<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To play Indian without losing a feather<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a very particular term in the English language that does not truly have an equivalent\nin French: \u201cblank.\u201d Its trace can nevertheless be found in French expressions such as blanc-\nseing (\u201cblank cheque\u201d or \u201ccarte blanche\u201d) or ch\u00e8que en blanc (\u201cblank check\u201d). Within both\npast and present media systems, this principle of \u201cblankness\u201d persists in a particularly\nstriking way: being present while representing nothing more than a pure surface, a pure screen\nthat is at once opaque and transparent, onto which others can project their power, their stories,\ntheir desires, or their fantasies. In other words, two opposing yet complementary forms of\ninvisibilization: erasure and, conversely, overexposure.\nThe current exhibition at the Ma\u00efa Muller Gallery by Hassan Musa, a Sudanese artist living\nin France, is closely linked to this notion. Entitled American Way of Life and Death\u2014a title\nthat inevitably recalls the approaches of Andy Warhol or Richard Avedon\u2014the exhibition\npresents, for the first time, a series of portraits of iconic American figures whose images have\nbecome so famous and celebrated that they have ultimately eclipsed their very humanity, even\nthe lives they actually lived, in favor of a narrative written about them, through them, but\nwithout them. Did Andy Warhol not proclaim: \u201cFame is like eating peanuts: once you start,\nyou can\u2019t stop\u201d? Peanut pickers may appreciate the irony...\nThe artist himself explains:\n\u201cI remember that when I was a child, I loved watching Westerns. One day, I heard someone\nsay that \u2018the only good Indian is a dead Indian.\u2019 At the time, this shocked me because I liked\nIndians; I thought they were more beautiful than cowboys. It also intrigued me. Later, I\ndiscovered that even President Roosevelt had, at one point, referred to this phrase. This\nrelationship with the Indians (Native Americans) opened my eyes to the capitalist machine\nthat crushes everything in its path, including Americans of European descent.\nIn fact, if you reverse the phrase and say, \u2018A GOOD AMERICAN IS A DEAD AMERICAN,\u2019\nit becomes shocking, because you no longer see the Indians; instead, you see the European-\ndescended Americans who dominated America. So I titled a series of portraits \u2018A GOOD\nAMERICAN IS A DEAD AMERICAN.\u2019\nI began with Lincoln, then Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Kennedy, before portraying\nthe Native leaders who fought against the American army. A man like Geronimo, who spent\nhis life fighting the U.S. military, ultimately died under very tragic circumstances. He had\nbeen incorporated into an American circus show called Wild West. In that show, Geronimo\nplayed the role of the Indian. He was dressed up as an \u2018Indian\u2019 and performed that role.\nIn doing so, he became an allegorical figure for all those people who opposed the capitalist\nmarket machine but ultimately ended up being crushed by it, one way or another. Either killed\nby bullets, like Sitting Bull, or simply destroyed by the logic of the market.\u201d\nThis cynical paradox recalls Musa\u2019s tribute to Josephine Baker, in which the artist\npainstakingly deconstructed the reasons why Baker chose to embody on stage an almost\ncaricatural image of herself, only to turn that image back on itself like a glove\u2014or a banana\npeel\u2014upon which the racism of her captive audience would inevitably slip.\n\nHassan Musa\u2019s new paintings on fabric therefore focus, in a deliberately allegorical form, on\nsome of these \u201cdead Americans,\u201d whose disappearance enables American capitalism to\nsurvive itself and continue, almost single-handedly, to produce the \u201cglory,\u201d the \u201ctriumph,\u201d\nand the \u201cgreatness\u201d of America. The fabrics have never been so vibrant and colorful, so joyful\nand shimmering, resembling parade banners.\nFor my part, they evoke the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the \u201cpatchwork of names\u201d created to\ncommemorate AIDS victims, in which the popular American quilting tradition was\nrepurposed to honor the memory of other \u201cdead Americans\u201d who had died in anonymity,\ndistress, and extreme precarity.\nThus, somewhere between document and representation, between a duty of justice and the\npreservation of identity, the artist\u2019s monumental works emerge as celebrations rooted in the\nexuberance of life as opposed to the spectacle of death. As Richard Avedon once stated:\n\u201cThe moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer a fact but an\nopinion.\u201d\nIn Hassan Musa\u2019s work, the fact indeed becomes opinion; but above all, in a world obsessed\nwith controlling beliefs, behaviors, and appearances\u2014that \u201cblankness\u201d mentioned\nearlier\u2014the human being joyfully regains the very fabric of reality.\n\u201cTruth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow\u201d was the slogan of The Adventures of Superman in\n1952, at the height of the Cold War. This ideal of truth and justice seems more necessary than\never today, even if I cannot truly say whether the promise of a \u201cbetter world\u201d remains\neffective. No matter. As long as we can still hope for brighter tomorrows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Marc Donnadieu<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":21632,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-21628","exposition","type-exposition","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-en-cours"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposition\/21628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exposition"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exposition"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maiamuller.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}