the art of eastern parts in the west

Let me begin with a personal conviction, put bluntly: the non-Western artist in Denmark (and Europe in general), like the average non-Western person in Denmark, lives in a state of ‘visible invisibility’

This ‘visible invisibility’ can be highlighted in different ways. I have known of non-Western artists—and, for that matter, non-Western writers (including a serious Chinese candidate for the Nobel prize)—who have lived in Danish cities for years without attracting much attention as artists. Sometimes these artists and writers get some space in the popular media—though more often as ‘immigrants’ or commentators on ‘immigrant issues’ than as artists or writers—but the relatively closed world of Danish universities prefers to remain blissfully unaware of them. In any case, it is often the rule that their ‘visibility’ accrues from their ‘otherness’, while their ar-t-as contemporary art, with claims to individuality and difference but not to a sweeping ‘otherness’—remains largely invisible.
It is not uncommon even today to find non-Western art exhibited in Danish museums on largely anthropological terms—something that would be a minor scandal in, say, England. Recent art as ‘anthropology’ is obviously an indication of the ‘otherness’ that dominates most Danish (and continental European) perceptions of non-Western art. It is, actually, the scholarly counterpart of the social-journalistic tendency noted above. Just as the non-Western artist and writer is more likely to enter Danish society as an immigrant spokesperson of a different culture rather than as an artist or writer living in Denmark, non-Western art is more likely to enter Danish scholarly discourses in anthropological terms rather than, say, aesthetic ones. In other words, one is more likely to find a non-Western artist or novelist writing about Bin Laden than about Michael Kvium in Danish papers. Even books by non-Western writers, such as Derek Walcott or Arundhati Roy, are given to Danes for review, while a Denmark-based Caribbean or Indian writer would almost never be asked to contribute a critical opinion on such matters. Similarly, non-Western artists in Denmark are almost never asked to review an art exhibition.
There is—as Rasheed Araeen, artist, critic and editor of the art and theory journal Third Text (Routledge, London), has pointed out in a number of articles—a tendency in the West to see non-Western art in terms of ‘tradition’ rather than within the complex continuity of, say, modernism. Hence, for instance, Picasso could incorporate non-Western aboriginal elements into his paintings and revolutionise modern art, but an Indian or African combining aboriginal elements with modern forms, techniques and material is, nevertheless, seen as ‘restoring tradition’ or ‘exploring his tradition’. By definition, such an attempt by an Indian or African is pushed beyond the discourse of contemporary art and into that of ‘anthropological’ otherness. This tendency, it appears to me, is far more pronounced in Denmark than in the UK.
It appears that the non-Western artist can be accepted as an ‘other’ in many Danish circles, but not as a different contemporary artist with her own perception of art, aesthetics etc. And yet, one of the earliest objective books by a European on Hinduism and Hindu iconography (with its implicit relationship to Indian sculpture and art) was by a Dane. As Partha Mitter writes in Much Maligned Monsters:
‘The most impressive work of this genre was written … in 1713 by the Royal Danish missionary, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, at Tranquebar in south India … In Ziegenbalg we have a missionary who refused to go along with the prevailing attitudes and show how the Word of God had been distorted by the Hindus. Instead he wanted his readers to make up their own minds with the help of his straightforward, factual, and matter-of-fact presentation of Hinduism … Unfortunately, Genealogy of the Malabar Gods, a work of great usefulness even today was not welcomed in the eighteenth century. The hostility of Ziegenbalg’s colleagues prevented its publication, for it was pointed out that the duty of the missionaries was to extirpate Hinduism and not to spread heathenish nonsense.’
As unfortunately (or perhaps significantly), Ziegenbalg—who, like most respectable Danes of the time, wrote in German—is available in an English translation but not in Danish.

The (obscured) presence of German in this short digression returns us again to the ways in which a largely homogenous Danish identity has been created in recent decades. It is this creation of a homogenous Danish identity that explains why non-Western artists—and for that matter, non-Western immigrants in general—are both more tolerable and more repulsive to many Danes only in their essential ‘otherness’. Depending on the political sympathies of the Dane in question, this ‘otherness’ can be seen as a threat or it can be seen as a colourful strength. At one extreme, you have priests and politicians who claim that one needs to be Christian in order to be a Dane; at the other, you have exotic festivals like ‘Images of the World’ in the year 2000 in Copenhagen. The former might wish to expel all ‘otherness’, the later might wish to ‘mother’ it. In both cases, however, there is a tendency to control and, in the longer run, assimilate the non-native, either forcibly (for the unmentioned purity of Denmark) or lovingly (for the good of the non-Westerner who decides to live on in Denmark). In both cases, the non-Westerner is seen as such an alien presence, that she and her art, literature etc. can only be spoken of in rather anthropological and sociological terms. In any case, an equation can be formulated to express the situation: othering + mothering = smothering.
The extremity and depth of the myths of coloured ‘otherness’ that pervade all aspects of Danish thinking can be, perhaps, best illustrated with reference to a popular children’s book. In 1945 and 1948, Jørgen Clevin wrote and illustrated two books featuring an ostrich, Rasmus, who is captured in Africa and brought to Copenhagen Zoo. The books, which have been re-issued by the leading Danish publisher, Gyldendal, in 2002, are replete with stereotypes about Africans—’neger’—and the Danish state. However, I am not concerned with most of these stereotypes in this essay. What interests me here is the complete otherness that informs the book’s narrative of a generalised Africa and a specific Denmark. This can be best highlighted with the help of one innocuous-seeming example, though there are many other, more complex instances of it in the book. Rasmus has been captured and brought to Copenhagen Zoo, where he experiences rainy weather. This, we are told, Rasmus had never experienced before. Here you have a plausible fact, relative aridity in many parts of Africa, turned into an extreme myth of otherness: no rain whatsoever in ‘Africa’ versus regular, daylong showers in Denmark.

This otherness of the non-West in Denmark—the consequence of historical factors as well as the complex correspondence of the rightist-nationalist and social-democratic projects in recent years— often obscures large stretches of Danish history. Not only the history of Danish colonies and slave trafficking, but also the history of many of the most redoubtable Danish buildings that were built or extensively renovated in exactly these periods of affluence. It strikes me as remarkable that Danish history books have almost nothing to say of the coloured presence in Denmark from the 17th to the early 20th century. Unlike, say, the UK, where much has been done over the last 20 years to recover the stories of coloured servants, slaves, sailors, mistresses, nurses, soldiers, traders etc, who lived in the UK at least as far back as the 17th century, Danish historians seem to dismiss the coloured presence in Denmark as completely unimportant. This is not a question of numbers, but of significance. After all, there is evidence of coloured slaves/servants being brought to Denmark and of Asian sailors being employed on Danish ships. British historians tell us, for instance, that in 1782, several lascars (South Asian sailors widely employed on European ships) ‘who had been hired by Danish ships arrived [in England] from Denmark’—and that, in England, this was one of the factors that led to a rise of interest in the plight of lascars who were often arbitrarity discharged and abandoned by ships in Europe.

But such interesting and overlooked facts do not seem to have attracted the attention of at least mainstream Danish historians. Even in books by left-leaning and highly erudite historians, the coloured presence is relegated to Danish colonies-as if these colonies had nothing to do with the Danish ‘mainland’, as if masters could never bring coloured servants and slaves back ‘home’ with them, as if coloured sailors were not employed on Danish ships docking in Copenhagen, as if entire villages were not brought to Denmark for display etc. But let alone the far non-West in the shape of Caribbean families and Indian villages brought to Copenhagen to be exhibited as late as the 20th century, or teams of Chinese acrobats or groups of Asian lascars, even the near ‘non-Western’ presence of Greenlanders seems to be acknowledged only grudgingly in most Danish books about Denmark.
In short, with some honourable exceptions, scholars, journalists, critics and politicians in Denmark seem to show a great reluctance to acknowledge the coloured presence in all its complexity. This reluctance extends back into time—Danish history is daily whitewashed-and into the present in which non-Western artists and writers are often reduced to representatives (or critics) of their own ‘othered’ cultures. While non-Westerners in Denmark in the past are rendered simply invisible, non-Westerners in Denmark today have to be registered due to their somewhat greater numbers—but by being seen primarily as cultural others (to be expelled, assimilated or patronised), they are largely rendered invisible in their complexity as artists etc. Once one realises this, it is not surprising to come across, say, books on the Cobra school of artists that do not mention Ernest Mancoba, a coloured artist who was an active member of the ‘Danish’ group.

Tabish Khair is Associate Professor of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His recent Books include the poetry collection, Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, Delhi, 2000), and the novel, The Bus Stopped (Picador, London, 2004)

Let me begin with a personal conviction, put bluntly: the non-Western artist in Denmark (and Europe in general), like the average non-Western person in Denmark, lives in a state of ‘visible invisibility’ This ‘visible invisibility’ can be highlighted in different ways. I have known of non-Western artists—and, for that matter, non-Western writers (including a serious…