Swedish Culture Minister cuts blackface cake, causes scandal

 Right wing extremism is front and centre, as is its mirror on the left.

Linde made an active decision to change the form of a polite cake ceremony into one that would generate awareness and discussion. “I wanted to change the form of what was going on and scream, react and beg for mercy,” he says.

The cake was created based on African fertility symbolism and he thinks he was able to convey the strength of the emotions. “Some people actually get it when I explain and show my other work. People try to lecture me on the history of blackface, I’m very aware of where it comes from. People seem to think I am unaware of postcolonialism but I’m facing the issue every day,” he says. “I think this issue is very different when you live in Stockholm versus in New York. There aren’t that many Afro-Scandinavian artists and it is important that people talk about this.”

This is what the world will see, in photos and on video, the next morning.
On the table, a huge cake, with a smooth shiny black surface, in the form of a caricatured African female body, sans legs. Naked, splayed on its back, it is composed of crotch, belly mound, large pendulous breasts held by truncated stick arms, a row of neck rings. Where the neck rings end, a living human head rears up through a hole in the table. The head belongs to the kneeling body of a man. It is tricked out in exaggerated blackface –large white circles around the eyes, drawn-on cartoon red mouth and pointed teeth.

The plot thickens.

Swedish arts blogger Johan Palme frames the incident as a ‘very efficient mousetrap’ for the Minister of Culture.

Apparently, Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth, the culture minister, “is reviled by large parts of the art world for her culture-sceptic stance and for previously condemning provocative art in what many see as a kind of censorship.”

Therefore, she arrived at the event acutely conscious of the need to repair her tattered image and dissolve the perception that she is a threat to freedom of expression in Sweden. Handed a knife, and asked to cut into the crotch of the cake-woman, she knew that if she balked or questioned, she risked being pilloried as an enemy of provocative art.

I wonder why Nyamko Sabuni, Sweden’s dynamic Minister for Integration and Gender Equality, and the only black woman in Sweden’s cabinet, has not been asked to comment. In 2006, Sabuni created a storm of controversy when she called for mandatory gynecological examinations of all schoolgirls in Sweden in order to prevent genital mutilation. If she had been the speaker at this event, would she have been asked to cut the cake? Could her absence from the debate be because the inconvenient fact of a live articulate powerful black Swedish woman, who actually makes policy on FGM, shows up Linde’s shock art for the puerile nonsense it is?

Jiwon Chung, leading theorist of Boal’s Theater Of The Oppressed, offers a useful set of questions to apply to any art that claims to address the suffering of a particular group or class of human beings. Let’s apply them to Linde’s cake installation, and the argument of his supporters that it somehow serves women and girls from communities that practice FGM.

1) Cui bono? Who benefits?

Linde has achieved overnight global fame from this exercise – the kind of exposure and media spotlight artists dream of. Sweden’s Culture Minister, Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth has established herself as a champion of provocative art. It’s not clear how any woman who has had FGM, or any girl at risk of FGM, is materially better off.

2) How do those whose suffering / body / experience is depicted feel? Do they feel they've been done justice?

A brief survey of comments on media sites and facebook postings about this event suggest that the overwhelming majority of African women feel ‘outraged’, ‘violated’, ‘furious’, ‘sick’. 

3) Are you speaking for them (because you have a voice, and they don't), or are they speaking for you, because what they have to say is so much more compelling than you? 

The only one vocalizing anything in Linde’s art is – Makonde Linde. His caricature of an African woman doesn’t even vocalize words, just sounds of pain.

The next five questions, only Linde can answer.

4) Are you attributing clearly (giving clear credit?) 

5) Are you dialectical?

6) Is your I a we? Is your we an I? 

7) If their suffering were to disappear, would you be truly happy? Or would you have to look for something else onto which to glom your dissatisfaction?

8) Do you belong, do you truly claim solidarity with the suffering -- or do you do it only when it fits in with your concerns and schedule? How do you support them outside your art?

Here’s an idea for truly provocative art. No more male artists, black or white, speaking for African women. No more ever-more-graphic ever-more-voyeuristic art on the suffering of African women. Stop using the female African body as raw material to be worked – unless you happen to live in one. Then, notice that African women are making their own work about their lives and struggles. Look. Listen. Learn.