The dance between artefact, commodity and fetish: a case study of Brendan Fernandes’ Lost Bodies

Abstract

In 2015, artist Brendan Fernandes was invited to interpret ‘African collections’ from the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Textile Museum of Canada. The result, Lost Bodies, critiques racist ideologies that justified presenting objects from colonised African peoples as evidence of ‘superstition’ or ‘witchcraft’ in early European museums. Fernandes redirects the deferential gestures of ballet, professionalised in Louis XIV’s court at the same moment of the objects’ collection, to reanimate and apologise to them. Considering Lost Bodies, I explore how it is possible to nuance Western museums’ public development narratives by engaging such artefacts without either ignoring their history or rejecting museums on account of their own.

Keywords:

• Critical religion
• ritual
• enchantment
• museums
• post-development
• Brendan Fernandes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the time and generosity of the Agnes Etherington Art Gallery, especially Jan Allen, Sunny Kerr, and Carina Magazzeni, and the artist Brendan Fernandes. Thanks also to the students of RELS 202 and SOCY 362 for their insights on Lost Bodies in lively class discussions and in their assignments.

Notes

1. According to a definition used by the Agnes curators (found in the glossary of a website called ArtTownGifts.com), siligraphy is a ‘water-less planographic printmaking process based on the repellence of ink and silicone. Designs are drawn or painted with water-soluble art materials onto ground glass. The surface is then coated with silicone, covering the non-printing areas of the image and leaving the exposed areas to be coated in ink applied with a roller. The print is then made by pressing paper against the inked drawing’.

2. In making this comment, I mean to acknowledge critiques like Bruno Latour’s seminal We Have Never Been Modern and those that have followed in its vein, like Peter Geschiere’s The Modernity of Witchcraft.

3. See, for example, Ziai, ‘The Ambivalence of Post-Development.’

4. Jones and Petersen, ‘Instrumental, Narrow, Normative?’ 1291–2.

5. Ibid., 1301–2.

6. Ibid., 1301.

7. Jones and Petersen, 1298. Their review article delves into the contemporary religious studies literature only to the extent of acknowledging that the debunking of the strong secularisation thesis [that religion is disappearing in the face of modernity] has helped to explain the persistence of religion as a public force in development work.

8. Ibid.

9. It is important to note, however, that today, thanks to strong Evangelical missionising and other globalising cultural forces, we see a great deal of syncretism between, especially, charismatic forms of Protestant Christianity like Pentecostalism, and local traditions in many African countries. See, for example: de Witte, ‘Electric Touch Machine Miracle Scam.’

10. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 28.

11. The linguistic turn is not without its critics. For an excellent recent example, see Donovan O. Schaefer’s Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power, in which he does not dispute that ‘religion’ is a categorical construction, that it is historical, or that it is about power, but rather he proposes that religious practices might exist before concepts, and that power is ‘not limited to the plane of language’. Schaefer, Religious Affects, 7.

12. Arnal and McCutcheon, Sacred is the Profane, 20.

13. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, ‘Justin and Elisabeth Lang Collection.’ https://agnes.queensu.ca/collections/african/.

14. Ibid.

15. Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding.’

16. Fernandes, ‘Artist Statement.’ http://www.brendanfernandes.ca/new-page/.

17. It is important to note that many scholars have identified problems with the term ‘postcolonial’. For a summary, see: Brians, ‘Postcolonial Literature.’ http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/anglophone/postcolonial.html.

18. I use the phrase ‘radical contextuality’ in the cultural studies tradition after Lawrence Grossberg, who uses it to describe cultural studies as something that ‘rather than practices … always constitutes its object as an alliance, a set of relations among practices (not all of which need be textual, symbolic, signifying nor even discursive)’. Grossberg, ‘Cultural Studies,’ 35. ‘Cultural studies’ radical contextuality affects its theory and politics, which must be related not only to its historical context but to its institutional context as well’. Grossberg, ‘Cultural Studies,’ 38.

19. Fernandes, ‘Artist Statement.’

20. For a revisiting of this concept in light of radically democratic goals, see: Anderson, ‘Human Development.’

21. For a fuller discussion of the relationship between reason and Christianity, see: Vattimo and Girard, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith.

22. Bennett, ‘Birth of the Museum,’ 77.

23. Ibid., 59.

24. See: Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

25. Bennett, 59.

26. Ibid.

27. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, ‘Brendan Fernandes: Lost Bodies.’ https://agnes.queensu.ca/exhibition/brendan-fernandes-lost-bodies/.

28. Clarke and Berzock, ‘Representing Africa.’

29. Ibid., 4.

30. Ibid.

31. Fernandes, ‘As One.’ http://www.brendanfernandes.ca/as-one/9tfq0y3s9gvjnhj65nicci57ctpwe6.

32. Two notable examples are Ronald Grimes and Catherine Bell.

33. For further illustration, we could swap out ‘religion’ with ‘ritual’ and substitute any substantive definition of it in the following passage from Arnal and McCutcheon: ‘All definitions of religion in terms of spirit-like or god-like entities—whether the classical definition of Tylor, more recent anthropological definitions like that of Spiro (1966), or current cognitively oriented definitions (e.g. Sperber 1996; especially interesting is Stowers 2007: 14–15)—come to grief on precisely this issue: They assume a distinction based on an intuitive modern understanding of ‘religion’, which they then read into the data, separating things that their own stated definition, rigorously applied, would not actually distinguish (Zeus from Superman, imaginary friends from spirits, etc.; cf. also Atran 2002: 13–14)’. Arnal & McCutcheon, Sacred is the Profane, 24–5.

34. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, ‘Brendan Fernandes: Lost Bodies.’

35. Magliocco, ‘Neopaganism,’ 51.

36. Fernandes, ‘Projects: As One.’ http://www.brendanfernandes.ca/as-one/.

37. This is from Marx via Palmié’s paraphrase of ‘ungeheure Warensammlung’ – ‘a term Marx uses on the first page of Das Kapital to characterize his own social formation’, 852.

38. Saler, ‘Modernity, Enchantment, and Fictionalism.’ http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2013/12/20/modernity-enchantment-and-fictionalism/.

39. Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment,’ 692.

40. Ibid., 695–3.

41. There is a florescence of work on this issue, but one of the most interesting and succinct recent pieces comes from an object-oriented philosopher – see: Bryant, ‘Ages of Monsters.’ https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/ages-of-monsters-of-gods-and-monsters/.

42. Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment,’ 694.

43. Bonhomme, ‘The Dangers of Anonymity,’ 205.

44. Styers, Making Magic, 4.

45. The author wishes to thank an anonymous reviewer for the eloquent phrasing of this comparison.

46. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, ‘Teachers’ Notes: Wild Wires.’ https://agnes.queensu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/TeachersNotes_WildWires_2016.pdf.

47. Graves, ‘SAM Invokes New Spirits in the Ambitious Disguise: Masks and Global African Art.’ http://www.thestranger.com/visual-art/features/2015/06/24/22437203/sam-invokes-new-spirits-in-the-ambitious-disguise-masks-and-global-african-art.

48. Parish, ‘Free Market, Black Market,’ 131.

49. Ibid., 118.

50. Ibid., 131.

51. Ibid., 132.

52. Saler, ‘Modernity and Enchantment,’ 708.

53. Johnson, Spirited Things: The Work of ‘Possession’ in Afro-Atlantic Religions.

54. Again the author thanks the same reviewer as above for articulating this additional level of the way movement operates in the exhibition.

55. Ziai, ‘The Ambivalence of Post-Development,’ 1045.

56. Ibid., 1047.

57. Agnes Etherington Art Centre, ‘Brendan Fernandes: Lost Bodies.’

58. Jones and Petersen, 1298–301.

59. Ibid.

60. Inspired by the expansion of the ‘culture industries’ in England and work on the so-called ‘creative class’ by researchers like Richard Florida, these are prepared by the Vital Signs Community Foundation. http://communityfoundations.ca/vitalsigns/.

61. Arjona et al., ‘Museum Development and Cultural Policy,’ 88–9.

62. Jones and Petersen, 1297.