Vonetta Berry Danner was trained as a visual artist at the Art Institute of Chicago. She was featured in FotoFest 2008 and has performed and exhibited her works around the country. Vonetta says the transition from traditional canvass to the human canvass was a practical decision that resulted from motherhood. In a medium often dominated by white males, she is amongst a handful of African –American body painters asserting themselves in that artistic cosmos.
Palapala magazine and Vonetta explore the human body as organic canvass for expression, the politics of her art and genetic memory.
Human body as canvass
Body art was a practical response to a change in circumstances. When I became a mother, I started searching for alternative creative outlets. Motherhood meant that I spent less time in the studio and more time with my kids. Even so, having to move canvasses and stuff around to make way for children was getting inconvenient. It is a lot easier to tell people to move. I had been painting for over ten years when I made the decision to use the human body as my canvass. My intention was to push the medium and alter how we look at skin. In a way re-conceptualize the body the way Italian artist Daniel Guido re-conceptualized hands as a result of his work on hand painting. So, I decided to work with a type of canvass that breathes, lives, moves and has a history. With a traditional canvass, the artist has to create a history for that canvass but with people, there is a story.
My first project was a model that had been badly scarred in a car wreck. A scar ran from her face to her neck, which made her feel ugly. After painting her as a lion and realizing how much joy she felt, our histories became intertwined and in a way provided a new context in which she saw herself.
My current project is a series of birds on the backs of two people. The idea is to bring up issues about relationships and interdependence as it pertains to unity. It is a desire to place birds within a new context, at least visually whereby without one model the bird is without a wing and hence incomplete. I want the work to speak to unity and equality. You know body painting is often seen as being dingy and dirty because of the nudity. But at this point I don’t see the nudity.
The politics of body painting
It is unintentionally political because of the nudity and because I am a black woman. Most of the people in this field are white males. Apart from Atlanta based Synthe, there are not a lot of black females in this medium, at least those who embrace the discipline and identify themselves as body artists.
As a black female artist, almost anything I do that deviates from the norm is political. A white man paints a white woman as a tiger and it is art. But if a black woman painted the same white woman, then the question will be asked: what is she trying to say? There is always an underlying political agenda, people assume, when a black woman is involved, especially in the art world.
Genetic Memory
Before I got into body painting I was very interested in henna. Then one day a friend from Ghana told me how different ethnic groups in her native Ghana used henna during rituals, passages and rites.
Because ideas and products are often prepackaged I had often associated henna with Indians. After my Ghanaian friend’s revelation I started doing research on the subject and began making discoveries on the history of body painting, especially in the African continent. What was fascinating were some of the enlightening parallels between some of the African body painting traditions and African-American sub-culture in this country. The parallels are too enlightening.
But ultimately, I do body painting for two reasons; first of all, I get paid from doing it and secondly because I want to make a statement. I want to understand the meanings behind these paintings. I want to know why they are done and not just from some photographs exhibiting nude ‘natives’.
Vonetta is the creative director of Houston based ABC Body Art.
This reconceptualization of corporal/epidermal frames as media of expression has more to with a kind of archetypal streak that has always streamed in humanity through space and time. The differences has always been the cultural determinants of such practices. In older societies it denominated a kind of ritual/communal identifiers as you rightly see with the transafrican henna body painting and other totemic scarifications comparable with today's tattoo signifiers. Body arts today, exemplified by the significance it took with feminist writers and theorists, as medium and symbol of independence and emancipation has abetted avant-guardist exploration of this radical publicisation of a very intimate/private medium, that has hitherto been restrained by our socialization on topics and connections between nudity and impudence/pornography. But today this negative education has been discredited by new schools that encourage our harmonious relationship with natural and the natural, the beauty of the pristine, symbolic identification of nudity with virtue (truth, purity, unhypocritical, emancipation etc), positive dedevelopment (reduction of industrial growth which harms the ecosystem: industrial garment making and consumerism are some of the greatest sources of ecodegradation). Ecritically speaking, exploration of the symbols of your showcased body painting, the thematics of birds (non human life)and our(human) interrelationship/interdependency indicates a deep ecological experience of harmony and respect that is worth emphasizing. In another breathe, under the modern aspect of apparent individualism in corporal arts ( urban tatoo culture), there has also an indication at the same time of a valued celebration difference.
Posted by: Wirndzerem G. Barfee | February 08, 2009 at 04:05 PM