In the winter of 1810, a Khoikhoi woman from the Eastern Cape named Saartjie Baartman was exhibited as the Hottentot Venus to a gawping London public. Visitors could watch her move and sing – and suffer their scrutiny – on a platform at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for the meagre price of two shillings.
The Prince Regent arrived, bringing with him “the principal nobility of all England” according to contemporary handbills, followed by the cartoonists of the day. Their images send up Baartman’s “broad bottom” with ever-increasing glee. One even includes a smirking dandy ostentatiously measuring her anatomy with a pair of callipers. It appears in this riveting exhibition.
The monstrous trafficking and exploitation of Baartman – who was displayed all over England, eventually ending up in Paris, where she died at 26 of probable smallpox – haunts Black Venus from first to last. It is there, explicitly, in the Jamaican-American photographer Renee Cox’s 1994 self-portrait posing as Baartman, nude with prosthetics, and a confrontational eye on the viewer. Who (not what) are you looking at?
It is there in American artist Carla Williams’s photograph of herself titled Venus (1992-4), in which she, too, appears as a naked odalisque, beautiful but tormented as Baartman, eyes shut and head turned proudly askance.
And it is there, throughout, in the resistance of all these images, ranging back over the past century, to every shocking racial and colonial stereotype of black women as exotic, other, hypersexual, mysterious, or simply – to quote the advertisements for Baartman – as “a perfect phenomenon of nature”.
One of the earliest retorts is a very quiet and dignified image of a young woman, seated, black and white and very nearly in profile. The sitter does not look at the camera, which is in itself unusual, since she is her own photographer. This is Florestine Perrault Collins, born to a Creole family in New Orleans in 1895, and originally forced to lie about her age to get work with white photographers.
Collins eventually set up her own studio, using self-portraits such as this one, from the early 1920s, to attract Creole customers, women in particular. Her photographs are beautiful revelations of a long-ago community, now collected by American museums.
A few years later, in 1932, George Bernard Shaw published The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God, with its questing heroine who encounters all kinds of absurd prejudice and condescension in her pursuit of the truths of the Christianity to which a feeble white missionary has converted her. Shaw appears to have been surprised at the outrage his title story caused among Church of England clergy. Perhaps more surprisingly to modern eyes is the use the African American artist Carrie Mae Weems (currently the subject of a magnificent Barbican retrospective) made of the endpapers the English artist John Farleigh designed for Shaw’s book, repeating it as a backdrop for a 1995 show on African identity. The eponymous black girl appears to move ever upwards through swaying harvest fields in what Weems, who loved the motif, called a metaphor for “searching, probing, looking”.
Something of that figure seems to hover in Ayana V Jackson’s 2019 lifesize photograph Black Rice, in which the American-born artist appears dressed in a flowing crinoline and bonnet composed of hemp sacking, cowrie shells and corn, two sheaves of leaves in her hands. The caption tells you that she is based upon Mame Coumba Bang, a river goddess worshipped in Senegal, who traditionally receives such tributes on the birth of a baby. But the image irresistibly invokes the period costume of western colonisers, at a time when pregnant enslaved women were thrown overboard on transatlantic crossings. It is from a series with the mordant title Take Me to the Water.
All these works turn us face to face, so to speak, with the inhuman past. And threaded throughout are the late Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter’s celebrated photographs of herself as a black Jacobin, or a black Terpsichore, in white wigs and dresses. And she plays the part, too, of Baudelaire’s French-Haitian mistress Jeanne Duval, once described by the poet as his “Vénus Noire”. She is said to have been driven mad by his incessant recitations of his own poetry.
But just as this show winds its way through an enfilade of elegant rooms in Somerset House, so it gradually moves closer to the present. Renee Cox shoots Hollywood wives in their swimming pools, except that they are black not white, and drinking Jamaican rum. Sonia Boyce, who represented Britain at the last Venice Biennale, takes a fragment of Elisabeth Welch singing Stormy Weather, from Derek Jarman’s film The Tempest, and turns her into a GiF, complete with CGI sparkles. And Zanele Muholi’s black model in full beauty pageant get-up is bannered with a sash that reads Miss Black Lesbian, one in the eye for the judges.
The majority of the 20 and more artists in this show have received something of their international due, with solo shows and museum retrospectives. Lorna Simpson’s two-screen video projection Corridor, which shows the lives of two African American women (both parts gracefully played by the artist Wangechi Mutu) at critical moments in US history – the civil war, and the civil rights movement – has been shown all over the world.
But what makes Black Venus so unusual is precisely its focus on this very phrase, so sinister and slippery, with its inherent objectification of black women in terms of race and “ideal” beauty. All of these artists, famous or not, have been selected by curator Aindrea Emelife for their high and defiant intelligence. Especially startling are the chromogenic prints of the young British ceramicist Shawanda Corbett. She is here and not here: a black artist, but with her face masked in white clay slip. Is she male or female, white or black, made of clay, a living being?
Quite apart from the skit on race and beauty, there is a subtle reference here to the silent film star Buster Keaton, who also appeared behind a mask of white makeup. Corbett pastiches the deadpan expression that earned Keaton the nickname “the Great Stone Face” – a spry play on her own profession as a maker of stone vessels.
Black Venus is at Somerset House, London, until 24 September
