Penny Siopis at the Goodman Gallery
by Michael Smith
The worldwide resurgence of interest in painting should come as no surprise to anyone possessed of even a basic understanding of the art trade. Painting's resilience is due in no small part to its collectability: when Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, each flag-bearers for installation art on their respective sides of the pond, start mass-producing paintings, then even the most stolid Conceptualist has to admit that something is afoot.
In South Africa, a similar trend is detectable. In the last year and a bit, Gauteng has seen some hot shows by young artists who continue to engage with paint and surface. Amongst these, Mary Wafer and Cobi Labuschagne's show at Wits' Substation, Conrad Botes' stellar outings at Gallery Momo and the JAG and Theresa-Anne Mackintosh's admittedly multifarious show at Franchise, where painting nonetheless remained pivotal, all demonstrate an interest in deriving new personal modes of expression from an allegedly outmoded medium.
Yet it remains for the likes of Penny Siopis, doyen of the Wits University Fine Art department and veteran of innumerable artistic self-reinventions, to convincingly investigate the process of painting with her characteristic fervour and commitment, and to continue to make its use relevant in a South African context.
Siopis' success with painting is certainly not attributable to factors as lowly as saleability. In fact, her affinity for plumbing the awful depths of what South Africans are capable of has, in recent years at least, probably prevented her from securing the kinds of commissions that some of her contemporaries like Walter Oltmann, Clive van den Berg and Karel Nel have enjoyed. It is with this realisation that I wandered around Siopis' latest Jozi show, 'Panics and Passions'.
Siopis' value as a social commentator can hardly be overstated: the Shame series, produced in 2003, comprises 90 hellish little snippets of seduction, sexual abuse and gender violence, SA style. YBA schlock-horror meisters Jake and Dinos Chapman would cower before Siopis' vision of real horror, the kind that happens in your home, committed by people you know. Where Jo Ractliffe's Vlakplaas 2 June 1999: a drive-by shooting (1999) dealt astutely with the banality of apartheid-era evil, Siopis' Shame series explored the messy domesticity of it all in a new South African context, without for a moment losing sight of the gravity of SA's abuse epidemic.
The success of the Shame series lies in Siopis' willingness to straddle the knife-edge between formal beauty, always inherent to her painting process, and frequently abhorrent content. As Sarah Nuttall says in her fine essay The Shock of Beauty: Penny Siopis' Pinky Pinky and Shame Series, ' The ugliness [the Shame paintings] are depicting never belies their intense beauty... ' . This uneasy alliance between form and content bespeaks the fraught relationship the abused often has with the domestic abuser, one that oscillates between love and hatred, desire and revulsion.
The apparently ongoing Pinky Pinky series, dealing as it does with the mythologies around abuse and violence, goes to the heart of the almost pathological level of denial about abuse that has become something of a national pastime. The main point of the Pinky Pinky story is that girls who wear red or pink underwear are vulnerable to this shadowy perv, somehow deserving of his attentions and whatever consequences may befall them as a result. Siopis accurately points to this shift of responsibility onto the victim as the central atrocity around which future understandings of this trauma must revolve. What keeps Siopis' exploration of this very particularly South African myth interesting is her obvious reveling in the physical and metaphoric properties of paint, combined with a sharp eye for found objects that are partially assimilated into the surface of the works.
Much has been written about Siopis' work in general, but one new idea kept nagging at me, an idea borne of my interest in what's happening in painting in Europe, particularly as constructed by Charles Saatchi's mammoth and multi-part 'The Triumph of Painting' show. The idea was one of wonder at the difference between what Siopis is doing and what British painter Cecily Brown is doing. The choice of Brown for comparison with Siopis is not arbitrary. For both, the deliberate position of 'female painter' is as much about subverting a male-dominated paradigm as it is about personal creative exploration. For both, the act of painting seems to be a cathartic, catalytic event where the line between paint and flesh, painting and sexuality is continually stepped over and back.
But the point at which they diverge becomes most telling about Siopis, and about her context. Brown's works deal in a kind of street-smart re-take of established gender politics, reviewing sex and fantasy in art from a female perspective. Brown's oeuvre is, if you will, the logical conclusion of Seventies radical feminism and generations of sex-negative art: paintings by a woman artist so confident in the success of European feminism that they positively ooze enjoyment of sex.
But for Siopis, use of paint, as a language for sexualised flesh, must inescapably deal with the besieging of sexuality by violence in a context where even the most basic tenets of feminism have yet to take root. 'Passions and Panics' is my top show of the year because it resists the rampant commodification of the painting, and accepts its responsibility, in a paraphrase of David Bunn, to record South African trauma.
Opened: November 5
Closed: November 26
Goodman Gallery
163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood
Tel: (011) 788 1113
Fax: (011) 788 9887
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