Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery

Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Judie Newman

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317990208
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Art & Politics

In this collection distinguished American and European scholars, curators and artists discuss major issues concerning the representation and commemoration of slavery, as brought into sharp focus by the 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade. Writers consider nineteenth and twentieth century American and European images of African Americans, art installations, photography, literature, sculpture, exhibitions, performances, painting, film and material culture. This is essential reading for historians, cultural critics, art-historians, educationalists and museologists, in America as in Europe, and an important contribution to the understanding of the African diaspora, race, American and British history, heritage tourism, and transatlantic relations. Contributions include previously unpublished interview material with artists and practitioners, and a comprehensive review of the commemorative exhibitions of 2007. Illustrations include images from Louisiana, Maryland, and Virginia, many previously unpublished, inblack and white, which challenge previous understandings of the aesthetics of slave representation.

This book was published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

Museums, Public Art and Artefacts

Atlantic Slavery and Traumatic Representation in Museums: The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum as a Test Case

Marcus Wood

The 2007 bicentennial of the abolition of slavery by Britain enforced prolonged confrontation with the difficult and probably un-resolvable question of whether it is possible to represent the memory of the trauma of Atlantic slavery through museological display. Given the lure of a pot of National Lottery funding, just about every institution that put in a bid tried to re-invent itself or refurbish itself for the bicentennial. Liverpool and Bristol set up new permanent slavery displays, Hull had a complete makeover and the big London institutions mounted various interventions. The V&A museum gave its young African American curator Zoe Whiteley an unexpected degree of freedom to set up a show entitled ‘Uncomfortable Truths’, which attempted to draw slavery associations out of various objects in the museum’s collections. At another level of interaction, contemporary artists from across the slave diaspora were invited to interact with the V&A collections, and display their own aesthetic reactions in galleries and the garden.¹ The British museum went so far as to buy a piece of installation art about the middle passage, which included the sawn off tops of hundreds of plastic petrol containers, and a tub of excrement, tobacco, alcohol and urine.² Across England these efforts were uniform in the manner in which they tended to reject historical immersion, mimicry and parody of traumatic experience as display options. Hull, for example, decided to dismantle its model of the slave ship Brookes complete with life-sized black slave manikins, in favour of a far less garish approach.³

The varied responses to the bicentennial in England in 2007 make it timely to assess what might be the right ways and the wrong ways to come at the display of human trauma generated by slavery. In the world of museum display, it is pertinent to ask whether the recently popular ‘immersion’ and ‘evocation’ techniques of display, or the ideology of ‘heritage tourism’, have any place in the shadow of such a vast disaster as the Atlantic slave trade.⁴ Is there, or might there ever be, a museum that confronts the memory of Atlantic slavery in historically, morally and aesthetically successful terms? The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, in Baltimore, Maryland, provides a fascinating test case with which to try and answer this question, and I will use it as an institutional, archival and memorial resource for thinking about slavery, racism and the limits of cultural display.

A Brief Account of the Generation of the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum

The Great Blacks in Wax Museum was the brainchild of two extraordinary African Americans: Elmer and Joanne Martin. As intellectuals, academics and teachers from the mid-1970s up to the present, the Martins attempted to make the African American community re-examine its identity by returning to the inheritances of slavery and racism. They came at these subjects via an unusual focus on African American models of the family, approaches to history and memory, and variants on seminal social structures – most centrally, religion, ancestor worship and votive objects. They lectured about and published influential monographs in these areas, yet in the early 1980s they decided they wanted to use museology to further their work.⁵ They began by speculating on the most suitable institutional environment to further their ideas. Having settled on the concept of a black wax museum, they began by spending the money they had saved for the down payment on their first house on the construction of four black wax figures: Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, Mary McCloud Bethune and Harriet Tubman.⁶

The museum began as a touring road show in the early 1980s, where these figures were dismantled, placed in a hatchback car, and re-assembled in market squares, church and town halls, shopping malls or any space where the Martins could set up a temporary exhibition and lecture for an hour or two. By 1984, the Martins had moved into a shop front space on 207 West Saratoga Street, and the collection of figures had grown and was shown under the title ‘The Martin’s Wax Exhibition of Great Afro-Americans’. In 1984 and 1985, this version of the museum began to attract large numbers of students from city and county schools from Delaware, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC, and became an increasing focus for Black History Month in Baltimore. In the early 1990s, the museum changed its name to ‘The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum’ and moved into its current location in an ex-fire-station and a set of Baltimore brownstones located at 1601–1603 North Avenue.

During the subsequent fifteen years, the Martins attracted increased funding and acquired more space to develop in this dilapidated but once architecturally grand nineteenth-century district, and the museum expanded into its present form. It now consists of more than 10,000 square feet and several hundred wax, fibreglass and plaster figures, which inhabit four distinct narrative and thematic spaces within the museum. The exhibits and wax personnel are in a constant state of development, but their current state can be roughly summarised as consisting of four distinct zones, each with a separate identity. The first is the upper floor, which is generally organised according to the model of wax museums devoted to representing celebrated individuals through full-sized wax portrait models. The second space is the ground floor, which combines portrait models with more complicated narrative scenes focused on such subjects as the Underground Railroad, slave insurrection, black exploration or the plight of sharecroppers during reconstruction. The third section is an elaborate themed exhibit in one part of the basement called ‘The Slave Ship’ and focuses on the description of the Atlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage. The fourth section, the last to be built and again situated in a basement space, confronts one of the darkest outfalls from the race divisions inaugurated by the slave systems – namely, white-on-black lynching. It consists of a small square room displaying a variety of lynching atrocities in the form of photographs, texts and models, and includes a barbaric ‘trophy cabinet’ showing reproductions of black body parts, including sexual organs, collected as mementos by whites. At the back of this space is a sealed off hallway showing contemporary African American youth as victims of ghetto crime, which includes manikins using and dealing drugs, or addicted to alcohol and gun crime.

The following analysis of the museum will open by considering the overarching philosophy underlying the display and narrative methods of the ‘Great Blacks in Wax’. The discussion then confronts the most controversial aspects of the museum, namely its representation of the traumas of the middle passage and of lynching. This part of the analysis will be developed out of a series of filmed interviews with the artists and craftsmen who made the exhibits, and who explain the ideas and the working methods which lead to the creation of these unique traumatic narrative displays.

Didactic Anachronism: The Politics of Display in ‘Great Blacks in Wax’

The Great Blacks in Wax Museum is prepared to take chances with how the mass trauma generated by Atlantic slavery can be visually encoded. It is prepared to go into popular areas of representation coming out of farce, pantomime, folk art, freak shows, amusement arcades, the cinematic horror industries, shopping malls and supermarkets, and the sheer joy of fancy dress. It plays extreme games with the assumption of authenticity; indeed, these games can be so extreme as to render the desire to distinguish between real and fake a revisionist luxury. The Martins’ museum theory does not operate according to exhibition criteria that ultimately are underpinned by a notion that history is a stable set of events and memories that can be recovered relatively painlessly via recourse to material objects. Nor does this museum have any pretence to objectivity or to an authority founded in the mimicry of the ‘real world’. Above all, the museum deals in emotion, and in its dynamic essentialism, its symbolic extremity, its tragic and comedic narrative drives, it is intensely theatrical. It seems to have no single aesthetic, but to incorporate into a space still ultimately in dialogue with, although not dominated by, conventional museological practice, a series of other more populist discourses, or media. So how is this creation to be culturally located, what does it grow out of and what does it relate to?

At this point it is relevant to turn to a whole area of North American popular museum culture and display that generally has been neglected. In a typically energised, unfocused and entertaining ramble through the emporia of popular cultural display in North America in 1989, Umberto Eco stumbled upon some important truths.⁷ He stressed, quite rightly, that as soon as one gets away from the grand galleries and museums of the great East Coast cities, the approach to remembering history through exhibition display emerges as strange, primitive, old-fashioned and even dream-like. There is a whole seething underbelly of small oddball wax museums dotted across the country, stretching from Austen, to New Orleans, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlantic City and New Jersey. America abounds with waxworks, wax tableaux vivantes and full-blown wax museums. For Eco, many of these enjoy a curious retroactive relationship with Europe. In Europe there are very few wax museums, the most famous being Tussaud in London, a single one in Paris, one in Amsterdam and the famous anatomical wax museums of the Enlightenment like La Specola in Florence. However, America has made up for the gap, taking Europe’s historical figures, narratives and artists, and reproducing, or rather reinventing, them with a spectacular and overblown literalism. Eco, for example, found no less than seven full-scale waxwork versions of Leonardo’s Last Supper between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Eco isolates sadism and theatricality as elements lying at the heart of many of these moth-eaten setups:

The Museum … presents the reconstructed laboratory of a medieval witch … jars containing odd roots and amulets, alembics, vials with sinister liquids, dolls pierced with needles, skeletal hands, flowers with mysterious names, eagles beaks, infant’s bones … and in the background you hear the piercing screams of young witches dragged to the stake, and from the end of the corridor you see the flames of the auto-da-fé flicker, your chief impression is theatrical; for the informed visitor, the skilfulness of the reconstruction, for the ingenuous visitor the violence of the information – there is something for everybody, so why complain. The fact is that the historical information is sensationalistic, truth is mixed with legend, Euspia Palladino appears (in wax) after Dr Bacon, and Dr Faustus and the end result is absolutely oneiric.⁸

Eco’s account of the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft is instructive, because in setting out with such gusto the theatricality and eclecticism, the sheer collective brio of this gallimaufry, he takes us into something of the same world, the same cultural ballpark, as the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. Eco stipulates that it is two elements above all that define the appeal of this place. First violence, or in Eco’s ingenious phrase ‘the violence of the information’ – in other words, the information itself has somehow morphed into an essence of violence. And second, a commitment to a new kind of reality that fuses fact and fiction, or in Eco’s more compromised terms: ‘truth’ and ‘legend’. When Eco describes the effect of the museum’s temporal, geographical and historical elisions as ‘oneiric’, he sees it as reaching out to a new dream-world that has jettisoned the commitment to logic, teleology and historical veracity, which we normally demand of a respectable museum. The Great Blacks in Wax Museum generates it own oneiric quality and its own interrogations of authenticity.

One of the aspects of the museum that introduces a sense of...