tv HAR Dtalk BBC News November 29, 2022 4:30am-5:01am GMT
4:30 am
on webcams paid for by customers in the us, australia and some european countries. the uk and some european countries. now on bbc news, it's hardtalk, with zeinab badawi. welcome to hardtalk with me, zeinab badawi. i'm in the serpentine galleries in london where there is a major exhibition of the work of the renowned american artist barbara chase—riboud. her art is on display in museums around the world, and she is also an award—winning novelist and poet. throughout her long career, barbara has been fascinated by public memorials and her sculptures honour various historical and culturalfigures. but how should society commemorate controversial people from the past?
4:31 am
barbara chase—riboud, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. we're sitting here at a major exhibition of your work called infinite folds, and you started your artistic training at the age of seven. how on earth did you know at that early age that you wanted to become an artist? i didn't know i wanted to be an artist. it was my mother and my grandmother who decided that i was going to have something to do with the arts. they weren't quite sure what. you were 16 and you were the youngest person to ever have a work acquired by moma, the museum of modern art in new york. it was reba, which was a woodcut print of a young girl
4:32 am
with a plant next to her. and you have said that "success as a child came easily to me," and that "i grew up as a confident, curious child, "not willing to settle for anything but the best." were you always very ambitious from an early age? i wouldn't call it ambition. i didn't know what it was. i knew that i wanted to do something, you know, significant, but i had no idea what and i had no idea how. and i had no concept of the world except my little family, you know, it was very intimate. and it seemed to me that the world was intimate too. i mean, i didn't... iwasn�*t afraid of people and i wasn't afraid of the world. i wasn't afraid of, um...
4:33 am
..stepping out and having opinions about things. 0k. well, that lack of fear and stepping out is very much reflected in your work. you have a very innovative, experimentative approach to your work, and you forge figures in bronze, for instance, using animal bones and vegetable matter. you know? and we're looking at adam and eve from 1958, which is being shown publicly for the first time, and it depicts two figures entwined underneath a tree canopy. and you completed that whilst you were at the american academy in rome. but, you know, art critics, barbara, find it very hard to describe the genre of your work. how would you, in a nutshell, describe it? it is hard to describe. and it changed so much over the years, which are very long. and i would say
4:34 am
abstract, um... poetic... ..literary. .. ..artist. and there is this combination that are so entwined now, although i tried to keep them separate most of my career, but now they have simply resurged in their own way, and so i'm...|'m stuck with it. one of the features of the way you work is that you also like to commemorate. the commemorative aspect of your work is very important. so, for example, this sculpture ofjosephine baker, the celebrated
4:35 am
african—american, black american singer-actress. this is the last. . .- yeah. | this is the last big monument. this is the last series of, you know, of steles that arrived you know, i had no idea i was going to do a josephine until i did it. so how important is that commemorative aspect of your work to you? why is it so significant? i think that is not only commemorative, but it's also the poetic... ..the poetic aspect of my work. and it's there as a persona. these sculptures are not just sculptures in space. they are also personas. they are also histories
4:36 am
and monuments of these people. so included in your sculptures are the stelae to malcolm x, the assassinated civil rights activist who was killed in 1965 and a very hugely important figure for you. and you say that his assassination came like a bombshell to you. how did you feel at the time when you heard about his death? and how did that influence the stelae, which have taken you the best part of five decades to make? i had been living in europe for many, many years when malcolm was assassinated, and it was at his assassination that i realised... you know, the shock of it, i realised that this was... ..one of the most important figures in history and certainly in american history.
4:37 am
and i was outraged, you know, that his life had been taken at such a young age, and these steles were not supposed to be, you know, portraits of him or political statements. it was the essence of... the essence of malcolm. the essence of revolution. the essence of a martyr. and theyjust grew like topsy, i made... first i made four. then maybe ten years later, and then maybe... ..15 years later, i made another ten. but, barbara, you say what an
4:38 am
important figure malcolm x was, and you were really a bit of a trailblazer yourself. african american woman, black american woman, studied at temple university, yale school of architecture and design. you were the first black american woman to receive a masters in fine arts. and yet, you decided to settle in paris, in france, late 1960, 1961. but why did you not stay in the united states and be part of the civil rights movement if it was so important to you? it was not a question it was a question of my own... it was a question of my own...life. it was my own star i was following. it was... i was supposed to have a life in london, as a matter of fact, when i left yale,
4:39 am
and something happened. and so my sort of... and in monuments and so on is not... it is part of me, but not the main part, not the... it is more like following the star, following my own path, but you didn't want to use any influence you might have had to help advance the civil rights movement by staying in the united states? well, i married a frenchman. i was a runaway bride. they chuckle i was a runaway bride. any regrets? we went to paris for
4:40 am
the weekend. and the man i married was one of the great photographers of the world. that's marc riboud, the late french photographer. and he sort of opened up a whole new universe to me, which was international, which was... ..had nothing to do with america or europe or africa, but had to do with everything. and so i became this kind of you know, explorer, whatever, that i had started in egypt on my own with him, which lasted 20 years. so he opened up a whole new world for you. but you always maintained this interest in monuments,
4:41 am
as you said, and i want to ask you about the controversy that we have been debating all over the world, really, about the role of monuments in society. here in the united kingdom, for instance, the 17th century slave trader edward colston had his statue torn down by an angry crowd and they threw it into the water. you have had the controversies in the united states about confederate statues and so on. where do you stand on this? should monuments come down if some people deem them offensive? where? well, my stance on that is very famous. my stance on that is what i did with thomas jefferson. i should just remind everybody you're referring to the fact there's a historical novel you wrote in 1979 about sally hemings, who was the enslaved woman in the united states who had a relationship and bore seven children to thomas jefferson, the third president of the united states.
4:42 am
why was it important for you to tell that story? i didn't think that it was as important as it turned out to be. i had looked at, you know, the relationship of this invisible woman with the most powerful man in the world, really, in the western world, it's a sort of half love, half hate story to tell. i mean, it was... it's operatic in its, you know, in its stance. and it was only after all the hullabaloo and all, you know, the controversy, which lasted for 38 years. mm. 38 years- _
4:43 am
and it was finally solved by dna. some people didn't actually want to accept that the story was true, that thomas jefferson had this relationship with a black woman. the jeffersonians didn't. the jeffersonians didn't want to accept it— the public did. the public realised because you did a follow—up book as well and, indeed, you... idid. youj received awards for that work. not only did i do a follow—up, but this book began a whole series of other historical novels about invisible women or invisible historical personages, which went on to valide, sarah baartman, and many others. seven, to be exact.
4:44 am
you mentioned sarah baartman, and of course she was the southern african woman who was known in a derogatory way as the hottentot venus and was put on display and travelled around the west in the 19th century. and of course, sarah baartman is the subject of africa rising. it's sarah baartman that is the winged victory, that is the nike on top of the statue. with naomi campbell's profile. they chuckle just going back to statues, though, because there's also a statue of theodore roosevelt who was us president in the early 20th century, and there's an equestrian statue of him outside the natural history museum in new york, flanked by two shirtless figures — one native american, one african — and the idea was people objected to it
4:45 am
because of the racial hierarchy depicted in that statue. it was removed earlier this year, early 2022, after being there for 80 years. do you think that was the right thing to do? and what would you like to see in its place? i would like to see in its place africa rising, which is a statue... ..which is a commission that i did for general services in 1997, which is, you know, downtown, completely obscured, because it's in the... ..it�*s in the area of 9/11. i think it was absolutely right to remove... ..to remove roosevelt's statue. 0k. and i'm hoping that something significant will happen with mine replacing it. so... it's, um...
4:46 am
and it wouldn't be... it's not a matter of exchange. it's a matter of historical truth. it's a matter of... you know, 1619 — it goes back a long time. you'd like to see the roosevelt statue replaced with one of your sculptures, africa rising from around 1997—98, which is of a large concave black platform, on top is a winged figure. it's in manhattan now, and it stands on the site where bodies of enslaved africans were buried. i want to ask you this question. how important do you think the legacy of slavery is today? how relevant is it? it is the...
4:47 am
you know, it is the original sin. it is something... it is so, um... how can i say it? so essential a historical event in the soul of america until... i really don't think that we will ever be free of this history. now, we have to deal with it. it's not going to go away. it's not going to... it can be rewritten 1,000 times, but it is still going to be there. and as, you know, a great sort of...
4:48 am
a great thinker has said that history... ..that art is the only proof that history has ever happened. and, um... levi—strauss. and this is my... this is my contention that this is necessarily a question that has to be monumentalised in every way. history and art are very important to you, barbara chase—riboud, in your work and you use bronze a lot in homage to the lost wax method that was used in the ancient kingdoms of benin with the guild of bronze makers there. you have your own twist on it. how important is your african heritage to you? well, you know that
4:49 am
the benin method of lost wax is medieval and is the beginning, is really the foundation of lost wax casting, so i'm returning to my, quote unquote, roots. you're returning to your roots, but it's interesting because i know that you don't like being referred to as "african american." you call yourself "black american," so you're taking the african out of your identity. why is that? i'm not taking the african out of my identity! but you don't describe ourself... ., , the african into my identity! if you, you know, allow me to say that. and as long as there are white americans, there are going to be black americans.
4:50 am
america is not a one—race country. but do you recognise your african heritage and you pay homage to it? you have only to look at my sculpture. of course. your work as a celebrated black american artist and sculptor, you know that there was a report the french government carried out in 2018 that said that 90% of african treasures and artefacts, works of art are held outside the continent. outside. do you believe in i restitution? that these works should be returned to their continent? i believe in restitution. i believe, not in total restitution. i believe that certain works are universal and belong to humanity, not to africa or to europe or anybody else. but, basically, i'm for restitution.
4:51 am
even if there are circumstances which mean that the works of art may not be secure? we saw how the treasures of timbuktu. . .— ..in mali — when it was overrun by extremists, people really worried about what would happen to these fine treasures in 2013. that is really a colonial attitude towards art and also towards museums. and the fact that africa has made incredible progress in sort of excavating their own history and celebrating it, so that's not the problem. you know, it's a false excuse. you are not only an artist and a sculptor, you're also a poet and a novelist,
4:52 am
and you have said you sculpt what you can't write and write what you can't sculpt. so how do you decide which is which, barbara? that is a very good question. they chuckle i don't know how i do that. all i know is that for a very long time, i kept the two professions totally apart, and that now at the end of my life, finally there is a kind of conversion, or convergence of literature and sculpture. i have two retrospective sculpture exhibitions on back—to—back and i have my memoir, i always knew. yes. so you've published your memoir, i always knew, which is structured around 30 years of letters to your late beloved mother.
4:53 am
you know, you've been awarded the legion d'honneur france's highest order of merit. what would your mother, vivian may, think if she could see the heights which you've reached and the decorations you've received? my mother had such a kind of... ..wondrous attitude toward me. she often made jokes and said, "i don't know where you came from, barbara, "but i think they exchanged babies in the hospital!" they chuckle i was very lucky to have lived a life of great adventure without ever being wounded by my colour. now, this, i think this isjust dumb luck, because i was in a lot of situations
4:54 am
where something like that would have happened or could have happened, but didn't happen. and so this kind of liberation of not having a brick, not having to face a brick wall made me perhaps brave, which is what my mother wanted me to be. barbara chase—riboud, thank you very much indeed for coming on hardtalk. i was delighted to be here. thank you.
4:55 am
hello. we started november with temperatures above average for the time of year and some very wet and windy weather. we're going to start december with temperatures nudging below average and the weather becoming increasingly settled. why the difference? well, recently it's all been about these areas of low pressure piling in from the atlantic. and this one looks like it's got good intentions to try and do the same thing through tuesday, but it will get the brakes put on it through the middle of the week by that high extending across from the east. it's quite a slow progression for the high. itjust builds gradually day on day, but by the weekend it becomes properly established across us and by then it will tap us into some much colder air. we've seen temperatures across russia recently well below average and that colder air will come across towards scandinavia, then the uk. first thing tuesday, on the chilly side, many of us seeing a patchy frost and some dense patches of fog, which in some areas could linger. we're only going to see very light variable winds across the uk through tuesday.
4:56 am
so, where we get the fog lingering, our temperatures will be pegged back and even where it lifts in some areas, it may stick around as low cloud. these are the best of our temperatures and these are anticipated for areas where we do see the sun coming out and you can see they are lower than we've been seeing recently, we're sliding down that single figure scale. overnight tuesday into wednesday some mist and murk initially, but the wind likely to pick up to the south of the uk through the small hours of wednesday. so, perhaps actually clearer skies to the south first thing wednesday and a little milder. coldest spots on wednesday i think first thing will be across northern and eastern scotland and then through wednesday daytime there's that front towards the west. well, it mayjust manage to get some rain into northern ireland and western scotland through the day, but for the majority it's the high coming to dominate. the winds perhaps up a little on the winds on tuesday, may mean we've got lesser issues in terms of lingering mist and fog, but i think there could be quite a lot of low cloud around. so quite grey, quite gloomy for many. and there's that rain just briefly making its way
4:57 am
into northern ireland and western scotland. because we're going to have a little bit more of a breeze and therefore a slightly milder start to wednesday, temperatures perhaps just nudge up briefly on those figures from tuesday. but as the high continues to build through the end of the week and takes us into the weekend, our wind will pick up, our easterly wind. mist and fog shouldn't be such an issue, but we really will start to drive through that chillier air.
4:59 am
in the 19th century. this is bbc news. this is bbc news. i'm sally bundock with i'm sally bundock with the latest headlines the latest headlines for viewers in the uk for viewers in the uk and around the world. and around the world. a heavy police presence a heavy police presence across cities in china, across cities in china, as authorities tighten security as authorities tighten security to try to suppress the protests to try to suppress the protests taking place against taking place against covid lockdowns. covid lockdowns. shouting. one of the problems in china shouting. one of the problems in china is that nobody knows is that nobody knows when zero—covid will end. when zero—covid will end. a teenager who shot dead a teenager who shot dead ten people in a racist attack ten people in a racist attack in the us city of buffalo in the us city of buffalo pleads guilty pleads guilty to murder charges, to murder charges, meaning he'll be sentenced meaning he'll be sentenced to life in prison. to life in prison. charities in the philippines charities in the philippines say there has been say there has been a sharp increase in the sexual a sharp increase in the sexual exploitation of children online exploitation of children online since the pandemic. since the pandemic. we have a special report. we have a special report.
58 Views
IN COLLECTIONS
BBC News Television Archive Television Archive News Search ServiceUploaded by TV Archive on