Renee Cox is one of my favorite African- American female artists and I have been intrigued by her practice since my undergrad days. I had the opportunity to see her work at the exhibition Pictures from Paradise which was an association between the Wedge Curatorial Project, and Scotia Bank Contact Photography Festival (May 2014). Renee Cox’s photographic series The Discreet Charms of the Bougies (2009) was inspired by her immediate environment. Living in an upper-class suburban area, Cox is surrounded by privileged Afro-American women who by their social status conceal themselves in an evasive world imbued with alcohol, painkillers, and antidepressant. The artist sheds a new light on the praised and popular iconography of the “desperate housewives” by challenging the negation of an existing Black bourgeois community. Through her carefully arranged mise en scène, Cox attempts in an unconventional way to demonstrate how identity is strongly tied to race, material, and class. Her portraits generate a space for critique of the constraining nature of normative representations of Black women. In the media Black women are often victimized or portrayed as insipid loud mouths, unsophisticated, uneducated and poor (especially dark skinned women). The desire to showcase a different “misery” as of the “welfare queen” or struggling single mother, Cox investigates an alternative narrative of pain that is most often reserved and associated with white upper-class. Furthermore, the artists highlights representational tensions situating the black woman’s body as marginal and exploitable. Amade M’charek states “that differences are not given ‘entities’ out there, awaiting dis-covery; rather they are effects that come about in relational practices.” (M’Charek ,308) Thus, the series The Discreet Charms of the Bougies becomes an articulation of the politics of representation where the artist sets in motion a differential ‘relational practice’ that adds another body type within a specific lifestyle. The cynicism by which she performs demonstrate which bodies have the possibility to thrive rather than only survive, and this discourse could be read as a global phenomenon. By connecting boredom, alienation, isolation, and intoxication, the artist’s work illustrates how these components found in another environment, for example, if it was depicted in a less fortunate neighborhood, the variables would work differently and frame another type of marginalized body (and reiterate social stigmas). By positioning her body as the medium through which difference is expressed, Cox demonstrates that one pole cannot exist without the other.
Work Cited
M’Charek, Amade. “Fragile Differences, Relational Effects: Stories about the Materiality of Race and Sex.” European Journals of Women Studies vol. 17(2010): 307-322.
Photographs:
http://reneecoxstudio.tumblr.com/
– Geneviève Wallen
Dialogues in Feminism and Technology 