For the exhibition Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire (1995),  Lyle Ashton Harris in collaboration with Renee Valerie Cox created the photograph, "Venus Hottentot 2000."  In this futuristic reinterpretation of the Hottentot Venus, Renee Valerie Cox directly inserts her own body into the historical matrix of Western representations that configured black female sexuality.  In the photograph Cox's body is transformed, recalling the Hottentot Venus, with the addition of protruding metallic breasts and an accompanying metal butt extension.  The white strings that delicately hold these metallic body parts in place with bow, seem to emphasize the artists' complex and ambivalent relationships to representations of black female sexuality.  Cox wears the metallic appendages like a costume or disguise, but her own nude body is simultaneously revealed to the viewer.  She stands in profile emphasizing her bodily dimensions, hands akimbo, and stares directly at the viewer.

 "Hottentot 2000" is one photograph in a series by Harris called The Good Life, 1994.

Quote from Harris:
 

This reclaiming of the image of the Hottentot Venus is a way of exploring my own psychic identification with the image at the level of spectacle. I am playing with what it means to be an African diasporic artist  producing and selling work in a culture that is by and large narcissistically mired in the debasement and objectification of blackness.  And yet, I see my work less as a didactic critique and more as an interrogation of the ambivalence around the body. (Read 150)
 

Bibliography:

Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire.  London: ICA and inIVA, 1995.

Alan Read. The Fact of Blackness.  Seattle and London: Bay Press and inIVA,  1996.

For more information on Lyle Ashton Harris: www.nervemag.com/Harris/noframes.html
 

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