Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art
by Bettina Malcomess
There is a difficulty in reviewing an exhibition catalogue. It is almost as if two reviews are required. The first is the review of the presentation of the exhibition in the catalogue. This considers how the catalogue photographs reproduce the work of the artists as it was displayed, and how the accompanying text, ranging from smaller captions containing basic information like titles, names and dates to longer essays or interviews, frame the exhibition in terms of themes, choices of artists and exhibition spaces. The other is a review of the exhibition itself, its curatorial choices and exclusions, its overall look and feel. On one hand I am reviewing something that I could never have experienced, something that took place in New York at the Museum of African Art and its joint venue, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on the northern edge of Central Park, 'The gateway to Harlem'. On the other hand I am reviewing what Okwui Enwezor in his introductory essay, on history, memory and identity, might call, 'the trace of a place'.
Personal Affects directly addresses this difficulty of the double role of the catalogue review by breaking the catalogue up into two volumes. Volume I focuses on the 'working processes and the artist's own voices, in the form of interviews around the formulation of artists' proposals, and documentation of works in progress.' Volume II 'presents the works as they were realised, installed and finally viewed' in the dual spaces of the Museum and the Cathedral.
In their introduction, the curatorial team, David Brodie, Laurie Ann Farrel, Churchill Madikida, Sophie Perryer and Liese van der Watt, explain the main thematic concerns of the exhibition:
A common thread throughout is the highly personal point of departure of the artist's working methods: the use of the body, personal histories, and the construction of personal mythologies. Moving beyond the confines of identity politics towards subtler investigations of agency and affect, this exhibition looks at works of art as the powerful and poetic expressions that artists leave behind - from the ephemeral nature of performance art to more lasting manifestations. This constant interrogation is what affects our selves: the feelings, emotions, memories and interactions that disrupt our subjectivities recurrently, incessantly.
Following site visits in February 2004, the selected artists submitted proposals for works. Ranging from sculpture to drawing, photography installation, video, performance and dance, what comes across most strongly in the catalogue is an emphasis on process and dialogue, both between artists and curators and between the works and the exhibition space. In terms of the exhibition's intention to 'present art as traces and residues of existence', and to interrogate any idea of a 'fixed' subjectivity, the double catalogue, presents an interesting mediation between artistic process, product and display.
Tracy Murinik's comprehensive interviews that accompany photographs of the artists on site, also provide for the translation of the artwork into the artist's personal terms, without reducing the complexity of the interactions of the personal with the political or historical. The word 'translation' is appropriate here, for while many of the artists produced new work for the show, most adapted or selected from existing works to fit the spaces they had chosen. The small chapels and altars of the cathedrals were also transformed by the installations.
For Jane Alexander's The Sacrifices of God are a troubled spirit the floor in front of the All Souls' Altar enclosure in the Cathedral is covered with red industrial strength rubber gloves. This sea of red, a thread of blood that runs throughout the work, creates a continuity between the space of the work and the altar which it re-frames as part of the work. At the same time the enclosure frames Alexander's selection of nine figures, including her guardian, a figure that recurs in other works, so that they constitute a very particular grouping that is necessarily site-specific.
There is emphasis on the work as site-specific in the second volume, where last minute changes such as Sandile Zulu's sourcing of stones from the Hudson River for his installation, Mustafa Maluka's addition of bunches of plastic flowers found in Chinatown for his tribute to Cape Flats rapper/social activist, Mr Devious, and the construction of a massive screen that obscured the altar for Minnette Vari's video installation are noted.
In an interview, Steven Cohen explains the difficulties in showing his work Chandelier, the video of his 'public intervention by the artist as a living chandelier' in an informal settlement in Johannesburg that coincided (unintentionally) with a forced eviction, outside of a South African context: 'Everything's different� everything's the same, in a different way, because it's another culture, another language... - it's like bringing a whole gang of squatters' reality to New York'. Volume II contains stills from Cohen's on-site performance of Chandelier, juxtaposed with images of Boudoir, an installation of a room containing several props that contextualise the work as South African. Here, Chandelier is projected over a dressing table in the mirror, reflecting Cohen's sensitivity to how audience and space necessarily transform the work, while retaining its original identity: as trace.
Curator of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, Okwui Enwezor's essay, 'The Enigma of the Rainbow Nation - Contemporary South African Art at the Crossroads of History', discusses the intersection of personal memory with historical memorialisation and monumentalisation. While Enwezor's essay stands as a work in its own right, it frames such works as Thando Mama's 1994, a combination of video animation and stills traced from Mama's photographs of himself, painted onto glass panels. Several themes intersect: black masculinity, personal meaning and historical memorialisation. Mama, by playing with the interaction of several media, looks to 'broaden my mode of working, so that I am not stuck in a box!'
I suppose this could be another way of phrasing what Liese van der Watt means in her essay, 'Towards an adversarial aesthetics'. Van der Watt's essay serves as a curatorial assessment of the show. For Van der Watt, 'Personal Afftects' made an attempt to go beyond the limits and failings of 'identity', the 'fiction of subjecthood'. This 'going beyond' affixes to all fixed categories the prefix 'post', so that for Van der Watt we are not only 'post-modern' but 'post-race', 'post-identity' and 'post-black'.
The careful response to the show by American academic Steven Nelson cautiously rehistoricises Van der Watt's argument as an attempt to go beyond the essentialism of 1990's identity politics. Caution is valid. Van der Watt is quick to reduce Churchill Madikida's video work struggles of the heart, a loop of the consumption and regurgitation of mielie pap during a Xhosa initiation ritual, to a 'failing of identity'. Madikida, however, describes his work in terms that indicate a strong sense of identity: 'I can stand up for my beliefs - which I did by participating in those rituals'. At the same time this is the condition for the questioning of identity: 'I grew up with all these mixed identities� [M]y experience is that there is a gap between myself and them'. It is unusual to hear artists speak for themselves in a catalogue, and moreover to locate points of departure between the curatorial discourse that frames the artists' work and what the artists themselves have to say.
As a catalogue, Personal Affects puts into effect the aims of the show: to capture the interaction between the personal and the historical, the political and the mythological. Far from going 'beyond identity', its two volumes present the complex mediation of personal and collective visions, process and product, text and context - as such what often stands out are the gaps between. As such, this catalogue is yet another reframing of the work that was framed by and re-framed the spaces of the cathedral and the museum. Artists selected include both established and younger artists, many adapting previous work to fit the exhibition space and its theme. Between the catalogue and the broader frame of what constitutes South African art at any particular moment, is another striking absence: a black female artistic presence. The catalogue's success in showing the complex interaction of artistic frame and curatorial reframing, opens up a broader question. Perhaps the 'enigma' of post-South Africa is who is 'beyond' the curatorial box?
Bettina Malcomess is a writer and academic living but not working in Cape Town
Personal Affects
Edited by Sophie Perryer
2 vols. Cape Town & New York: Spier & The Museum for African Art, 2004
R325
ISBN 0 945802 42 0
