I've got you under my skin
by Sean O'Toole
To the soothing accompaniment of songs such as 'Mack the knife' and 'I've got you under my skin', an entranced Johannesburg audience recently watched as artist Kathryn Smith had her left upper arm tattooed. 'Don't start looking for unicorns until you've run out of ponies' reads the completed tattoo.
The public performance, titled Jack in Johannesburg, took place in the rarefied confines of the Johannesburg Art Gallery's Luytens Room. A discreet antechamber filled with numerous canvasses dating back to the nineteenth century, the room includes classic paintings by Sir David Wilkie and Sir Edwin Landseer. It represented the perfect choice of venue for a performance that explicitly celebrated British painter Walter Sickert.
An artist with a predilection for the perverse, Sickert has sometimes been accused of being Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer who haunted London's east end at the end of the Victorian era.
Dressed in period costume, the wall behind her illuminated with images culled from Sickert's oeuvre, Smith's performance purposefully pursued this line of conjecture. On one projector the artist presented extracts of writing and bits of 'evidence' that linked Sickert to the Ripper crimes, either as sole agent, accomplice, or an individual who is on record as being interested in the murders to the point of obsession.
Smith's interest in this forgotten painter might seem rather arcane but it has bearing on much of her personal artistic output to date. Over the years (and now for her Doctorate) Smith has been researching aspects of violence, pathology, excess, crime and death in relation to representation, more specifically as it relation to visual art, photography and the moving image. More simply stated, Smith's work explores the relationship between art and criminal practice, a rather appropriate field of inquiry in contemporary South Africa.
Assisting Smith in realising her project were a whole coterie of documenters and entertainers, including photographer Andrew Meintjes, filmmakers Daron Chatz and Jahmil X.T. Qubeka, as well as the duo of Edith Klug and Johnny Fourie, who provided the faultless musical accompaniment to the event.
"In bringing together aspects of the theatrical and forensic, referencing aspects of Sickert's visual language and mimicking forensic processes of information-gathering and image-making through X-Ray, UV and infrared photography, I intend to produce a body of work that engages directly with criminal aesthetics," commented Smith on her carefully orchestrated performance.
It is not the first time that a South African artist has used the ghettoised art of tattooing to make a creative statement. In 1997, on a fringe exhibit at the time of the second Johannesburg Biennale, artist Werner Vermuelen presented evidence of a tattoo that had been surgically removed from his arm. The performance was said to be an enquiry into ownership, the tattoo originally executed by fellow artist Barend De Wet.
More recently artist Edward Young had a 'sympathy' tattoo when his artwork Bruce Gordon (Concept) was acquired by the National Gallery in Cape Town and bar owner Bruce Gordon had to be tattooed with an indelible acquisition number. Internationally, Spanish artist Santiago Sierra has also incorporated tattoos into his artistic work.
Commenting on the event, David Brodie, a senior curator at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, remarked, "Smith's work represents a perfect synthesis of ideas, implicating works in our collection into her contemporary practice." The Johannesburg Art Gallery owns six works by Sickert, including Pork Pie Hat (1898).
Further commenting on Smith's performance, the climax of Christian Nerf's seven-week residency programme at the public gallery, Brodie also remarked that, "This particular work offers a good example of how a museum space can be used as a laboratory space. It also shows us [the gallery]] using a different language to engage with our audience."
