Further to this, it not only reached an enormous new audience, many of whom may not be interested in art or in entering galleries or museums, it also forced people driving by to visually consume the work of Indigenous female artists, many of whom, including Farrell Racette, have addressed ongoing violence against Indigenous women in their work. Significantly, two of the billboards were positioned along British Columbia’s Highway of Tears, which is infamous for being a dangerous public site for Indigenous women.52 Many scholars of historical and contemporary Indigenous art have underscored the importance of Indigenous artists taking up space both physically and vocally.53 The Resilience project undertook this political strategy on a dramatically large scale, and in so doing, previously quiet, small-scale works such as Farrell Racette’s painting were enlarged and positioned within a spatial context that demanded visual attention from those driving by, even if those drivers only caught sight of the works out of the corner of their eye and did not know or fully understand what they had seen. This is one of the challenges of political billboard art; without didactic labels and an exhibition catalogue, viewers, accidental or otherwise, may not understand what they are looking at, or the histories that are being referenced and critiqued.54 Nonetheless, the immense undertaking of the Resilience project, demonstrating the sheer number of Indigenous female

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artists who are actively producing art in Canada, will likely have an impact on the Canadian art landscape, even if it will take time for the ripple effects to reveal themselves. Increased awareness of those artists also translates into increased awareness of the issues they are addressing, including violence against Indigenous women.

Blanket statements Farrell Racette has observed, In much of what is now Canada, encounters between Europeans and First Nations involved an exchange of material goods for either economic or diplomatic purposes. The Hudson’s Bay Company offered warm woolen blankets in exchange for soft, worn beaver robes. Gifts of beads, cloth, blankets and shawls were used to negotiate peaceful and mutually beneficial relationships. Blankets and cloth slipped into the ceremonial and symbolic space previously occupied by fur robes and painted hides.55

This statement is taken from the 2009 exhibition catalogue Clearing a Path, and it is highly relevant for Farrell Racette’s companion paintings Hudson’s Bay Company Coat of Arms (Figure 3.1) and A Skin for a Skin (Figure 3.2).56 The first painting represents two elk or moose standing alongside a coat of arms adorned with four beavers and a fox sitting atop the coat of arms. At the bottom of the painting the Latin words Pro Pelle Cutem are inscribed on a white banner. The background of the painting is comprised of the green, white, red, yellow and black lines that are now widely recognized as characteristic of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s brand. This background is not explicitly a Hudson’s Bay Company woollen trade-blanket, but I read it as such in order to underscore that these two works have textiles as their conceptual cores as well as the ground for the paintings.57 This reading was confirmed by Farrell Racette in an email. She wrote that in their initial display, ‘the two paintings were accompanied by a large “flour” bag and box installation that included text and photographs transferred to fabric and stitched onto the “flour” bags. It was really about women’s labour. I used the HBC blanket as a visual code because most viewers wouldn’t recognize the HBC coat of arms.’58 Hudson’s Bay Company woollen blankets were made in a range of colours in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The now-iconic green, red, yellow, white and black striped blankets – the colours that appear in Farrell Racette’s two paintings – are familiar to contemporary white settler Canadian



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viewers in particular, thus functioning as a mobile signifier that can evoke a range of things from nostalgia and patriotism to domestic comfort.59 However, the Hudson’s Bay Company blanket is not an innocent or safely domestic textile, and indeed, blankets have played a violent, deadly role in colonialism in the North American context. In employing the Hudson’s Bay Company blanket as the background for these two paintings, Farrell Racette is tapping into the symbolic power of the blanket as a dangerous object for Indigenous peoples. As Robyn Maynard has pointed out, British settlers enacted a range of violent acts against Indigenous peoples. For instance, they traded blankets infected with disease with the Mi’kmaq people of the Atlantic Coast.60 Anthropologist Fiona P. McDonald has previously studied the various roles woollen blankets have played in artworks by Indigenous artists.61 In her 2014 doctoral thesis, McDonald includes a list of artists based in North America who have engaged with the multicoloured stripe Point blanket (or tradeblanket). Farrell Racette is not included in this list, but her paintings might be productively analysed against the blanket works by Ron Noganosh, Rebecca Belmore and Teresa Burrows, among many others.62 Rosalie Favell (Métis, Cree/ English), for example, references the Hudson’s Bay Company blanket in her photograph I awoke to find my spirit had returned (1999). Favell’s photo-based works combine humour and gentle critique through the digital manipulation of her personal archive of personal and family photographs, which are often combined with historical images.63 Her work was included in the group exhibition HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor (2010) at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, which I discuss in the next chapter. Favell’s photograph I awoke to find my spirit had returned represents the artist in bed, covered by a Hudson’s Bay Company blanket, surrounded by black-and-white characters from the Wizard of Oz. Louis Riel, the leader of the Métis Resistance in 1885, pokes his head through the window. According to Indigenous artist and scholar Jeff Thomas, ‘Favell’s artistic strategy challenges early photographers whose work effectively silenced Aboriginal women either by avoiding them or by leaving them nameless when photographed.’64 Favell centres herself in this photograph, and the title suggests a hopeful (re-)awakening to her spirit and, perhaps, traditional Indigenous spirituality. I am inclined to read the blanket in this work as a symbol of a mythological, monolithic ‘Canadian’ identity that the artist must discard in order to return fully to herself. As McDonald outlines in her dissertation, the woollen blanket has had various significations for Indigenous peoples. Some artists, such as Noganosh, have used woollen blankets to engage critically with histories of land theft and treaty

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agreements. McDonald notes that the ‘giving and gifting of woolen blankets for land in treaty agreements with the British Crown was common practice in many settler states’ including Canada and the United States.65 No less historically and affectively resonant is the historical relationship between woollen blankets and disease in Indigenous communities. McDonald writes, ‘The specific use of blankets in what is called germ warfare in the United States in particular is traced back to documentation and statements made by General Amherst around 1763.’66 Here McDonald is referring to the practice of traders giving Indigenous people woollen blankets infected with smallpox, thus spreading the disease throughout communities and decimating the Indigenous population.67 Although Farrell Racette’s paintings are not explicitly related to disease or unjust treaties enacted through the trading of blankets for land, by using the Hudson’s Bay Company blanket as the background for the two artworks, Farrell Racette is calling back to these histories, inviting her viewers – both Indigenous and non-Indigenous – to consider the painted blankets as signifiers of colonial violence. However, there are layers of affective meaning in these paintings: on top of histories of violence, there are signs of resilience, survivance and support. Farrell Racette’s second painting, A Skin for a Skin (Figure 3.2), has the same blanket background as Hudson’s Bay Company Coat of Arms, but here two Indigenous women stand on each side of the coat of arms, which has two beavers chewing twigs in the lower left and right quadrants, while the upper quadrants are now occupied by stretched beaver skins. As Joseph Robson wrote in 1752, ‘the beaver skin was the measure of everything else’ in the North American fur trade.68 The Indigenous women in this painting wear colourful, long-sleeved dresses over beaded leggings and both wear beaded moccasins. Troupe has written that ‘the basic dress for Métis women was long skirts, colourful long sleeved blouses with a pleated bodice and puffed sleeves, a blanket or shawl, leggings and moccasins’.69 Like coats, pouches, blankets and leggings, moccasins made by Métis women were often decorated with floral beading. Glass beads, which were introduced to the Métis by European traders, became ubiquitous in their creative production, both for men and women, Métis and settlers.70 There is an extant early-twentieth-century saddle blanket in the collection of the McCord Museum in Montreal that is decorated with a characteristic beaded floral design.71 The Métis became so closely aligned with beaded objects that they were known as the flower beadwork people.72 In nineteenth-century journals and narratives written by male fur traders, the men frequently made note of Métis women’s clothing. For instance, Métis women of the Red River settlement were noted to be ‘tidy’ in their dress.73 Robert Ballantyne wrote



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in 1848: ‘With beads, and brightly coloured porcupine’s quills, and silk, they work the most beautiful devices on the moccasins.’74 Cheryl Troupe observes that after the 1870s, Métis women’s clothing was increasingly a combination of European (English) style and traditional Indigenous articles of clothing, including leggings, moccasins and usually a blanket.75 Troupe remarks that blankets were indispensable textile objects for Métis women in all seasons, as they infrequently wore hats. Métis women wore blankets on their shoulders or head, depending on the season.76 European men sometimes criticized Métis women’s habit of wearing blankets, with one male settler stating that blankets gave the women a ‘stooping gait’.77 In Farrell Racette’s painting (Figure 3.2), the Latin words Pro Pelle Cutem have been translated into English, reading, ‘A skin for a skin.’ In The Savage Country (1960), Walter O’Meara writes, ‘All over North America, the fur hunters ruthlessly killed beaver. … “Pro pelle cutem” was the motto of the greatest and the grandest of the trading companies; or, less delicately, “A skin for a skin.” It could have served them all.’78 ‘Pro pelle cutem’, the motto of the Hudson’s Bay Company, has also been translated as ‘we risk our lives for pelts’.79 In A Skin for a Skin, the two Indigenous/Métis women do not appear to be in distress or to be experiencing the ‘reactive’ or ‘negative’ affects described by Coulthard in Red Skin, White Masks. Rather, they are depicted as experiencing positive affects. This reading is bolstered by Farrell Racette’s drawing (Figure 3.3), which was transferred to fabric and stitched onto a bag of flour in the installation of this multimedia work. In the drawing, the Indigenous woman on the right is clearly smiling or perhaps even laughing. In the painted version, the Indigenous woman on the left appears to be attempting to push the coat of arms away from her or, alternatively, to hold it up. The woman on the right, clothed in a long-sleeved blue-green dress, stands at ease, one hand resting on the top of the coat of arms, while her left hand is placed on her left hip. The women are not obviously at risk nor are they explicitly the survivors of violence. Nonetheless, the title, A Skin for a Skin, hints at material violence. As Farrell Racette wrote in an email to me, the Hudson’s Bay Company motto really was ‘A skin for a skin’, which ‘is rather chilling when you think of the violence against animals and women that was part of the fur trade. One interpretation is that traders lost skin to get skin – implying human cost … If anyone lost skin so the HBC could get skins it was women. They’re the ones who actually skinned the animals, dealt with men on both sides of the exchange, and raised children.’80 Elsewhere, Farrell Racette has observed that

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Figure 3.3  Sherry Farrell Racette, A Skin for a Skin, 2008. Drawing on paper that was transferred to fabric. Photo: Courtesy of the artist. women’s experiences with the fur trade had a darker side. Women and their children were often cast aside … The violent sexual exploitation and commodification of women’s bodies introduced during the fur trade and the progressive devaluing of women were justified by depicting them as naturally promiscuous and wanton. This depiction subsequently absolved European men of guilt and responsibility for their actions, creating a representation of Indigenous sexuality that has persisted to the present time.81

The exploitation of Indigenous women was part of a racist ethos that positioned them as expendable and animal-like within the context of the fur trade. The fact that the two Indigenous women in A Skin for a Skin have replaced two animals could also be interpreted as unveiling the historical perception of Indigenous women as ‘savage’ and uncivilized.82 Nonetheless, the woman pushing against (or holding up) the coat of arms is characterized by her physical strength, if not her resistance, while the women’s calm affects seem to undermine the violence implied by the title. There is ambiguity in this work that forces us to consider the paradoxical affects and lived experiences of Indigenous women during the fur trade era as well as in the contemporary context. Post-contact, Indigenous women were recognized for their physical strength, and were often in relationships with white European men who benefited greatly from



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the knowledge that First Nations and Métis women had about surviving in the Canadian climate, including their skills in producing clothing.83 Indigenous women were at times respected for their knowledge, and at other times exploited, harmed and discarded. Farrell Racette’s paintings represent Indigenous female subjects as strong and resilient, rather than victimized, while not ignoring or erasing the lived realities of Indigenous women during the fur trade, which did include material violence. As previously noted, Farrell Racette has observed that the second painting in the pair is concerned with Indigenous women’s labour.84 Many craft scholars have discussed the making of textiles as labour and the concomitant affective labour that is woven into the final products. Julia Bryan-Wilson, for instance, refers to the ‘affective politics fostered in sewing circles’.85 Many craft scholars are concerned, explicitly or implicitly, with white female producers. However, Bryan-Wilson observes ‘a basic fact about textile production: it is grounded in racialized, gendered systems of labor’.86 What of the affective labour of the Indigenous-feminist artist and scholar? Farrell Racette has written about being a ‘warrior researcher’, a phrase that not only denotes strength but also points to the necessity of strength and resilience in the face of ongoing colonialism in the Canadian context, including in the Canadian academy.87 The ambiguous pose of the woman on the left in A Skin for a Skin speaks to various kinds of strength: physical, psychological and affective. The woman on the right, on the other hand, stands upright, striking a casual but formidable pose. Kristina Huneault has noted that the hand-on-the-hip pose is characteristic of historical portraits depicting male figures of power.88 In her discussion of Indigenous female performance artists, Carla Taunton has underscored the importance of Indigenous peoples taking up space with their bodies, whether in performances, land defence or political protests.89 The Indigenous women in this painting are not shown engaging in labour such as sewing, skinning or cooking, but their bodies speak volumes about the layers of affective labour that Indigenous women have had to enact in the face of colonization and ongoing colonial violence. Read through the lens of Indigenous-feminism, these two women embody survivance and the thick skin of the resilient Indigenous woman. Their colourful clothing, read as a ‘second skin’, signifies the power of Métis material culture to speak of tradition, contemporaneity and futurity all at once. The term ‘second skin’ has been used by psychoanalysts to describe the sense of containment that infants need to feel safe and secure in their environments, pointing to the relationships among the skin, space and mental health.90 Significantly, the phrase was also used by Carly Brascoupé in a 2018 article entitled ‘Indigenous Fashion: Our

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Second Skin’.91 Clothing, fashion, textiles and craft were long dismissed by Western art historians but are now analysed by many scholars for what they illuminate about resistance, identity, politics and power. Indigenous textiles are objects of survival, resilience and resistance, weaving together threads of the past, present and future.

Conclusion In Farrell Racette’s three textile paintings, there are no explicit representations of material violence against Indigenous women. This is noteworthy, considering the ubiquitous victimization of Indigenous women in popular media, which is directly related to the material violence Indigenous women experience in lived culture. Instead, Farrell Racette depicts calm, labouring, resilient Indigenous women. And yet, if viewers are willing to look beyond the frames of her paintings, there is much to learn not only about colonialism and historical colonial violence but also about ongoing violence against Indigenous women. Farrell Racette’s paintings point viewers towards hard truths about anti-Indigenous racism as well as towards Indigenous epistemologies. Further to this, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers have the opportunity to learn about how First Nations and Métis women have long employed traditional materials to fashion clothing and objects for survival and survivance, resistance and resilience, pleasure and livelihood. In her 2017 article ‘Tuft Life: Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art’, Farrell Racette observes, ‘Artists describe the transformative power of traditional materials that enable them to revitalize and mobilize endangered knowledge, and to confront trauma and hidden histories, while affirming the ongoing vitality and sovereignty of their communities.’92 Farrell Racette herself, of course, is doing exactly that.

Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was supported by a Lillian Robinson Visiting Scholar Award from the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University, Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal). I am extremely grateful to Dr Sherry Farrell Racette for taking the time to answer questions about her work and for her permission to reproduce her artworks.



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Notes 1 Aruna D’Souza, ‘Introduction’, in Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza (eds), Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), xxi. 2 Verna St. Denis, ‘Feminism is for Everybody: Aboriginal Women, Feminism and Diversity’, in Joyce Green (ed.), Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2007), 37. 3 Ibid., 38. 4 Ibid., 40. 5 Joyce Green, ‘Taking More Account of Indigenous Feminism: An Introduction’, in Joyce Green (ed.), Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, 2nd ed. (Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2017), 1–20. 6 The term Métis refers to Indigenous individuals who have both Indigenous and European ancestry. Farrell Racette is of Algonquin and Irish heritage. 7 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Tuft Life: Stitching Sovereignty in Contemporary Indigenous Art’, Art Journal, vol. 76, no. 2 (2017): 114–23. 8 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. 9 See Chapter 1 in Skin Crafts. 10 See Allison Hargreaves, Violence against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2017). 11 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 3. 12 Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). 13 Barthes quoted in Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 4. 14 Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 15 Cheryl Troupe, Expressing Our Heritage: Métis Artistic Designs (Regina, SK: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2002), 7. 16 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 193. 17 Hargreaves, Violence against Indigenous Women, 1. 18 Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (2019). 19 Sherry Farrell Racette, Metis Art, 1880–2011: Resilience/Resistance (Ottawa: Parks Canada, 2011), 7. 20 Damian Skinner, ‘Settler-Colonial Art History: A Proposition in Two Parts’, Journal of Canadian Art History, vol. 35, no. 1 (2014): 161. For Skinner, ‘settler art history’ refers to art history written by white scholars without attention to the ways that art

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and art history function as harmful discourses that marginalize Indigenous subjects and Indigenous artists. In contrast, ‘settler-colonial art history’, refers to a critical, self-reflexive mode of art-historical writing that takes into account the scholar’s own subject position, privilege and possible blind spots, while attending to the ways that colonialism and colonial violence have impacted the artistic production of both white artists and Indigenous artists. 21 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010; originally published 1984), and Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). See also Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Julia Skelly, Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), especially the introduction. 22 Skinner, ‘Settler-Colonial Art History’, 161. 23 David B. MacDonald, ‘Genocide in the Indian Residential Schools: Canadian History through the Lens of the UN Genocide Convention’, in Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto and Alexander Laban Hinton (eds), Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 315. 24 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Haunted: First Nations Children in Residential School Photography’, in Loren Lerner (ed.), Depicting Canada’s Children (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2009), 49–84. 25 See Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 26 Carmen Robertson, ‘Clearing Paths’, in Carmen Robertson and Sherry Farrell Racette (eds), Clearing a Path: New Ways of Seeing Traditional Indigenous Art (Regina, SK: University of Regina/Canadian Plains Research Center, 2009), 11. 27 Marcia Crosby, ‘Construction of the Imaginary Indian’, in Stan Douglas (ed.), Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), 267–91. 28 See Phillips, Museum Pieces, 109. See also Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Ruth B. Phillips, ‘Nuns, Ladies and the “Queens of the Hurons”: Souvenir Art and the Negotiation of North American Identities’, in Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (eds), Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 155–77; Ruth B. Phillips, ‘From “Naturalized Invention” to the Invention of Tradition: The Victorian Reception of Onkwehonwe Beadwork’, in Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson (eds), Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), 327–56. 29 Ruth B. Phillips, ‘Performing the Native Woman: Primitivism and Mimicry in Early Twentieth-Century Visual Culture’, in Lynda Jessup(ed.), Antimodernism and



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Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 28–9. 30 Ibid., 29. 31 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘“I Want to Call Out Their Names in Resistance”: Writing Aboriginal Women into Canadian Art History, 1880–1970’, in Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson (eds), Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), 285. 32 Walter O’Meara, The Savage Country (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 113. 33 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Sewing for a Living: The Commodification of Métis Women’s Artistic Production’, in Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (eds), Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 41. 34 See The Rebel Yells: Dress and Political Re-dress in Contemporary Indigenous Art (Montreal: FOFA Gallery, 2015). Loris Beavis and Rhonda L. Meier curated the exhibition at Concordia University’s FOFA Gallery. 35 Quoted in Farrell Racette, ‘Tuft Life’, 115. 36 Emma LaRocque, ‘Métis and Feminist: Ethical Reflections on Feminism, Human Rights and Decolonization’, in Joyce Green (ed.), Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2007), 122–45. 37 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Artist’s statement’, Saskatchewan Arts Board, undated. Available at http://collection.artsboard.sk.ca/items/1018/. 38 For Homi Bhabha, the signs of agency are intentionality and purpose. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 199. 39 Phillips, Museum Pieces. See also Shannon Bagg and Lynda Jessup (eds), On Aboriginal Representation in the Gallery (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 2002). 40 Sherry Farrell Racette in conversation with Alan Corbiere and Crystal Migwans, ‘Pieces Left along the Trail: Material Culture Histories and Indigenous Studies’, in Chris Andersen and Jean M. O’Brien (eds), Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies (London: Routledge, 2017), 224. 41 Phillips, Museum Pieces, 111–31. 42 See Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, Art History, vol. 3 (December 1980): 447–69. 43 Troupe, Expressing Our Heritage, 8–9. Additionally, in 1851 Swiss Artist Rudolph Friederich Kurz met a group of Red River Métis, and afterwards wrote that they were ‘dressed in bright colors’. Quoted in Troupe, Expressing Our Heritage, 15. 44 Ibid., 10. 45 Ibid., 11. 46 Ibid., 58. 47 Farrell Racette in conversation with Corbiere and Migwans, ‘Pieces Left along the Trail’, 224.

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48 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 22. 49 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Tawâyihk: Thoughts from the Places in Between’, Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review, vol. 41, no. 1 (2016): 30. 50 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, They Came for the Children: Canada, Aboriginal Peoples, and Residential Schools (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2012). 51 Stacey Abramson, ‘Resilience Billboard Project’, 21 May 2018, https://www. gallerieswest.ca/magazine/stories/resilience-billboard-project/. 52 Claudette Lauzon, ‘What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore’s Memorial to Missing Women’, in Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux and Christine Ross (eds), Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 155–79. 53 See Lee-Ann Martin (ed.), Making a Noise! Aboriginal Perspectives on Art, Art History, Critical Writing and Community (Banff: International Curatorial Institute, 2004). 54 Jennifer Doyle, ‘Queer Wallpaper’, in Amelia Jones (ed.), A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 350–1. 55 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Traditional Arts and Media: Resilience and Survivance’, in Carmen Robertson and Sherry Farrell Racette (eds), Clearing a Path: New Ways of Seeing Traditional Indigenous Art (Regina, SK: University of Regina/Canadian Plains Research Center, 2009), 25. Emphasis added. 56 The Hudson’s Bay Company, one of two major fur trade enterprises in Canada, was founded in 1670. Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Nimble Fingers and Strong Backs: First Nations and Métis Women in Fur Trade and Rural Economies’, in Carol Williams (ed.), Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 149. The paintings Hudson’s Bay Company Coat of Arms and A Skin for a Skin are not discussed or reproduced in Clearing a Path. 57 Robert (Bob) Boyer (Métis Cree) created a series of artworks entitled Blanket Statements beginning in the early 1980s, including Smallpox Issue (1983). 58 Email from Farrell Racette to author, 12 September 2018. 59 See Eileen Stack, ‘“Very Picturesque and Very Canadian”: The Blanket Coat and Anglo-Canadian Identity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in Fashion: A Canadian Perspective (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 17–40. 60 Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Halifax: Fernwood, 2017), 23. 61 Fiona P. McDonald, ‘Woollen Blankets in Contemporary Art: Mutable and Mobile Materials in the Work of Sonny Assu’, Material Culture Review, vol. 76 (Fall 2012): 108–16; Fiona P. McDonald, ‘Charting Material Memories: An Ethnography of Visual and Material Transformations of Woollen Blankets in Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States’ (PhD thesis, University College London, 2014).



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62 McDonald, ‘Charting Material Memories’, 88–102. 63 Farrell Racette, Metis Art, 1880–2011, 15. 64 Jeff Thomas, ‘Emergence from the Shadow: First Peoples’ Photographic Perspectives’, in Carol Payne and Andrea Kunyard (eds), The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 226–8. In Jeff Thomas’s essay, the work is identified as I Dreamed of Being a Warrior (226). See also Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Returning Fire, Pointing the Canon: Aboriginal Photography as Resistance’, in Carol Payne and Andrea Kunyard (eds), The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 70–90. 65 McDonald, ‘Charting Material Memories’, 100 n.29. 66 Ibid., 98. 67 See Adrienne Mayor, ‘The Nessus Shirt in the New World: Smallpox and Blankets in History and Legend’, Journal of American Folklore, vol. 108 (1995): 54–77. This particular brand of colonial violence has been linked with the practice of European settlers giving Indigenous individuals alcohol to deliberately enact harm. Sylvia Van Kirk, for instance, has noted that Indigenous wives of fur traders were ‘more exposed’ to the dangers of European diseases and alcohol. Sylvia Van Kirk, ‘Many Tender Ties’: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1980), 86. Walter O’Meara wrote of ‘the systematic debauchery’ of Indigenous peoples with alcohol, noting that the ‘rum of the fur trade was not just something to barter – like blankets, guns and trinkets – for beaver. It was a deliberate means of reducing the natives to a state of groveling dependence.’ O’Meara, The Savage Country, 103. For more on this see Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (London: Cornell University Press, 1995). For a discussion of contemporary art by Indigenous artists who resist damaging stereotypes and discourses related to alcohol and addiction, see Julia Skelly, ‘Alternative Paths: Mapping Addiction in Contemporary Art by Landon Mackenzie, Rebecca Belmore, Manasie Akpaliapik, and Ron Noganosh’, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 268–95. 68 Joseph Robson, An Account of Six Years Residence in Hudson’s-Bay, from 1733 to 1736, and 1744 to 1747 (London, 1752), 39. Accessed at the McCord Museum, Montreal. 69 Troupe, Expressing Our Heritage, 8. 70 Ibid., 15. 71 Maker unknown, Saddle Blanket, Northern Plains, Métis, 1875–1925, velvet, glass beads, cotton thread, hide, metal, 97.5 × 121 cm. McCord Museum, Montreal. 72 Troupe, Expressing Our Heritage, 7. 73 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 102. 74 Quoted in Farrell Racette, ‘Sewing for a Living’, 27. Robert Ballantyne, Hudson Bay, or Everyday Life in the Wilds of North America (London: W. Blackwood, 1848), 106–7.

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75 Troupe, Expressing Our Heritage, 101. 76 Ibid., 12. 77 Quoted in Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 86. 78 O’Meara, The Savage Country, vii–viii. 79 McDonald, ‘Charting Material Memories’, 102. 80 Email from Farrell Racette to author, 4 October 2018. 81 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘“This Fierce Love”: Gender, Women, and Art Making’, in Cynthia Chavez Lamar and Sherry Farrell Racette (eds) with Lara Evans, Art in Our Lives: Native Women Artists in Dialogue (Santa Fe, New Mexico: School for Advanced Research Press, 2010), 35. 82 See Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). O’Meara notes that Métis women were often described in terms of their ‘Gallic vivacity and provocative beauty’, as well as their ostensible lack of morals. O’Meara, The Savage Country, 112. 83 Farrell Racette, ‘Nimble Fingers and Strong Backs’, 149. 84 Farrell Racette email to author, 4 October 2018. 85 Bryan-Wilson, Fray, 6. 86 Ibid., 8. 87 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Confessions and Reflections of an Indigenous Research Warrior’, in Material Histories: Proceedings of a workshop held at Marischal Museum, University of Aberdeen (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen, 2007), 57–67. 88 Kristina Huneault, Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 210. 89 Carla Taunton, ‘Performing Aboriginality at the Venice Biennale: The Performance of Rebecca Belmore and James Luna’, Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses, vol. 13 (2007): 55–68. 90 Marc Lafrance, ‘Skin and the Self: Cultural Theory and Anglo-American Psychoanalysis’, Body & Society, vol. 15, no. 3 (September 2009): 3–24. See also Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 91 Carly Brascoupé, ‘Indigenous Fashion: Our Second Skin’, 15 June 2018. Available at: http://muskratmagazine.com/indigenous-fashion-our-second-skin/. 92 Farrell Racette, ‘Tuft Life’, 123.

4

Festering wounds and stitched scars in works by Rebecca Belmore and Nadia Myre

Colonial violence in the Canadian context In 2002, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore performed Vigil (Figures 4.1 and 4.2) on a street corner in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, a space that has become synonymous in Canada with drug addiction, sex work and a largely Indigenous population.1 These intersecting themes were at the core of Belmore’s performance, which was an act of anger and activism for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women of Canada.2 The climax of Vigil involved Belmore putting on a red dress, nailing the textile to a telephone pole and then vigorously, and indeed violently, tearing the dress from the pole, until the dress was nothing but fragments of red fabric. Textile symbolism in art related to violence may not be subtle, but the time for subtlety has long passed when it comes to calling out the ongoing violence towards Indigenous women around the globe. Canada is only one case study that functions to prove, without one ounce of doubt, that Indigenous women are disproportionately the victims of violence. This includes historical colonial violence (the deliberate genocide of Indigenous peoples by the white settler Canadian government), ongoing colonial violence (stigmatization, police brutality, rape, murder and homelessness), discursive violence (harmful, degrading stereotypes in film, television, fiction and news media) and medical violence (ignoring Indigenous women’s pleas for help at Canadian hospitals; invasions of Indigenous women’s bodies without consent by medical professionals; and verbal, emotional and psychological abuse in medical contexts). Medical violence will be an important theme in this chapter, as it is pertinent for both Belmore’s and Anishinaabe artist Nadia Myre’s work, and because Indigenous individuals continue to die unnecessarily in Canada, sometimes strapped to beds, crying out for help.3 This is what happened to Joyce Echaquan,

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Figure 4.1  Rebecca Belmore, still from The Named and the Unnamed (video of Vigil), 2002. Exhibition view of Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from 20 June to 6 October 2019 © Rebecca Belmore Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.

Figure 4.2  Rebecca Belmore, still from The Named and the Unnamed (video of Vigil), 2002. Exhibition view of Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from 20 June to 6 October 2019 © Rebecca Belmore Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.



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an Atikamekw woman who died at a Quebec hospital in September 2020, when two white female nurses abused Echaquan verbally, shamed her for the number of children she had had, ignored her statements about her pain, tied her to her bed and watched as she died, pleading for help. These nurses called Echaquan stupid, and stated that she was only good for sex and would be better off dead. Echaquan, realizing what was happening to her, filmed the two nurses live, showing them laughing at their patient, and in this video, which was streaming live on Facebook, Echaquan’s family and friends watched, powerless and at a distance, as she died in real time. This is only one of many instances in Canada of Indigenous patients being abused and effectively murdered by medical professionals. This abuse, and the tendency for medical staff to blatantly ignore Indigenous peoples’ own words about their bodies and health, has its roots in colonialism. Anti-Indigenous racism has been deeply embedded in the Canadian collective consciousness since white European settlers travelled to the territory now known as Canada to trade with Indigenous peoples, to steal their land and to enact genocidal policies that included deliberately infecting blankets with small pox and creating residential schools. Colonial violence has also been enacted through damaging stereotypes about Indigenous peoples including the addicted Indigenous person who cannot control their alcohol or drug consumption, the ‘Squaw’ – the Indigenous woman who is sexually promiscuous and discardable – and the Indigenous person who is by turns lazy, dangerous or simply taking up space on land that rightly belongs to First Nations peoples. Another result of colonial violence towards Indigenous peoples in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic has been blatantly obvious in Montreal, the city where I live and work. An Indigenous man named Raphael Andre (whose preferred nickname was Napa) froze to death in a portable toilet in mid-January 2021 because the Quebec government had decreed an 8 pm curfew for all Quebecers, simultaneously deciding that while homeless shelters could stay open during the day, they had to close their doors overnight. Raphael, like other unhoused individuals in Montreal, was afraid not only of being fined by Montreal police but also of the very real potential of police brutality, an ongoing problem in Canada.4 America is not the only country where police habitually murder Black people and Indigenous people. Raphael died in a way that was humiliatingly symbolic. The most marginalized of people, he died in a place associated with waste. Anthropologist Mary Douglas writes in her book on taboo and pollution that dirt is ‘matter out of place’.5 In a similar vein, Anne Anlin Cheng, in her book Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (2011), illuminates the powerful symbolism of dirt in racist discourses. As Cheng observes,

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‘Self-management – obviously growing out of an anxiety about bodily waste – enjoys an enduring presence not only in modern aesthetic value but also the ideological construction of the modern nation-state, both Western and nonWestern. This accounts for the ubiquity of lavatory discussions in the most surprising of texts.’6 She continues, Freud is well known for suggesting that [Western] civilization is built on the repression of the scatological. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he famously claims that when men walked on all fours, smell was the most important sense, but when they stood erect, vision became privileged and the olfactory and the excremental at once degraded and repressed. The cultural trend toward cleanliness is thus directly linked to civilization, progress, and vision. As Anne McClintock has eloquently argued [in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Imperial Contest (1995)], the ideal of cleanliness constitutes a powerful and complex tool of colonial ideology and imperial dissemination.7

‘Out of sight, out of mind’ could be the motto of the Canadian government when it comes to Indigenous individuals. But young Montrealers such as McGill student Sophie Hart, the founder of Meals for Milton-Parc, refused to accept this act of violence, and released a blistering rebuke to the Quebec premier in January 2021. Raphael Andre, an Innu man who frequented Park Avenue in downtown Montreal, was symbolically and discursively positioned as matter out of place and as waste. Park Avenue is known for a small community of Inuit individuals who are unhoused. Some of them identify as addicted individuals. These Inuk are homeless and therefore regarded as shameful, a blight on the streets of Montreal. Montreal is just a microcosm of Canada, which is a space of ongoing violence towards Indigenous peoples in general, and Indigenous women in particular. In this chapter I focus on the work of Rebecca Belmore and Nadia Myre who have both used traditional Indigenous materials – namely textiles and beads – to address material and affective violence. While Belmore is most associated with Vancouver, Myre is based in Montreal and teaches at Concordia University. Belmore’s work has long been concerned with violence, both historical and contemporary, and she works in a range of media, including craft materials, photography, performance and video. I will examine the different affective consequences of these various media in Belmore’s artworks that are concerned with violence. Myre also works with craft materials, and she has engaged with photography in many of her pieces. Whereas Belmore’s work often explicitly references acts of violence towards Indigenous peoples, in many of her works



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Figure 4.3  Nadia Myre, Scar Stitch from the Scarscapes series, 2010. Photograph of beaded object.

Myre employs beads and thread to index the aftermath of violence (both physical and psychological) in series such as Scarscapes (2008–10; Figure 4.3) and The Scar Project (2005–13; Figure 4.4), a collaborative series of stitched scars.8 Unsurprisingly, I am not the first scholar to consider Myre’s work in relation to skin, as Scar Project obviously invites this kind of investigation. In 2010, the National Museum of the American Indian published the catalogue for its important exhibition Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor, which included the work of a range of Indigenous artists based in both Canada and the United States.9 In what follows, I will build on the scholarship written for the Hide exhibition catalogue, foregrounding the specific power of ‘craft’ materials to speak of both violence and healing for Indigenous peoples. I will also examine more recent works by Myre, namely her series Meditations on Red (2013; Plate 8), which is comprised of round close-up photographs of red and white beads that evoke not only blood drops but also Petri dishes, thus inviting a discussion of what I am calling the visual culture of medical violence. The ‘red’ in the title of Myre’s series of works not only refers to the colour of the beads and the colour of

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Figure 4.4  Nadia Myre, single canvas from The Scar Project series, 2005–13. Thread and canvas.

blood but also alludes to a particular kind of discursive violence that still haunts Indigenous peoples, namely the racist term ‘red skin’ to refer, inaccurately, to the colour of their skin. Indigenous scholar Glen Coulthard appropriates this racist slur in the title of his book Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014), in which he argues that the Canadian government’s policy of ‘reconciliation’ is not founded upon making amends and restitution but is rather a smokescreen for ongoing colonial violence and anti-Indigenous racism.10 As I mentioned in the previous chapter on Métis artist Sherry Farrell Racette, Coulthard also advocates for the political power of so-called ‘ugly feelings’11 such as anger as part of Indigenous activism. Coulthard’s title is, of course, an explicit reference to Black philosopher and psychologist Frantz Fanon’s canonical text Black Skin, White Masks (1952). In a chapter entitled ‘The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized’, Fanon states, ‘Yes, European civilization and its agents of the highest caliber are responsible for colonial racism.’12 In the same chapter, Fanon, discussing colonialism in Madagascar, observes, ‘The arrival of the



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white man in Madagascar inflicted an unmistakable wound. The consequences of this European irruption in Madagascar are not only psychological, since, as everyone has said, there are inner relationships between consciousness and social context.’13 For Fanon, these consequences are financial and psychological, as well as material, that is, corporeal. Canada, as a nation state created through the deliberate and carefully calibrated genocide of Indigenous peoples, is a case study of the festering wound that colonization enacted and enacts. In the nineteenth century, the Canadian government created residential schools, where Indigenous children, often taken by force from their parents, were prevented, violently, from speaking their own languages as part of an assimilationist project that involved rampant physical, sexual and psychological abuse that has resulted in intergenerational trauma.14 The Canadian government’s goal was to ‘kill the Indian in the child’, and this frequently manifested as material violence – murder – which continues today in violence towards Indigenous men and women, for example, in Canadian police’s notorious ‘starlight tours’, wherein Indigenous men who are identified as intoxicated are taken by police to isolated locations in the dead of winter and left there, often to freeze to death. In his article ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ (2006), Patrick Wolfe identifies the close, violent relationship between ‘genocide and the settler-colonial tendency that I term the logic of elimination’.15 Later on, Wolfe remarks, ‘Here, in essence, is assimilation’s Faustian bargain – have our settler world, but lose our Indigenous soul. Beyond any doubt, this is a kind of death … But just what kind of death is it that is involved in assimilation? The term “homocide,” for instance, combines the senses of killing and of humanity.’16 In other words, assimilation and other governmental policies related to Indigenous peoples are frequently, if not always, de-humanizing, and very often result in either soul death or physical/ material death. It is not an exaggeration to say that, when it comes to Indigenous peoples, Canada has been, and continues to be, a death cult. In ‘White Settler Death Drives: Settler Statecraft, White Possession, and Multiple Colonialisms Under Treaty 6’, art historian Erin Morton points out, ‘Violence enacted by white settlers toward Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island/North America has defined the settler colonial occupation of these lands for 500 years.’17 Importantly for many of the artworks that will be discussed in this chapter, drawing on the work of Kanien’keha:ka scholar Audra Simpson, Morton argues ‘that the white settler state needs Indigenous peoples, especially women, to disappear in order to maintain its sovereignty’.18 Both Belmore and Myre are hyper-aware – for how could they not be, as Indigenous women – that colonial violence has not been

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relegated to the past but rather continues into the present, on a daily basis, in new permutations that normalize the violence enacted on Indigenous individuals’ bodies and psyches. Neither Belmore nor Myre depict actual corporeal violence in their works; they index violence through performance, red paint, ripped textiles, dripping blood-red beads and stitched scars. Given the ubiquity of representational violence when it comes to women of colour, particularly Indigenous women, in the Canadian context, the choice made by Belmore and Myre to not depict actual material violence towards Indigenous women is poignant and powerful. The viewer is denied access to the suffering Indigenous female body, undermining the normalcy of seeing the transgressed and violated Indigenous female body in visual culture. The thesis running through this chapter is that by employing textiles and beads to symbolize violently harmed bodies, Belmore and Myre avoid enacting further violence and trauma on Indigenous female viewers.19

Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil (2002) Indigenous women artists are lower-paid and have fewer shows than white artists. Nonetheless, Rebecca Belmore has become one of the most famous artists working and living in Canada. In 2005, she represented Canada at the Venice Biennial, four years before Teresa Margolles represented Mexico at the same fabled art event.20 Her solo retrospective, Facing the Monumental, which was organized by Indigenous curator Wanda Nanibush for the Art Gallery of Ontario and which travelled to Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain in 2019, included multiple works that were concerned with colonial violence, both past and present. That exhibition accurately positioned Belmore as a highly influential, international, or global, contemporary artist. Writing about Vigil (Figures 4.1 and 4.2), Charlotte Townsend-Gault observes, ‘Belmore was making a connection between the violence against these unnamed, apparently unimportant women – sex workers, addicts, many of them First Nations, all of them relatively powerless – and the exercise of the “power of the nation”.’21 Townsend-Gault foregrounds the importance of the red dress in terms of both symbolism and materiality. As Townsend-Gault remarks, The crimes against the body, the Native body, the woman’s body, are embodied in, enacted by, or inscribed on her own body, as if in an act of atonement. Then comes the ritualistic violence of the disrobing. Belmore is wearing a long,



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flowing red dress. … Repeatedly, attention is drawn to the way that the material behaves. It is an empirical experiment, demonstrated for all to see, felt on the body. No representation, this is the phenomenology of material under stress. But the phenomenology of driving nails through fabric to wood, of nailing and tearing, cannot deflect the metaphors crowding in: this is bodily stuff, this is the fabric as flesh.22

Belmore has used the red dress more than once in her work, and the red dress has become a powerful symbol for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls of Canada.23 Art historian Claudette Lauzon also discusses the red dress in her feminist analysis of Belmore’s Vigil, drawing on theorists including Elisabeth Grosz and Margrit Shildrik to demonstrate how the Indigenous female sex worker has been discursively transformed into a threatening body that must be violently disappeared to protect the white, Canadian social body. Lauzon’s essay on Belmore is extremely useful for understanding how the most vulnerable individuals in society are perceived as the most threatening, and thereby become extraordinarily vulnerable to material violence. As Lauzon states, ‘when the context shifts radically to the lives of women who literally vanish, the ghosting of excessive bodies takes on material consequences’.24 Lauzon cites Shildrick’s insights about the ‘historical construction of non-normative female bodies as sites of contamination and containment’, discursively transforming them into ‘monstrous bodies’ through texts and images.25 She also cites an important case study written by Sherene Razack about the 1995 rape and murder of Indigenous sex worker Pamela George in Regina, Saskatchewan. As Razack has shown, the trope of the ‘squalid and immoral squaw’, which has its roots in early settler colonialism, has normalized and justified the material and discursive obliteration of Indigenous women. Lauzon quotes Razack, who argued that ‘bodies that engage in prostitution and the spaces of prostitution are racialized … regardless of the actual race’ of the sex worker. Razack goes on to state that when Indigenous women experience violence, whether it be intimate violence or murder by serial killer, the Indigenous women are framed as having got ‘what they deserved’.26 This has an obvious precedent in the nineteenth century, when sex workers who died violently or died by suicide were said to have paid the price of being a ‘fallen woman’, as it was believed that the ‘wages of sin was death’.27 Like Townsend-Gault, Lauzon sees the red dress in Belmore’s performance as a powerful symbol not only for the ‘fallen woman’ or ‘scarlet woman’ but also as a metaphor for the violently torn, and literally dismembered, skin and bodies of Indigenous women. According to Lauzon,

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The dress, heavily burdened with associations – of the abject menstruating woman, of the red tent in which menstruating women were sequestered in the Biblical epoch, of the red dress of Jezebel and the scarlet woman – is, in this performance, associated with both the stain of shame that marks the prostitute body as contagiously abject and, conversely, with the stain of traumatic death.28

Lauzon argues that Vigil does not offer closure to viewers of the performance, as closure is impossible in the context of violence bred by misogyny and antiIndigenous racism. There is no re-sewing of the fabric’s fragments, and even if there were, it would be a facile, unconvincing and unproductive metaphor for physical and psychological healing. Some of the scholars29 who write about Indigenous peoples and mental health suggest that healing from trauma is possible, but as Lauzon rightly notes, while healing may well be possible for some of the people left behind, art, even art as angry, empathetic and ethical as Belmore’s Vigil, cannot bring back the dead. The Indigenous women who have been murdered cannot be re-membered following their violent dismembering, and remembering may or may not be a salve that heals psychological wounds for Indigenous women who are still living. In her article ‘Stitching through Silence: Walking with Our Sisters, Honoring the Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada’, art historian Stephanie G. Anderson quotes adviser to the British Columbia Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, Linda Locke, QC, who has written, For Aboriginal communities, the experience of losing their young women inflicts a deep trauma. All of the Aboriginal groups in the Northwest are matrilineal – women are seen as the ones who carry the culture, history and lineage forward; they play an important role in continuity. … When a woman is lost there is a disruptive ripple throughout the clan and nation. As a result, there is a wound that does not heal, and many generations lose their sense of belonging.30

I suggest that this psychological festering wound informs Belmore’s Vigil, and thus while her work is certainly about resilience, resistance and survivance, her work is intentionally difficult, disavowing easy solutions (such as reconciliation or recognition), repelling closure (as Lauzon argues) and inevitably resulting in different affective responses for Indigenous viewers and non-Indigenous viewers. Belmore’s work positions white viewers as complicit in ongoing colonial violence, leading to discomfort and unsettling affective responses including defensiveness, anxiety and white guilt. In an article about Belmore’s mentor, Native American artist James Luna (who passed away in 2018), Jane Blocker asks, ‘What manner of violence is done when memory is tied like a stone to the



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foot of the native and then tossed into a sea of postmodern cynicism?’31 This pointed statement is related, I suggest, to Jennifer Doyle’s trenchant critique of detached or disinterested art viewing and criticism in her book Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013). Doyle discusses Luna’s performance of The History of the Luiseno People (Christmas, La Jolla Reservation 1990) in 2009 at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions as part of a show Doyle had curated. In Luna’s performance, he sat on a ratty Lazy-Boy chair, drinking beer, watching Christmas movies and pretending to have awkward phone calls with, we might speculate, loved ones. According to Doyle, Luna’s performance of ‘alcoholic masculine depression’ in a work with a title that suggests the largely white audience will have access to some kind of ethnographic spectacle did not go down well, with viewers becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the lack of beginning-middle-and-end narrative, the consumption of alcohol (simultaneously an allusion to Luna’s self-identified alcoholism and the stereotype of the addicted Indigenous person32) and the absence of any clear moral or message, as well as what was perceived of as inauthentic affect.33 Doyle remarks that ‘As time passed, he seemed to lose his place, and his talk soured. He wobbled between an anger that felt faked (and was therefore a bad performance) and that felt real (and directed at his audience). More and more people left the room.’34 In many ways, Belmore’s Vigil is very different from Luna’s performance, not only in terms of gender but also in having a clear arc of actions including washing the street corner, lighting candles, calling out the names of missing and murdered women, tearing roses through her teeth, putting on the red dress, nailing the dress to the telephone pole, ripping the dress off the pole, then, once the dress was in tatters, leaning up against a black pickup truck, wearing a white tank top (colloquially known as a ‘wife beater’), while James Brown’s song ‘It’s a Man’s World’ blasted from the truck. There are clear connections between Vigil and Luna’s performance, however, and I want to argue that the primary links are affective, in terms of foregrounding the artists’ ‘ugly feelings’ or negative/difficult emotions, while also eliciting difficult emotions in viewers, and refusing viewers a sense of closure or ‘happy ending’. While I am focusing on female artists of colour in Skin Crafts, it is worth noting that scars played a major role in many of Luna’s works, including Artifact Piece, a 1987 performance in which Luna enacted a parodic ethnographic display of his own body, lying flat on his back in a glass vitrine, as museum goers (at the Museum of Man, in Balboa Park, San Diego) visually consumed his body. As Blocker notes, ‘Placards that appeared with the display transcribed the various scars by which Luna’s body is marked’, for example: ‘Drunk beyond the point of

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being able to defend himself, he was jumped by people from another reservation. After being knocked down, he was kicked in the face and upper body. Saved by an old man, he awoke with a swollen face covered in dry blood.’35 Interestingly, the same year that Belmore represented Canada at the Venice Biennial, Luna represented the United States in Venice. As Townsend-Gault writes in a 2006 article, To experience their work together in an international location is to get a sense of how their trajectories through local communities and increasingly transnational art worlds have done much to shape the direction and discussion around Native art of the past twenty years in both Canada and the United States. This should not be taken as career progress from the local to the global – both artists have always insisted that their first allegiance is to their own communities, as both source and audience.36

In 2005, Jill Bennett wrote, ‘Up until now, theorists of trauma and memory have paid relatively little attention to visual and performance art.’37 An important exception to this is scholars who have been discussing performance by Indigenous women since at least the 1980s. Indeed, Belmore entered the Canadian art scene in 1985 as her artistic alter ego with a performance in Thunder Bay, Ontario, entitled A High-tech Tipi Trauma Mama.38 The humorous title that nods to Indigenous futurisms does not overshadow the explicit reference to trauma that Belmore has been addressing since the beginning of her career. Scholars including Ruth B. Phillips and Sherry Farrell Racette, among many others, have foregrounded the importance of performance for Indigenous female artists in particular, because of its urgency, temporality, and space-based orientations. In an essay about early-twentieth-century Indigenous female performers, Phillips writes that ‘during the modernist century that lasted from the 1860s to the 1960s, performance, not graphic or plastic art, was the available space for Native artistic production, and further … performance offered the most favourable site for Native negotiations of the dominant culture’s images of [Indigenous individuals] as pre-modern, degenerate, and vanishing’.39 Focusing on the latter half of the twentieth century and early-twenty-first century, Sherry Farrell Racette observes, ‘Photography in its many interrelated forms is currently, with performance, the most vigorous mode of production in contemporary Aboriginal art. There is an immediacy and connectedness to community that are difficult to achieve in other media.’40 The importance of Indigenous women taking up space on stolen Indigenous land is crucial for these performances. As previously noted, the specific location that Belmore chose for Vigil was highly significant as it was



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a street corner in Vancouver’s DTES that has not only become associated with sex work and drug use but is also a place where Indigenous women have been picked up and subsequently murdered. Vigil was only thirty minutes long, not a particularly punishing length of time for viewers, although the performance was physically and, one might speculate with confidence, emotionally draining for Belmore. In a book about Indigenous performance, theatre scholar Julie Burelle observes that ‘endurance performance’ is particularly resonant for Indigenous artists, and that this approach to performance art speaks to ‘Indigenous endurance as ontology and as a resistance tactic’. If the length of Vigil did not require physical or temporal endurance, it did demand emotional or affective endurance on the part of both the artist and the Indigenous viewer in particular. There is a good chance that some Indigenous female viewers may have been triggered by the performance, even while experiencing some degree of catharsis or sense of being seen. Building on performance scholar Patrick Anderson’s work, Burelle asserts that ‘settler colonialism’s [ongoing] gendered violence’ is at the root of endurance performance by Indigenous women artists.41 To not put too fine a point on it: Indigenous women have long had to endure a range of violences, and they continue to endure a range of violences. This violence is not inevitable or natural. It is part of structural violence that is threaded through Canadian governmental policies and results from anti-Indigenous racist beliefs. Although Burelle does not discuss Belmore’s Vigil, her words are poignantly relevant for the performance, as she remarks that performances by Indigenous artists ‘render visible Indigenous presence and epistemologies where they have been and continue to be violently erased’.42 As with any performance, the order of actions is highly relevant for understanding the affective power of Vigil. We can break Belmore’s performance into four distinct parts: (1) the ritualistic cleaning of the street corner and lighting of candles (Figure 4.1); (2) Belmore crying out the names of missing and murdered women, and after each name was shouted, the artist pulled full-stem roses through her teeth; (3) the donning of the red dress, nailing the dress to the telephone pole, and the repeated and violent ripping of the dress away from the pole until the fabric was in fragments; (4) wearing a white tank top, Belmore leans against the black pickup truck with James Brown’s song blaring. I argue that part of the affective power in Belmore’s performance is not its offering of catharsis – the release of pent-up painful emotions such as fear and anger – but its deliberate failure to offer catharsis and consolation to white viewers. Indeed, catharsis is offered, I argue, to Indigenous viewers in the

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second part of the performance, when Belmore had written the names of the missing and murdered women of the DTES on her arms in thick black marker (Figure 4.2), and then yelled out their names. After each name, she dragged a rose through her teeth. The yelling of names suggests a cathartic moment of release, while also naming women who had long gone unnamed. But the naming part of the performance is not the conclusion of the performance. If it were, Vigil would have ended with catharsis, at least for some viewers. The yelling of missing and murdered Indigenous women’s names, I argue, simultaneously interpellated (hailed) Indigenous viewers, inviting them to grieve and release sadness and anger. In Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s 2020 novel, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, one nonbinary character states, ‘Grief is saving yourself over and over again.’43 This particular act of the performance is a space for Indigenous viewers to experience catharsis and grief. I want to propose that white viewers – Simpson’s ironically referenced ‘white ladies’ – are not invited into this space. Belmore does not make this explicit at any point in the performance, but if white viewers wish to engage in acts of decolonizing spectatorship, and are willing to be unsettled when we view art by Indigenous artists, we must know our place, and we must stop taking up space, both literally and figuratively. I propose that while there is the potentiality for catharsis for Indigenous viewers in the second part of Vigil, the third part – the ripping of the dress – symbolically opens up old wounds. It is a ripping off of multiple scabs, not to harm Belmore’s Indigenous viewers further with triggering traumatic materiality but rather to repel any easy interpretation of the performance as offering closure (as Lauzon has argued) and to refuse to offer comfort to white viewers who have no right to ask for comfort from Indigenous artists specifically or Indigenous peoples generally. If the third section of the performance opens up new and old wounds, then the fourth section, with Belmore performing (white) machismo, signified by the white tank top, is an act of pouring salt into the wound. Again, I want to propose that this part of the performance is not meant as a blow to Indigenous viewers but rather as a blunt rejection of white viewers’ desire for catharsis, closure and a happy ending. There can be no happy ending until antiIndigenous violence stops. In wearing a white tank top, associated with poor white trash, Belmore is performing not only violent or toxic masculinity but also, perhaps, a kind of white face, a clear repost to white viewers who want their Indigenous art tied up in a bow, with all uncomfortable loose ends tucked away. In this way, Belmore’s performance is not unlike Luna’s performance in its deliberate affective failure; that is, its deliberate failure to give white audience members what they think they want. As previously noted, Doyle argues that



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Luna’s performance failed to provide the expected ‘ethnographic’ experience, offering instead stilted, one-sided conversations, apparent intoxication and anger that was either inauthentic, authentic or both. Luna’s performance fits into Julie Burelle’s framework of ‘endurance performance’, and as Doyle notes, many audience members were unwilling to endure the performance to its bitter end. The video of Vigil that was displayed as part of the 2002 exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery at the University of British Columbia (significantly titled The Named and the Unnamed, and curated by Charlotte Townsend-Gault) and in 2018 in the Facing the Monumental retrospective does not show explicit evidence of audience members experiencing physical or affective discomfort. That does not mean, of course, that viewers – whether Indigenous or nonIndigenous – did not experience a range of ugly feelings, and indeed it is highly likely that the vast majority of viewers did experience some kind of affective discomfort given the subject matter. But there does not seem to have been the same level of irritation that viewers experienced watching Luna’s performance in 2009. Nonetheless, both Belmore and Luna rejected closure and catharsis as the defining affects of their performances. In an essay about performances of Oscar Wilde’s notorious play Salome, which was originally written in French in 1893 and deemed obscene by a British judge, Ellen Crowell focuses on the climactic scene of the play in which the decapitated head of St John the Baptist is brought out onstage on a silver platter. Crowell demonstrates that in multiple performances, the ‘dummy’ head that was used elicited negative affective responses in viewers and critics. At first glance, Wilde’s play and Belmore’s performance are worlds apart, and I certainly do not want to ignore the specificities of Indigenous women’s suffering as indexed in Vigil. However, at the core of both Wilde’s play and Belmore’s performance is violence against women who have been framed as threatening to the patriarchal social order. Salome is killed at the end of the eponymous play because she is perceived as monstrous and out of control, having asked for the head of St John the Baptist as a reward for her erotic dance for her stepfather Herod. What I want to foreground with this comparison is Crowell’s insightful analysis of what was perceived as the ‘aesthetic failure’ in performances of Salome, namely the dummy head as either too life-like or too obviously fake. She remarks that the prop head, ‘as a theatrical object, introduces an intentional flaw, a productive mistake, an aesthetic amplification designed to trouble any predetermined affective responses sutured to distinct ideas about art’s social, moral, and political role’.44 Crowell draws on Sianne Ngai’s book Ugly Feelings (2005), borrowing Ngai’s theory of ‘stuplimity’, one of

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the ‘weaker affects’, and which is a ‘strange amalgam of shock and boredom’.45 Ngai identifies this particular affect ‘as registering modernity’s ambivalent and equivocal attitudes toward the role of the aesthetic in delimiting art’s political function’.46 Belmore’s choice to end with a performance of white, toxic masculinity rather than with catharsis is, I believe, a deliberate affective ‘failure’ that is not intended to suggest the impotence of art to enact political change but rather to illuminate the Sisyphean task of Indigenous activism and resistance in the face of ongoing white supremacy. Indigenous viewers will already know this experience of exhausted endurance; white settler viewers must realize that we are the salt in the festering wound. In her essay on Wilde’s Salome, Crowell writes that in failing to provoke the more recognizably sublime aesthetic feelings of wonder, terror, and transcendence, the ugly things of Salome seek something different. As an early aesthetic experiment in tedium, dullness, and irritation, Salome works by not working, and by making us think about how it is not working. … Wilde’s decadent experiment in meta-response may have been lost on his early modernist audiences. But in the work of later twentieth-century artists, including Bertolt Brecht, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol, and John Cage, we again find artists pursing productive aesthetic failure as catalyst for the creation of new generic forms.47

In Ugly Feelings, Ngai links the affect of irritation with skin. According to Ngai, ‘the split between the bodily sensation that is “soreness” and the emotional quality that is “mild anger” foregrounds irritation’s liminality or instability as an emotional response’. She continues, Whether ‘irritation’ is defined as an emotional or physical experience, synonyms for it tend to apply equally to psychic life and life at the level of the body – and particularly to its surfaces or skin … one of the synonyms for ‘irritation’ qua ‘mild anger’ – namely, ‘aggravation’ – carries the implication of worsening or worrying a wound or sore, with ‘sore’ itself signifying both a condition of the skin or body (an ulcer, abrasion, or inflammation) and, in twentieth-century slang, a state of indignation or resentment.48

While the terms ‘tedium, dullness, and irritation’ are perhaps more relevant for Luna’s performance than for Belmore’s performance, both artists engage in deliberate affective ‘failure’ rather than aesthetic failure, not to create new generic forms per se but rather to avoid providing affective comfort for white viewers, even while, I would like to suggest, offering spaces of grief and catharsis, if not closure, for Indigenous viewers.



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Like Doyle, who argues that Luna was performing ‘masculine alcoholic depression’, I propose that depression is also a relevant affect for Belmore’s performance. Specifically, building on Ann Cvetkovich’s work, I am thinking of Vigil’s thread of depression as a ‘public feeling’ in Indigenous communities that has resulted from anti-Indigenous racism and colonial violence. In her book Depression: A Public Feeling (2012), Cvetkovich asks, ‘What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances?’49 Although Cvetkovich is primarily concerned with African Americans’ experiences of depression in the United States, her words are hyper-relevant for the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada and globally. Art historian Charmaine Nelson has been writing scholarship for many years that shows incontrovertibly that there was slavery in Canada, and that both Black individuals and Indigenous peoples were enslaved.50 Thus, in Canada, Indigenous individuals are the inheritors of intergenerational trauma that is the consequence of colonialism, slavery, displacement, dispossession, segregation on reservations, residential schools, deliberate germ warfare and medical violence, among other things. Cvetkovich argues that long histories of dispossession, ‘both geographic and psychic’, have resulted in ‘what I would call political depression’, an affect related to what Anne Anlin Cheng has termed ‘racial melancholy’.51 According to Cvetkovich, ‘Although trauma can be a useful category for thinking about the psychic and transgenerational effects of slavery and colonialism, a full picture of this history must include racism’s connections to more chronic and low-level feelings, such as those associated with depression.’52 Significantly, she adds, My use of examples drawn predominantly from African American culture represents a necessary narrowing of focus for a hopelessly large project and is only one possible trajectory of the multidisciplinary project of thinking race and depression together. My borrowing from indigenous studies represents a claim for its necessary status as a resource for work on dispossession, and I hope that combining diaspora and Indigeneity will inspire other comparative projects.53

If we think of the primary affects of Vigil not as catharsis but as anger, grief and depression, we arrive again at an interpretation of the performance that does not provide a tidy solution for healing, or a comfortable viewing experience for white viewers, but does acknowledge the negative affects that Indigenous viewers experience as a result of colonial violence and anti-Indigenous racism.54

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As noted previously, the video of Vigil was included in the 2002 exhibition The Named and the Unnamed, as well as the 2019 retrospective Facing the Monumental. In both exhibitions, the video was projected onto a wall, and light bulbs were inserted into the wall to create a grid pattern (Figures 4.1 and 4.2), so that the light bulbs interrupt the viewer’s gaze when watching the video. There is already a distancing effect with the video, as it lacks the temporal urgency and site-specificity of the original performance, though the power of the performance is certainly not lost. The light bulbs distance the viewer even more, protruding from the wall and entering the space of the audience, while also acting as visual distractions from the performance itself. Lauzon observes that in The Named and the Unnamed, ‘the filmed performance [was] projected on an eight-by-nine-foot screen in an otherwise empty room, endlessly looping, as if, Townsend-Gault suggests, to convey the endless “re-enactment which characterizes trauma” ’. She adds, ‘The screen is punctured with red lights that echo the candles lit during the performance but that also obscure the screen, disrupting our vision, and perhaps, our desire for unmediated access to the trauma that is invoked.’55 If we think of the screen as a kind of skin, the light bulbs function another way, namely, as a material irruption from the skin; blemishes or blisters that call attention to the skin’s vulnerability and permeability. In her book The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000), Laura Marks writes, quoting Walter Benjamin, ‘often meaning escapes the audiovisual registers altogether. … I will argue that cinema itself appeals to contact – to embodied knowledge, and to the sense of touch in particular – in order to recreate memories a story “bears the marks of the storyteller much as the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter’s hand”.’56 Marks’s proposal, which builds on Benjamin’s craft simile, brings together film, the screen, the body, touch and craft, as well as evoking different kinds of marks (fingerprints, scars, brush strokes, stitches). Although she does not explicitly mention skin here, she does implicitly point to it with her reference to touch. For Marks, the screen-asskin invites the idea or memory of touch, even without literal (physical) touch. She calls this ‘tactile memory’, observing, ‘The fabric of everyday experience that tends to elude verbal or visual records is encoded in these senses. Senses that are closer to the body, like the sense of touch, are capable of storing powerful memories that are lost to the visual.’57 Thus the most visceral moments in Vigil are when Belmore is tearing the red dress away from the pole again and again. Tactile memory reminds us of what fabric feels like in our hands and against our skin. Empathic knowledge, or corporeal empathy, makes us feel in our bodies every rip of the textile skin.



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The puncturing light bulbs of The Named and the Unnamed add another level of skin transgression, both into the skin (the gallery wall as screen) and into our own phenomenological space (the threat of transgression, violence, into our own skin). The screen is rendered abject, as per Kristeva’s theory: the threat of transgression between self and other, and the threat of transgression between the outside and the inside of the body via the skin. Although not writing about Indigenous performance, Marks’s theory of ‘haptic visuality’ is productive for thinking through Belmore’s work, as well as Myre’s work, as she suggests ‘The theory of haptic visuality I advance should allow us to reconsider how the relationship between self and other may be yielding-knowing, more than (but as well as) shattering.’58 With the penetrating, puncturing light bulbs, the video of Vigil transforms the screen from flat, pure, white surface to affective minefield. No longer pure and smooth, the screen is now uneven, wounded, scarred, bursting with pustules. While it is the norm to have artworks hang from gallery walls, the light bulbs are intrusions on the viewing experience; protuberances that evoke imperfect skin; and the bodily fluids that lie beneath the surface, ready to burst forth if the skin is violently broken.

Belmore’s Fringe (2008): Material culture and medical violence Métis artist and scholar Sherry Farrell Racette has pointed to photography as one of the most powerful mediums for contemporary Indigenous artists: ‘Almost from the moment of the camera’s introduction to the territories that would become Canada, Aboriginal people were in front of it, our images controlled and manipulated. Relegating us to the past as vanished and vanquished, photography was fixated on the colonized subject but lost interest in contemporary Aboriginal people.’ She goes on to state, ‘The notion of the camera as an instrument of colonialism, as a weapon to be seized, has its roots primarily in feminist and postcolonial critiques of photography and cinema and in the worldwide emergence of the practice of resistance.’59 Belmore’s Fringe (Plate 7) brings photography and the practices of beading and resistance into the same frame. In an article about the Missing and Murdered Women and Girls of Canada, Stephanie G. Anderson is concerned with the practice of beading as it has been used in the context of mourning. Both Belmore and Nadia Myre have repeatedly employed red beads to stand in for blood and to index violence against Indigenous women’s bodies. Belmore’s Fringe is a 2008 photograph that was displayed as a large billboard in Montreal (on Duke Street between Ottawa

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Street and William Street; 300 × 800 cm) that same year; it was also included in Belmore’s 2018 solo retrospective Facing the Monumental. Fringe represents an Indigenous woman (possibly Belmore herself) lying on her left side, her back to the viewer. The woman is nude, but her buttocks are covered with a white cloth, similar to the white cloth she is lying on. Her right arm is draped elegantly on the right side of her body, and the curve of her ribcage and hip creates what British artist William Hogarth described as the line of beauty. Her head is supported by a pillow, creating the suggestion of comfort, but that comfort is undermined by the diagonal line of bloody stitches that begin at the tip of the woman’s right shoulder and traverse her back to just above her left buttock. The extremely realistic-looking stitches are sutured with dirty-looking white thread, and lines of red beads hang from the stitches, some of them pooling on the white cloth that the woman is posed upon. Standing close to the photograph, the sutured skin still looks unbearably realistic, with the areas of the skin that have been ‘pierced’ with string appearing bloody. From a distance, the viewer would be forgiven for thinking that this is a photograph of a woman post-surgery, with blood spilling from her sutures. Standing close to the photograph in a gallery setting, it is usually only the double take that reveals that the red drips are beads, not blood. The photograph is therefore not a depiction of actual material violence. The beads function as a mimetic representation of blood, but they also index the epidemic of material violence towards Indigenous women, as well as affective and psychological trauma among Indigenous women. White European settlers introduced glass beads to Indigenous peoples around five hundred years ago, and they subsequently became part of Indigenous and Métis art production, including on baskets, clothing and other important objects, as I discussed in the previous chapter. Beads are now regarded as traditional Indigenous materials and are sometimes used in celebratory ways by contemporary Indigenous artists (e.g. Christi Belcourt) or in ironic ways that allude to white art collectors’ expectations of traditional Indigenous materials in ‘authentic’ Indigenous art (e.g. Ron Noganosh).60 In Fringe, Belmore’s use of red beads nods towards both of these artistic strategies, but ultimately the red beads function as symbols of blood and metaphors for violence towards Indigenous women. With a minimalist aesthetic and an economy of visual signs, Belmore has communicated to the viewer that this work is concerned with violence against Indigenous women in the contemporary context. The beads as traditional materials effectively link contemporary colonial violence to historical colonial violence in Belmore’s work. But there is another layer of meaning to this photograph that the exhibition catalogue for Facing the



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Monumental illuminates. A real-life incident inspired Belmore to create Fringe. The exhibition catalogue cites a 1993 report written about the Winnipeg Health and Social Services by the Northern Health Research Unit at the University of Manitoba. In that report, it is recorded that on 24 November 1980, a white male surgeon at St Boniface Hospital ‘inserted’ two glass beads (description of the number of beads inserted varies from media reports of ‘dozens’ to the Hall Inquiry Report of ‘two’) into the ends of a suture ‘after a lung biopsy on a fifty-two-year-old Cree woman from Shamattawa in northern Manitoba. The surgeon claimed that he had joked with the patient about inserting these beads prior to the surgery’, and stated in a subsequent inquiry that he had meant to communicate his respect for the patient’s beadwork skills. He claimed to have used another Cree male patient in the hospital as an interpreter, although this individual denied any knowledge of the alleged discussion. The female patient, who did not speak English, asserted that she had not consented to having beads sewn into her sutures, and she was ‘embarrassed and angry’ after learning why hospital staff were looking at her skin and laughing; the sutures were located below her right armpit in an area that she could not see without the aid of a mirror.61 With this knowledge, the photograph is translated into an example of the visual culture of medical violence; the medical invasion of the body, the ostensibly celebratory use of glass beads functioning as a material ‘signature’ of a male medical professional, indexing his presence as well as his assumed power over the Indigenous woman’s body. There is a direct line, I would argue, from this violation of an Indigenous woman’s body, which solicited laughter in other medical staff, and the humiliation and murder of Joyce Echaquan in Quebec in September 2020. Belmore’s use of beads to symbolize blood, combined with turning the Indigenous woman’s body away from the viewer, also avoids spectacularizing or sexualizing the suffering (or indeed murdered) Indigenous female subject. In her insightful article ‘Reconsidering the Dead in Andres Serrano’s The Morgue: Identity, Agency, Subjectivity’ (2008), Andrea D. Fitzpatrick demonstrates the problematic ethics of turning photographs of corpses into art. Fitzpatrick critically examines Serrano’s 1992 series The Morgue, which resulted from the artist visiting a morgue to photograph various individuals who had died. As Fitzpatrick notes, ‘I would like to explore the ways in which Serrano shows his awareness of the vulnerability of the dead, not by recognizing it as an ethical paradigm, but by exploiting and reifying it, perpetuating a subjectivity for the dead that is disrespectful, if not also wounding.’62 She continues,

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I intend to demonstrate how the proclivity of the dead to ‘endure’ violence occurs not only at a material level but also at a discursive level and through artistic representations (involving images, language, and the cultural systems through which they are understood). This representational violence constitutes the posthumous production of their subjectivity.63

Unlike Serrano or Mexican artist Teresa Margolles (as discussed in Chapter 1), Belmore never photographs actual individuals who have died, even while much of her body of work is concerned with violence and death. Instead, she uses her own body to stand in for individuals who have died violently, as in Vigil, or she uses beads, textiles or other materials such as wood, metal and clay to symbolize violence towards the Indigenous subject, rather than showing the Indigenous female subject in extremis. Fitzpatrick undertakes a particularly trenchant critique of Serrano’s three photographs entitled Rat Poison Suicide, which depict parts of a woman’s body, turning those body parts into fragments, metonymic tatters. According to Fitzpatrick, The works that comprise the Rat Poison Suicide trio necessitates a feminist reading because of the gendered specificity that adheres to the corpse. These works demonstrate the consequences of the dead female, who is subject to a deterministic camera gaze that occludes the head and face while violently exposing the genitals. Identity, and the means of expression traditionally associated with the face (the locus for the eyes, the voice, and the agency they implicate), is overturned in favour of a reification of the deceased as a sexualized object whose genitalia and painful-looking wounds are treated as equivalents.64

Although we cannot see the woman’s face in Belmore’s photograph, the artistic gesture does not deny the subject agency. Instead, the image reads as though the woman has turned her back to us, deliberately denying access to her face and the front of her body, while the white cloth conceals her buttocks. Without the woman’s face we can read the subject as Belmore, making the work a selfportrait, or as an embodiment of Indigenous women who endure physical and/ or emotional trauma. Belmore’s use of materials points not only to material violence to the body but also affective and psychological pain. We can read the bloody red beads in Fringe as symbolizing physical violence, as well as emotional suffering in a relational or empathetic mode. It is interesting to note that the woman’s pose, as well as the mimetic representation of bleeding sutures, in Belmore’s photograph is remarkably similar to one of the self-portraits in Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s 1946 painting Tree of Hope (Stay Firm), which depicts Kahlo twice: on the right



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she sits facing the viewer, wearing traditional Indigenous dress, and on the left, Kahlo is shown on her side on a gurney covered with a white cloth. Her back is to the viewer, and a white cloth covers her upper back, while another covers her buttocks. While Kahlo was not Indigenous, art historian Janice Helland has explored the ways in which Kahlo employed (some might say appropriated) Indigenous art and iconography as part of her nationalist project of Mexicanidad.65 Kahlo also famously suffered from chronic physical pain and psychological pain, although Kate Chedgzoy warns feminist art historians against focusing on the artist’s suffering at the expense of foregrounding her formidable artistic skill.66 Given that Belmore studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design and her knowledge of feminist art history (she has identified Ana Mendieta and Carolee Schneeman as influences), it is highly likely that Belmore knows this relatively unknown work by the most famous female artist of colour of all time. Whether or not Kahlo’s painting was a direct source of inspiration for Fringe, the aesthetic and thematic similarities offer, I would like to propose, an iconography of physical and affective pain for women of colour specifically, an iconography that symbolizes not pain alone but pain tinged with resilience, even healing. Kahlo’s painting alludes to one of her many surgeries. Fringe alludes not only to one specific real-life surgery but also to the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women. The narrative she constructs in this particular work is distinct from the narrative in Vigil, however. In Vigil, full catharsis is denied, as the experience of catharsis is followed quickly by the figurative opening up of new and old wounds. In Fringe, the wound is both mimetic and symbolic, but it has been stitched up. Even though it is bleeding, the stitches will eventually be removed, and the body will be allowed to begin healing itself. There is then, in Fringe, the suggestion of healing, even if the healing process will leave a large and permanent scar.

Nadia Myre’s Scar Project (2005–13) If Belmore’s body of work is informed by the festering wound of gender-based colonial violence, and if, as I have argued, Belmore’s Vigil repels facile attempts to read it as an allegory of healing and closure, Nadia Myre’s textile, beaded and photographic works walk the line between wound and scar, pointing to the possibility of healing, but never ignoring the fact that a scar is an index of a wound, whether physical or psychological. In the catalogue for Myre’s 2011 exhibition En[counter]s at Carleton University’s art gallery in Ottawa, Sandra

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Dyck writes that Myre ‘resists surface readings’ of her works ‘in favour of the haptic and symbolic’.67 Dyck quotes Myre as stating, ‘There’s no such thing as decoration. Everything means something.’68 This remark is significant for textile art, which has long been denigrated in Western art history as merely decorative. It is doubly significant for Indigenous artists whose works that employ traditional materials such as feathers, fibre and beads have been dismissed as ‘craft’ and thus emptied of their political meanings. Myre’s interest in skin and scars is apparent in multiple series including Skin Deep or Poetry for the Blind (2004) and Scarscapes (2008–10; Figure 4.3). As Anne Elegood writes, ‘Scars carry heavy emotional weight – they indicate trauma as well as survival – and the experience of seeing dozens of scars protruding from a woman’s body can feel like witnessing an unspeakable atrocity.’69 It is apparent from these series that Myre understands skin and scars as semiotic systems that can be interpreted. For Indigenous peoples, skin is an overdetermined sign of inferiority when viewed by racist individuals. In semiotics, the sign is comprised of signifier and signified, and it is interpreted based on cultural knowledge. Myre’s skin and scar works demonstrate, however, that the signifier is interpreted differently based on a person’s subject position and beliefs about Indigenous peoples. She uses scars as a metaphor for physical and psychic trauma caused by colonial violence, as well as a literal, mimetic, material signifier for both damage and healing. As Dyck observes, ‘situations of serious illness, accident, or trauma’ are ‘embodied by the simplified scar forms Myre depicts in Scarscapes – which cause the sufferer’s profound alienation from the world of health and normality’.70 Whereas in Scarscapes Myre beaded ‘images’ of scars, in her Scar Project series (Figure 4.4), she shifted to thread as the material with which to create symbolic scars. Both beads and fibre have functioned as important materials for Indigenous peoples, in making clothing and other crucial objects for survival and ceremony. For Myre, beads also symbolize contact between Indigenous peoples and white European settlers. They therefore function as both symbols of traditional art production and the violence of settler colonialism. According to Dyck, ‘Glass beads, brought across the Atlantic by explorers, traders, and missionaries, are a singularly post-contact product. … Myre’s beaded works manifest her continuity with this past while grounding them in physical labour, here and now.’71 The images of beaded scars in Scarscapes exist in two forms: the material object (the beads and thread) and photographs of the beaded objects. As Dyck remarks, ‘Myre has transformed small, three-dimensional beaded objects into large, two-dimensional prints. The former articulate intimacy, materiality, and the handmade, while the latter speak of the impersonal, the flat surface, and the



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machined.’72 As with Belmore’s Fringe, Myre’s choice to photograph her beaded objects is highly resonant in the context of Indigenous art production that is negotiating with the history of, and harm caused by, photo-colonialism. Sherry Farrell Racette notes, Photo-colonialism has been defined as the use of photography to collect evidence for and construct a colonial narrative. Most discussions of photo-colonialism include a critique of Edward S. Curtis. An enormous body of photography has its roots in textual and photographic colonial narratives and the ethnographic documentation projects of the emerging discipline of anthropology. The most damaging and persistent aspects of photo-colonialism have been its nostalgic celebration of ‘vanishing races’ and the authority given to its representations. Regardless of rigorous critiques of the inaccuracy and artificiality of photocolonialism, its authority continues to have power.73

Photo-colonialism functioned upon the ethnographic principle that difference could be read from the body, or indeed from the skin. It was therefore fundamentally concerned with the body, and with capturing the bodies of Indigenous peoples in photographs to document the visual signifiers of an ostensibly ‘vanishing’ race. Curtis famously carried a collection of props and costumes with him on his travels, and when he thought an Indigenous individual did not look sufficiently ‘authentic’ enough, he would ask his subject to put on the ‘right’ clothing or carry the ‘appropriate’ prop. Some contemporary Indigenous artists, such as Jeffrey Bear, critique photocolonialism by photographing contemporary Indigenous subjects in their own clothing that is not ‘traditional’ Indigenous dress. Others, such as Myre, refuse the act of photographing Indigenous subjects and bodies altogether. Instead, she photographs her hand-made beaded objects that symbolize both psychic and corporeal wounds that have healed into scars. Her refusal to photograph Indigenous subjects generally, and suffering Indigenous subjects in particular, is a deliberate political gesture that denies the white settler viewer’s expectation of the spectacularized and victimized Indigenous person. In her book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (2010), Susie Linfield explores the ethical dangers of photographing suffering individuals. Nonetheless, Linfield, unlike Susan Sontag and others, does not refute the possibility of photographs to evoke empathy in viewers. ‘Yet,’ she writes, ‘in bringing us close, photographs also illuminate the unbridgeable chasm that separates ordinary life from experiences of political trauma … In this sense, photographs teach us about our failure – our necessary failure – to comprehend the human.’74 While foregrounding the reality

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of physical and psychological trauma among Indigenous individuals, Myre refuses to photograph Indigenous bodies in pain. In photographing her beaded objects, Myre does draw on the power of that particular medium – photography – that Linfield outlines. According to Linfield, with photographs that represent, or in this case, index, trauma, the photograph as an object demands that we do affective and intellectual work: ‘by refusing to tell us what to feel, and allowing us to feel things we don’t quite understand, they make us dig, and even think, a little deeper’.75 Myre’s Scar Project is related to Scarscapes in using the scar to symbolize both trauma and healing. The Scar Project is a relational, collaborative series of stitched scars on small canvases. Beginning in 2005, Myre began circulating calls for volunteers to stitch a scar in thread on canvas and contribute it to the project. Sometimes volunteers stitch their scar on their own and send it to Myre. Other volunteers participated in ‘artist-facilitated workshops’, creating their stitched scars with the artist and other contributors.76 The 10″ × 10″ canvases have been displayed in different combinations and different patterns since 2005, for instance, as part of the exhibition Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor at the National Museum of the American Indian in 2010.77 In addition to stitching their scars, participants interpret their actions and products in words. ‘Occasionally, participants include their names on the canvas or page’, but often the canvases and stories are anonymous.78 Although some scholars have questioned the affective and political efficacy of participatory artwork,79 it would engender a kind of epistemic violence to Myre and her collaborators to deny the possibility of healing enacted through the stitching and storytelling that comprises The Scar Project.80 Myre herself has stated that beading is an act of resistance, and Stephanie G. Anderson has demonstrated the importance of beading as a mode of memorialization and grief for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls of Canada, focusing primarily on hand-beaded ‘vamps’ that have been sewn to honour the Indigenous women who have died violently.81 The combination of crafting and storytelling in The Scar Project brings together two forms of healthy coping that can comprise parts of a holistic approach to healing from trauma.82 Crafting is a particular kind of Indigenous epistemology that can create community and contribute to the healing process. Importantly, some of the scars in The Scar Project are not fully sewn up, pointing to the fact that some of the participants acknowledge that they still have healing to do. Kathleen Ash-Milby, who curated Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor, writes in the exhibition catalogue, ‘For Native people, skin encompasses an entire universe of meaning. Our own skin functions as a canvas that we can inscribe



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with messages about our identity, or use as a shield, protecting and hiding our secrets. … Whether considering hide or Native skin, skin is a deeply symbolic reminder of historical misrepresentation, exploitation, and racial politics.’83 With Scarscapes and the Scar Project, Myre uses beads and thread to signify both trauma and healing, while simultaneously repelling an ethnographic gaze that would read Indigenous skin for signs of inferiority, otherness and pathology. Both series signify the surface of the body without ever representing actual skin. In her more recent series Meditations on Red (2013), Myre repeats several of her previous artistic gestures. Like Belmore’s Fringe, Myre’s Meditations on Red #2 was selected to be part of the Resilience billboard project in 2018. Meditations on Red is comprised of large round photographs that are 120.3 cm in diameter (Plate 8). These digital inkjet prints are mounted under Plexiglass, creating an optical effect of sheen from the gallery lights. From a distance the photographs appear abstract; they are mostly red with spots of white woven throughout. Up close, it is still not necessarily clear what we are looking at. These are, like the Scarscapes photographs, images of beads tightly sewn together. Like with Scarscapes, Myre created beaded objects and then photographed them and enlarged the images, transforming them into a kind of photographic rondelle that appears to glisten in the reflected lights. In doing so, Myre opens up the symbolic possibilities of the imaged beads: they could be droplets of blood, or perhaps Petri dishes under a microscope. In this way, we might link these photographs with medical violence against Indigenous peoples: not only the verbal and physical abuse Indigenous individuals experience in hospitals but also the deliberate germ warfare enacted through diseased blankets that white settlers traded with Indigenous peoples during the fur trade era.84 The shape of the photographs also suggests optical tools associated with the medical gaze other than microscopes: spectacles, magnifying glasses, even (if obviously) the camera lens. The medical gaze and the ethnographic gaze have often intersected on the bodies of people of colour, including Indigenous individuals. This led to various racist pseudo-sciences such as physiognomy.85 Both medicine and ethnography are founded upon ocularcentrism; both disciplines have bolstered the belief that looking is an act of mastery. Art historian Mary Hunter notes of the nineteenth century: ‘New technologies of vision – microscopes, stereoscopes, cameras, and telescopes – further altered the way in which the real was understood and imaged. … Conceptions of vision, along with novel visual experiences, formed modern observers, including physicians, scientists, and artists.’86 We could add, of course, ethnographers and anthropologists who used these new technologies of vision to record corporeal signs on the body as empirical ‘evidence’ of Black

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individuals’ and Indigenous individuals’ ostensible differences from white people. In that vein, Laura Marks notes that ‘ethnographic photography and film have objectified non-Western cultures and made a spectacle of them; they have reduced cultures to their visual appearance; and they have used vision as part of a general will to knowledge of the other as a means to power’.87 Myre’s red circles also invoke stop signs, warnings and red-light districts. The title of the series invites us to meditate on not only the colour red but also the racist connotations of the term ‘red skin’, of danger and violence experienced by Indigenous peoples. The colour of these works links them with the red dress in Belmore’s performances as well as the red dress that has been adopted as a symbol of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls of Canada. In using the colour red, contemporary Indigenous artists such as Belmore and Myre point up the direct line between the discursive racism of the phrase ‘red skin’ and the material violence towards Indigenous women that results in torn bodies and bloodied clothes. As with all the works discussed in this chapter, Myre deliberately avoids enacting representational violence on the bodies of Indigenous female subjects, instead using minimalist, even abstract, visual language and the powerful media of both beadwork and photography to index material and psychic violence against Indigenous individuals. The texture of beads is flattened in these photographs. Nonetheless, the highly detailed images still suggest the hapticity of beads, thus evoking what Laura Marks has called ‘sensuous knowledge’88 and, as previously discussed, ‘haptic visuality’.89 I find her discussion of film remarkably resonant for understanding how Myre’s Mediations on Red functions. I will therefore quote her at length: A film or video (or painting or photograph) may offer haptic images, while the term haptic visuality emphasizes the viewer’s inclination to perceive them. The works I propose to call haptic invite a look that moves on the surface plane of the screen for some time before the viewer realizes what she or he is beholding. Such images resolve into figuration only gradually, if at all. Conversely, the haptic work may create an image of such detail, sometimes through miniaturism, that it evades a distanced view, instead pulling the viewer in close. Such images offer such a proliferation of figures that the viewer perceives the texture as much as the objects imaged. While optical perception privileges the representational power of the image, haptic perception privileges the material presence of the image. Drawing from other forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinesthetic, haptic visuality involves the body more than is the case with optical visuality. Touch is a sense located on the surface of the body: thinking of cinema



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as haptic is only a step toward considering the ways cinema appeals to the body as a whole.90

I want to suggest that Myre’s abstract, beaded, photographic works that invoke haptic visuality will signify in a range of different ways for different viewers, but whatever Myre’s specific intentions with this series,91 I personally see bloody violence, as well as heart’s blood; that is to say, love for, and solidarity with, Myre’s Indigenous sisters and brothers who are daily faced with racism and violence.

Acknowledgements I am grateful for funding from the Friends of the Archives (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto), which supported the research for this chapter.

Notes 1 Claudette Lauzon, ‘What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore’s Memorial to Missing Women’, in Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux and Christine Ross (eds), Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 155–79. 2 See Stephanie G. Anderson, ‘Stitching through Silence: Walking with Our Sisters, Honoring the Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada’, Textile: Cloth and Culture, vol. 14, no. 1 (2016): 84–97. 3 Medical violence towards Indigenous peoples is still an understudied issue. For an important text on medical violence towards Black individuals, see Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 2008). 4 See Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Halifax: Fernwood, 2017). See also Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Colour (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017). 5 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, [1966] 2001). 6 Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 141. 7 Ibid., 142–3.

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8 Myre is also well known for her beaded collaborative series The Indian Act (2002). The title is a reference to the Canadian government’s policy related to Indigenous peoples. See Julie Burelle, ‘Endurance/Enduring Performance: Nadia Myre, La Marche Amun, and the Indian Act’s Tumultuous Geographies’, in Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Quebec (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 115–40. See also cheyanne turions, ‘How Not to Install Indigenous Art as a Feminist’, in Heather Davis (ed.), Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 242–56. 9 Kathleen Ash-Milby(ed.), Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor (Washington: National Museum of the American Indian, 2010). 10 Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 11 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (London: Harvard University Press, 2005). To be fair, Ngai does not dedicate a chapter to anger. 12 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, [1952] 2008), 70. 13 Ibid., 77. Emphasis added. 14 See Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Haunted: First Nations Children in Residential School Photography’, in Loren Lerner (ed.), Depicting Canada’s Children (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2009), 49–84. 15 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4 (2006), 387. 16 Ibid., 397. 17 Erin Morton, ‘White Settler Death Drives: Settler Statecraft, White Possession, and Multiple Colonialisms Under Treaty 6’, Cultural Studies, vol. 33, no. 3 (2019): 437–8. 18 Ibid., 438. 19 For an insightful discussion concerning the ethics of photography and corpses, see Andrea D. Fitzpatrick, ‘Reconsidering the Dead in Andres Serrano’s The Morgue: Identity, Agency, Subjectivity’, RACAR, vol. 33, nos. 1 and 2 (2008): 28–42. 20 See Charlotte Townsend-Gault, ‘Rebecca Belmore and James Luna on Location at Venice: The Allegorical Indian Redux’, Art History, vol. 29, no. 4 (September 2006): 721–55. 21 Ibid., 730. 22 Ibid., 730–1. 23 In 1997, Belmore dedicated a performance to the young Native man Dudley George, who was shot to death as he joined twenty armed protestors occupying Ontario’s Ipperwash Provincial Park in 1995 to protest against the provincial government’s destruction of traditional burial grounds in the park. Belmore wore a sweeping



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red dress and stripped a young tree of its leaves and twigs, systematically dismembering it with her own hands. Then she stripped herself naked. Ibid., 727. 24 Lauzon, ‘What the Body Remembers’, 161. 25 Ibid., 162. 26 Sherene Razack quoted in Lauzon, ‘What the Body Remembers’, 162. 27 For more on this, see Julia Skelly, ‘Closeting Addiction: Confinement, Punishment, Concealment’, in Wasted Looks: Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 99–127. 28 Lauzon, ‘What the Body Remembers’, 166. 29 See Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, ‘Preface’, in Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis (eds), Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009), xiii. 30 Quoted in Anderson, ‘Stitching through Silence’, 93–4. Emphasis added. 31 Jane Blocker, Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 14. 32 For more on this see, Brian Maracle, Crazywater: Native Voices on Addiction and Recovery (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1993). 33 Jennifer Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 100. 34 Ibid., 101. 35 Blocker, Seeing Witness, 15–16. 36 Townsend-Gault, ‘Rebecca Belmore and James Luna on Location at Venice’, 722. 37 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 23. 38 Townsend-Gault, ‘Rebecca Belmore and James Luna on Location at Venice’, 727. 39 Ruth B. Phillips, ‘Performing the Native Woman: Primitivism and Mimicry in Early Twentieth-Century Visual Culture’, in Lynda Jessup (ed.), Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 27. 40 Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Returning Fire, Pointing the Canon: Aboriginal Photography as Resistance’, in Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard (eds), The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 84. 41 Burelle, Encounters on Contested Lands, 21. 42 Ibid. 43 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (Toronto: Anansi, 2020), 61. 44 Ellen Crowell, ‘The Ugly Things of Salome’, in Kate Hext and Alex Murray (eds), Decadence in the Age of Modernism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 48–9.

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45 Ngai quoted in ibid., 48. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 67. 48 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 185. 49 Anne Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 115. 50 See Charmaine Nelson, ‘Towards an African Canadian Art History’, in Charmaine Nelson (ed.), Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (Concord, ON: Captus Press, 2019), 1–43; Charmaine Nelson, Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (London: Routledge, 2016); Charmaine Nelson, ‘Slavery, Portraiture and the Colonial Limits of Canadian Art History’, in Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art (London: Routledge, 2010), 63–75; Charmaine Nelson, ‘Tying the Knot: Black Female Slave Dress in Canada’, in Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art, 88–102. 51 Cvetkovich, Depression, 120. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 121. 54 Christine Ross has explored depression in contemporary art, although she does not discuss Indigenous artists. Christine Ross, The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2006). 55 Lauzon, ‘What the Body Remembers’, 167. Emphasis added. 56 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 129. 57 Ibid., 130. 58 Ibid., 151. 59 Farrell Racette, ‘Returning Fire, Pointing the Canon’, 70. 60 For a discussion of Noganosh’s work, see Skelly, ‘Alternative Paths’. 61 Yvon Allard, Georg Lithman, John O’Neil and Moneca Sinclaire, Winnipeg Case Study of Health and Social Services: Final Report (Winnipeg: Northern Health Research Unit, University of Manitoba, 1993). Quoted in Wanda Nanibush (ed.), Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2018), 28. 62 Fitzpatrick, ‘Reconsidering the Dead’, 28. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 34. 65 Janice Helland, ‘Culture, Politics, and Identity in the Paintings of Frida Kahlo’, in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds), The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 396–407.



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66 Kate Chedgzoy, ‘Frida Kahlo’s “Grotesque” Bodies’, in P. Florence and D. Reynolds (eds), Feminist Subjects, Multi-media: Cultural Methodologies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 39–53. 67 Sandra Dyck, ‘Making Contact’, in Nadia Myre: En[counter]s (Ottawa: Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, 2011), 48–9. 68 Quoted in ibid., 49. 69 Anne Ellegood, ‘Nadia Myre: Scarscapes’, in Kathleen Ash-Milby (ed.), Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor (Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2010), 54. 70 Dyck, ‘Making Contact’, 57. 71 Ibid., 43. 72 Ibid., 53. 73 Farrell Racette, ‘Returning Fire, Pointing the Canon’, 79. 74 Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), xv–xvi. 75 Ibid., 29. 76 Ibid., 65. 77 At present there are more than five hundred canvases in The Scar Project. 78 Amanda Jane Graham, ‘Abstract Division: Tracing Nadia Myre’s Scar Trajectory’, in Nadia Myre: En[counter]s (Ottawa: Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, 2011), 67. 79 See, for example, Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012). 80 Participants were both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. 81 Anderson, ‘Stitching through Silence’, 87. ‘Sometimes called “tongue”, or “uppers”, vamps are the topmost panels of moccasins, which are generally beaded and embroidered with various patterns, symbols or pictorial motifs.’ 82 See Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, 50, 275–7, 440–68. 83 Kathleen Ash-Milby, ‘Hide’, in Kathleen Ash-Milby (ed.), Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor (Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian, 2010), 15. 84 See Chapter 3 in Skin Crafts. 85 Mechthild Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 147. See also Sander Gilman, ‘The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality’, in Kymberly N. Pinder (ed.), Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History (London: Routledge, 2002), 119–38. 86 Mary Hunter, The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 23. 87 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 133.

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88 Ibid., 145. 89 Ibid., 151. 90 Ibid., 163. 91 Myre was inspired to create the series of beaded objects and photographs when she was asked to prove her Indigenous identity when crossing the border into the United States: ‘I was required to prove that more than 50% of my blood is Native American.’ The ‘red’ in the title therefore refers to both the ‘blood quantum’ rule and the racist epitaph ‘red skin’. See: https://resilienceproject.ca/en/artists/nadia-myre.

5



Concrete and caresses: The case of Doris Salcedo

In this chapter I set out to contribute to the existing body of literature on Colombian artist Doris Salcedo by considering what the materials she has chosen to work with can tell us about skin and violence. I first examine a work from the Untitled Furniture series, which combines a found wooden armoire with cloth and concrete; secondly, I discuss Salcedo’s well-known series Atrabiliarios from the early 1990s, which brings together leather shoes, coarse surgical thread and vellum (Figure 5.1); finally, I consider A Flor de Piel (2011–12; Figure 5.2), a textile made out of thousands of rose petals that were hand-sewn together with thread.1 As I have been doing throughout Skin Crafts, I want to make a case for considering Salcedo’s works through the analytical frameworks offered by both critical craft studies and skin studies, looking closely at the specific properties of the materials that Salcedo has used to symbolize skin and violence to skin, considering these materials not just as metaphors but also catalysts for specific affects. I am also broadening the scope of materials that I have been examining so far (namely beads, ceramics and cloth), locating flower petals as a kind of textile, and considering the material and affective powers of concrete. As I noted in the introduction, of all the artists discussed in Skin Crafts, Salcedo, who was born in Bogotá, Colombia, has received the most curatorial and scholarly attention.2 She is, as Mary Schneider Enriquez has observed, a ‘major artist from the global south’.3 As with Teresa Margolles, several scholars have previously read Salcedo’s work in relation to skin, using phrases such as ‘gaping wound’,4 and referring to the black threads that stitch vellum into the gallery walls in the Atrabiliarios series as ‘symbolic suturing’.5 By employing vellum in her series Atrabiliarios (the vellum covers niches carved into gallery walls in which the artist/curator places one or two shoes standing vertically), Salcedo clearly invites viewers to consider the installation in relation to skin. Here the shoes index the absent person who has died violently, and the vellum

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Figure 5.1  Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios, 1993. Wood, calfskin and shoes. 9 × 54 × 53 cm. MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation. Long-term loan of Brondesbury Holdings Ltd. © Doris Salcedo. Photo: FotoGasull.

indexes an animal that has likewise died violently, bringing into conversation violence against both humans and non-human agents. Laura Garcia Moreno links Salcedo’s sculptural works with textiles and skin when she pointedly uses metaphors related to both: ‘For if Salcedo’s art contributes to an opening up of the difficult process of mourning losses brought about by an undoing or damaging of the social fabric in Colombia, it simultaneously questions the possibility of a complete mourning or a fully successful ‘stitching’ of individual and collective wounds.’6 Like Charles Mereweather, Moreno frequently refers to ‘wounds’ in Salcedo’s found object sculptures. In her analysis of Orphan’s Tunic (1997)7 from the Unland series, for example, Moreno brings together textile practice (weaving) and the metaphorical wound when she notes that the work, which ‘appears to be a long wooden kitchen table is the result of two tables of different height, length, and hue jammed together. Where the table is disjointed, a fine mesh of hair and silk joins them together, but the fragility and precariousness of the weaving action is evident.’ She goes on to remark, Despite the gestures of repair and the attempt to join the fragments – the combination of hair and silk meticulously woven around the point of fusion between the two ­tables – they remain irreparably disjointed and fragmented. The legs of the tables are amputated. The fracture remains unconcealed. In fact,



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the gauze-like hair and its application over the wound, which darkens the color of the table in that precise zone, highlight the dislocation.8

In addition to referencing a material wound in the table that symbolizes material violence to anonymous Colombians, Moreno’s analysis also implicitly points to the metonymic link between the ‘amputated legs’ of the table and the violence done to human bodies, including but not limited to dismemberment. In a related but distinct vein, Salcedo’s more recent work A Flor de Piel (Figure 5.2) asks the viewer to think about skin in relation to violence; the title translates literally as ‘On the surface of the skin’; it is also an idiomatic phrase that denotes the display of passionate emotions.9 Given the final appearance and materiality of the work, as well as the title, it has been read as a skin-textile. The title also demands attention be paid to the relationship between the materials used (rose petals and thread) and specific affects. I propose considering compassion as one possible affect that results from engaging with the work’s materiality and sociopolitical context. Regarding A Flor de Piel, Mary Schneider Enriquez states, ‘In addition to producing an effect of freckled, scarred, and worn skin, the surface that Salcedo conjures through the juxtaposition of varied textures and material traces

Figure 5.2  Doris Salcedo, A Flor de Piel, 2011–12. Rose petals and thread. 12 feet 2 13/16 inches × 92 1/16 inches (372.9 × 233.8 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift of D. Daskalopoulos Collection and the artist, 2012.

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operates as a topography of violence.’10 Put another way, the skin-textile signifies violence to the skin; marks on the skin, such as scars and wounds, make the skin a legible map of damage and harm. As Marsha Meskimmon notes, ‘thinking through the skin is always a confrontation with geopolitical borders, sexism and racism which limit the power of women of colour and reduce them to the objects of knowledge’.11 If we apply this passage to A Flor de Piel, in which the dead petals are of various brownish shades, we might consider how the particular shades of faded, dead roses in the petal-skin-textile evoke the skin of women of colour, thus opening space for this work to be read in terms of violence against women of colour specifically. For art historian Maria Elena Buszek, approaching contemporary art that employs craft media necessitates going beyond ‘description, biography, formal analysis or technical advice’, to consider the symbolism, political power and ethical implications of works made from clay, fibre, glass and wood, among other materials.12 Buszek suggests that scholarship and criticism concerned with contemporary art made with craft media must attend to ‘the sociohistorical underpinnings of a medium’ as well as a material’s ‘unique material properties’.13 Although concrete is not a ‘traditional’ craft material, it is associated with some applied arts, such as architecture.14 As for the sociopolitical associations of this particular material, Edward Bacal has noted the fact that Salcedo, Teresa Margolles and Santiago Sierra have all used concrete in their works in various ‘Latin American contexts’.15 Bacal notes that all three artists address ‘the systems of power that undergird social and cultural production in the globalized world’, the term ‘undergird’ tacitly linking concrete with material and symbolic foundations.16 Significantly, Bacal also discusses ‘concrete’s ramifications for labour in the development of capitalism … the proliferation of concrete beginning in the late nineteenth century is part and parcel of the effectiveness by which unskilled workers could produce it. … with concrete each individual workman’s labour dissolves into the continuum of the whole, leaving no trace’.17 This reference to an absence of a ‘workman’s’ trace here is significant for Salcedo’s art practice, as many of her works do not explicitly bear the trace of the artist’s hand. Rather, the dents, gouges and other material ‘wounds’ in the wood and concrete sculptures index the domestic lives of Colombians who have given the pieces of furniture to Salcedo in order to create work that memorializes their lost loved ones. Granted, the combination of materials could be said to index Salcedo’s body, but this trace ‘dissolves into the continuum of the whole’. In terms of the specific sociopolitical contexts of Latin America, Bacal builds upon Adrian Forty’s ‘material history’ of concrete, observing that in ‘ “Latin



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America making concrete is integrated into domestic life,” given its adoption by unskilled workers as a cheap and easy building material (hence the proliferation of concrete buildings in the region’.18 Although Bacal is wary of the idea that ‘a medium specificity for concrete art ultimately exists’, he convincingly argues that concrete ‘carries the affective sense of its embodied use (certainly, one can readily imagine the sensation of touching and lifting it, or of walking upon it and living inside it)’.19 Thus we might argue that concrete evokes ‘haptic visuality’ as theorized by Laura Marks.20 A critical craft approach to Salcedo’s artworks that incorporate concrete into domestic furniture benefits from a close attention to the material specificities of both wood and concrete as well as the socio-symbolic connotations of the materials, as suggested by Buszek. It is worth noting that Salcedo is always identified as a sculptor, even though she engages with ‘found’ objects such as shoes and domestic furniture, and in A Flor de Piel deliberately created a textile artwork. Her engagement with craft materials is overshadowed by the attention paid to the sculptural end products and the conceptual aspect of her works. Nonetheless, many of the scholars who have written about Salcedo have argued that the domestic objects that the artist employs have particular affective resonance because they come from families of people who have died violently, and because pieces of domestic furniture are marked (literally and figuratively) by domestic (familial, relational) intimacies. Mereweather, for instance, writes, ‘Utilizing mundane domestic objects and organic materials, her work seeks to draw an audience closer to the locality and affective dimension of an experience which leaves only its trace within the community of those who have suffered loss.’21 Like Teresa Margolles, her Latin American contemporary, Salcedo’s works have a conceptual component, which is crucial to know and understand in order to analyse her pieces. Interestingly, Buszek remarks, ‘Contemporary artists working in these [craft] media with a primarily conceptual bent are caught in the middle, finding acceptance in neither camp’, that is, in art history or craft studies, but this is not the case for either Margolles or Salcedo.22 Both artists have been embraced by Western curators and art historians largely because of their conceptual bent, which seems to allow for the acceptance (and indeed the glossing over) of their use of craft materials. Important for this lineage of ‘blurring the lines between art and craft’ is the late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement – which is particularly well-known for furniture making – and the mid-twentieth-century Studio Craft movement.23 Like Margolles, scholarship on Salcedo does not foreground the fact that she is often working with so-called ‘craft’ materials (especially cloth, thread, animal skin and wood). I would argue that this is in large part because

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of the ongoing marginalization and feminization of craft media in Western art history, which Elissa Auther outlines at length in her book String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (2010). According to Auther, Despite the efforts of artists, writers, and curators ensconced in the field of craft to call attention to the prejudices and injustices of the hierarchy of media, the subject of the art/craft distinction in the field of modern and contemporary art history, my own disciplinary location, continued to occupy a marginalized position in the late twentieth century, and it remains … largely taken for granted and thus almost invisible as a topic of inquiry.24

Craft materials have been associated not only with ‘women’s work’ but also with ‘non-Western’ or, the now preferred term, ‘global’ cultures.25 One of the potential consequences of a ‘global turn’ in art history then is the careful attention to the craft media employed by contemporary artists in a range of global contexts rather than focusing exclusively on artistic categories that have been privileged in Western art history, such as sculpture, painting and conceptual art. As I have argued in previous chapters, by examining the work of contemporary female artists who use craft materials such as fibre, beads and ceramics through the lens of skin, the artists’ engagement with the fragility and vulnerability of the human body is productively illuminated. As Schneider Enriquez remarks, Salcedo ‘focuses on the surface [of objects] as a kind of skin, one that is at once scarred, enduring, and elastic as well as sensual, seemingly fragile, and bearing beneath its surface the damage that violence has inflicted’.26 Salcedo herself has stated, ‘I think surface is the most essential aspect and I always connect it to vulnerability, to our fragility and our human condition. For this reason I make textures that, in spite of being in cement or steel, are fragile. It is that fragility I want to point out so that it leaves a permanent legacy.’27 This attention to fragility and vulnerability flows with skin scholars’ understanding of skin as a resilient yet vulnerable surface. As Marc Lafrance has observed, for instance, privileging the skin as an object of inquiry shows how ‘the body’s surface is made liveable, intelligible and meaningful’, and it forces scholars to consider the skin as ‘open, processual, relational and sentient; it is human and non-human, material and immaterial, indeterminate and multiple; and finally, it is crucially bound up with thinking and, indeed, rethinking agency, experience, power, and technology’.28 I would add that in thinking about and through the craft materials that symbolize skin we must illuminate how media including vellum, wood, flower petals and even concrete can signify better than paint the ephemerality, fragility,



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vulnerability, resilience and decay of skin as it cycles through life and violent death. Although Lafrance describes the skin as ‘a defensive armour’,29 what all of the works examined in this book ultimately show is that the skin often fails as armour in the face of violence.30

Closets, clothes, wood and bones: Untitled Furniture (Armoire) (1995) In his article ‘Closets, Clothes, disclosure’, Henry Urbach explores the history of the closet from a queer perspective. According to Urbach, The non-room, the closet, houses things that threaten to soil the room. Likewise, in a social order that ascribes normalcy to heterosexuality, the closet helps heterosexuality to present itself with certainty. The stability of these arrangements – a clean bedroom free of junk, and a normative heterosexuality free of homosexuality – depends on the architectural relation between closet and room. The two closets resonate against one another within a linguistic and material network of representations that organize the relation between storage and display, secrecy and disclosure.31

In other words, the threshold of the material closet (or armoire) functions as a cordon sanitaire, separating the ‘clean’ room from the hidden ‘dirt’.32 In the Colombian context, this ‘dirt’ is both state violence and people who have died violently. As Meskimmon has observed, ‘Colombia has been subject to civil unrest, factional fighting and extreme forms of political brutality for over 40 years. One of the most devastating phenomena of this violence is the systematic “disappearance” of citizens who dare to resist state oppression and localised paramilitary power.’33 Extending the closet metaphor, wherein the closet conceals the open secret of state violence in Colombia and the ‘bedroom’ is the (desired) public image of Colombia constructed by those in power, the dirt (political violence) threatens to explode from within the closet, tainting Colombia’s global reputation. Urbach notes, ‘The built-in closet concretises the closet of identity, while the closet of identity literalises its architectural counterpart.’34 And he continues, ‘Holding things at the edge of the room, simultaneously concealing and revealing its interior, the closet becomes a carrier of abjection, a site of interior exclusion for that which has been deemed dirty’.35 Urbach’s text is relevant for Salcedo’s sculptural works that employ the armoire (a kind of closet) as material object. Salcedo’s (literally)

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concretized armoires are filled with not only cement but also, significantly, pieces of clothing and bits of bone that protrude from the hardened concrete. The clothes are ghostly remnants (revenants) of individuals who have died violently and/or have been disappeared. Urbach’s queer theory helps us to consider the ways that victims of violence (often, if not always, already marginalized individuals pre-death) can be tainted or pathologized by the cause of their death, and are thus ‘swept under the rug’ as much as possible by those in power.36 As Edward Bacal has written in his article about Salcedo’s and Margolles’s use of concrete, ‘these artists specifically use concrete’ to index ‘abstract bodies’, that is, ‘absent, invisible or otherwise virtual bodies which have disappeared from the scene of the work but nevertheless leave their impression on it’.37 To use a tired cliché, in using everyday domestic objects such as armoires to create works that are explicitly intended to index state violence, Salcedo is airing Colombia’s dirty laundry around the world, one gallery at a time. As with the vast majority of her works, her untitled series of ‘found’ pieces of furniture is comprised not so much of actually found objects but, rather, objects that have been given to Salcedo by victims’ families. Many of the sculptures in the Untitled Furniture series include both pieces of furniture and clothing given to the artist by people touched by violence ‘as material evidence of those who are absent’.38 The clothes and pieces of bone that are sometimes also inserted into the concrete both function as indexes of, and metaphors for, violently obliterated bodies. The clothing and bones are drowned, and indeed buried and cemented, into the interior of the armoire. The material specificities of both the cavernous wooden armoire and the cement work together to enact a range of violences on the cloth and bones, burying them in an act that mirrors the actual burials that have taken place, or as shadow burials for the bodies that were never found. At the same time, the haunting agency of the victims of violence is evoked by the sculptural object that results from the material process of concretizing. Once the cement has hardened, bits of cloth and fragments of bone are visible protruding from the surface of the cement through the opening of the wardrobe. These fragments-as-indexes of the victims (as subjects and as bodies) have resisted the disappearing acts initiated by Salcedo; her concretizing process fails to fully obliterate the fragments. To put it bluntly: murder will out. In Salcedo’s furniture works, victims surface, even through deathly concrete, and the sculptures, when considered in relation to the sociopolitical context within which they were produced, bear witness to violence in Colombia.



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As Bacal observes, The material quality of these sculptures is crucial, for it is within their alternate fragility and formidability, lightness and weight, and immateriality and physicality that they form their ethico-political expression. That is to say, through an affective contact with specific materials, Salcedo conjures the spectral presence of disappearance and with it the social, political and ethical burden of state violence.39

Building on Bacal’s insightful analysis, I propose that there are multiple ‘skins’ signified in Untitled Furniture (Armoire). Interestingly it is the bones, actual traces of human bodies, that are the furthest from symbolizing skin. The cloth’s skeins and rippability signify vulnerable skin, as I discussed in Chapter 4, and the wood of the armoire and the cement can both signify skin, the former dented and scarred, symbolizing skin that has been damaged, and the latter symbolizing the transformation of soft, malleable, living skin into the hardened, deathly pallor of dead skin. Bacal underscores the importance of different materials interacting to achieve the affective and ethical power of Salcedo’s works. In referring to Salcedo’s use of cloth and other ‘organic’ or more ‘personal’ materials that ‘foreground a delicacy that is frail and often flesh-like’, he contrasts the transition from soft to hard when the clothing is caught and concretized within the armoire, noting that ‘these concrete surfaces appear impersonal, cold and synthetic’.40 I have only one quibble with Bacal’s analysis, and that is the distinction between ‘skin’ and ‘flesh’. The skin covers the flesh; in Untitled Furniture (Armoire) the (absent) flesh has been cleaved from the (symbolic) skin, as in a slaughterhouse; but at the same time, using ‘cleaved’ in the second, contradictory way to analyse these non-representational sculptures, I argue that Salcedo very deliberately cleaves violence with everyday objects, revealing the ‘everydayness’ of violence in Colombia through common objects such as armoires, tables and shoes, as I discuss in the next section. With the conceptual sculptures in the Untitled Furniture series, pieces of domestic furniture have been torn from their original contexts.41 The tables and armoires of this series are constructed in the most basic, minimalist fashion possible. They are comprised of hard edges and unadorned surfaces. This is function over visuality and ornament, and there is no clear evidence of the original craftspersons’ hands on the pieces of furniture. These works of carpentry have been translated into art objects through Salcedo’s material interventions. Furthermore, we do not know if these pieces of furniture were exclusively hand-made, a practice that was promoted by nineteenth-century

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Arts and Crafts socialists such as William Morris and John Ruskin, or if they were mass produced.42 As craft scholar Glenn Adamson has observed, ‘The division of labor is a preeminent consideration in any discussion of craft’s relation to industry.’43 Of furniture making, Adamson writes that once a desire for carved and ornamental furniture began to subside in the eighteenth century, ‘the general tide of furniture [globally] was undeniably away from the carved and toward the flat’.44 The wooden pieces of furniture in Salcedo’s Untitled series are anonymous, and this anonymity relates to the anonymity of the dead whose Salcedo’s sculptures are indexing and mourning. With these ‘found’ (craft) objects, Salcedo undertakes a Baroness Elsa-ian manoeuvre by adding her own material and conceptual touches, although unlike Baroness Elsa, Salcedo does not, in this series at least, give the works titles to guide the viewer’s interpretations.45 Dented, old wood is sometimes referred to as ‘scarred’, indexing where the wood has been ‘wounded’ by human touch. Interestingly for my purposes here, Adamson remarks that for William Morris, a ‘perfect finish’ on wood furniture – that is, the smooth surface with no index of the craftsperson’s hand – was tantamount to a ‘dead surface’, to use Adamson’s phrase. He expands on this, writing, ‘Because they believed in vital, “savage” workmanship, Ruskin and Morris both thought that a flawlessly made object must necessarily be a sign of dehumanization’, that is, a sign of alienation and exploitation in the Marxist sense.46 Morris preferred furniture that had some indexical marks of the craftsperson’s work. In Salcedo’s armoires, the surfaces are rarely perfectly smooth, but I suggest they can be read as ‘dead surfaces’ in order to read them as metaphorical stand-ins for dead bodies, while also signifying violence against human skin. Domestic furniture can signify safety and intimacy, but it is also true that domestic spaces can be unsafe, thus the term ‘domestic violence’. Salcedo’s material interventions with the wood furniture, whether an armoire, table or chair, enact a kind of ‘domestic violence’ to the object that speaks to ‘state’ or ‘public’ violence towards Colombian citizens. Untitled Furniture (Armoire), at one time a signifier of domesticity, has been filled with concrete, cloth and bones in order to signify violence to the human body. In choosing an armoire as the primary material object in this particular work, Salcedo highlights the fact that the home, like the skin, is a protective shell or boundary that can fail against violence. The wood itself is wounded, and the clothes that index absent (violently killed or disappeared) individuals are drowned, buried and/ or suffocated (depending on how one reads the materiality of the sculpture) in concrete, thus, as Bacal has argued, literally concretizing acts of violence, making



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the material matter for how the work affects (touches, moves) the viewer. This is a hard work in more ways than one. Its affective impact is like a blow to the face (or heart, or psyche). In the next two sections I consider works that have different kinds of affective ‘touch’. I suggest that whereas Atrabiliarios is more of a bruising work than a battering work (as I have been arguing about Armoire), A Flor de Piel, which I discuss in the final section, enacts (or evokes) what textile artist and theorist Catherine Dormor might identify as a ‘caress’.47 As Levinas (1969) has written (and as quoted by Dormor), ‘The caress consists in seizing upon nothing in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure, but of search: a movement into the invisible.’48 These various kinds of touch speak to the material, affective and symbolic connections between craft media and skin that are engendered by Salcedo’s artworks. To recapitulate: in Untitled Furniture (Armoire), the ‘dead surface’ of the concrete that has become the impenetrable entrance of the armoire creates a cold, deathly pallor, alluding not only to corpses but also to the affects of grief and, paradoxically, the brutality and lack of empathy that are present in acts of violence. The sculpture demonstrates the symbolic power of the armoire (and home) to shift from safe space to container for traumatic memories. The armoire, then, is a slippery signifier that speaks powerfully of domesticity and intimacy, dirt and cleanliness, as well as trauma, violence and loss and the related affect of grief. Once hard, the concrete becomes a cold, impassive face, as well as the cold, grey skin of a dead body. These various symbolic skins are in dialogue in this work, evoking those lost to violence, resisting the discourses that would sweep that violence under the rug and circulating globally to communicate knowledge about Colombia’s state violence to those who are willing to look and learn. As Mieke Bal has commented in her book about Salcedo’s work, referencing the autistic protagonist’s literalness in Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, ‘People do not have skeletons in their cupboards … [but] they do have skins that hurt and eyes that see.’49

Atrabiliarios In Atrabiliarios (1993; Figure 5.1), dark, thin, surgical threads (sutures) are used to stitch vellum (animal fibre derived from cow bladders) into gallery walls; the opaque vellum covers shoes that stand vertically in niches, thus symbolizing the erect human being while simultaneously indexing individuals who have

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died violently or who have been disappeared by the Colombian government. According to Bal, the title of the installation is, strictly speaking untranslatable. There is, however, an antiquated English approximation in the adjective atrabilious, meaning ‘affected by black bile’ or ‘melancholic.’ The Spanish title Atrabiliarios is composed from the Latin words atratus and bilis. The former refers to clothing in black (for mourning), and the latter to bile or rage. Highly significant, these two terms neatly sum up what the work is about.50

The niches contain either one or two shoes. Whether solitary or in pairs, the shoes speak of loneliness and loss. Importantly, all of the shoes were given to Salcedo by families who have lost loved ones to violence; the shoes therefore index specific, anonymous individuals – mostly women – who have died violently in Colombia. With this installation, the surface of the gallery wall becomes a symbolic skin that has been wounded. The vellum is the skin graft, sutured into the wall as though part of a surgery. The shoes are visible but obscured by the vellum. They are inside the wound, covered by the literal and symbolic skin graft. In a surgery where a ‘foreign’ object is placed in the wound before covering the wound with the skin graft, healing would be difficult, if not impossible. By putting the shoes into the wound and stitching over them with vellum, Salcedo is not evoking a healing process but rather suggesting the difficulty (if not the impossibility) of healing, because the memory-object (the shoe as symbol of trauma) is still in the body. Or, put another way, the body/psyche must attempt to heal around the memoryobject; the body/psyche can never return to its original state. It will be forever warped and altered by the trauma. Even if there is some healing possible for survivors and families of victims, visible (physical) and invisible (psychic) scars remain. The dark sutures suggest an early stage in the grieving/healing process; that is, the skin graft has just been stitched into the skin; it remains to be seen how the healing process progresses or fails to progress. In my opinion, the strongest and most convincing analyses of Salcedo’s works, including Atrabiliarios, but also her Untitled Furniture series, are those that reject the possibility of these works resulting in, or symbolizing, actual, affective healing. To argue that these works can heal or bring closure to survivors of violence or the families of people who have died violently is too idealist, too utopian.51 Bal, for instance, refuses to read the works in this way, although she does believe that they are powerfully political artworks. As she has argued, ‘Salcedo handles materials as a form of “hopeless mourning”. This material handling of hopeless mourning, it seems



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to me, can hint at the function political art might have today.’52 If Salcedo’s works suggest ‘hopeless mourning’ rather than closure, they do bear witness to violence, opening space for the possibility of political action and activism. If nothing else, Atrabiliarios demands something from the viewer, namely to look at, and through, the vellum to access the empty shoes. Even without reading a didactic label or knowing the sociopolitical context within which this series was developed, the empty shoe has become widely known as a symbol of atrocious violence, and of human evil, even while indexing the individuals who have been deliberately obliterated. The difficulty in fully perceiving the shoes through the vellum signifies, I suggest, a (partially) blinding, bruising grief. The bringing together of animal skin and leather shoes that index violently erased human bodies in Atrabiliarios encourages the viewer to consider violence done to both humans and non-human animals. I will return to this point in the next section, but in order to lay the groundwork for that discussion, I want to briefly discuss Argentinian writer Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender Is the Flesh (2020), in which an apparent virus has made all animal meat toxic to humans.53 In order to feed the dual desires for money and meat, humans become the new primary source of capital and protein. This is gore capitalism run amok and pushed to its (inevitable) extreme, where marginalized and powerless humans are bred and butchered in order to keep capitalism grinding and wealthy people fed.54 Early in the novel, the difference between skin and flesh is made explicit when the narrator visits a tanner and records how ‘the owner of the tannery is always smiling and he feels that when this man observes him, what he’s really doing is calculating how many meters of skin he can remove in one piece if he slaughters him, flays him, and removes his flesh on the spot’.55 In a dark art-historical joke, Bazterrica has the owner of the tannery decorate his office with a cheap reproduction of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, in which the artist may have inserted a self-portrait as Saint Bartholomew’s flayed skin. The owner of the tannery notes that ‘human skin is the smoothest in nature because it has the finest grain’.56 The slim volume paints a picture in which humans are horrifyingly quick to turn other humans into chattel, to torture and butcher them for money and meat. This, of course, should not be a surprise if we know even a little bit about transatlantic slavery. The brilliance of Bazterrica’s novel is that readers are forced to acknowledge that capitalism is inextricably bound up with violence and exploitation; that the violence towards humans bred for butchery in the novel not only mimics the violence towards animals in the meat industry but also functions as an allegory for the violence that occurs in every global context today, whether

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that be domestic violence, narco-violence, femicide of Indigenous women and girls in Canada (and elsewhere), micro-aggressions towards people of colour, anti-Asian violence (verbal, textual or physical), and the many other kinds of violence perpetrated by humans against other humans due to transphobia, homophobia, racism and white supremacy. It is a difficult novel to read, because it rings so true. Considered in relation to Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios, I argue that both the novel and the artwork demand attention be paid to interlocking acts of violence towards humans and non-human animals that effectively dehumanize the perpetrators and obliterate the vulnerable in the context of global, gore capitalism. If works such as Atrabiliarios do not, and I would argue cannot, lead to healing or closure, Salcedo’s more recent work A Flor de Piel offers something akin to solace, or at least a kind of affective warmth, what I would identify as compassion, linking intersubjective ‘communication’ with an affect of ‘love’ or ‘passion’ for the other, with a desire for their well-being. As I noted at the outset of this chapter, A Flor de Piel translates as ‘On the surface of the skin’, but it is also an idiomatic phrase that suggests passionate emotions.57 The artist appears, then, to want this particular work to be considered in relation to passion, and I propose that the affect of compassion – as linked with or inspired by passion – goes hand-in-hand with the political activism that Salcedo’s body of works can potentially provoke. Salcedo accomplishes this affective feat by again evoking human skin, but this time with an ancient symbol of love, intimacy and, yes, even femininity. I want to propose that Salcedo’s A Flor de Piel is an exercise in inviting viewers to experience and practice compassion, and the related gesture of the caress, in their daily lives. As Catherine Dormor notes, the caress is defined as ‘a gentle touch or gesture of fondness, tenderness or love’.58 I suggest that A Flor de Piel invites this particular kind of touch to itself as a textile object and, by extension, a caressing compassion to those who are suffering, whether in Colombia or closer to home.

Compassion and the caress: A Flor de Piel (2011–12) I begin this section with a long passage from Mary Schneider Enriquez’s book The Materiality of Mourning (2016), as she has previously examined A Flor de Piel with a close eye to the powerful significations of skin. As Schneider Enriquez notes, and this is important for critical craft studies because of the weight placed on the ‘hand-made’, the work was



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sewn by hand, creating a delicate textile of soft, veined petals sutured together in an expanse that exceeds 17 by 15 feet – [and] spreads over the floor, gathered in folds like a heavy sheet; the flowers are sealed within a transparent coating that allows the veins, petal edges, and stitches to mark the surface like creases, freckles, and scars on a body. Recalling skin, the piece bunches and stretches, the surface delicate but semi-elastic; and like flesh, it reveals some of what lies underneath. This ephemeral work, with its color of dried blood and its veined petals sutured together as if closing a deep cut, is the wound made material. Salcedo has created the tortured woman’s wound as a shroud, evoking her absent body within and beneath the covering. Its weight, scale, and blood-stained surface projects a pregnant silence, as if this is both the live skin and the rumpled sheet that covered the nurse’s body and so many bodies before hers. One longs to kneel and touch, and yet shrink from, the evocative, improbable membrane that constitutes this piece.59

As Schneider Enriquez notes, this textile was made to memorialize a female nurse who died violently. There are also echoes here of Margolles’s stained textile works such as Tela bordada (2012), which absorbed the blood of a woman murdered in Guatemala.60 Schneider Enriquez goes on to add that A Flor de Piel ‘comes as close to realizing the skin, the presence of the victims, as any work that Salcedo has conceived. And the impossibility of bringing back the dead is mirrored by the unlikely, improbable feat of sewing together thousands of rose petals and maintaining them in this suspended state.’61 Like Bal, Schneider Enriquez does not go so far as to undertake an idealist interpretation of the work that cannot be backed up with material, empirical evidence. Rather, she focuses on the material specificities of the work: the veined petals create a skinlike effect, evoking the beauty and fragility of human skin, while simultaneously mimicking a blood-stained sheet. The inevitable transience of the rose petals also parallels, or symbolizes, the transience of the human skin and, by extension, the human subject/body. As Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey have suggested, ‘The marking of the skin is linked to both its temporal and spatial dimensions. Skin is temporal in the sense that it is affected by the passing of time or, to put it differently, it materializes that passing in the accumulation of marks, of wrinkles, lines and creases, as well as in the literal disintegration of skin.’62 Similarly, Schneider Enriquez refers to the ‘creases, freckles, and scars’ in A Flor de Piel, a time-consuming, hand-made textile that signifies a particularly femme skin, and which unveils the innate vulnerability and eventual decay of both petals and human skin.63 I want to argue that this work is evoking a different affect and, in relation, a different kind

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of touch – namely, the caress – than the other two works I have examined in this chapter. The softness of the petals, which is much closer to the softness of skin than wood, concrete or even dried and stretched vellum, evokes a softer and gentler touch than the violent punch or blow of Untitled Furniture (Armoire) and the pricking and blinding enacted by Atrabiliarios. I hope it is clear with my phrasing in this chapter that I am giving agency to Salcedo’s artworks in terms of the different kinds of touch they evoke, which relates to their specific affective powers: cold numbness in Untitled Furniture (Armoire) and blinding grief (or as Bal puts it, ‘hopeless mourning’) in Atrabiliarios. Because of the specific choices that Salcedo made for these artworks, the combination of materials in each work suggests different kinds of touch and different affects related to those kinds of touch. I previously discussed in the introduction how the contributors to The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (2018) repeatedly foreground the connections among skin, cloth, touch and affect.64 Building on Catherine Dormor’s discussion in A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory (2021), I argue that A Flor de Piel evokes (and invites) the caress, and in relation to that particular kind of touch, the work has the affective power (or at least the affective potential) to draw forth compassion in the viewer. Both the caress and compassion imply a softness and tenderness towards an other, which can (and often does) co-exist with other ‘negative’ affects such as sadness, grief and depression.65 For Dormor, the textile as ‘caressing subject/object’ symbolizes and evokes intersubjective touch, in both the tactile sense and the affective sense, as in we can be ‘touched’ by another’s suffering, and we can feel sadness, empathy or compassion as a result. Citing the OED, Dormor defines caress as ‘a gentle touch or gesture of fondness, tenderness or love’, and as ‘a loving touch’. She critiques the Freudian understanding of the caress as a precursor to heterosexual intercourse; according to this framework, the female body is ‘incomplete’ without the male touch and, eventually, the phallus.66 This Freudian heteronormativity need not concern us here, as I analyse Salcedo’s A Flor de Piel not in terms of a hetero-sexual caress but rather as a textile affective bridge between one person and an other, regardless of sexuality, gender or race. Rather, I want to consider the ways that this hand-sewn textile made out of skin-like petals can be considered as a powerfully affective skin-cloth, one that touches and moves the viewer, potentially to action. Compassion can be defined as ‘sympathetic pity and concern for the suffering or misfortunes of others’. The ‘com’ in ‘compassion’ is crucial, of course, as it signifies ‘together’ or ‘with’, as do words such as community and communication. Dormor understands caress as ‘a



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form of porous communication’ between people.67 I want to focus on the active element of compassion, which distinguishes it from empathy. Empathy suggests a recognition of someone else’s suffering; we have some degree of understanding of what the other is going through, even if we have not had the exact same experience. Empathy creates a closer connection with the person suffering, as it demands that one person create a link between their own lived experience and an other’s lived experience, and it is fundamentally other-oriented. It demands that we put ourselves in another person’s shoes. Circling back to the relationship between compassion and the caress, I suggest that this affect pushes us one step further than empathy, as it – according to the accepted definition – is an emotional response to suffering that creates a desire to help or enact (social) change. As Dormor writes, ‘To think of the caress as a model for textile practice is to think of the cloth’s woven structure as a form of reciprocal awakening of warp and weft, a term drawn from Luce Irigaray’s search for a language of the caress.’68 Compassion, I propose, involves a reciprocal awakening between a person who is suffering or who has suffered and a person who bears witness to that suffering. In order to avoid an idealist or utopian reading of A Flor de Piel, I will avoid making the claim that this work will or has led viewers to (try to) ‘help’ people in Colombia, although this is certainly a possible consequence of viewing Salcedo’s various works concerned with violence. Rather, if we can accept the argument that contemporary political artworks can ‘touch’ or ‘move’ us affectively, and that textiles (whether made of cloth or rose petals) have particular material and affective powers because of their symbolic associations with comfort, intimacy, security, softness and care, then might we not accept the possibility that A Flor de Piel can evoke compassion in at least some viewers, creating not only an awareness of violence and suffering in Colombia but a gentle awakening to the fact that people all around us are suffering, and that this work can create the ‘desire to help’ in both small and large ways? I address some of the material consequences of contemporary political art on my own life in the afterword, in order to offer at least a little empirical evidence that contemporary political art can have a material impact on the world. As craft scholar Janis Jefferies has often written, ‘To craft is to care. Craft is a verb rather than a noun. As a verb, craft is active. It is about doing and moving forward.’69 If we consider Salcedo’s works through the framework that critical craft studies offers, we see that her work does not offer an empty promise of closure or healing but rather that it demands something quite difficult from viewers: to care enough about others’ suffering to do something about it. That may mean donating money, it might mean protesting, it might

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mean changing the way we write, teach or talk about art. It might mean taking the lessons about violence that Salcedo is offering us, and committing to live in a way that does as little harm as humanly possible: to others, to ourselves, to animals, to the environment. Salcedo and the other artists discussed in this book are very generously offering us lesson after lesson about how we might live more ethically. If we examine A Flor de Piel in proximity to Atrabiliarios, and carefully consider Salcedo’s evocation of (human) skin in the former and the artist’s use of animal skin in the latter, I propose that we arrive at an ethical project that demands attention to violence against all beings, including non-human animals. Silvia Federici’s book Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (2018) is productive for this consideration, as she shows that changing views towards non-human animals in the seventeenth century went hand-in-hand with increased violent misogyny towards women. Her choice of words is also highly relevant for my purposes here. According to Federici, By the seventeenth century a drastic change was underway, reflected in Descartes’s theory that animals are nonsentient machines. Having companion animals was increasingly treated with suspicion, animals being depicted as the embodiment of that uncontrollable instinctuality that capitalism had to curb to produce a disciplined worker. Touching them, caressing them, living with them, as had been the norm in rural areas, became taboo. With the witch-hunt, especially in England, animals were demonized, according to the theory that the Devil provided his acolytes with daily helpers in the form of domestic pets, serving to carry out the witches’ crimes. These ‘familiars’ are a constant theme in the English trials, as evidence of the irrational, bestial nature of the ‘witch’ and potentially every woman.70

Federici’s use of the word ‘caress’ points towards tenderness and love between humans and non-human animals that became suspicious just as the seventeenthcentury witch-hunts began to single out and obliterate women who were deemed either a threat to patriarchy or as superfluous in the context of early-stage global capitalism. Significantly, Federici ends her chapter entitled ‘Witch-Hunting, Globalization, and Feminist Solidarity in Africa Today’ by highlighting the need for both solidarity and compassion among feminists around the world in the face of ongoing gender-based violence: One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken on a life of



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its own, so that the same mechanisms can now be applied to different societies, whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement, as they turn the accused – still primarily women – into monstrous beings dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity.71

To my mind, this passage underscores the urgent need for feminist scholars and activists to attend to gender-based violence not only locally but also globally by whatever means possible, and that compassion for the suffering of others is a crucial first step in fighting for the human rights of women of different races, classes, sexualities and gendered identities.

Petals and vigils The rose petals in A Flor de Piel create an intimate, haptic skin-textile, one that signifies comfort and loving care, but Schneider Enriquez suggests that it can also be read as a shroud or blood-stained sheet. As I noted earlier in this chapter, the dead, faded roses are inevitably different shades of brown, thus inviting a reading that attends to violence towards women of colour specifically. In this work, the process (sewing by hand), materials (rose petals and thread) and final object all matter a great deal. Each petal, from a long dead rose, can signify an individual who has died violently, not unlike the post-autopsy suture threads used for Teresa Margolles’s 127 cuerpos (2006) and 36 cuerpos (2010).72 The petals in Salcedo’s A Flor de Piel also recall the rose petals that play a central role in Rebecca Belmore’s 2002 performance Vigil (see Chapter 4), in which Belmore memorialized and grieved for the murdered Indigenous women of the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver. During the performance, Belmore tore roses through her teeth, one for each murdered or missing woman’s name she wrote on her own skin and then screamed out loud (Figure 4.2). Rose petals in Belmore’s performance signify very differently than in Salcedo’s installation. In the former, the petals symbolize blood pouring from the artist’s mouth to suggest the intense suffering of the murdered Indigenous women and also the affective suffering of Indigenous women still living who are mourning their lost sisters. We might not only consider the rose petals in Salcedo’s work as signifying the comfort of a soft textile but also consider it as a skin, or as fragments of skin stitched together, signifying the murdered women of Colombia. Although

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Salcedo’s works are usually discussed in relation to political violence, femicide is an ongoing social issue in Colombia.73 Salcedo’s rose petals may evoke a blanket or sheet, but if we consider the fact that it is usually displayed on the floor of a gallery, it is perhaps closer to a carpet. When put into dialogue with Belmore’s Vigil, A Flor de Piel can also evoke the carpet of flowers that often appear at impromptu vigils for murdered women, for instance, at the vigil for Sarah Everard, a young British woman who was murdered by a white male police officer in London in March 2021. Amy France’s photograph of the flowers left at that particular vigil is the cover image for this book. Many readers will be aware that at the vigil for Everard, Metropolitan police officers assaulted and arrested a number of grieving women. This genderbased violence, taking place at a vigil for a young woman murdered by a police officer, unveiled once again the systemic misogyny and loathing for women that exists globally, not just in the ‘global South’ but in the so-called ‘Western’ world as well. Furthermore, another layer of gender-based violence occurred during the vigil, with amateur male photographers shoving their cameras in the faces of the women who had gathered to mourn Sarah Everard and to bring attention to the extreme prevalence of violence against women in the vast majority of societies.74 Violence against women – including transwomen, women of colour and white women – is a contemporary global epidemic.75

Conclusion: The fragment as a metaphor for violence At the outset of this chapter I quoted Laura Garcia Mareno as stating, vis-àvis Orphan’s Tunic, ‘Despite the gestures of repair and the attempt to join the fragments – the combination of hair and silk meticulously woven around the point of fusion between the two ­tables – they remain irreparably disjointed and fragmented.’76 Salcedo’s use of silk is significant in this work, alluding not only to a dress worn every day by a young Colombian girl who witnessed her parents’ murder (the eponymous orphan) but also indexing the transcultural trade in luxury fabrics such as silk that was part of early global capitalism and continues today in late-stage global capitalism.77 Although I cannot address her work at length, I want to acknowledge South African artist Billie Zangewa who works with silk and collage to create gorgeous textile artworks (tapestries) that are frequently autobiographical.78 Significantly for my purposes in this final section, Zangewa’s cut silk pieces with cotton embroidery and text are deliberately created to look like fragments ripped from a larger piece of silk.



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While the imagery in these tapestries represents Black female subjects with agency and jouissance, the ‘fragmented’ pieces of silk invoke, I propose, material violence to Black women. The representational content of the works therefore functions as resistance to that material violence. Her choice of material, too, is an act of pleasurable resistance or pleasure activism; Zangewa has described silk as ‘radiant’ and ‘seductive’, indicating the visual and sensual pleasures of working with this particular material.79 Jill Bennett, among other scholars, has also noted the presence of fragments in many of Salcedo’s works: ‘The fragments of clothing encased in furnishings (e.g., the lace and embroidered flowers, suggestive of a particular kind of “feminine” taste …) no longer enliven these objects; instead, they haunt them in a way that does not recall their former use, confirming instead that these items no longer function as they once did’.80 This concern with the fragment is significant for my purposes, as I argue that in contemporary artworks that employ craft media, fragments of materials such as textiles and wood signify powerfully if considered in relation to violence against women. The subtitle of this section is a deliberate nod to Linda Nochlin’s Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures given at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 1992. The lectures were published in 1994 as a slim text entitled The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity. In her lectures, Nochlin undertook a survey of the fragmented body in modern Western visual culture. As Nochlin observes, depictions of bodies that ‘are quite literally “in pieces” – broken, amputated – serve to remind us that there are times in the history of modern representation when the dismembered human body exists for the viewer not just as a metaphor but as an historical reality’. She continues, Art historians like myself, wrapped up in the nineteenth century and in gender theory, have a tendency to forget that the human body is not just an object of desire, but the site of suffering, pain and death, a lesson that scholars of older art, with its insistent iconography of martyrs and victims, of the damned suffering in hell and the blessed suffering on earth, can never ignore.81

The gap in Nochlin’s statement, of course, is that historians of (global) contemporary art cannot ignore the fact that the human body is the site of suffering, pain and death. The reader will have noted, furthermore, that in a range of different ways, all of the artists examined in Skin Crafts have engaged with the fragment as a metaphor for violence towards human skin and, by extension, the human body.

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As scholars such as Mieke Bal have previously argued, in Salcedo’s body of work the fragments and fragmented objects removed from their original contexts function as metaphors for the violated body in absentia. Like so many of the artists discussed in Skin Crafts, Salcedo does not visually represent the spectacularized suffering of the dead (female) body. This desire to eschew further (representational, epistemic, discursive) violence towards the violated subject is a crucial aspect of her ethical approach to political art. As I have argued throughout this book, contemporary female artists working with craft media to create non-representational (and sometimes representational) art concerned with violence implicitly acknowledge that art, images and visual culture (i.e. depictions of violence) can do further harm to those who have experienced violence or who have lost loved ones to violence. This sensitivity to the affective and psychological consequences of trauma goes hand-in-hand with these artists’ choice of craft media such as fibre, clay, beads, wood, glass and even petals and concrete to stand in for (and signify) human skin, highlighting the fragility of skin and thus the fragility of human life. It has been my argument that craft media – not only because of their material specificities but also because of their symbolic associations and affective power – are, and have been proven to be by the artists I have discussed – particularly productive for political art that addresses, unveils and ultimately battles against violence of all kinds.82

Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to Bella Silverman (formerly of McGill University) who helped me collect material for this chapter and secure reproduction rights for this book.

Notes 1 There are several armoires in the Untitled Furniture series. I am primarily concerned in this chapter with Untitled Furniture (Armoire) of 1995 (wood, concrete, cloth, glass and steel; 162 × 99.5 × 37 cm), which is in a private collection in San Francisco. A photograph of the work is reproduced in Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), on page 76. Another armoire, produced in 1998 (wood, concrete and metal; 182.9 × 157.5 × 53.3 cm), is in the collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.



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2 For only a small selection of texts, see Charles Merewether, ‘Naming Violence in the Work of Doris Salcedo’, Third Text, vol. 7, no. 24 (1993): 35–44; Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 51–69; Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Lori Cole, ‘At the Site of State Violence: Doris Salcedo’s and Julieta Hanono’s Memorial Aesthetics’, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, vol. 15 (2011): 87–93; Claudette Lauzon, ‘Reluctant Nomads: Biennial Culture and Its Discontents’, RACAR, vol. 36, no. 2 (2011): 15–16; Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 32–8; Edward Bacal, ‘The Concrete and the Abstract: On Doris Salcedo, Teresa Margolles and Santiago Sierra’s Tenuous Bodies’, parallax, vol. 21, no. 3 (2015): 259–70. 3 Mary Schneider Enriquez (with contributions by Doris Salcedo and Narayan Khandekar), Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), xi. 4 Merewether, ‘Naming Violence in the Work of Doris Salcedo’, 42. 5 Laura Garcia Moreno, ‘ “Troubled Materiality”: The Installations of Doris Salcedo’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 43, no. 2 (June 2010): 102. 6 Ibid., 99. 7 Peggy Phelan describes Orphan’s Tunic thusly: As the viewer approaches an old, worn table, spliced together from two broken sections, a white sheen is perceived to be a fine covering of silk. At the join of the two parts, human hair is also seen to be woven into the table’s surface. In Unland, a series of three works made between 1995 and 1998, Salcedo referred in her titles to writing by the exiled German Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920–70). A survivor of the Holocaust, Celan reflected in his poetry a despair in the possibility of recovering coherent meaning and of overcoming loss. In his fragmented verse the negative prefix ‘un’ appears frequently, as do references to blindness and constraints against sight. Peggy Phelan, Art and Feminism, edited by Helena Reckitt (London: Phaidon, 2001), 164. 8 Moreno, ‘ “Troubled Materiality” ’, 102–3. Emphasis added. 9 Katherine Brinson, ‘The Muted Drum: Doris Salcedo’s Material Elegies’, in exh. cat. Doris Salcedo, edited by Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine Grynsztejn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), www3.mcachicago.org/2015/salcedo/ texts/the-muted-drum, endnote #8. Last accessed 26 March 2021. 10 Schneider Enriquez, The Materiality of Mourning, 81. 11 Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2003), 86. Meskimmon is concerned with ‘borderlands

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feminisms’, specifically in relation to ‘Chicana feminists [who] have been especially critical of Anglo-American, liberal [white] feminists who, under the joint banners of equality and sisterhood, all too easily acceded to the position of central, knowing subjects over their “others”, including non-western, non-white, “Third World” and working-class women’. Her point is relevant for Skin Crafts, as I am a white feminist art historian writing about female artists of colour. 12 Maria Elena Buszek, ‘Introduction: The Ordinary Made Extra/Ordinary’, in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.), Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2. Buszek is building on art historian Jean Robinson’s lament regarding craft criticism. 13 Ibid., 5. 14 See Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). 15 Bacal argues that ‘Teresa Margolles’s work in concrete relates to her broader practice of creating sculptures and installations that, composed with the residue of corpses, bring their socio-politically fraught materiality into relief ’. Bacal, ‘The Concrete and the Abstract’, 263. 16 Ibid., 265. 17 Ibid., 266. Emphasis added. 18 Forty quoted in ibid., 268. See Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London: Reaktion, 2013). 19 Ibid., 268. 20 See Chapter 4 in Skin Crafts for a discussion of haptic visuality. 21 Mereweather, ‘Naming Violence in the Work of Doris Salcedo’. For more on the affective powers of everyday objects, see Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). 22 Buszek, ‘Introduction’, 2. 23 Ibid., 12. 24 Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xix. 25 Buszek, ‘Introduction’, 5. 26 Schneider Enriquez, The Materiality of Mourning, 78. 27 Salcedo quoted in Schneider Enriquez, The Materiality of Mourning, 116 n.49. 28 Marc Lafrance, ‘Skin Studies: Past, Present and Future’, Body & Society, vol. 24, nos. 1/2 (2018): 3–4. 29 Ibid., 4. 30 Significantly, Lafrance adds later in his survey of skin studies: ‘Like the cultural politics of gender, the cultural politics of race indicate that racialized skin is inscribed by power relations, objectified by oppressive stereotypes and all too often assaulted by state violence in ways that the non-racialized is not.’ Ibid., 6. We might argue that white skin is racialized (if usually not named as a race), but as the ‘ideal’ or ‘supreme’ race in the context of white supremacy.



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31 Henry Urbach, ‘Closets, Clothes, Disclosure’, in Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden (eds), Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 342. 32 Claudette Lauzon, ‘What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore’s Memorial to Missing Women’, in Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux and Christine Ross (eds), Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 162. 33 Marsha Meskimmon, Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (London: Routledge, 2011), 33. 34 Urbach, ‘Closets, Clothes, Disclosure’, 342. Emphasis added. 35 Ibid., 346. According to Urbach, ‘Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and socio-cultural analysis of abjection examines how things which are considered dirty and therefore subject to exclusion are never fully eliminated. Rather, they are deposited just beyond the space they simultaneously soil and cleanse. This partial, incomplete elimination keeps that which is dirty present so it can constitute, by contrast, the cleanliness of the clean’ (346). 36 Several scholars have referenced ghosts or haunting in their examinations of this series. See, for example, Brinson, ‘The Muted Drum’, n.p. For a relevant nonart historical discussion, see Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 37 Bacal, ‘The Concrete and the Abstract’, 259. 38 Brinson, ‘The Muted Drum’, n.p. 39 Bacal, ‘The Concrete and the Abstract’, 262. 40 Ibid., 263. 41 Furniture-making and wood-working are discussed by some scholars concerned with contemporary art made with ‘craft media’. Dennis Stevens, for example, notes that ‘fields [such] as ceramics, glass, textiles, jewelry, black-smithing, and woodworking are separate communities of practice, for each of these communities shares a common sensibility. In effect, it is through the social nature of their practice that they create their own realities’. Dennis Stevens, ‘Validity in the Eye of the Beholder: Mapping Craft Communities in Practice’, in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.), Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 47. 42 For an extended discussion of the British Arts and Crafts movement, see Imogen Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 43 Adamson, The Invention of Craft, 9. 44 Ibid., 26. 45 Rather than referring to found objects and ready-mades with the conventional epitaph of ‘Duchampian’, I refer here to the German dadaist Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven (1874–1927), as I am convinced by Irene Gammel’s argument that it was Baroness Elsa who was responsible for turning a urinal into the now-famous

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work of art, Fountain, in the early twentieth century. Gammel provides ample evidence to back up this claim, thus positioning the Baroness as the first artist to create ready-made sculptures, rather than Marcel Duchamp. See Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2002), especially 219–30. 46 Adamson, The Invention of Craft, 195. 47 Catherine Dormor, ‘Textile as Caressing Subject/Object’, in A Philosophy of Textile: Between Practice and Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 99–101. 48 Quoted in ibid., 99. 49 Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak, 67–8. 50 Ibid., 33 n.3. 51 See Gen Doy, ‘Concretizing the Abstract’, in Materializing Art History (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 173–201. 52 Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak, 2. 53 Agustina Bazterrica, Tender is the Flesh, trans. Sarah Moses (New York: Scribner, 2020). Originally published in Spanish in 2017. 54 See Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (Cambridge: Semiotext[e]‌, 2018). 55 Bazterrica, Tender is the Flesh, 10–11. 56 Ibid., 11. 57 Brinson, ‘The Muted Drum’, n.p. See www3.mcachicago.org/2015/salcedo/texts/themuted-drum, endnote #8. Last accessed 26 March 2021. 58 Dormor, A Philosophy of Textile, 99. 59 Schneider Enriquez, The Materiality of Mourning, 121. 60 See Hilda Morales Trujillo, ‘Femicide and Sexual Violence in Guatemala’, in RosaLinda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano (eds), Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 127–37. 61 Schneider Enriquez, The Materiality of Mourning, 121. 62 Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, ‘Introduction: Dermographies’, in Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (eds), Thinking through the Skin (London: Routledge, 2001), 2. 63 Craft and textile scholars frequently highlight the temporality of hand-made objects. See, for example, Buszek, ‘Introduction’. 64 Lesley Millar and Alice Kettle, ‘Introduction’, in The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18. See also Angela Maddock, ‘Folds, Scissors, and Cleavage in Giovanni Battista Moroni’s Il Tagliapanni’, in The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 26, 29; Claire Jones, ‘ “A Perverted Taste”: Italian Depictions of Cloth and Puberty in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Marble’, in The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 38, 45; Debra Roberts, ‘The Rustle of Taffeta: The Value of Hapticity in Research



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and Reconstruction of an Eighteenth-Century Sack-Back Dress’, in The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 62, 64, 70; Catherine Harper, ‘Present or Absent Shirts: Creation of a Lexicon of Erotic Intimacy and Masculine Mourning’, in The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 98; Caroline Wintersgill and Savithri Bartlett, ‘Empowering the Replicant: Visual and Haptic Narratives in Blade Runner’, in The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 111; Catherine Dormor, ‘Caressing Cloth: The Warp and Weft as Site of Exchange’, in The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 124–5, 126, 128. 65 As for many people depression means inhibited abilities to connect with others, I anticipate some readers may view depression as incompatible with compassion, but I want to allow for different experiences of depression, rather than a monolithic definition that would reject the possibility of a depressed person having compassion for an other. For discussions of depression, see Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012) and Christine Ross, The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 66 Dormor, A Philosophy of Textile, 99. 67 Ibid., 100. 68 Ibid. 69 Janis Jefferies, ‘Loving Attention: An Outburst of Craft in Contemporary Art’, in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.), Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 231–2. 70 Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018), 22. Emphasis added. 71 Ibid., 82. Emphasis added. 72 For more on this see Chapter 1 in Skin Crafts. See also Emeren García and John Zeppetelli, Teresa Margolles: Mundos (Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain, 2017), 40. 73 See Joe Parkin Daniels, ‘ “Nowhere is safe”: Colombia confronts alarming surge in femicides’, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jan/25/ nowhere-is-safe-colombia-confronts-alarming-surge-in-femicides (25 January 2021); last accessed 1 April 2021. TW: The first few lines of the article refer to the murder of young children. 74 Email communication from Amy France to author, 15 March 2021. 75 This has become glaringly obvious during the Covid-19 pandemic with the explosion of domestic violence, including femicide, that has occurred globally. See, for example, https://globalnews.ca/news/7715820/seven-women-killed-quebecdomestic-violence-spike/ (24 March 2021); last accessed 1 April 2021.

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76 Mareno, ‘Troubled Materiality’, 102–3. 77 See Giorgio Riello, ‘Fashion in the Four Parts of the World: Time, Space and Early Modern Global Change’, in Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (eds), Dressing Global Bodies: The Political Power of Dress in World History (London: Routledge, 2020), 41–64. Riello has observed that the transcultural trade in textiles including Chinese silks and Indian cotton ‘influenced design in Latin America’ (49). See also Donna Pierce Ronald Otsuka (eds), Asia and Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850 (Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2009). 78 My thanks to Sadie McInnes for bringing Billie Zangewa’s work to my attention. 79 ‘African Artist Billie Zangewa on Working with Silk’ (5 April 2007). 80 Bennett, Empathic Vision, 62. 81 Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), 16–18. 82 ‘I take the potential melodramatic aspect of La Casa Viuda I [1995] as a polemical aspect that harbors a sting directed at the international art world as much as a sword raised against Colombian, and then universal, violence.’ Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak, 114.

Afterword

I want to conclude Skin Crafts by turning from the ‘global’ to the local, namely Montreal, where I live and work. I have written a lot about art as political action in this book, and I have attempted to walk the line between idealism and materialism without falling into the trap of offering an unconvincing, utopian reading of contemporary artworks concerned with violence.1 Nonetheless, in looking closely at both the content and materiality of art created with craft media including textiles, ceramics, beads and wood, I have set out to link these artworks with the material consequences of violence as well as the material consequences of looking at political art by contemporary female artists of colour. I am not an ethnographer, and I have not done fieldwork in the ‘global South’ or elsewhere (nor could I afford to do it as a precariously employed adjunct art historian with no research funding) to collect data that would function as empirical evidence proving the artworks that I have discussed have had a material impact on individuals’ actions. I can only speak to the material impact these artworks, and other political artworks, have had on me, since I began working on this project in 2018, but especially since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the spring and summer of 2020. This afterword is an opportunity to show that contemporary art by women of colour has had a material impact on my thoughts and actions, and not just on my pedagogy and scholarship (although it has absolutely impacted how I teach and write about art). Because of Teresa Margolles’s work concerned with femicide, I have donated money to women’s shelters (such as the Native Women’s Shelter in Montreal). Because of Lubaina Himid’s work I have focused some of my courses on anti-racist artists and texts, such as Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (2017), which I had my McGill students read cover-to-cover in the fall 2020 semester. Those students also wrote letters to McGill University’s powers-that-be asking them to remove the sculpture of James McGill who founded McGill University

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and owned slaves. Despite a multitude of requests from students of colour and faculty members of colour, including Dr Charmaine Nelson, stating unequivocally that the sculpture harms them mentally and emotionally, at the time of this writing, McGill University (as an institution) has refused, repeatedly, to remove the sculpture from the university’s downtown campus.2 Sherry Farrell Racette, Rebecca Belmore and Nadia Myre have produced artworks that have taught me about the murdered Indigenous women and girls of Canada, while also teaching me about the resilience and survivance of Indigenous peoples. At the same time, I have learned about my own privilege as a white, cis-woman in Canada (i.e. a white settler); I am an uninvited guest on Indigenous land. But I can honestly say that it is the artists who I follow on Instagram who have had the most impact on me politically and affectively this past year. Because of artists such as Lyla Mori (@moonflesh), a Black, Japanese, queer, nonbinary artist who creates beautiful embroideries with gemstones, I have learned about anti-Asian hate and violence. One of the most important things that I’ve learned since the pandemic started is that mutual aid and ‘wealth’ redistribution matters. I have no one to blame but myself that it took me until 2020 to realize this. So I began to buy work by female artists of colour such as Rocio Marie Cabrera3 (a Black Latinx artist based in the Bronx), Black female artist Lana Denina (based in Montreal) and Kezna Dalz, a Black female Montreal artist whose colourful prints, shirts and pillows encourage two interconnected acts: resistance and rest.4 The importance of prints and textiles (including clothing) for political art cannot be underestimated. Selling work online, rather than through the gallery system, allows young political artists to create explicitly political work (often combining text and image) that is circulated globally without the often suffocating and censoring grasp of the gallery.5 Further to this, (most) prints and shirts are affordable to those of us who are precariously employed thanks to neoliberalism’s death grip on academia and the resulting gig economy. Dalz, who goes by Teenadult on Instagram, believes that art can function as activism, and that art can engender change. I share this belief, because it has changed how I (want to) navigate the world, and I have seen how some of my students’ perspectives and actions have changed as a result of learning about contemporary art, especially contemporary art by women artists of colour. I own two of Dalz’s prints, as well as two shirts and a throw pillow, the title of which is Rest Without Guilt. One print says ‘RESIST’ below the face of a Black woman with one tear running down her face. The other print says ‘REST’ below a Black, nude woman with her hands in the air and a contented smile. When Dalz gave an artist’s talk to my Canadian Art and Race class at McGill at the

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beginning of December 2020, she noted that body positivity is important to her, and her depictions of the Black, nude female subject reject the taboo of Black female artists depicting the naked Black woman because of the histories of representational violence and fetishization written onto Black women’s bodies.6 The importance of Dalz’s dual message of resistance and rest is crucial for antiracist activism, whether that activism be in the form of protesting, teaching or art-making, as resistance, of course, involves a great deal of affective labour, as does crafting, as scholars such as Ann Cvetkovich and Janis Jefferies have noted.7 Dalz teaches us that in order to keep resisting, we must rest as part of radical self-care, which is crucial for anti-racist, as well as anti-fascist, activism.8 It is also worth noting that in her work, Dalz often delineates the skin of her Black female subjects with wavy lines. Asked about this artistic decision, Dalz told me, I believe I use wavy lines because I like to keep the naive aspect to my art practice. It also helps me in depicting things that are not and aren’t meant to be or look perfect. It removes the pressure of wanting to achieve perfect and realistic looking art and also reflects how imperfect the human body is and how ok it is to be. Wavy lines also remind us of movement and how things are not stable and constant. They are also very fun to draw.9

The obvious joy that Dalz experiences in producing art is an important part of her project, which combines politics and Black jouissance. At the core of her body of work is the strong belief that art is power (Figure A.1), specifically for Black female artists. I want to draw out Dalz’s remark that the wavy line signifies movement. As I argued in the previous chapter, compassion as an affect is fundamentally related to forward momentum, as Dalz implies here. Compassion can compel action. The wavy lines that represent skin in many of Dalz’s drawings could, I want to suggest, speak to this belief, namely that the wavy line is the line of compassion in her work: compassion for herself and for other Black women, but the line of compassion here is inextricably linked with affective and material movement. The viewer can be moved emotionally, and thus she can be moved to act(ivism). Having just written a whole book about how skin signifies in a range of ways depending on context, viewer subject position and iconography, I propose that the wavy lines that signify skin in Dalz’s work also illuminate the fact that skin is a slippery signifier; that it is an unreliable surface for interpreting things about a person. In the context of anti-Black racism, Black skin signifies threat if not pathology. In the context of Black pride, Black skin signifies power and beauty. The skin is not a surface that can be ‘read’ only one way; it is always multiple and

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Figure A.1  Kezna Dalz, Art = Power, 2021. Colour print. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

shifting, permeable and fluid. It is, as I have argued, both resilient and vulnerable. It can be wounded, healed and scarred, or it can be opened and split violently, leading to death. Dalz’s wavy lines unveil the frustrated desire for skin that is reliably legible and therefore categorizable in reductive (read: racist) ways. In mathematics, two ‘tildes’ or wavy lines are used to indicate ‘approximately equal’, while one tilde above two straight lines is often used to indicate a congruence relation. In artistic and racial terms, might we not read Dalz’s wavy lines symbolically, then, as an indication of equality among individuals with different skin colours, and indeed with non-human agents such as plants and animals (which also sometimes appear in Dalz’s work), suggesting a more ‘holistic’, ethical, multispecies world order, one that is still in the making.10 If money talks, and if gore capitalism is all around us, not just in so-called ‘third world countries’,11 then the material actions I can do as a white intersectional feminist who continues to learn from political artists include: teach, write about and buy the work of as many artists of colour, queer artists, trans artists and nonbinary artists as humanly possible; pay women of colour not just for their products but for their affective labour; donate money on a regular basis, whether

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it be to the Bail Fund, women’s shelters, LGBTQ+ shelters and organizations, Planned Parenthood (as I’m grateful every day for the fact that I was able to access a safe and legal abortion in Montreal when I was twenty-three) or the SPCA (because animals give me hope and joy); and last, but certainly not least: don’t be an asshole, because people are hurting. Black Lives Matter. Black Trans Lives Matter. Trans women are women. Eat the Rich. Montreal, April 2021

Notes 1 See Gen Doy for a hilariously scathing rebuttal to scholars taking an ‘idealist’ approach and arguing that certain artworks and art movements (e.g. Abstract Expressionism) are ‘political’. There is certainly a risk in arguing that contemporary artworks by Margolles, Salcedo, Himid, Farrell Racette, Belmore and Myre have a material impact on (all) viewers without backing it up with tangible evidence. I offer this afterword as an acknowledgement of that risk as well as a rejoinder to anyone who says art cannot make a difference in terms of anti-racism and anti-fascism. It is true that some art historians claim that contemporary art can change the world without stating clearly how and when it has done so. It is also worth noting that I am in absolute agreement with Doy that Abstract Expressionism was not ‘political’ art, despite the protestations of several (male) art historians. I also take seriously Doy’s warning against reading political intent into artworks that are not dedicated to enacting political activism. I have argued throughout Skin Crafts that all of the artists I have discussed are indeed deliberately producing political art, in the sense that their work is unveiling material violence with the aim of not only bearing witness to that violence but also discouraging, in the strongest terms possible, all forms of violence (material, discursive, psychological and affective). See Gen Doy, ‘Concretizing the Abstract’, in Materializing Art History (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 173–201. 2 Claire Loewen, ‘Taking Down Statue of James McGill Is Only One Step in Fighting Systemic Racism, Students Say’, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/jamesmcgill-petition-1.5611769 (14 June 2020), last accessed 17 March 2021. 3 Cabrera is included in a ‘Noncomprehensive List of Artists Everyone Should Know’, in Arlene Dávila, Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 178.

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4 Both Dalz and Denina participated in creating the Black Lives Matter street mural in Montreal in July 2020. During an artist’s talk in one of my classes at McGill, Dalz noted that she received a range of responses to the mural, including supportive, dismissive and racist comments. 5 See Aruna D’Souza, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2018). 6 For more on this taboo, see Derek Conrad Murray, ‘Loving Aberrance: Mickalene Thomas and the Queering of Black Female Desire’, in Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity after Civil Rights (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 111–42. 7 Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 184–85; Janis Jefferies, ‘Loving Attention: An Outburst of Craft in Contemporary Art’, in Maria Elena Buszek (ed.), Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 222–40. On affective labour see Jennifer Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 92. 8 Angela Dimitrikaki and Harry Weeks, ‘Anti-Fascism/Art/Theory: An Introduction to What Hurts Us’, Third Text, vol. 33, no. 3 (2019): 271–92. 9 Email correspondence from Kezna Dalz to author, 17 March 2021. 10 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); J. Keri Cronin, Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870–1914 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018). 11 Sayak Valencia self-reflexively employs this debated term in her text on gore capitalism. See Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism, trans. John Pluecker (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2018).

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206

Index abuse 73, 100 of Black female slaves 73 domestic 53 emotional and psychological 121 Indigenous patients 101, 123 physical 147 political 71 Adamson, Glenn 164 addiction 5, 51, 121, 123–4, 128 aesthetic failure 135 African architects 78 African slaves 13 Ahmed, Sara 1, 169 Ai Weiwei 16 alcoholic masculine depression 131 Andre, Raphael 123–4 animal skin 4, 19, 166 anti-Asian hate 14 anti-Black racism 24, 68, 77 anti-Indigenous racism 96, 107, 114, 123, 133, 137 Appadurai, Arjun 65 armoires 165, 176 n.1 art/craft hierarchy 101 art-historical writing 116 n.20 art-in-the-public-interest model 79 Ash-Milby, Kathleen 146 Asian ceramics 8 Attfield, Judy, 72 Auther, Elissa 101 authoritarianism 4 autopsy suture threads 35

Beckett, Jane 66, 79, 82 Belmore, Rebecca 15, 20–2, 24, 121–2, 124, 141 Fringe 139–43 Vigil 121, 128–39 Benjamin, Walter 138 Bennett, Jill 4, 51, 132 Bernier, Celeste-Marie 67, 71, 74, 77, 84 Betterton, Rosemary 45 Bhabha, Homi 99 bigotry 86 Biles, Jeremy 61 n.54 Black artists 88 Black female slaves 73, 84 Black identity 68 Black skin 7, 11, 88 Black subjectivity 68, 88 Black women’s lives 77 Blade Runner 15 blanket works 109 Blocker, Jane 130 blood-stained textiles 51, 53 ‘blue willow’ transfer 68 bodily excess 46 bone china. see china Borland, Christine 11, 13 Botey, Mariana 38, 47, 61 n.51 Bronfen, Elisabeth 46, 61 n.53 Brontë, Charlotte 72 brown skin 10 Bryan-Wilson, Julia 97, 113 Buszek, Maria Elena 158

Bacal, Edward 158, 162 Bal, Mieke 176 Banwell, Julia 34 Barthes, Roland 97 base materiality 46 Bataille, Georges 50, 61 n.54 Baydar, Gülsüm 46, 62 n.55 beads 141, 183 Bear, Jeffrey 145

Cabrera, Rocio Marie 184 canon 23 capitalism 9, 13 Carroll, Amy Sara 38 cement 38, 160, 162–3 ceramics 8, 16, 65–6, 68, 183 semiotic malleability 69 sweet jelly moulds 82 trade of 68

208 Cheng, Anne Anlin 7–8, 10, 51, 123 Cherry, Deborah 65, 78, 89 n.6 china 9, 11, 69 Chinese Cultural Revolution 16 classism 4 collective amnesia 86 Collins, Liz 17–18 colonial domination, violence of 97 colonialism 8, 97 colonial violence 23, 96–7, 119 n.67, 121, 123, 137 in Canadian context 121–8 commodification of women’s bodies 112 compassion and the caress 168–73 corporeal vulnerability 19 Coulthard, Glen Sean 97 Covell, Thomas 66–77 Covid-19 pandemic 14, 183 craft materials 1–2, 15, 20, 24, 35, 55, 77, 124, 158–60, 183 cranio-facial injury 2 critical craft studies 2, 37, 155, 168, 171 Crowell, Ellen 135 Cvetkovich, Ann 137 Dali, Salvador 50 Dalz, Kezna 184, 186 Dávila, Arlene 22 Deleuze, Gilles 74 Delft ceramics 13 despotism 4 destruction art 21 Deutsche, Rosalyn 78 dirty textiles 46, 53 discursive violence 23, 121 domesticity 54 domestic violence 40, 53, 164, 168 Dormor, Catherine 164, 171 Douglas, Mary 54, 123 Doyle, Jennifer 78, 86, 131, 134, 137 dress as resistance 103–7 Driver, Alice 56 n.4 D’Souza, Aruna 22, 95 dullness, 136 Echaquan, Joyce 121, 141 effeminization 9 Elliott, Bridget 39 Emin, Tracey 46

Index English slavery museum 81 enslavement 84 eroticism 9 erotics of textiles 14 excess 38–45 and art history 39, 43, 45–6 and dirty textiles 45–8 and touch 39, 48–50 exoticism, 9 Farrell Racette, Sherry 33, 95–7, 102, 104, 107–8, 111–13, 126, 132, 139, 145 blanket statements 108–15 gouache and watercolour painting 96, 105 hybrid artworks 98, 100 Indigenous-feminist textile paintings 96–100 Indigenous women in paintings 106, 112–13 textile paintings 114 Federici, Silvia 23, 37–8, 89 n.10, 172 female artists of colour 95 female bodies 36 female grotesque 47 female monstrosity 36 femicide 1, 20, 23–4, 37–9, 46, 53, 56 n.4, 58 n.2, 58 n.24, 168, 183 epidemic 20, 38, 53 excessiveness of 51 feminicide. see femicide feminine interiority 17 feminine monstrosity 36 femininity 17, 69 Fend, Mechthild 3, 5, 16 fibre and beads 96 Folkestone 85 fragmentation 7 Frankenstein, Victor 36 Freud, Sigmund 124, 170 fur-lined fabric 15 Gallo, Rubén 39 Garner, Eric 41 gender-based violence 4, 19, 23, 96–7, 172–4 gender identity 17 genocidal mentality 20 germ warfare 110 Giasson, Patrice 40–2

Index Gillow, Robert 70 Gillray, James 75 Gilman, Sander 7 global art history 23 global contemporary art 2, 16, 21–4, 29 n.65, 34 n.98, 95, 128, 175 globalization of contemporary art 45 gore capitalism 33–5, 45, 65 Frankenstein’s monster 37 Guattari, Felix 74 Haifeng, Ni 9–11, 13 Halberstam, Jack 35–6, 57 n.10, 64 n.92 haptic skin-textile 173 haptic visuality 14, 139, 148–9, 159 Harlem embroiderers 40–1 Hart, Sophie 124 Helland, Janice 39, 53 Himid, Lubaina 20, 22, 65, 67–8, 72, 74, 77–80, 86, 183 on Folkestone pavilion 84 Jelly Mould Pavilion 78–88 pavilion as sculpture 87 spatial politics 80–1 suffering of slaves 84 Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service 66–77 Hogarth, William 75–6, 140 homophobia 168 homosexuality 161 hyper-exploitability 73 hyper-political art 103–4 illness 5 imperialism 8 indexing 164 Indigenous aesthetics 101 Indigenous artists 95 Indigenous craft 100–3 Indigenous dresses 104 Indigenous female artists 95, 132 Indigenous-feminist artists 113 Indigenous-feminist project 96 Indigenous languages 101 Indigenous resilience 97 Indigenous skin 95 Indigenous textiles 95 Indigenous visual culture 103 Indigenous women, exploitation 112

209

intergenerational trauma 100 intimate violence 23, 39–40 irritation 136 Jefferies, Janis 44 Jelly Mould Pavilion 77–8, 88 Folkstone 83–6 Himid’s spatial politics 80–1 Liverpool 81–3 monuments and memory 78–80 Jones, Amelia 41 Kahlo, Frida 53–4, 142–3 Kettle, Alice 14–15, 177 n.64 Kilby, Jane 17 Kopytoff, Igor 65, 89 n.5 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth 82–3 Kristeva, Julia 46, 139 Kwon, Miwon 79 Lafrance, Marc 160 Lagarde y do los Ríos, Marcela 4, 20 LaRocque, Emma 104 Latin American art 22, 40, 158–9 Lauzon, Claudette 36, 57 n.17, 149 n.1 leather shoes 166 Lefebvre, Henri 81 Linfield, Susie 145 Liverpool Museums 81–3 Loos, Adolf 10, 51 Luna, James 130, 132 Margolles, Teresa 15, 21, 33, 54, 142, 155, 159, 183 blood 53 clothing of victims of violent death 45 death-related artworks 38, 52 indexing violence 53 textiles 33–4, 39, 43–4, 46–7, 49, 55 Marks, Laura 14, 138, 148 material culture and medical violence 128–30 materialist spectrality 47 materiality of textiles 18 material violence 55, 129, 140 McDonald, Fiona P. 109 McGill, James 183 medical violence 121, 149 n.3 memento mori 11

210

Index

Meskimmon, Marsha 5–6, 9, 13, 161, 177 n.11 Millar, Lesley 14–15, 177 n.64 misogynoire 38 misogyny 38, 96 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls of Canada 129, 146, 148 monstrosity 36 monuments and memory 78–80 Morris, William 164 murder 4, 6, 15, 21, 39–43, 46, 53 murderous pathology 46 Myre, Nadia 15, 20, 24, 125–6, 150 n.8, 154 n.91 Scar Project 143–9 skin and scar works 144 narco-violence 24, 33, 37, 45–8, 167 National Billboard Exhibition Project 107–8 necroempowerment 33 negative emotions 106 Nelson, Charmaine 73, 84, 137, 184 Ngai, Sianne 135 Nochlin, Linda 175 Ornamentalism 8 painted textiles/textile paintings 96–100 Panofsky, Erwin 40 Parker, Rozsika 101 petals and vigils 173–4 Phillips, Ruth B. 101, 104, 132 photo-colonialism 145–6 physical pain 143 physiognomy 147 Picasso, Pablo 7–8, 27 n.27 plastic surgery 2 political activism 168 political brutality 161 political public art 79 Pollock, Griselda 101 prostitution. see sex work protective agency 50 psychological pain 143 public art 80–1 Quilley, Geoff 77 racial melancholy 137 racial violence 1, 4, 7

racism 4, 38, 86, 88, 168 rape. see sexual violence Razack, Sherene 129 representational violence 23 Rice, Alan 79, 88 Ridsdel, Beccy 16 Robertson, Carmen 101 Rodney, Donald 5–6 rose petals 173–4 Ruskin, John 164 Russo, Mary 46 Said, Edward 8 Salcedo, Doris 3–4, 19, 21, 155–76 Atrabiliarios 4, 165–8 salvage paradigm 105 scars 1–2, 17, 19. 55, 125, 128, 131, 144, 146, 166, 169. see also wounds self-harm 1, 17 self-stain 46 SEMEFO 39 sensuous knowledge 148 settler-colonial art history 116 n.20 settler colonialism 127 sexism 86 sexual fetish objects 4 sexualized femininity 46 sexual violence 56 n.4, 73, 129 sex work 7, 14–15, 36, 55, 58, 129 sex workers 7, 36, 128 discursive violence 36 trans women of colour 36, 58 n.18 Sharpe, Christina 73 Shildrick, Margrit 36, 46 silk 174 skin capacity 5 clothes as 19 diseases 12–13 fragments 6 Indigenous 95 lines of stitches 37 materiality of 3 picking 18 power of 3 in relation to violence 157–8 self-harm 17 social canvas 35 studies 1–2, 25 n.6, 35, 155, 178 n.30 textiles as 51, 54

Index threshold 6 as veil 17 vulnerability and resilience 35 skin grafts 1, 19–20 skin-textile 157 slavery 66, 184 slavery museum 80–1 slave trade 9, 13, 20, 66, 68, 70, 73, 77–8, 81, 83, 85–6. see also Transatlantic slave trade Folkestone’s history 79 Sloboda, Stacey 8–9, 69 social skin 19 socio-cultural value of body 52 Sorkin, Jenni 46 state violence (Colombia) 161–3 Stiles, Kristine 19–21 tattoos 5, 10, 16 tedium 136 textiles 169, 183 in art 39 caressing subject/object 170 contradictory symbolism 43 dirty and blood-soaked 43 Indigenous 95 in Indigenous cultures 100 as skin 51, 54 symbolism 121 touch and violence 48–54 Thomas, Jeff 109, 119 n.64 threads 34–5 Townsend-Gault, Charlotte 128, 132, 138 Transatlantic slave trade 65, 67, 73–4, 77–8, 80–1, 167 transphobia 38, 168 trans women 23, 36, 55, 58 trauma 1, 132, 140, 166 healing from 146 intergenerational 100 to psyche 1 to skin 1 tropical plantation slavery 85 Troupe, Cheryl 98, 111 Turner, J. M. W. 80 ugly feelings 126 Urbach, Henry 161

211

Valencia, Sayak 33–4, 56 n.5, 56 n.9 Vanitas 11 vellum 4, 19, 155, 160, 165–7, 170 Venice Biennial 21, 47, 128, 132 Victorian ceramic jelly moulds 82 vigils 173–4 violence 1, 36, 73, 77, 183 against Black people 7 against Black women 24, 175 in Colombia 1 colonial 23, 97, 106, 121, 123, 137 depictions of 176 discursive 23, 121 domestic 40, 53 gender-based 19, 23, 53, 96–7, 172–4 to human bodies 157 intimate 23, 39–40 material 36, 55, 140 medical 121, 149 n.3 representational 23 skin in relation to 157–8 symbolization 15 touch in excess 39, 48–54 towards Indigenous peoples 149 n.3 against women 4, 38, 51, 95, 175 violent death 97 White, Bob 15 whiteness 7, 9, 16–17, 74 white supremacy 168 Wilde, Oscar 135–6 witches 90 n.10, 172 witch-hunting 36, 38, 172 women’s rights 20 Wood, Marcus 73, 81, 88 wood furniture 164 wounds 1–2, 6, 18, 21, 37, 55, 127, 141–3, 155, 164, 166. see also scars individual and collective, 156 material 157–8 old 134 psychic and corporeal 145 psychological 130 xenophobia 4 Zangewa, Billie,174–5 Zorach, Rebecca 53

Plate 1  Ni Haifeng, Self-Portrait as Part of the Porcelain Export Trade, 2000. Photograph. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 2 Hella Jongerius, Chicle Delft Jug, 2009. White-and-blue ceramic jug with chicle. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Photo: Roel van Tour.

Plate 3  Bob White, Between Skin and Cloth #1, 2004. Acrylic on calico. 163 x 66 cm. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 4 Beccy Ridsdel, from the Art and Craft series, 2016. Porcelain and metal. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 5  Liz Collins, The Walking Wounded, 2011. Textile banner. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 6 Sherry Farrell Racette, Ancestral Women Taking Back Their Dresses, 1990. Gouache and watercolour on paper. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 7  Rebecca Belmore, Fringe, 2008. Photograph on the right. Exhibition view of Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from June 20 to October 6, 2019 © Rebecca Belmore. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay.

Plate 8 Nadia Myre, Meditations on Red #3, 2013. Photograph. Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.