"Kehinde Wiley’s Catholic Imaginary" in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (2 October 2016)

Artist Kehinde Wiley’s A New Republic offers a way to think about art and history as reflections on public culture. 

My longest held memory of the brown-cassocked St. Anthony is of that time on a school holiday when my grandmother made me kneel in front of the altar because I had stayed out longer than usual. She had frantically been asking of passers-by if they had seen her errant grandson. Oblivious, I sauntered back home and was promptly dragged to the shrine in her room. “Tell St. Anthony you’re sorry”, she ordered. Later, I would come to realise that the dear old lady, like so many Catholic Goans, held the tonsured Franciscan in such high esteem for the faith she placed in him as the finder of lost things, naughty lads included. A couple of weeks ago in the American city of Richmond, I encountered St. Anthony again at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art exhibition, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, and he looked very different from my childhood memory. 

In Wiley’s canvas, “Anthony of Padua” (2013), he is a young Black man with closely cropped hair. He wears an octopus pendant on a chain and is adorned in a military green jacket with patches. One of these decorative circles bears the image of a snarling black panther, a symbol suggestive of the Black Power movement of 1960s’ America. Cradled in the crook of his left arm is a book instead of the Child Jesus. His raised right hand holds a rod in place of the traditional stalk of lilies. In this pose, it is as if the saint is a painter, with palette and brush, taking in his subject. Behind him, flowers swirl, some of them encircling his waist, others set in relief against his teal-coloured trousers. Through it all, no Jesus to behold, the modern-day Anthony looks upon his viewers with an expression of deep composure. Haughtiness, even. His gaze breaks the fourth wall between the dramatic portrait and its spectators, between the exalted and the mundane. 

Reminiscent of the methods of Goan painter Angelo da Fonseca (1902-1967), the American Wiley employs ordinary people as subjects in depicting themes that evoke the Renaissance, French Rococo, and other Western periods of art, as well as European Christian iconography. Where da Fonseca used South Asian models, including his wife Ivy, to render Christian imagery, Wiley’s muses of choice are everyday Black Americans. In both cases, these artists’ works subvert Eurocentric conceptions of the sacred, by challenging implicit assumptions of race and class in the idealisation of the divine. Moreover, their images alter public culture by demonstrating that the faithful come in many hues and from various economic backgrounds, for the icons in their art are just regular folk. If such art is to be taken as political statement, then Wiley’s reverential presentation of Blackness resonates powerfully with the Black Lives Matter movement in today’s United States where serious questions are being asked about the police killings of Black men and women.

Wiley’s St. Anthony is inspired by the representation of the saint in the 1842-1843 stained glass window created by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres for the Chapelle St. Ferdinand in Porte des Ternes, Paris. Christian imagery appears elsewhere in Wiley’s oeuvre, including in his own stained glass windows, which again characterise young Black men in contemporary garb as saints. At the Virginia exhibition, museum patrons would have walked through a dark chapel-like gallery, where these back-lit windows and other elements of iconography would have been on display. They would then emerge into a brightly lit space where they would witness various canvasses from the artist’s World Stage series, including pieces from his Indian and Sri Lankan collections. 

In Kehinde Wiley – The World Stage: India-Sri Lanka (2011), critic Gayatri Sinha wonders if Wiley’s South Asian works challenge orientalised notions of the region, but concludes that he “instead pushes for a different dimension of recognition”, especially because the artist “takes young men of the street and accord[s] them a heroic cast … [A]ny one of them could be an unemployed youth familiar from the streets of Bombay or Bangalore. Or they could be Goa’s beach boys, car cleaners from the streets of Tamil Nadu, or young advisasis (tribals) serving in the capital’s diplomatic enclave” (pp. 7-8). To say that Sinha lets slip her class and caste biases would be to state the obvious. Indeed, what Sinha fails to acknowledge is the very divide that Wiley seeks to breach in placing paintings of young men of the street, beach boys, car cleaners, and “tribals” in the elite (or is that elitist?) spaces of the art gallery and the museum. In saying that these subjects are recognisable, Sinha implies their objectification by the Indian art patron. This othering is intensified when the critic does not question why Wiley’s subjects must exist outside these exclusive circles, while only the representation of who they are is allowed in so that it may be consumed by those with access to art.

“The European Orientalist discourse is invoked and vivified, but it also becomes the site for fresh enactments” in Wiley’s South Asia paintings, Sinha muses. Even so, it is Sinha herself who relies on an orientalised understanding of what constitutes South Asian culture when she traces a line between Wiley’s Indian scenes of “temples or prayer rooms” and “Hindu painting tradition from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries” (p. 8). Reliant solely on a British postcolonialist purview, this Brahmanical rendition of India not only eschews the Portuguese Indian legacy (except to tellingly minimise it to “Goa’s beach boys”) but also refuses to consider other faith traditions as influences in South Asian art history. 

To this end, even as Sinha sees Wiley’s representations of blackness as being linked to “histories of shared oppression” in the Afro-Asiatic context (p. 6), she is unable to connect the Catholic themes in the Nigerian American artist’s canon to South Asia. Wiley’s “Anthony of Padua” proves useful in this regard. Though St. Anthony died in Padua, Italy in 1231, he was born in Portugal in 1195. Revered around the Catholic world, his legacy took particular shape in the former Portuguese colony of Angola, where the 17^th-18^th century Kongolese prophetess and anti-colonial revolutionary Kimpa Vita claimed to be a medium for his spirit. 

In the novel Skin (2001), based on the Portuguese Afro-Asiatic slave trade, Margaret Mascarenhas transports the enslaved progeny of the real life Kimpa Vita to Goa. The novel’s magical realism manifests, among other things, in the form of the prophetess’ Goan descendants being able to shape-shift into black panthers. That the black panther appears as an emblem on St. Anthony’s jacket in Wiley’s painting is coincidental. However, what is not is how Wiley’s Catholic imaginary transcends space and time, in much the same way as a 12^th-13^th century Portuguese saint shape-shifts into a Black person in African history and in African American art. Here, one figure is not meant to replace the other; rather, what is to be contended with is why one is not as revered as the other. It is through this palette of complexities that Kehinde Wiley envisions a new republic, even as he questions its borders.

From The Goan.

"You Came, You Saw..." in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (18 September 2016)

While others have the luxury of leaving when they find Goa is no longer pristine, it is Goans who have to continue to bear the consequences of a deteriorating environment. 

 

It wasn’t so much the issue that Goans were being told that there was something rotten in their homeland. No, this would assume that Deepti Kapoor was actually aware of the presence of Goans. To be fair, in her article “An Idyll No More: Why I’m Leaving Goa” (The Guardian, 7 September, 2016), Kapoor registers an impressive set of real grievances. She laments the pollution of the beaches with “plastic bags” and “shards of glass from … bottles”. She decries the condition of “the hills and roadsides, covered in garbage”, as well as “the earth inland that mining has stripped bare”. She denounces the “floating casinos and effluent” in the Mandovi river. She has decided to leave, the dream now having turned into a nightmare.

Kapoor tells her readers that she moved from Bombay to Goa eight years ago along with her husband so that she “could study yoga”, and because of “the beaches! The restaurants! The music, and the people!” (Yes, she really is that overenthusiastic with her use of exclamation marks!) She reveals that “when the sun is setting over a village called Aldona, and the evening bread is delivered on the backs of bicycles, you can convince yourself that Goa is all right”. But nostalgia no longer serving to blunt the vagaries of development, Kapoor feels it is time to call it quits. Given all the ills that she lists, who can blame her? Except that it is exactly people like Kapoor who are the problem, and even more so that they fail to see themselves as being at fault. 

For Kapoor, the inconveniences she lists are something she can escape. Yet this is not the luxury available to the people of Goa. And if Goans must leave their land, it is not always because they have a choice in the matter. That “village called Aldona” is the place my paternal family has called home for more than a century. I often wonder what my now deceased grandmother whose home once overlooked the greenest paddy fields would think of the changes in Aldona. What would she make of the altered landscape, where second homes built to serve as vacation getaways for upper class Indians have become commonplace? 

A wise woman, she would recognise that the cost of living has shot up to such an extent, that Aldonkars not of means have been priced out of the real estate market in their ancestral lands. And in the waters, those Goans whose traditional occupation is fishing, must continue to rely upon the catch, regardless of the pollution which threatens their livelihood, their health, and that of those who eat what Kapoor describes as “shellfish … decimated by coliform bacteria...”, among other forms of affected water life.

But it is as if Goans do not exist for Kapoor who like so many other Indian sojourners consider the region to be solely the preserve of those of their ilk – the yoga-learning dilettantes and those with the option of decamping to “Europe or Latin America”, as Kapoor says she might because things in Goa are so rough. Sure, Kapoor mentions “Reginald or Tulsidas or Lata or Maria [who] stand at the front gate speaking to that passerby at dusk…”, but in the same way as she lists the beaches! The restaurants! The music! At the end of which index she adds “the people”, almost as an afterthought and as much as the backdrop for and the service providers of the idyllic life she bemoans the foreclosing of.

No doubt, Kapoor does convey the efforts of some Goans who have been doing their bit to save the environment. The writer also highlights such entrenched issues as systemic corruption and an economic overreliance on tourism without the creation of adequate infrastructure to protect beaches or the tourists who frequent them (again, it is as if the safety of locals must come second, if they are to be thought of at all). Additionally, she refers to the destruction of six villas (which she misclassifies as “Portuguese”) – heritage homes that are being torn down to make way for luxury apartments that will not house Goans. Of course, it would be naïve to believe that Goans are not part of the many problems enumerated by Kapoor, but their involvement in the ongoing destruction of Goa’s natural and architectural heritage does not occur in a vacuum. 

As Raghuraman Trichur argues in his book Refiguring Goa (2013), it was the rise of tourism in the coastal location that first made the Indian bourgeoisie interested in Goa economically. There was once a time when my parents were able to run a small home-based tourism business, but their little outfit folded when larger corporations started to set up shop in Goa. Today, as Kapoor finds, while many Indian tourists come to Goa, they contribute little to the local economy, for much of the money sustains the corporations rather than the actual location. 

Indians continue to find Goa attractive as an investment opportunity, with real estate topping that list. Completely blind to the irony, Kapoor finds common cause to commiserate with one “Phil from England, who has been coming [to Goa] for 25 years, [and who] said: ‘The joke I made this season was, we all used to say Goa was not the real India, but now REAL India has turned up’.” Yes, Phil. And that REAL India looks like Deepti Kapoor, the interloper who got what they wanted, leaving a mess for others to deal with.

From The Goan.