Sue Williamson: Selected Works
by Sean O'Toole
A comprehensive review of the artist Sue Williamson's work has been long overdue. Its delay has, however, only enriched the breadth and scope of the content of her newly published monograph. Sue Williamson: Selected Works is a studiously designed book that charts an impressive body of work. Spanning an epochal period of communal history, from the forced removals in District Six right through to the Aids debilitated present, Williamson's output is as much a meditation on history as it offers a mediated view of it.
Starting around the early 1980s, with her Last Supper installation, and ending with her recent From the Inside project, the book offers an unflinching record of what the artist has seen. It is Sue Williamson's testimony - to the assault of apartheid, as well as the imprecision and mendacity of master narratives.
The book eschews the imperative to present the artist's works in a clear-cut chronological narrative, which has the benefit of allowing each of the projects illustrated a certain autonomy. Ncithakalo John Ngesi, the subject of For Thirty Years Next To His Heart is thus allowed the same agency as the artist's biography. It is a refreshing approach, one that again reiterates Williamson's distrust of the hierarchical structuring of power in ways that subsume the voiceless.
Two texts narrate the book; the artist's own brief descriptions of the various projects illustrated, as well as a thorough review of Williamson's work by the critic Nic Dawes. I have to admit to being thoughtfully shaken by some of Dawes' insights. "For Thirty Years Next To His Heart is an obscene work," he writes, "or at least a work of obscenity. It has neither the anonymity of example, nor the historical distance of metaphor."
As he is keen to point out, Williamson's work "brooks no resolution, no sacrifice of conscience that would deliver us whole and self-assured to our home, the seat of judgement." Both Dawes' critical tone as well as his basic grasp of the task at hand make his contribution an eminently worthwhile read - as well as a benchmark reference for editors and monograph essayists alike.
One thing that surprised me initially about the book though was its relative economy: it is only 103 pages. However, once I stopped glossing over it superficially and actually engaged with its contents my reservation was quickly set aside. This is a concise history of the last three decades of South African history, but not on a grand scale. It is a subliminal whisper, a record against forgetting.
Sue Williamson: Selected Works, Softcover
Publisher: Double Storey, 2003
ISBN: 1-919930-24-8
Price: R285.00
