A short film of 20 minutes on Mubi from 2025 by Alice Diop called Fragments for Venus. 5 star bitch is a song someone is jamming to on the film and it looked like the most fun someone is having on an afternoon. She is what we might call overweight and looking very happy about it. Fat is celebration. Reference to Venus of Willendorf is interesting since when Willendorf was carved all people probably were dark skinned 30 000 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Willendorf. Another black fat lady is an observer and walks around the neighborhood. She gets painted by a young black girl while sitting in a park, Venus of New York. All black women are all the Venuses in this film, as it is to say they are beautiful, representing the original beauty, fertility and love and the shape of a woman.
Venus was a Roman goddess of beauty and love and shines the brightest of the planets. Aphrodite for the Greeks. Beyonce and Jay-Z did a music video (2018) at the Louvre about this same topic as this film black people in white art space, called Apeshit in which they say, they can’t believe they made it. Making it is having wealth and being in white spaces like the admired statues and large paintings. https://youtu.be/kbMqWXnpXcA?is=oszs2G_4SOuYlG29 kind of decolonising. Art belongs to all now, but how about places of art? The film hints, the streets are where the disadvantaged see art and do art. Via this film I understand being black woman is a position of disadvantage and Beyonce and Jay-Z are not believing they can make a music video at the Louvre.
In the US the wound done by slavery and racism is not healing. It is living, an organism and the history is not far away. It is very close like the black woman watching closely the paintings in the film and seeing her colour in service next to plump white people. Marble is white, but the statues were painted. Black and white are having a fight. The fight is about conquering and winning, owning, which doesn’t sound like reconciliation. No peace. No.
Centred in Europe art is powerful, mythology and European art are very influential, beauty being the highest virtue. Posing is big part of art. Europeans painted themselves owning the world being at the centre of all, on top. Others were exotic and an addition. It is a known fact that European artists took influence from art of the indigenous people, Modernism especially. We admired Asian religions and art and African as well for their energy, creativity, novelty, naivety, purity and used it: exploitation is still part of art. Some call it inspiration. European concept of art now is that art is thinking and of ideas. Ideas matter and lead to innovations and new thinking and making, to a new world. We are still waiting. Art supposedly leads the way. To be productive and make beautiful things, be useful and prosperous and show it. Art is to be free to create. What gets valued as art, is one matter.
European state of mind was to be superior, but it dosn’t mean those others didn’t think so of themselves. The demand now has been to decolonise European art, which means put the black people in the places of white people. To think there is white art and black art together as there are such things could be problematic? Art is just art, isn’t it? Still there is the divide. We see skin as separating. What changes in thinking so, should be the question. Colours, perspectives, materials, stories. Need to be seen and heard is a living thing need.
To equalize art and via art the world somehow doesn’t work. Art is on a pedestal, it has value when it is placed there by experts. Equality is not where excellence comes from. Via art people look for certain things especially in Fine Art, they seek for prestige, ability and recognision. That is part of the rich white people’s history and legacy. European art in general was to worship God, depict mythology, the Bible and aristocracy. For the poor illiterate people images in the churches had the function of picturing the Bible and its message. Art is about power and wealth still today, so trading places doesn’t change much. European art is art of white people and invading it doesn’t change it. The function of art has changed to commodity completely. Worth is in money, recognition and places of show. In that picture change and activism fade to yesterday’s news.
In history people had slaves and people sold others regardless the colour. We are all the same in that regard: greedy, vain, evil, envious, cruel and violent etc. Black people had and have mythologies and art of their own. Slaves of their own. There are no white people in black art. The Brits ended slavery and thought it inhumane and anti-Christian. Black and white is a battle of good and evil like a mythology. To recognize human nature is to understand our will to rule and have power over others. All colours share this. The noble savage doesn’t exist, but it is a beautiful thought. Noble human was a rich human. Virtuous person is a complex thought and a deed, an act, way of existing, almost impossible to achieve because of the idea of the original sin. One has to be stripped of everything earthly to be virtuos.
Naked white woman on the other hand is a common theme in European historical art. Is she adored or just a sexual thing? She is not without sin. She is part of mythologies thousands of years old. Problem may be she looks very white. Thinking all important people were white may be the issue, but that is how Europeans thought. White skin and blond hair seem to be a luxury even today, as are big butts and breasts, curves, very Rubensian or Vicrorian.
Black woman walks in a grand old museum looking at old European art reading the titles such as Fragment from a statuette of a black dancing girl, Statuette which once supported an unguent vase, Statuette of a black slave girl, right half of body and head missing, you get the point. Beginning is black image, black background and the text is white. Language is French. She speaks French. Is it Malevich influence?
Looking at and for black women in history of western art and on the streets of New York. I understand the anger, I see it on the stern unmoving face, today anger is still about racism and slavery. Finding slavery and racism in old art is to look at human history. They are there depicting the world from the point of view of white rich people who had servants and slaves. To have a black toy was a luxury item, black boy or a girl. They are in movies also of the aristocracy. Black skin must have been weird, an oddity. Slavery has been common in the world definitely not only by white people and Europeans and still exists, as does hunting of witches.
Simplistic still as a continueing unchanging hatered which isn’t contructive nor healthy to anyone white versus black is a bit tiring. Art has been at the centre of social movements. Now art activism trending may test the cause and causes and become just a wash and virtue-signaling. How black people got portrait in paintings hundreds of years ago and what should we think and do about it now? Do we still paint Venuses? Does Venus matter in this day and age? Venus of Willendorf and Venus of New York, Venus Williams, first two are overweight women, voluptious and neither born a Venus, I suspect. There is the tennis player Venus Williams. She’s black. So what’s up with Venus, other than in paintings she is white? And what’s up with black vs. white? Doesn’t seem to be settling down but heating up. Yes, we are different in looks, culturally, mentally and in attitude, in opportunities and take from each other, influence. What is the mental state of black culture in the United States and why does it involve and harass the rest of the world with its anger and hate?
Now trending is the Black badketball player who said she hates white people. She assaulted a white player, black woman wearing blond hair being this angry. What is that? What is this short film on Mubi where a black woman walks in a museum looking at old paintings and finding black women as slaves? Are you slaves and oppressed still?
You want to be portrait as queens with long blond hair naked? I think you are obsessed and can’t get over it.
Which animal? wood and paint, 75•75cm, 2011 Henna Timanttimetsä
