Mathura Umachandran (Cornell University)
In Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture (2018), John Levi Bernard ‘bring[s] together postcolonial insights on the classical tradition as a mechanism of imperial power, while aligning with … [a] dialectical reading of African American cultural production in relation to dominant American culture of classical monumentalism and public historiography’ (11). The culmination of his analysis, which tracks both the hegemonic appropriations of the classical in public imageries and imaginations, African American counter-narratives and rebuttals as well as the resulting tensions and ambivalences, turns to the 2014 monumental work by American visual artist Kara Walker called ‘A Subtlety’, a enormous Sphinx-mammy constructed with the discarded materials of the sugar trade, calling attention to the artwork’s site as the former Domino Sugar Refinery Plant, due for demolition.
This paper attends to Kara Walker’s most recent monumental artwork that puts on display and spectacularizes imperial violence. ‘Fons Americanus’, a thirteen foot fountain-cum-artwork was installed in London’s Tate Modern in 2019. Through formal representation of decomposition, this paper therefore pursues how ‘Fons Americanus’ departs from Bernard’s analysis of Walker’s counter-monumentality in ‘A Subtlety’. This paper intervenes in the debates around the ethics of classical reception by thinking with the critiques of Black classicism as a lens onto the relationships between monumentality, power, and the aesthetics of the classical.
Where several of the figures on ‘Fons Americanus’ are clearly articulated, two figures or figure groups are in depicted in states of deliquescence – paying attention to these further determines Walker’s disposition towards the classical as an aesthetic of impermanence. It therefore reads the double figures of the ‘Pietà of Emmett Till’ at the rear of the fountain in its bottom pool (who have merged into one another so completely it is hard to tell them apart) and the crowning figure atop identified as ‘Venus’ (the bottom half of her body melting into the plinth on which she stands) as refusals to represent Black suffering and Black grief in straightforward terms, even as the visual economy of the whole fountain bear witness to them. ‘Fons Americanus’ therefore explicates the classical not as an aesthetic that romanticizes loss, but one committed to fashioning collective memory of the predations of empire and its intimate effects on persons, unwitnessed, unrecorded or unacknowledged as they may be.
To continue meeting with Walker and Bernard’s co-issued invitation to think of the classical as an aesthetic that decomposes and eschews permanence, this paper concludes with reflections on the 2021 music video ‘Don’t Judge Me’ by British musician FKA twigs with rapper Headie One, in which ‘Fons Americanus’ is featured prominently in one of a threefold visual story. The jerking solo choreography of twigs wrestling against an invisible riptide of history, in juxtaposition with the street scene of a young Black man’s arrest in which the cop’s absent-presence has violent effects, derive ‘Fons Americanus’ as a site of conscience for critically remembering the British empire.