MARGARET BOWLAND’S THEATRUM MUNDI

ONE NIGHT, LYING IN BED on my way to sleep, I was thinking about Margaret Bowland’s paintings, and this sentence came to my mind: Bowland stages confrontations. This felt right to me, but its rightness must be explained. I believe every encounter with a work of art is dialogical, that is, what happens when someone looks at a canvas or sculpture or any object that announces itself as art is created between the viewer and the thing viewed. Art partakes of the intersubjective because we do not treat it as just a thing but as an object imbued with the traces of another living consciousness. In figurative art, this intersubjectivity, this dialogue between viewer and image, is heightened. Not only do we encounter the artist’s intentionality as expressed in the work before us, we gaze at a representation of someone like ourselves, another human being. There is a form of mirroring at work.

From birth, infants treat other human faces with particular attention. A face is viewed differently from an inanimate object. Babies respond to a photograph or simplified drawing of a face, as well as to the mobile features of a living person. They prefer anatomically correct renderings to scrambled or distorted faces. Newborns are not predisposed to like cubist portraits. Discoveries in infant research have demonstrated that even before we become self-conscious beings, we mirror and participate in the actions of others. Looking at a depiction of a person in a work of art necessarily activates this mostly unconscious attraction and connection. It is precisely this face-to-face human drama that Margaret Bowland uses in her work. The viewer finds herself caught in a visual dialectic that is enacted on multiple levels—from the simple desire to continue looking at a beautiful face to the complex reading of imagery each one of these pictures demands. They are dense with particular cultural and historical references as well as more ambiguous allusions, ones that, variously, give pleasure and disturb. The static reality of these canvases opens into an emotional tumult created by the spectator’s need to understand what she or he is actually seeing.

The question, “What am I looking at?” should never be posed casually. Perception is a tricky business, one laden with expectations, both conscious and unconscious. This is an inescapable state of affairs. We all come to a work of art with thoughts and feelings, as well as with a history of experiences that have shaped our vision, both personal and cultural. Each one of us can, however, struggle against our own prejudgments by adopting a phenomenological attitude. After looking long and hard enough at a work of art, I have often seen what I couldn’t see before. Examining Bowland’s oil canvases and pastels in this exhibition, I began to understand how her work both exploits and undermines our expectations. We are confronted with multiple images of a single person. She has been rendered by the artist with such technical refinement we participate in an illusion of her reality, but she has been placed inside an iconography that demands to be deciphered.

The model for all of these works is the same child, Janasia or “J.J.” Smith, a girl who is now nine years old. She inhabits the world of what I like to call high middle childhood, the era before even a breath of puberty has blown over her body, the time Freud called “latency.” She is beautiful. What beauty is remains mysterious, but this child’s face is beautiful, and I was immediately drawn to her large eyes and delicate features. We look at faces first. But in many of these images the brown skin of the girl’s face has been whitened, dusted with a powder or masked in white makeup. The story of race in the United States and our legacy of slavery make her white face startling, if not shocking. Her fake pallor instantly summoned its opposite for me—blackface—the necessary ingredient of minstrel shows, in which a bewildering mixture of hatred for and envy of black people mingled to create the first wholly American form of theater adopted from black music. There were black minstrel troupes, too, who also performed with blackened faces. Indeed, the recurring white masking in Bowland’s images evokes myriad forms of the theatrical: Japanese Kabuki and Noh players, the white-faced clowns of the circus, and the high artifice adopted by members of the eighteenth-century French court with its powdered wigs and eggshell-colored makeup, directly referred to in Bowland’s canvas Party, in which our child in white wig, with posture suggestive of the court servant, holds out a black-and-white Hostess cupcake, a quintessentially American second-half-of-the-twentieth-century mass-market treat, while behind her on the wall hangs a painting that pushes the viewer into still another period. The picture inside the picture is a noirish canvas of a car and the headless body of a man in forties garb.

Skin, surfaces, artifice, art, signs, and objects that have become symbols—we are looking at works of art, but within each work we are lured into a drama of contradictory appearances. What am I looking at in It Ain’t Necessarily So? The child, in white face, is wearing a bikini, a garment designed to cover only female breasts, buttocks, and genitalia, but this girl has no breasts, an observation that becomes poignant when the viewer notices that the top of her bathing suit is twisted to one side. She is posed with her arms outstretched; one of her hips juts to the side; and one foot rests on the other. Despite the “itsy, bitsy, polka-dot bikini” and the potential eroticism of her posture, she exudes no sexuality. She stands inside an immense, opened watermelon—that icon of a specifically American racism—on the skin of which is written the title of the famous Gershwin song (about not taking the Bible literally) from Porgy and Bess. The text is not fully visible, but is not difficult to read. Behind the melon is a huge, menacing kitchen knife and, in the background, the seductive suggestion of more text—further letters or hieroglyphics that might be deciphered were we only able to see them better.

Bowland’s mastery of painting technique is on display in the rendering of the girl herself; this is not a slick photographic realism but a painterly, visual realism that draws on centuries of figurative representation in the West. The watermelon is subject to a somewhat different treatment; it is not “realistic,” after all, this gigantic melon and its seeds; it is fantastic, supernatural, a thing of our collective cultural nightmare. Although it is not known how watermelon became associated with black people in the United States, the fruit was featured endlessly in racist trading cards, postcards, figurines, and countless knickknacks for decades. A Victorian trading card from the 1890s for Sapolio Scouring Soap is exemplary: it depicts the head of a smiling black girl inside an opened watermelon. Grinning with satisfaction seems to have been an intrinsic and defensive part of the racist message. And let us not relegate such horrors to the past. In 2009, the mayor of Los Alamitos, California, Dean Grose, sent out an e-mail card of the White House lawn as a watermelon patch. The caption: “No Easter Egg Hunt This Year.” (The aptly named Grose was forced to resign, but has received Republican endorsement to return to public office and is seeking your contributions.)

It Ain’t Necessarily So borrows overtly racist imagery and complicates it—evoking iconic American music composed by a pair of white Jewish brothers for an opera about black people based on a novel about a black man, Porgy, written by a white man. The thematic material of the painting mingles race with childhood and femininity. We continue to romanticize childhood, a legacy of the nineteenth-century notion that early human life is a time of unspoiled innocence. Children and women were tightly linked in science and popular culture as pure, desexualized beings. This pivotal idea of innocence became the hallmark of the period’s sentimentality and its condescension to women. It is no accident that the fight for women’s rights was waged simultaneously. Infantalization was also, of course, a tool of racism. In the United States, the childlike “happy darkie” was essential to the argument for slavery, despite the fact that this creature of white fantasy was belied again and again by the reality of slave sabotage, insurrection, and violent uprising. Fear sharpens stereotypes.

A few passages from an article in Dwight’s Journal, November 15, 1856, I found in an anthology Jazz in Print: 1859 to 1928, edited by Karl Koenig, offer a gloss on this complicated history, a history Bowland forces us to recognize: “The only musical population of this country are the Negroes of the South…” the author tells us. Musically, the white North is a desert. “Even the gentler sex who ought to have most of poetry and music, seem strangely indifferent to it.” The Negro, however, is a “natural musician” and “the African nature is full of poetry.” Codes of thought, frames of reference, ideologies that shape us and produce a train of associations that become part of the iconography of Bowland’s work. Janasia wears a crown of cotton in The Cotton Is High. The extraordinary beauty of the girl with her steady gaze and erect posture stands in stark opposition to what we know is the brutal landscape of the plantation and enslavement. The crown of cotton is also a crown of thorns. The artist forces us to look, to confront what many white Americans would rather forget. The nearly nonexistent public discussion of reparations for slavery in this country is an indication of the degree to which this is true.

In Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a work which refers again to American popular music and a film about dreaming another world, Oz, Janasia stands, scissors in hand. In this canvas, Bowland visually quotes Kara Walker’s cutout images of the Antebellum South. Walker, like Bowland, has used racist forms to critique and explore the violence inherent in the images themselves as well as the history that created them. Some black artists, however, attacked Walker’s use of stereotypes as demeaning to black people and pandering to whites, to a white art world in particular. None of this is simple. What is certain is that references to race and to racist imagery remain dangerous in public discourse of all kinds. This was Walker’s angry response to her critics: “What you want: negative images of white people, positive images of blacks?” As the cliché goes, life is not black and white. Oppression deforms people; it does not, in general, make them better. And it is no guarantee of moral purity. Like Walker’s, Bowland’s work explores the fantasy that is race and its attendant cultural pollution. Each of these artists, one black, one white, unlocks a door and looks in on the monster that is us.

Such courage is rare, however, and a cult of both authenticity and repression has grown up around these discussions. In one of my novels I have a black character, a young artist named Miranda, who was born in Jamaica. Race and slavery are themes of her art and of the book itself. No journalist I spoke to nor a single reviewer, either in America or Europe, with a single exception, mentioned Miranda or her art or race. The man who did was a white Italian married to a black woman from Jamaica. I guess he felt he was on safe ground. My question is: What is the imagination if it is not becoming the other?

As the allusions thicken in Bowland’s art, so does the ambiguity. The black child of these works is not only whitened; she is variously adorned in the paintings with all manner of feminine frippery—lace and ribbons and full skirts—the stuff of sexual difference. How else can we distinguish children of that age if we don’t brand them with their sex from birth—in pink and blue and dresses and pants? In Murakami Wedding, the little girl, in flower-girl attire, occupies the center of an elaborate still life that includes balloons, a wineglass, china plates, a silver spoon and fork, a basket and rose petals, the ladder back of a golden chair. Weddings remain a fetish in our culture—the enactment of “every little girl’s dream”—a theatrical but also anachronistic event, with its virginal white symbolism and paternalistic “giving the bride away” as she moves from the stewardship of one man to that of another. The wedding in contemporary America may be thought of as the extravaganza of ordinary life, a ritual ceremony in which the bride becomes a momentary celebrity in a culturally scripted fantasy of femininity.

Again and again, these works articulate and then rearticulate the phantasms of crippling, simplistic ideologies, the fictions we live by. In Someday My Prince Will Come, Janasia and another girl, both untouched by white makeup, but dressed up in finery, stand in front of the bottom of a canvas, in which a black man, rendered in a cartoonish style, lies wounded or dead in this painting within a painting. The title (notably a song from the Disney movie Snow White), the somber girls, the image of a fallen man—together these make me unutterably sad. It is merely human to long for another person, to desire love and company, but romantic fantasies of love fulfillment, of princes and knights and heroes in films and songs and romance novels are, quite simply, corrosive. Girls are supposed to wait. Penelope waits. Waiting is a state of passive anticipation: “Someday…” The children look bored. Waiting is boring.

The reference to still life or nature morte in Murakami Wedding is pointed. Bowland “arranges” the girl along with the other objects in an elaborate, gorgeous, highly artificial evocation of the aftermath of a nuptial celebration. In Baroque still life, the remains of a meal on a table were depicted as a kind of study in chaos, an oxymoron that perfectly fits the form. These leftovers in the Dutch and Flemish paintings of the period were cautionary; their theme was vanitas, a reminder of our mortality—the ephemera of this world and its pleasures will vanish. But we also find in Bowland’s canvases an allusion to the theatricality of Baroque painting in general and the period’s idea of theatrum mundi, the world as stage, that resonates powerfully with the artist’s ironic references, textual and visual, to popular plays and music. Unlike the low genre of still life, the high genre of Baroque figurative painting was meant to break down the barrier between viewer and viewed, an illusion achieved by both technique and scale. The body of the spectator and the bodies on the canvas create a mirroring reality because the painting stages a form of corporeal mutuality. Through this device, Bowland allows the viewer no escape. She binds her spectator to the hallucinatory dream world of the canvas.

Standing in front of It Ain’t Necessarily So, I look directly into the girl’s eyes. She gazes back at me without any obvious emotion. Her expression is one of solemn attentiveness. It took me a while to understand that she is actually larger in the painting than she is in life. She is not nine-year-old size, but adult size. The scale of her body makes it literally impossible for me to look down on her. I am prevented from feeling the ordinary and comfortable condescension an adult has for a child. There is something in this girl’s face that resists the burden of both the trappings of gender—the silly bikini on her sexually immature body—and the broadly racist imagery in which she is so unmistakably framed. I am returned to the essential face-to-face reflection, the I and you dialectic of human exchange, the sense of seeing someone who is like me, not other. In work after work, I am confronted by this child’s dignified selfhood, neither fully open nor entirely closed to me. Who is she? I wonder. Is it the absorbing intensity of her gaze that has taken me in? Is it her posture? Who am I really looking at? The artist’s immense skill has rendered a personality, a being rather than an icon of a being, a defiant personage who shines through the riddled texts and myriad cultural signs of the theatrum mundi that surround her. In the pastels, which suggest forms of black-and-white photography, the girl’s face becomes a consuming focus; it is hard, very hard, to look away.

Margaret Bowland’s work orchestrates a visionary theater of difference, of differences that have cut so deeply into our cultural images and discourses, have become so critical to identity, that they may begin to seem natural rather than unnatural and artificial. It is crucial to remember that both skin color and sex have been defined and redefined in various ways over the course of history. In Bowland’s work, icons of the past and present are merged in the simultaneity of the canvas. And they may be read as dreams can be read through their relation to waking reality. The frightening constructions and constraints of race and gender—the lies of difference that have infected us—are also truths because their brutal divisions have entered us, become us. And sad to say, many of them are unconscious or suppressed. Do not be mistaken: there is rage in these pictures. But there is also the mute dialogue of human mirroring—the natural magic that occurs between us.

2011