Shop... Selling the Ontology of Whiteness

Shop

Selling the ontology of whiteness Michael Forbes

Shop… Selling the Ontology of Whiteness Shop… Selling the Ontology of Whiteness started out by default; I was researching and purchasing counterfeit handbags from African migrants on the streets of Europe, for my masquerade sculptures.

I started exploring the visual representation of handbags and their evolution as desired objects over recent years. As, I started documenting shop windows on my travels (including Venice, Rome,

is drawn in by the beauty of the photographic image, but part challenged by the text. The work allows the viewer to question their own positionality in relation to this critique. The layering is used as an aesthetic tool in line with fashion advertising, more strikingly the text is a genuine link to racial political discourse of today.

With Shop… Selling the Ontology of Whiteness, I

Naples and London) a number of interesting ideas started to emerge from my images and the research for my dissertation (titled; The Metaphysics and Racial Politics of Blackness through the work of Kerry James Marshall). The idea /question that came to my mind was; what is being sold through the shop windows, beyond the merchandise? My conclusion, from what I could see and absorbing from my research information, was the ontology of whiteness is being actively promoted through the shop windows and the use of the mannequins.

Predominately the mannequins are white, with a small percentage being brown and a few with a black person’s facial features, but coloured white or shades of blue. My hypothesis here is; the mannequins with black facial features, are not allowed to be black/brown, thereby undermining and devaluing blackness further in the capitalist system of creating desire. There is a clear message here, that whiteness sells luxury goods, but an element of blackness carries some cachet, coolness, edgy or danger?

The text layers in the work explores the extremities of racial politics and discrimination in relation to whiteness. The abstract text creates a form of push me pull me schematics, thereby the viewer

am able to develop a wider narrative from the shop window diorama than intended by the window dresser, which is emphasised with photography’s ability to raise the aesthetic value of its subject.

Contemporary and historical photography and the moving image has been developed to enhanced the white skin and its attachment the pure, Richard Dyer in his book White, refers to ‘The technology he is using and the habitual ways of using it, both to produce a look that assumes, privileges and constructs an image of white people’.

On the flip side of the privileging white skin, photography devalues black skin supporting my hypothesis the mannequins in my work, with black feature are not being allowed to be black – they are white or different shades of blue, which concurs with Jennifer Martins’ statement ‘a historical investigation of the use of photography as a tool of erasure and obscuration of black and brown peoples’ histories and identities’.

Michael Forbes Jennifer Martin, One Drop, One : What it Means to Burn states, 2018, Royal College of Art MA dissertation London Dyer, Richard White 1997, Routledge London

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Selling the ontology of whiteness

Images Š Michael Forbes - all rights reserved 2020 Images reproduced as photographic lightboxes - 170cm x 114cm