there's our catastrophe

Mathangi Suprabhatam

ardhra:

So last night I saw M.I.A. with everythingbutharleyquinn, which was an amazing experience overall.

But I wanna talk about some stuff on the internets which I doubt I’ll have a chance to do in person.

Even though we got there super early and went inside just as the doors opened (which is why we were close enough to the front to touch her), I managed to spot stuff that pissed me off early on.

Like white girls wearing bindhis. Which would be bad enough, but one was also wearing jhumki earrings (with a pretty ordinary T-shirt and shorts, which just lookedwrong).

Also the atrocious support act with the obnoxious fans.

And more fucking white girls with bindhis.

But then M.I.A. opened her set with a 3D animated clip set to the Shri Venkateshwara Suprabhatam (seems like it was a series of scenes strung together from the animated videos set to various bhajans, slokas & mantras by this youtube).

And I bet about 1/4 of the audience there got it.

If you watch any of the clips, you’ll see just how much they fulfill so many stereotypes of Hindu religious iconography as being all full of too many lurid colours, too many goddamn gods, anthropomorphic animals, etc. which, thanks to western pop music, is a well-worn feature of pop music iconography too.

But like most cultural appropriation there’s no distinctions between anything - styles of music, their histories, the histories of various styles of iconography, fashion - cultural appropriation and a white, western gaze renders all of these things interchangeable and unchanging.

But unlike all those pop musicians & designers & whatnot, and their intended audiences of white peers, I reckon like a third of the audience last night grew up listening to the M.S. Subhalakshmi version of the Shri Venkateshwara Suprabhatam. My mum used to put it on for every religious holiday while I was a kid - we didn’t have that many tapes that my parents brought over from India when we moved, and that was one of the few they brought.

The South Asian diaspora seems to have this super romanticised and sanitised view of all that kind of stuff, divorced from the realities of caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism, as well as all kinds of cultural repression and misogyny, that go along with hyper-religious traditionalism. So for all the second-generation kids like me, reactions to cultural appropriation are part of that romantic nostalgia for a set of meanings & traditions.

Which was why it was refreshing to see them satirised at a gig.

When the only kinds of cultural expression we get, as Hindu South Asians in the diaspora, is pretty much romanticised religion, or sugar-coated, Bollywood-ised film, some critical satire, even though it’s fairly superficial, is really welcome.

I get wanting to defend against appropriation, and stereotypes - more than half the audience would’ve been totally baffled, or amused, by the animation, and the mantra - but I’m really over being defensive about my culture. It’s such a one-dimensional way to engage with it. It’s not validating to just have to constantly either rapturously affirm your culture, or defend it against racist criticism and/or exploitation.

And probably a lot of white kids will walk away with an idea that the funny videos & images would be great to mash-up for some kind of hipster culture jam… frankly, I don’t really care about that right now.

White kids disillusioned with Christianity have had heaps of pop-cultural outlets for dramatising their frustrations, from the Ozzy Osbourne/Marilyn Manson school of shock-metal, to Tori Amos’ quiet ballads about masturbation and abortion.

I read this article, a long while back, about how people within a cultural group can pick up on behaviour, language, inflection, and other signs of others’ belonging to the same cultural group, which isn’t visible to people outside that cultural group. Which to me is obvious, because there are stacks of things about my culture that only people in my community know about (in fact, most people who don’t know me don’t even know what languages I speak!). Like how they speak, or particular ways of dressing, that nobody ever names as being particular to that group.

Which is why, even though all the things Maya was doing, if a white artist had done them, would have been appropriative, aren’t.

Appropriation is taking cultural elements outside of a culture by a process of imperialist supremacy & aggrandisement.

And even though most of the audience was white (gig was in Newtown), and a lot of M.I.A.’s global audience is white, and the industry behind her is invariably white, I still felt like she was speaking to people other than them.

Sure, for the white kids, it was a pretty show. “How exotic & worldly!” etc.

But there was a whole lot going on there, on a stage at a mainstream entertainment venue in the inner west of Sydney, that white people would never have picked up on. Like, a whole lot of stuff from Tamil culture that people who aren’t South Asian wouldn’t get, and that I really appreciate because of how much Tamil culture and Tamil people have contributed to my community (hint: I’m not Tamil but I am South Indian!) - a pretty refreshing change from all the assumptions about how I must speak Hindi & be familiar with North Indian stuff cos I’m brown.

Too often, like me, people who are critical from South Asian diaspora cultures & communities are drawn away from them, and don’t get a chance to express our frustrations and limitations. The Hindu fundamentalist kids usually get the distinction of being ‘part of the community’ (for Hindu communities), but people who are politically radical, queer, artistic (in none of the pre-approved ways), or intellectual usually don’t get to express anything in the terms of our cultures, or to each other.

And because we’re talking from a diasporic space (if anyone uses the terms “sourceland” or “hyphenate” in replying to this I will cut you), what we have to work with is always already appropriated. Like, on one level, yeah the white girls in bindhis shit me off. On another level, I’m living in spaces & working with cultures that are already transformed by imperialism and neoliberalism. And what I appreciated about the show was how much it came from that already-transformed space and eschewed any pretense to authenticity or cultural purity, but claimed continuity with a culture that gets compressed and marginalised in the places it’s migrated to.

So when I said it was a “religious experience”, I also meant that the satire, the way that celebrity worship is so much like how hyper-religious people respond to charismatic faith-healers, all of that culminated for me at the gig last night.

IDK, I’m not a mind reader. I have no idea if that’s what Maya intended. It just sticks out when I feel validated because it’s so rare, so maybe I’m grasping at things that aren’t there.

But art is what you make of it, so… I had a cry. I’ll move on, I promise.

TextaQueen leaves gallery over an ‘interesting debate’

textaqueen:

I recently left my Melbourne representation, Gallerysmith, when I realised the gallery had begun representing Lucas Grogan, a white artist whose work has appropriated Indigenous Australian art, depicted black figures often in misogynistic scenes involving alcohol and sex, and otherwise traded on the exotification of ‘the other’. I don’t believe his work ‘raises an interesting debate’ and am offended by justifications of it ‘expressing a universal humanity’ and ‘creating dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous art’ (quotes from his supporters) as I don’t believe that is a role for a non-Indigenous artist to undertake. 

As a non-Indigenous person myself, it isn’t my voice in this ‘interesting debate’ that should be prioritised either. Paola Balla has written succinctly on the subject in her correspondence with Gallerysmith. If people want to contemplate artists who discuss contemporary Aboriginality, which I feel is what Grogan’s work falsely alludes to via appropriation (regardless of his supposed intentions), then they could look to Balla’s work, or that of proppanow’s Tony Albert, Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee, Gordon Hookey, Laurie Nilsen, Megan Cope and that of many other Indigenous artists speaking from their own experiences.

Cultural appropriation is not a new or personally ‘interesting’ phenomenon. White artists adopting the expressions of people of colour have historically held greater cultural currency than those made my people from the cultures the white artists appropriated. It should be obvious how colonialism, racism and other dynamics of privilege have informed that history. Yet artists such as Grogan (and he is definitely not alone in appropriation and exotification) feel entitled to pillage the forms and aesthetics of as many ‘other’ cultures as they please and are then celebrated by many for their ‘edginess’.

If you are a non-Indigenous person and consider the work of Lucas Grogan to ‘raise an interesting debate’ or to be ‘bravely’ ‘pushing the limits of what is socially acceptable’ (Grogan’s words) then perhaps you could consider what privileges you may have to find it interesting rather than offensive. Perhaps, if you consider yourself anti-racist, you could try de-prioritising your voice and Grogan’s intentions in what should be a discussion centred on Indigenous opinions and experiences.

I am a non-Indigenous person of colour, I am not culturally connected to the various forms he has appropriated (though as he continues to adopt the forms of additional cultures, he might get around to my own heritage soon) yet his work reminds me of my own position as exotic ‘other’ and how, in the art world and beyond, otherness is commodified and otherwise exploited by those with privilege and power. Though I am grateful for my ongoing presence in the art world, that reminder is a depressing and depleting one. I could not continue to show my work, which often discusses race and cultural identity from my position of lived racialised experience, at a gallery that has chosen to represent an artist who, already benefiting from systems of colonialism, racism and patriarchy as a white man, further exploits his position through his art.

Regardless of whether or not Grogan’s work of the moment claims to directly appropriate specific Indigenous art styles, he has tried to build a career trading on controversy over this appropriation. His work is built on this association with (false) Aboriginality and it would be refreshing if galleries, artists, and others in the art industry and beyond would recognise the racist implications of supporting him. Perhaps you could show that you do not support him nor those in the industry that support him via correspondence to the various galleries that have chosen to represent him.

Jan Manton Art, Brisbane

jan@janmantonart.com

Gallerysmith, Melbourne

marita@gallerysmith.com.au

Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide

mail@hugomichellgallery.com

Rather than further investigate Grogan’s art, why not pay (more) attention to those culturally connected to the styles he has appropriated, and to proppanow; Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee, Richard Bell, and many other Indigenous artists speaking from their own experiences. And read Paola Balla’s correspondence with Gallerysmith.

Please do not contact me personally via email nor via fan page to defensively discuss Grogan’s work. Instead I recommend reading through this online resource of links discussing racism and how it links to cultural appropriation.

Sincerely,

Texta Queen

Feel free to forward or copy this post on FB, email or otherwise 

pet peeves: “white culture is boring”

terror-incognita:

<snip>

my pet peeve of the moment has to be when white people whinge about white culture being boring.

as mycultureisnotatrend says, 

if your culture is so well represented that you can become bored of it, you need to think twice about what it is you’re doing when you “borrow” from other cultures and people you have the position to deem “exotic.”

i’m not really sure what people refer to when they say ‘white culture is boring’ but whether it’s western european culture or anglo-australian culture or something else, it’s a lot of things but not boring. 

despite like zero representation of people of colour in the works of many of my favourite white writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers, i still find much to love. whether it’s sappho on desire or hopkins on god, cummings on spring or wyatt on giving up, or even morrissey on despair despite him saying ‘you can’t help but feel that the Chinese are a sub-species’, i find something that resonates with me. 

so if you’re white and you can’t even find that, then i have to think you seriously lack imagination or appreciation, or you’re just being disingenuous, saying that white culture is boring as if that compensates for white culture being racist.

racism is not boring & being bored by racism is white privilege.

rgr-pop on syncretism, appropriation, and wicca

rgr-pop:

ourcatastrophe:garconniere:killyourinspiration:

<snip>

This is so good. A few more points:

Wicca is, as you said, syncretic by nature and syncretism is not necessarily appropriation. Stuff like Central American Catholicism, Voodoo, the Native American church, and a lot of African-American/Pan-African churches are syncretic without being appropriative. Mostly this happens because those religions were forged by colonized people from combinations of their indigenous religions (which had been either appropriated or wiped out) and colonizing religions which they had either adopted or been forced into recognizing, or which had hegemonically strangled their own religions and saturated their culture. These syncretic religions also often emerge after diasporas and colonization when large diverse groups of people merge their cultural systems together as a form of self-preservation. There is a name for this! I don’t know what it is.

Wicca is kind of like these things. It’s true that indigenous European religions were appropriated into meaninglessness, erased, or destroyed by Christianity for centuries. It’s true that this was very deeply linked to colonization and oppression of ethnic groups in Europe. It is also true that Wicca is syncretic in that it incorporated components of lots of cultures that had been wiped out by colonial forces. However, this wasn’t an act of cultural survival. It wasn’t an act of resistance, simply because the people adopted the practices weren’t reacting to oppression, they were just doing a thing that they liked and believed in. That’s neat and respectable, but as ourcatastrophe said—it does not an oppressed group make.

You can argue that Wicca itself is appropriative, though I’m really not interested in opening the can of worms that is discussing whether or not white Americans with Irish origin “own” indigenous European cultures. That’s not really constructive or relevant. However, remember how appropriation works: hegemony co-opts from oppressed group, recontextualizes until cultural significance disappears. By this definition, Central American indigenous incorporation of Catholicism can’t be appropriation, because Catholicism was the colonizing force. (I might argue that the fetishization of Catholicism that’s rl cool on tumblr right now is appropriative! but also, I secretly identify as Catholic, so.) By this definition of appropriation, though, it’s kind of hard to argue that real appropriation is happening when tumblr ladies call themselves witches. Not only because of the power dynamic between Wiccans and non-Wiccan White American Ladies (hint: not really that marked!) but because “witch” and “Wiccan” are in no way synonymous.

And, actually? To equate those two things kind of offends me. As ourcatastrophe said: Witch wasn’t a thing as much as it was a space where colonizers put colonized people in order to justify killing them. Wicca is a contemporary mostly-American organization of people who share practices and philosophies.

The reason that tumblr ladies are so into witchiness (okay, well, there’s witchiness and then there’s wearing creepers, but I digress) is as a reclaimation of a term which historically has been used against them. It’s kind of like “slut,” except way more interesting and complex. Because that’s the other thing about witch: it’s about colonization, but it’s also obviously about gender. That’s why tumblr ladies are into witchiness: because they want to become that marginal monstrous-feminine thing that has been more or less destined for us to become. Because it’s interesting from a gender perspective, but also because it’s fun. Witch is an oppressor’s term. Ladies is stealing it back. Bagofshit writes about this a bunch (or, anyway, writes queer theories of Hocus Pocus, which is pretty much the same thing).

One final layer of appropriation in the Wicca debate: Wicca itself is fairly self-contained in its syncretism, but neopaganism in general very, very often does appropriate from Native American, East Asian, South Asian, and African religions. This has historical basis in a lot of things: the general new-aged mysticism movements starting in the 1960s unfolded parallel to organized neopagan movements, for one. There was also a large movement of second-wave feminists who explored global/ancient spiritualities in order to find places where women had been “worshipped,” and as such ended up spending a lot of excruciating time talking about primordial goddesses and mother earths and projecting their constructions of femininities on things they didn’t know anything about but saw naked ladies in so they assumed were empowering.