Review and Response of the Reading - Essay Example

Review of a Reading In this essay, I shall review the article “The bodies that were not ours” by Coco Fusco and “Some Kind of Love”, a dialogue with Nayland Blake by Ian Berry. Reading through both the pieces, I noticed the preference of both these artists to resort to provocative forms of art to make a point. The Fusco article is quite provocative in its own regard. It starts with criticizing the people who do not look at art as art but try to find how it hurts the moral sentiments of people.

Fusco is of the view that such denouncing of art because it may not appeal to the moral sensibilities of some people is not right. She then goes on to talk about some of the more provocative art forms, especially in context of African Americans. Her detailed analysis of the various African American arts, which challenge the established morals of the society is very enlightening. I was particularly impressed by her thorough research in the field, as she refers to a number of artistic displays, some of them long since extinct.

According to her, these arts, which were created by the African American, may be considered by many to be pornographic on the face of it, but when you look at these at another level, you realize that through these provocative art forms these African American artists are trying to point out how there bodies were used and abused over the years of slavery.Most of these artistic displays are extremely provocative, like the play by Robbie MacCauley’s “Aunt Sally’s Rape”, where she poses nude.

To the upholders of false morality, this play may seem to be pornographic, but it has a much deeper meaning in that brings out the humiliations faced by the African American slaves who had no right even over their own body. This and several other arts mentioned by Fusco serve to bring out the irony of African American fate whose bodies were abused for the viewing pleasure of the white audience even as they had no control over it and than the moralistic people denounced these very black people for being pornographic.

Nayland Blake in his dialogue with talk about some his similarly provocative arts. The most outstanding of his works is the “Gorge” where we see him being fed continuously for sixty minutes on the video. The fact that Blake is legally Black and the person feeding him on the video is also black is discussed in details in this dialogue. According to Blake, the notion of race has led to the African Americans being subjected to a number of horrors historically.Both Fusco and Blake talk about the horrors faced by African Americans throughout American history and believe that art, even though provocative, is only a means of making the American audience aware of these horrors.

Fusco clearly denounces the tendency to look at these art forms as pornographic and urges her reader to recognize these arts for art and to look beyond the nudity to see what these artists are trying to say.