I struggled with a title for this but settled on what I went for. Here are a couple of articles about a cake made in the form of an African woman that was created as a piece of art designed to highlight and provoke reactions to the perceptions of African women. The creator of the cake is herself Afro-Swedish and claims that it is to create a sympathetic understanding of the situation of the woman depicted, but both articles are critical of how she goes about making this point.
For me, this is one of the most horrific things I’ve seen recently, and had I been there I would have asked what the fuck she thought she was doing creating what is essentially a caricature golly African woman that can then be devoured by privileged white people as part of a statement. The artist argues she is doing it as part of her identity as a black woman, but that doesn’t make her position automatically correct and the negative reactions of others wrong. Looking at her picture, had I not been told she was Afro-Swedish I wouldn’t have even known she had any black heritage to be speaking on behalf of, which sadly I think undermines her position even further.
The people who were there to “participate” in the art “event” were not the kind of people who would buy into that kind of caricature anyway, so it’s preaching to the converted. In a place like Sweden, it’s probably more subtle forms of racism that need to be addressed.
Both articles refer to the artist as “he” so I don’t think the artist is female.
Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman also uses a cake in the shape of a woman. It didn’t trouble me so much reading about it but seeing these pictures was awful.
It wasn’t just about perceptions of African women, but to specifically address female genital mutilation, via a red velvet cake that was hacked into via its “crotch” region.
The artist is an Afro-Swedish man, not a woman. (This is specifically mentioned in both articles.) The curly haired person pictured with the second article appears to be its author. The person in the picture in the first article is the Swedish minister of culture, who apparently thought that this crude caricature of an African woman was the most hilarious thing she ever saw and laughed hysterically as she thrust a knife into the cake’s allegorical vagina in order to cut it, revealing the blood red cake under the frosting.
The artist was lain under the table and it was his face, in exaggerated blackface and tribal decoration, that was the face of the cake. As the minister cut into the cake, the artist screamed as if being cut. That made the minister of culture and the attending guests laugh even more.
There is video of the event on YouTube if you care to see it. I found it sufficiently repulsive that I cannot muster the will to go look for it.
There is a time and a place and a proper fashion for representative art, especially art in pursuit of justice for a misunderstood and frequently silenced population.
This was neither the time, nor place, nor proper fashion.
It is appalling enough that the voices of women who’ve undergone FGM are rarely if ever heard, even when they have safety and desire to speak about what they’ve experienced and its effects upon their lives. It’s even worse when such unbelievably ill-thought campaigns are used to replace and drown out their voices.
I don’t think it really counts as “art” so much as “absurd spectacle.” I can’t blame the participants for grinning and laughing; I would giggle madly if confronted with such a ridiculous situation.
Does anyone else think that the title of the second piece, with its alliteration and internal rhyme, sounds like something out of Beowulf-era English poetry?
My mistake about the gender of the artist, I read one article thoroughly then skimmed the other and it was referring to the female politician after having mentioned the artist, so got those muddled, and yes the again the photo in the article with the woman next to it is the author of the article - although the picture has the name of the artist on it which is why I was confused thinking that was Makode Linde. Mea culpa.
