Tate | Online project | Tarzan to Rambo


	The display takes as its starting point Boyce's From Tarzan to Rambo: English Born 'Native' Considers her Relationship to the Constructed/Self Image and her Roots in Reconstruction (1987), in which the artist explores her own sense of self in relation to media images of blackness and whiteness. Tarzan and Rambo are cited as examples of Hollywood's portrayal of white men who, pitched into alien natural environments, rise to supremacy over their surroundings, as if by virtue of the inherent superiority of their colour.
	The writer Richard Dyer has argued that, within Western societies, white people are free to disguise themselves or explore different identities, while black people are more constrained by the roles imposed upon them. In White (1997), Dyer compares our preconceptions about race to the paradoxical nature of the colours black and white themselves. Black, although it appears to have substance, is created by the absence of light; while white appears to be a blank emptiness, but is composed of all the colours of the rainbow. This ability of whiteness to be everything and nothing is one source of its representational power. Many of the works shown here address these themes of transformation or role play. They are particularly centred on the question of exchanging race, or arriving at a point where race is no longer an issue. Sutapa Biswas presents the white male body, thereby questioning our assumptions about the gaze and the relationship between artist and model; while Zoe Leonard uses the life of an imaginary performer to chart a neglected history of black creativity.

Other Works in Focus: Pharmacy | Cold Dark Matter

Panorama developed in association with Utopia Technologies.