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WHITE MAN born WITH BLACK DICK
WHITE MAN born WITH BLACK DICK fjallar um fullkomið vald og náttúrulegt fyrirbæri sem er blekking.
Photo Text Installation 162 x 110 cm
2006 Mackintosh Gallery & Newberry Gallery, Glasgow
Jona’s piece untitled consists of a large image on photographic paper (approx 2m by 1m), placed on the floor with the width pushed flush to the wall. On the wall (roughly 1,2m high) above the image is a text. The text is roughly as wide as the width of the image beneath it and reads; ‘WHITE MAN born WITH BLACK DICK’.
It is made of vinyl lettering stuck directly on the wall, in a slightly cooler shade of white than the paint on the wall.
The photographic image is of a white man standing against a wall. All that is visible of the space he is in is a slightly shabby wooden boarding and a patch of dusty floor around his feet. The man’s head is out of shot and the side of the photo where his head should be is the side touching the wall. The man is naked and his genital area (both penis and testicles) are black. It is not totally clear but it looks like black make-up rather than naturally black skin. The man is of a relatively slight build, not overly muscular, and appears young, in his twenties.
When approaching the work in the gallery the text would be most likely noticed after the image. It is difficult to get up close to the text because the image on the floor blocks access to the wall.
If the viewer stands in front of the photo and looks down, they see the feet of the man and then the rest of the body stretching away towards the wall. One is conscious that the image is not being presented as a piece of ‘photography as art’ because it is unframed and on the floor. Its qualities as an object that must not be stepped on are apparent as well as the image on its surface.
At the point when one notices the text one begins to ask questions about the relation between the text and the image. There is an immediate connection in that the text includes the words ‘WHITE MAN’ and ‘BLACK DICK’ because the image shows a white man with a black dick. The word ‘born’ is not so easy to connect with the photo because the image does not show a baby, and because the black dick looks painted on rather than real. This difference in relation between the word ‘born’ and the image seems intentionally highlighted by the (gramatically illogical) use of lower case letters for that word alone. Visually the word ‘born’ in lower case breaks up the line of the text and undermines the authority of the block capitals used for the rest of the statement. It also introduces an incongruous, poetic aesthetic to the text, which is in a fairly sterile, impersonal font. The fact that the text reads ‘WITH BLACK DICK’, instead of ‘WITH A BLACK DICK’ changes the rythym of the words making one imagine them being enunciated clearly, as if one were saying ‘HOW NOW BROWN COW’.
Taking in the piece as a whole in one glance is difficult. Perhaps you see all the text but only part of the image, but if you take a few steps back the text starts to recede in to the wall due to its similarity to the colour of the wall.
The viewer does not know if the artist is black or white, unless they are already familiar with the artists work. However, if one reads the title and sees the name ‘Jona Hlif Halldorsdottir’, one may gather that the artist is a nordic woman, and statistically more likely to be white. The idea of race is imbedded in the work, both in the image and the text, and the work raises but does not answer the question ‘What is the intention of the artist as a white female making this kind of work?’.
Questions of gender are also raised by the piece. The white male is prone on the floor with no head and a black penis. Stereotypically the black phallus symbolises the white man’s the fear of the potency of the black male, so transfering the black sex to the white male could be seen as transfering that power to the white male, but Jona has not made a powerful or sexually agressive image; the painted penis is small and the overall body language of the model suggests vulnerability. These observations point to a possible feminist reading of the work.
It is a strength in the work that the image, the text and the artists intention are difficult to pin down, despite the content dealing with familiar, almost stereotypical images and ideas, and potentially provocative ones. The viewer is denied the irony and sensationalism they might initially expect from the work.
This desire not to pin down the relation between text and image could lead to experimentation with the space between them, making use of exhibition sites that allow the work to unfold with the viewer seeing one element before the other.
Text:Mair Hughes
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