The State of the Union

Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written … can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.

- Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy


The productivity of Foucault’s concepts of power/knowledge lies in its refusal of an epistemology which opposes essence/appearance, ideology/science. ‘Pouvoir/Savoir’ places subjects in a relation of power and recognition that is not part of a symmetrical or dialectical relation – self/other, master/slave – which can then be subverted by being inverted.

- Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture



   National and pirate flags, Financial Times (FT), colour, shape, material, scale – all of these elements, always already semiotic per se, acquire a particular semiological depth in Godfried Donkor’s work presented in the solo exhibition The State of the Union.
   The phenomenological and ideological power of signs is exposed and explored at many levels. Donkor raises questions related to the visual perception of symbols whose colours usually embody highly charged connotations such as flags. In an attempt to broaden possibilities of aesthetic experience and disrupt typical interpretations, he has deprived national flags of countries such as USA (in spite of the disparate use of media, one could think of Jasper Johns), UK, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, China and former USSR from their colours and has composed them solely with layers of FT sheet, white paper, golden foil and dark blue embroidery.
   At another level, the FT component of these highly aesthetic flags seems to point towards the possibility of a shared element of both ‘large-’ and ‘small-scale’ countries, political and military alliances and enmities, in a potential allusion to the real but veiled worldwide corporative associations. Furthermore, one of the flags is politically outdated, for it belongs to a country that no longer exists – the USSR; however, as a symbol, this flag exists not only historically but also in a way that continues to shape our vision of twentieth-century history and twenty-first-century politics (namely as a reminder of the dangers of totalitarian utopias).
   In this sense and beyond questions of space, these symbols request for considerations of time – past and present are connected not only in the choice of the national flags, but also in the juxtaposition of these with several versions of the Jolly Roger or pirate flag, whose origin goes back to the first moments of globalisation in the form of worldwide maritime trade lead by European colonialist nations. Piracy, here also ‘made of’ FT sheet, possesses however layers of colour partially covering this, in what might consist of an index for the disruptive difference (but also similarity) between establishment and anti-establishment, state and stateless, legal and outlaw trade.
   Time and space, histories and geographies are also at stake in the inclusion of the Confederate, Rebels or Dixie flag. Symbol of the Southern states in their fight against the Union during the US Civil War, this flag carries the violent weight of slavery and racial and social discrimination. However, it is still adopted today as the state flag by some of those Southern states where paradoxically there is a majority of black, slave-descendant population.
   In this context and going beyond the work featured in this particular exhibition, other series of works by the artist deserve consideration as well, since they constitute very relevant parts of his practice and embody some of his main concerns. Donkor has developed several series of collages on paper and canvas, such as the Madonnas, Mammas and Boxers, by means of appropriating contemporary mass-media images and text as well as illustrations from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical books (in a way that recalls the works of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Glenn Ligon – although Ligon’s appropriations are more textual, literary, neon-made and stenciled rather than image-, mass media-, silk-screen-, collage- and assemblage-based, Donkor’s concerns are perhaps closer to Ligon’s than to Rauschenberg’s). 
   In these works Donkor has dealt with issues of subjectivity, ethnicity and gender in connection with the colonialist history of slavery and inter-continental trade between Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, in an attempt to subvert the ideologically veiled violence of the colonial stereotype (both male and female) not by inverting symmetrical relations of power and recognition, in Foucault’s terms, but rather by questioning this relational positioning of subjects itself. As the artist has explained, he intends to ‘disrupt all these categories’ with regards to identity, be it national, ethnic or gendered, by confronting the viewer with his/her own conscious or unconscious prejudices. The violently concealed power of these categorisations resides precisely in their (always already ideological) claim to an (always already flawed) epistemological verification. To quote Homi K. Bhabha, ‘the stereotype … is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated … it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalization; produces that effect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed’.
   The anxious repeatability of the stereotype is relatable, in Freudian terms, to that of the traumatic event of an initial acknowledgement and simultaneously immediate repression (out of fear) of the other’s difference. Accordingly, Donkor presents the viewer with densely diverse archives, while at the same time focusing on seriality and repetition (which is also sensed within each one of the larger flag pieces in their repetitive layering of FT sheet) in a way that potentially foregrounds the compulsion to repeat as the typical symptom of trauma, thus reminding viewers of historical and contemporary traumas in their Nachträglichkeit or timely deferred action. To quote Camila Loew, the artist ‘bring(s) the complexities of a traumatic past to a present which is still in the making’.
   Therefore, Donkor’s artistic disruptions of fixed identities address contemporary concerns that defy the notion of linear history and separable geographies by interweaving past and present in the unstable junctions of intertwined spaces.


Ana Balona de Oliveira (March 2008)