The many rooms of the Johannesburg Art Gallery devoted to the exhibition generally each contain one set of connected works, or, in the case of stand-alone video works, such as TKO (2000), a smaller antechamber. This arrangement operates well in the layout of the show, since the viewer can travel through it taking in complex and multivalent performance-based pieces documented by photographic prints and video, in their own context. Comparisons between different works, and seeking evidence of strands, themes and developments over time, tends to be an inevitable part of the retrospective approach however.
So it is that I was struck by the directness, subtlety and force of two early text-based works that stand at the entrance to the show: Sticks and Stones from 1998, and Ongetiteld (1999). Both deal in poignant ways with explicit racial, sexual and gender political issues. The former in particular, with the simplicity of a scrolling line of looped text on a video screen, is emotionally affecting and dramatically powerful, with its suggestion of an absent author/performer attesting to the liminality of life as a South African Coloured.
Leaving the particularity and simplicity of this approach behind in her practice however, the next major piece encountered is at the other end of the conceptual scale. The eponymous video work Waiting for God (2005-2011) is a long-form video landscape of a peri-urban park or orchard setting, with an anonymous city in the background. An indistinct figure engages, like Godot’s famous characters in the work referenced in the title, in futile, undirected activity in the midground. The work, shot entirely from a stationary camera, clocks in at a patience-testing 2h 37m. I wondered if anyone viewing it at the gallery had dared the entirety.
One of the better-known works is next, a splendidly arranged sequence of prints and video taking up the whole of one of the stately portrait chambers of the gallery. Lucie’s Fur (2003-4) is a complex, chaotic, lucid and idiosyncratic take on recreating archetypal Western creation myths. The centrepiece of the work is a video performance piece in which the artist fleshes out a carnivalesque central character, based on the first female African hominid, in this new mythos. She does so with the bright costuming, sexual and racial reference, and broad swathes of bawdy slapstick humour, that came to typify her work in many ways through the decade.
The arrangement of large prints of individual characters from the invented world of Lucie’s Fur which frame the video work in the JAG space is an approach seen in the earlier, neighbouring installation, Ciao Bella, from 2001.
The allegorical and faintly scurrilous religious framing is again apparent here, in the restaging of Christ’s Last Supper, that staple of religious painting since antiquity. A fascinating cast of strong women characters fade, zap, walk and declaim their way through a central video triptych in this work, viewable from a down-at-heel period sofa and chairs placed in front of it. There is a blind boxer punching herself, a resurrection of the 'Hottentot Venus' Sarah Baartman, a matronly mother, an erotically suggestive nun, a whore of Babylon… the list goes on. These female archetypes and characters take their place in a last supper that has much in common with the mad hatter’s tea party, with many similar truths contained in these figures and discourse of sex and madness that reveal themselves in this compelling work.
The semi-iconic 2001 print The Kiss is here as well of course, and, while it deserves its reputation as an iconoclastic image for the Western-dominated art establishment, it does not bear closer scrutiny, in my opinion, in the context of the much more complex and layered performance-based works around it. TKO, installed on its own, fares rather better. It is mysterious and compelling, partly in its opposition to the customary garish and brightly lit palette of most of the artist’s other work. The gutturality of the soundtrack adds to the effect of the work as primal and atavistic.
Two more recent video pieces conclude the show, What is it that makes today’s children so different, so appealing? (2005-2007) and The Cockpit (2008). The latter is another chaotic take on the crimes of organised religion, with a shambolic cast of characters eventually putting God on trial, with the sombrely South African suggestion of a necklacing for him as punishment.
Before these final works on the walk through the gallery however, is a large room devoted to an archive of the various influences, research and paraphernalia of the artist’s various performance pieces. In this case the archive, which can easily seem contrived when staged as part of a show, is of considerable interest. A strong didactic element appears in the material, a reminder that allegory, and carnival, while dissolute and anarchic traditionally, are always intended to illuminate.
Rose’s body of work is indeed strongest when it demonstrates this point, that, however idiosyncratic and anarchic it may appear, the carnival always points a finger at authority. The press release accompanying the show makes much of how Rose has taken on the canonical art world, upset the relation between the periphery of the art world and its canonical centres in Europe and the US. While this may be so, the show demonstrates also the artist’s strength at posing direct questions to power more broadly – in discourses of religion, race, sexuality – in a way that is sometimes impenetrably idiosyncratic but always urgent.
