The scars of America: why a nude artist is taking a stand at slavery sites

The scars of America: why a nude artist is taking a stand at slavery sites

There are many ways to remember slavery: You can leave tributes, as pilgrims do, at the slavers’ forts in west Africa, or tell the stories of slaves’ lives in books and on screen. Or, like artist Nona Faustine, you can pose naked but for a pair of white shoes at places around New York where slaves were once sold.

There are no more auction blocks, but the ghosts remain for Faustine at sites such as Wall Street where, between Water and Pearl Streets, a slave market operated in the 18th century. It is a chilling thought. But is that memory appropriately awakened by an artist standing nude on a box in the middle of the street?

The answer is yes. Faustine’s nudity is a graphic reminder of the vulnerability and powerlessness of slavery. More than that, in baring her flesh to history, she conveys the most fundamental horror of the slave trade, the way it reduced people to mere bodies, machines of muscle.

Seeing a yellow cab veer around Faustine’s calm yet troubling presence in the street, you also seem to see in your mind the diagram of a slave ship published by anti-slavery campaigners in 18th-century Britain, with its claustrophobic array of human bodies pressed together to squeeze in as many commodities as possible, to allow for the high mortality rates of the Atlantic voyage. The human body is at the heart of slavery’s history. In JMW Turner’s painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) we glimpse bodies in the water, thrown away like offal.

Faustine’s pose on a wooden box clearly calls to mind the slave markets at which survivors of the Atlantic crossing would be sold. Eighteenth-century posters for slave auctions emphasise the near-nakedness of the slaves: many bear the same image of two virtually naked Africans. Their nakedness strips them of individuality, a dehumanising effect brutally stressed by the poster’s use of two identical bodies. Yet the 18th century – when slaves were widely sold in New York – was also the age when aristocratic art lovers praised “the nude” and glorified the naked body in Greek and Roman sculpture. The artistic nude was not just about beauty; it ached with pathos. Statues such as the Farnese Hercules and Michelangelo’s Slaves, somewhat appropriately, are monuments to strength and suffering. Faustine echoes such art as she stands with strong, silent dignity. She gives the violated nakedness of slavery the heroism of the nude. Her carnal history paintings in the streets of Manhattan bring home once again the violence against humanity that still scars America.