Luc Tuymans - Mwana Kitoko PDF

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1969) 197–201. ‘Aliaga in Conversation with Tuymans’, op. cit., 13. Tuymans, ‘Disenchantment’, op. cit., 118. Ibid., 32. See Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘Borrowed Sight: The Halted Traveller in Caspar David Friedrich and William Wordsworth’, Word and Image, no. 1 (1985) 149–63, and Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990) 159–244. 33 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 182–3. 34 See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 78, and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) 23. 35 ‘Aliaga in Conversation with Tuymans’, op. cit, 15.

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Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘Monstrance’, in Luc Tuymans, exh. cat., ed. Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2009) 31–46.

Philippe Pirotte Mwana Kitoko (Beautiful White Man) 2001

During the 1867 World Exhibition in Paris, Édouard Manet rented a hall for a one-man exhibition with recent work instead of submitting his paintings to the humiliation of another official jury. Shortly before, Émile Zola had defended Manet’s art against the opposition of the Salon and the criticism of the French press. But despite this support, Manet’s repeated endeavours to participate in the Salon had proven not always particularly successful in the previous years. In the middle of the festivities that accompanied the World Exhibition, the execution of the Mexican Emperor Maximilian threw France into a political and cultural commotion. The French Emperor Napoleon III had installed the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian on the Mexican throne as a puppet emperor to ensure that the regime in power would remain under French influence. But American pressure made Napoleon III gradually reduce his military support, resulting in the quick demise of both the empire and the newly-crowned emperor, who was executed by Mexican ‘rebels’ led by Benito Juárez. France and the rest of Europe were shocked. Initially, Manet wanted to paint a large canvas of the execution and include it in his solo exhibition, but he was unable to collect sufficient visual material in time to carry out these plans in time. Drawing on rumours and the few documents and information that filtered through, in the following months and year, Manet constructed three paintings depicting Maximilian and his two generals at the moment of the fatal volley. The firing squad, true to documented fact, wearing ‘official’ Mexican uniforms after the French model, elicited from Zola the alternative title France Executes Maximilian. The face of the corporal on the right of the painting, inspecting his rifle before giving the unfortunate emperor the ‘coup de grâce’, bears a suspicious resemblance to Napoleon III. The authorities suppressed Manet’s painting even before it could be submitted to the official Salon jury in 1869. But the subject of the painting was not the only reason why it was not admitted. Although it clearly refers to the tradition of history painting, Manet did not keep to the conventions of the genre. He avoided traditional devices such as theatrical gestures or rhetorical facial expressions that evoke meaning

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and morality in an iconic formulation of betrayal or tragedy. Maximilian’s face is disconcertingly impassive, and the suggestion of drama is repressed. The chilling silence of the painting would earn the republican Manet the criticism that he lacked empathy. The detachment of the synthetic manner of painting and the ostensible lack of finish were interpreted as artistic failure, but Manet himself considered the work to be ‘une oeuvre absolument artistique’. He claimed an artistic space for his painting, not voluntarily to localize it outside political questions, but fully aware that precisely its ambivalence and the studied absence of dramatic rhetoric or an intrinsic moral stance, were what made the purely ‘artistic’ Execution of Maximilian so revolutionary and cause political resistance in France.1 With the series Mwana Kitoko – Beautiful White Man, Luc Tuymans has ventured to address a highly charged historical subject which, forty years after the facts, has been made topical again in Belgium by a recent upsurge of political conscience. Last year, the publication of Ludo De Witte’s book on the assassination of Lumumba indirectly led to the formation of the ‘Lumumba Committee’, charged with investigating the extent to which Belgium was implicated in the political and physical liquidation of the first prime minister of the Congo in 1961, just after the country had gained independence. The sudden urgency with which the current political class wants to deal with the colonial past of Belgium seems suspect and risks overreaching itself. Once the committee confirms what is already unspoken common knowledge – that the responsibility for Lumumba’s death has to be sought in a Belgian-Western conglomerate of various centres of power with political, economic and dynastic ramifications – and when public excuses have been made, it will be all too easy for Belgium to dissociate itself from the colonial project as a mistake made in the past, but at the same tine from the broad neocolonial consensus that the former colony had to be controlled for as long as possible.2 The nationalist Lumumba, who, to the great annoyance of Brussels and Washington, could not be moved to neocolonial tractability, was not given much time to rebuild the ex-colony into a new nation. Inspired by the ideas of African unity propagated by the future Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, Lumumba provoked Belgium and the West by nationalizing the command of the army as well as the lucrative ore mines shortly after independence in 1960. With the undisguised support of Belgium, the rich province of Katanga attempted secession from the central power, too occupied

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with controlling the general chaos into which the country had sunk shortly after the transfer of power. Earlier, the United States, which distrusted Lumumba’s flirting with the leftist Organization for African Unity, had hired assassins and poisoners with the purpose of eliminating Lumumba. Disappointed by the docility of the United Nations, which did not wish to thwart the Western powers in any way during the infringement of the Congo’s young sovereignty, Lumumba was eventually forced to turn to the Soviet Union for help, thereby signing his definitive death warrant. Both the American and the Belgians wanted Lumumba out of the way. Only five years before, everything still seemed fine, and Brussels was dreaming of dozens more years of the Belgian Congo. In 1956, Pierre Rijckmans, Honorary Governor of the colony and the Belgian delegate on the Supervisory Board of the United Nations, confirmed, in an almost nineteenth-century fashion, his belief in the civilizing mission of the West, pointing to the ‘superiority’ of Christian culture. At that same moment, the future president of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, and his Ivorian colleague Houphouët Boigny, had already been members of the French parliament for a number of years. The extremely paternalistic Belgian rule in the Congo kept the country in quarantine from the major political protest movements that swept Africa in the fifties. In 1958, when a Congolese delegation visited the World Exhibition in Brussels, no one in Belgium would have dared to assume that the Congo would become independent shortly afterwards.3 On 16 May 1955, Baudouin I, King of the Belgians, set foot on the ground of the Belgian Congo for a triumphant four-week tour. Although he received an exuberant welcome from the Congolese people, his visit was mainly meant as an encouragement to the main pillars of the Belgian colonial order: the army, the colonial civil service, the church and the agricultural and industrial sectors. However, the native population expected that this ‘good white man’ would organize a large-scale palaver, as a first step towards greater autonomy and less racism – the word ‘independence’ was not being used yet. The Congolese gave him the rather disrespectful nickname of ‘Mwana Kitoko’, meaning ‘beautiful boy’, which the colonial authorities were quick to turn into ‘Bwana Kitoko’, ‘beautiful master’ or ‘beautiful noble man’. However, to the people of the Congo, it was unthinkable that a young bachelor could be a ‘bwana’ or master, much less a great king.4 Baudouin had been put on the Belgian throne at the tender age of nineteen in 1950, without any preparation, as a result of a compromise after the Royal

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Mwana Kitoko (Beautiful White Man)

Question that had forced his father to renounce the throne. In a divided Belgium, the young Baudouin was supposed to embody the ideal of Belgian unity, and the Congo was very important to it. The imaginary Belgo-Congolese community was a mirror for the construction of a Belgian identity.5 Moreover, the Congo would personally yield the king a few of the most emotional moments of his career.6 Deeply impressed by the enthusiastic reception given to Baudouin on his first journey to Africa, even the Belgians welcomed him back as ‘Bwana Kitoko’ on his return. He adopted this view of himself and would ever after cultivate this image: benign, but at the same time aristocratic and aloof. Luc Tuymans based the painting Mwana Kitoko on a picture from a Belgian propaganda film on Baudouin’s joyous entry in the colony. The nearly lifesize painting shows the young king, looking slightly ill at ease in his dazzling white uniform, stepping onto the tarmac at Leopoldville. Baudouin is preparing to shake hands with the reception committee; he is wearing a pair of sunglasses to protect his eyes from the bright sun, and he is clasping a sword with his left hand. Even though the king is depicted in motion, the figure has a faint air of inertia, as if he were a stuffed dummy. His cap throws a shadow over his vaguely painted face and the sunglasses hide any further indication of an identity. The anonymity of the face turns the attention towards the decorations on the over-exposed uniform, which spell out the text of power like a kind of scarification. Both the steps and the sword are rather sketchily drawn and function at the symbolic level. The plane that has transported the king, painted in faded pink and blue pastel shades, lends the image an uncomfortable reference to the nursery. The ambivalence in the portrayal of this young man, dressed in the symbols of vertical power, is at its height in the depiction of the right arm. The other arm maintains itself by holding the sword in a forced grip, but the figure does not succeed in living up to the expectation of heroism. The combination of the colour palette and the bright lighting make Mwana Kitoko a picture of a strikingly unnatural ‘whiteness’. In this sense, the painting contains the colonial problem as it was summarized by Frantz Fanon in Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth); notwithstanding the successful appropriation and control of a new country, the ‘colonist’ will always be a stranger. It is not possessions, factories, or bank accounts that characterize the ruling class. The ruling class is, in the first place, white; it comes from elsewhere and is wholly unlike the native people, whom it

makes into ‘the others’.7 But in the end, that whiteness is vulnerable, and wit degenerates into a kind of possessed puppet show when it wants to maintain itself in the heterogeneity of the foreign, often tropical country.8 Baudouin’s tour of the Belgian Congo was graced with impressive ceremony, because the Congolese were believed to be very sensitive to decorum. In the painting Leopard, the king’s feet are stepping out of the picture in the top right corner, while Congolese hands can just be seen holding a leopard skin down near the left-hand edge of the canvas. Blinding tropical light saps the lively colours of the animal skin and the imaginary line walked by the king becomes visible in the decorative pattern of spots. The disorienting pattern of leopard spots takes up nearly the whole canvas and is delineated by a sharp dark shadow along its edges. It involuntarily reminds one of a map. As an exotic trophy, it embodies the ‘scramble for Africa’ and takes the place of the empty areas on the maps over which the author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, used to dream about the unexplored interior of the Congo as a young boy. Just like Mwana Kitoko, Leopard is based on a film still and shows a carefully orchestrated display of power: the king dominates the leopard – the live leopard is associated with beauty, cunning and power – by walking over it, but the black hands that have to hold it in place treat it with respect. In fact, only one ethnic group of the Congo used the leopard skin as a symbol of power of their ‘chief ’, but the Belgian colonial apparatus generalized this so that the king could define himself as the ‘natural’ and indisputable ruler of diverse groups of Africans, as there was no local empire or centralized ritual or hierarchy for the Belgians to incorporate. Instead, immediate connections were made with dozens of local rudimentary monarchies. They were taken as models to ‘invent’ traditions (‘On the leopard skin, there is place for only one chief ’)9 with which the whites justified their presence and proved their continuity with the past. On this first trip to the Congo, Mwana Kitoko had a more or less chance encounter with another ‘young man’: Patrice Lumumba. In the years leading up to independence, the first concern of this young man who had only recently entered politics would have been to safeguard the unity of his country, just like Baudouin. Lumumba realized that the fatal encounter with the white man was the only common heritage of the different Congolese peoples. In a frank speech at the celebration of independence, he defined the Congolese nation against the humiliations, discrimination and cruelty of Belgian

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colonialism, which Baudouin took as a personal insult. The king was personally to ensure the maintenance of relations between Belgium and the Congo, both before and after independence. With the rise of the criminal manipulator Joseph Désiré Mobutu, that seemed to work, at first. The king, Belgium and the United States thought of their economic privileges and spread out the leopard skin for Mobutu, who was to take the cult of the chief to absurd extremes. A bizarre friendship developed between the ultraChristian Baudouin and the tyrant Mobutu; as a matter of fact, Mobutu would continue to emulate his ‘cousin’ Bwana Kitoko. On the king’s last tour of the Congo, which had meanwhile been renamed Zaïre, Mobutu even returned the country to him when he welcomed him with the words ‘Voici mon pays, que dis-je, votre pays.’ Belgium, France and the United States did not turn their backs on Mobutu until after the Cold War, but in the meantime, we all know that the Belgian colonial adventure, that had started as the boy’s dream of Leopold II, has ended up as the greatest postcolonial failure of the African continent.10 However, at the time of Baudouin’s first visit to the Congo, the colony seemed more modern even than the mother country. Leopoldville is a painting based on a snapshot of the colonial metropolis: a modernistic office building, decorated with the flags of Belgium and the Congo. From a window, two figures are watching the royal parade. The perspective diagonals visualize a ‘modern’ dynamics. The modern fiction of progress was to be found in colonial Congo. Urbanity was conceived as the mimetic reproduction of a Western utopian idea. The conquest of the African territory went hand in hand with the destruction of local centres and of local concepts of architecture and spatiality. Colonizing is, in the first place, installing oneself, ordering and building, in complete contradiction to any exotic appreciation or surprise at local customs. Reduced to spectacle, African cultural items were sent to lead an ossified museum existence in Belgium. No greater contrast could be imagined with Leopoldville, showing the colonial town as a heterotopia of compensation, than the ‘invented’ African reality as it is shown at Tervuren in the Royal Museum of Central Africa.11 Via a long drawn-out process of neutralization, ‘re-creation’ and accommodation of a geography – new names such as Leopoldville signalled the connection of African locations with the Belgian monarchy – the colonizers of the Congo gave the most brutal shape to the metamorphosis, the transformation of a memory. The principle of ‘christening’ the ‘heathens’

was considered a necessary moral duty. This colonial gesture was also clearly a vehicle for subjecting the native people to the values upheld by European ‘civilization’. The Vatican kept a close and benevolent watch on the ‘mission civilisatrice’ of Baudouin’s grand-uncle, Leopold II. The pope thought that missionaries could aid the Belgian king in his civilizing mission; he was well aware of the church’s temporary loss of power in Europe and considered an expansion of Catholicism to the African continent more than desirable. The collaboration between the Vatican and Leopold’s colonial project became an acknowledged fact with the 1878 decree that governed the evangelization of equatorial Africa. The saga of the mission started with the arrival of a contingent of White Fathers, who opened the first Catholic mission soon afterwards. Together with the Belgian colonists, the missionaries would achieve the conversion of Central Africa and radically ‘reshape’ its physical space, its inhabitants and its culture. As an image of a minimal initial presence, the painting The Mission is reminiscent of a military outpost. The architectural frivolity in the long protective wall involuntarily brings loopholes to mind. In the construction of a Christian Kingdom, the mission was modelled after the military camp; self-sufficient, and, if necessary, capable of organizing its defence, e.g. against German attacks during the First World War. In spite of the dominant presence of the building in the landscape, this painting shows us a constructed reality that was fictional from the start. The mission station is a fragment of a larger spatial project, in which it was to form the locus of a new imported memory. In The Idea of Africa, Valentin Yves Mudimbe describes the mission as a synecdoche: it determines its own space and simultaneously stands for the larger movement that originally made it possible.12 The Mission is based on the idea of an abandoned and unfinished project. It is an after-image of the colonial fact, of a modern way of ‘being’ in the world. In a vast landscape, underneath a loaded sky, literally ‘in the middle of nowhere’, the typical colonial mission station stands as an idiolect: alien, massive, and turned in on itself. The cross mutilates the space by its dramatic position, but is unable to command a presence so close to the building. The painting clearly shows the degree to which such a building is an addition that is forced upon an existing physical space, but at the same time it affords protection from heat, night and nature. The extreme white hygiene of the modernistic building becomes a kind of cladding. The shaded area

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underneath the roof alienates itself from the order of the image and becomes an immaterial condensed blot. Thus liberated, the blot, as an ominous ornament, thwarts a formal interpretation of the picture and generates an oppression that evokes the madness of the civilization officials in Joseph Conrad’s Outpost of Progress. In their deal...