Zhané Warren at Art on Paper Gallery
by Michael Smith
Zhané Warren's 'Recurrence' finds her revisiting previous bodies of work. In particular, large sections of work on show, the series hands and faces (both 2006) result from performances of a piece called eatmyheartout, performed in South Africa, Belgium and Scotland over the last year-and-a-half. The piece, which involves a ritualised unwrapping of a bound pack of five sheets of paper, reading of the text contained on each sheet (each of which references five major fears held by the artist, i.e. rape, loss of culture, and, curiously, 'missing the point'), and finally the eating of the paper, is here presented in static terms as prints of digital photographs. However, this is no mere re-presentation of documentary images of a performance one may have missed. The show has a value and a power beyond mere documentation.
Documentary images or footage from a performance piece are all too often like Handicam videos of parties: all democratic lighting and focus and seldom any real, compelling sense of what it was like to physically be there. From Vito Acconci to Janine Antoni, images documenting performance art most often err on the side of cautious courtesy, dictated by generally misguided attempts to offer viewers an objective, uninterpreted account of what happened. The strength of this show is that Warren relinquishes creative control of the documentation of her performances to a variety of photographers. The results are visually startling.
While the gallery release that accompanied the show links these photographic works formally to the work of 17th Century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, they reminded me more of the intense, brooding chiaroscuro of Spanish painters Francisco de Zurbaran and Diego Velasquez. Velasquez's own hand, rendered in Las Meninas (1656) with such masterfully loose strokes, is especially evoked by the blurred images of Warren's hands, half captured as they nervously repeat the parts of the performance.
This power is not simply formal: one gains from these images a real sense of the intimacy and intensity of a performance viewed in real time. The frequently out-of-focus hands, like fugitive, searching passages of light tone in an abstract painting, strongly suggest the lapse between vision and immediate memory. Thus the works go beyond the confines of the performance and begin to reference ideas like memory versus recollection, perception versus sight.
The lengthy series of images (32 in all) shown horizontally across three walls of the gallery reinforce not only the linearity of time (so essential a part of the making and viewing of performance art) but also the intensely repetitive nature of this piece. The photographer's act of remaining trained on the hands for the full duration of the series mirrors Warren's concentration on her predetermined set of tasks. Through their sustained formal similarity, the images come to embody ritual, prizing as it does repetition, continuity and the absence of significant deviation. The action of reading of the phrases, the single verbal element of the performance Warren uses to punctuate the repetition of silent tasks, is only obliquely suggested by static hands holding the paper in a readable position. Thus, a tantalising mystery is maintained, as the photographer refuses to stray from his task and instead allows the viewer to fill in the blanks.
The series faces, taken from a similar performance, explores the act of consuming the paper, essentially the climax of the original performance. The shots of Warren's face in the process of chewing and swallowing are shown in a grid, resisting a repeat of the linear trajectory of hands. Instead, a confusing mass of images and sections of images results, reminiscent of the matter one chews and deconstructs in order to assimilate it.
While the short walk is to link eating and consumption (especially when dealt with by a woman artist) to feminist issues of food, weight and culturally determined body dysmorphia, Warren resists such easy interpretations. When I mentioned US artist Janine Antoni, who answered Acconci's masturbation (Seedbed 1972) with mastication in a work called Gnaw (1992), Warren shifts the conversation away from feminist concerns to focus on more universal fears. She says she is interested in utilizing the act of eating to talk instead about internalising of fears, yet sees the act of eating the pieces of paper with her fears written on them as a triumphant one, symbolic of the personal decision to conquer fear.
Warren is to be commended for deftly exploring the possibilities for interconnection between performance and documentation, resulting in a visually rich show with focus and purpose.
Opens: August 30
Closes: September 22
Art on Paper Gallery
44 Stanley Avenue, Braamfontein Werf (Milpark), Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 726-2234
Email: info@artonpaper.co.za
Hours: Tue - Sat 10am - 5pm
