Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

The Arts Council of Wales has commissioned an art teacher from Swansea
to make a plaster cast of her buttocks. The £20,000 grant will also
pay for an undisclosed quantity of buttocks belonging to other women.
The teacher, Sue Williams, hopes that her buttock collection will
challenge the complexities of communication between gender and the
North/South divide.

Ms Williams, 53, first learned of these complexities two years ago
when the Council sent her to Bulawayo to paint pictures of half-naked
Welsh prostitutes on the walls of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe.
The experience has informed all of her subsequent work and she hopes
that her new buttock work will give an imprimatur to the possibility
of closure.

'The project is taking on the issues around the bottom and how it is
viewed in contemporary culture and by the male,' she said. 'For
example, it is quite clear the bottom is sacrosanct to the African man
and woman. Their attitude to bottoms became a problem for me, because
I was having my work censored by the African government. It made me
understand a lot more about the culture I was working in. There, the
bottom is treated with respect, whereas over here in the West it's
treated as trivial, sensational and sexual.'

Such 'racial fetishism' can't last long. As soon they are dry, Ms
Williams hopes to head back to Bulawayo with her collection of Welsh
bottoms. The Arts Council of Wales is standing by with a cheque book
and hair-drier. Surely this time the African government will see the
light.

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VB

ObAUE: Any number of Ms Williams' 'texts' describing her 'art'. On
request. If you must. (Cripes, that stuff is disheartening.)