Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)
Tanulmányok / Studies - Sascha Renner: Hatalmi anatómia / Anatomy of Power
Julien Joseph Virey saw in them the "source of ardent passion" that contributed "undoubtedly to the decline of moral and intellectual capacities" and degraded the black woman to the level of an animal. 15 This "Venus" also offended the contemporary observer's aesthetic sense honed on the Greek ideal of symmetry. The most "repulsive" ("le plus rebutant"), according to Cuvier, was her physiognomy, a mixture of "Negro" and "Mongolian" that combined the most repellent aspects of both types: the Africans' protruding jaw and "disgustingly" turned-up lips and the Mongolians' flat nose, "narrow slit eyes" and cheekbones exhibiting an "enormous fullness". 16 Cuvier assigned Sarah Bartmann to the lowest rung of the aesthetic value-scale and considered his views corroborated by skull measurements taken by the Dutch anatomist Peter Camper (1722-1789). Camper was a painter who, from 1774 until his death, taught anatomy at the Academy of Drawing in Amsterdam. He was driven by a desire to get to the bottom of the essence of beauty through computational methods. After conducting extensive comparative anatomical studies, in 1768 he believed he had found the decisive measurement in the so-called facial angle. He found that "the head of an African Moor [...] produces a 70-degree angle, while that of Europeans makes an 80-degree angle. [...] This 10-degree difference renders the European head more beautiful, because the epitome of beauty consists of the 100-degree angle fixed in antiquity". 1 The facial angle served Camper as a scientific-grade measurement based on a canon of beauty derived from antiquity, a canon with which an African complied least of all. With his "ape-like receding forehead" and "protruding upper jaw" an African personified the antithesis of the Apollo of Belvedere. (III. 3-4, Cat. III-4) 1 * The aesthetic superiority of the European physique was undisputed at a time when painters and sculptors emulated the idealism conveyed in antique statues. Bodies that diverged from this norm were considered ugly. "Any digression from the symmetry that Polyclitus in his canon, or Parrhasius as the recognized rule-giver of painting, dictated, any un-Greek rendition of a head, any figure that does not take its character, its harmony from a Greek deity, declines immediately into the regions of distortion", wrote (1789) the ethnologist Georg Forster. 1 '' And Theophil Friedrich Ehrmann (1763-1811), an acclaimed historian of his time, explained in his History of Senegambia (1792) that in Africa one could observe "the gradual modification of human evolution, from white, long-haired, well-built people down to the Negro". He went on to declare: "The shape of the Negro skull is the exact opposite of that of Greek heads, which are the accepted ideal of beauty." 20 Sarah Bartmann substantiated the classicist norm by negating it, and thereby influenced it just as unequivocally as did the ideal image taught at art academies. Each society generates its own corresponding antithesis. The construction of a "beautiful" body can occur only against the backdrop of its shadow: a deviating, pathological body. Sarah Bartmann was a structural necessity at a time when the imaginary line between Self and Other was constantly redrawn in order to sustain the illusion of absolute distinction, the precondition for a policy of colonialism. In this Manichaean value-system, Africa stood for the category of "Other" - the "Primitive," the "Ugly," the "Instinct Driven," in short everything that countered the aesthetic idea based on classification, as developed by the theoreticians of classicism. The antithesis was presented live to an ever-growing audience in public displays of individuals seen at the time as disproportionate. Sarah Bartmann was the most famous among them. A series of caricatures and even a vaudeville play, 21 subjected her to ridicule, and scientific tracts set her in direct contrast to European beauties. (III. S) 22 Sarah Bartmann was presented as a racial pariah. For today's representatives of the indigenous population in South Africa, Sarah Bartmann personifies the exploitation and humiliation the Khoi endured from colonial times until the most recent past. For this reason they began in 1994 to fight for the return of her remains from the Paris museum. They found support from artists of African descent whose feminist and postcolonial criticism was sparked by Bartmann's story. As active authors, they demanded in their work the regaining of control over the representation of one's own body, a control that Sarah Bartmann never had. A wooden pulpit with the inscription "La Belle Hottentote", a stage spotlight and a structure resembling a ladder (printed with texts citing excerpts from Cuvier's investigation report) make up the installation by Afro-American artist Renée Green, a distressing ensemble that raises questions about the stigmatizing role of scientific classifications (Sa main charmante, 1989, ///. 6) 2i South African artists Willie Bester (Sarah Bartmann, 2000) and Penny Siopis (Saartjie Bartman, 1994) produced sculptures and photographic works paying tribute to Sarah Bartmann. The photographer Renée Cox, a native of Jamaica, has created a contemporary reinterpretation of the "Hottentot" myth (Hot En Tot, 1994), in which she inserts her own body into the historical matrix of Western depictions of the sexuality of black women. (III. 7) 24 The efforts to recover the remains were at last successful. In a flag-covered coffin, Sarah Bartmann's skeleton, the preserved organs in cylindrical glass containers and the plaster cast arrived back in South Africa in May 2002. In the presence of South African President Thabo Mbeki, Sarah Bartmann was buried on August 9 that year in her presumed birthplace on the banks of the River Gamtoos 35 kilometers from Port Elizabeth. TRANSLATED BY KRISZTINA RoZ S NVAI
