Diane Victor at the Goodman Gallery
by Michelle Matthews
A friend who was at Wits' University's School of Fine Art told me this story: 'Every year in second year drawing class, lecturer Alan Crump, would take out a drawing Diane Victor had done in her second year and say, "Now if any of you can draw like this, I'll graduate you right now."' Victor, it is generally conceded, could have been as big as William Kentridge, if only her work wasn't so dark. The same friend told me she'd been 'too scared' to go to the opening of this show.
So I was surprised by the flashes of joy, beams of hope, shafts of white space and sparkles of wit in her work. All shining out of the darkness, sure. For example, embossed forms of falling suited people, without a doubt referencing Twin Tower deaths, occur in several works. But if you look closely you see that there are angels reaching out to and even catching some people, and that several of them are not in fact falling, but flying. The artist takes stabs at charm in her Taalatlus, series; pencil drawings on the pages of a language map. But it's the charm of the man you meet at a party, the one who's planning to cut you when you invite him in. The jokes are cruel ones. And all the white space is punched and scratched.
One of the first works you see as you enter is Scavenger, an etching showing the horizontal mirror image of the outline of a shark. Inside the shape of the bottom shark, lies a man. The top shape is filled out like a shark, but for the shadow of a foot in its tail and a row of human teeth under its own sharp ones. A narrow vertical work close by shows a woman, with embossed sperm gathering around her head, clutching a vicious fish to her breast. It's called Keeping Sharks Warm. In another image - part of a diptych called Trojan Inclusions - we see a frightened woman, panties around her ankles, being attacked by a shark.
Men, even when in human form, are mostly represented as threatening. An exception is the other half of the Trojan Inclusions, where a man with his feet bandaged sits limply on a horse, inside which is a woman with a knife stalking him. There's another: the charcoal and pastel drawing, Little Deposition Picture, shows a man, his penis trussed, sitting on a woman's lap - her apron is pinned to her skin with safety pins. Above them several men in suits, and St Sebastian, swing, hanged. A dash of that sinister Victor humour can be seen in the top right corner: a glimpse of an angel copulating with a woman.
Sex and pain are explored most intricately in a set of three embossed etchings. Straitdress is, straightforwardly, a drawing of a Victorian style dress where the corset has been fashioned into a straitjacket. XXX shows a trussed woman in wolf''s clothing. She is wounded (like stigmata, another visual theme in the show, twice in the side), yet her garter belt is seductive. This would be a sexy picture of submission but for one thing: hanging like a black cloud above her is a somehow hideous (though you don't know what it is, exactly) trussed, flaccid, pendulous� organ. The third is called Mercy Seat. Fetishes (as in religious African sculptures) are found in other of the works on this exhibition and here Victor merges the two meanings of the word. The chair, which has a fur seat, nipples along the backrest and straps on the armrests, is decorated with teeth, shells and nails.
Recently, Victor has looked to the USA for inspiration. This is most clear in her entirely embossed triptich We Are All Going Down which features the amusing image of Disney's Snow White as the Virgin Mary. InJust Close Your Eyes... a pensive and prettily etched Dorothy looks sadly at the bodies falling from the sky. Victor is much harsher on her home country. A series of 16 small drawings called Disasters of Peace,depict every horrendous perversion of South Africa: taxi violence; poverty; drought; street kids; woman abuse; Aids; government, court and prison corruption; family murders; hijacking; incestuous child abuse and baby rape. No rainbow here.
The day I visited was mid-morning mid-week and there was an impressive crowd of people milling about the gallery looking at Victor's accomplished, evocative work. The show has been extended. You don't want to miss it.
Closes: February 8
Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood
Tel: 011 788 1113
Fax: 011 788 9887
Email: goodman@iafrica.com
Hours: Tues - Fri 9.30 a.m - 5 p.m, Sat 9.30 a.m - 4 p.m
