Offence and Seduction

vaginal beauty do little to change the way sexism works, the show, or at least the intentions thereof, did make one wonder about the status of the vagina in South African contemporary art. The last time the vagina held such a central position was in the late 90s, when Kaolin Thompson’s Useful Objects, a brown ceramic vagina with a cigarette butt clinging to its edge, caused a furore.

Sure, sexuality is never far from the centre of our on-going bunfight over culture, as this year’s overreaction to The Spear proved. But the vagina itself has been oddly absent from artistic discourse around feminism in recent years. Even 2010’s debacle in which then-Arts and Culture Minister Lulu Xingwana walked out of an exhibition in protest against Zanele Muholi’s work, had less to do with overt vaginal nudity than it did with imaging mutual affection between black lesbians.

And where such overt nudity does occur, it is to different ends: the dalliances artists like Tom Cullberg and Sanell Aggenbach perennially have with pornography seem to be about sensuality and the mechanics of images, rather than confrontation.

The successes of ‘Offence and Seduction’ lay in the moments of deadpan honesty. An extensive installation by Levin titled 30 Years consists of 391 unique ceramics of differently-folded sanitary pads; for the work she asked as many women as would respond how they folded their used pads, generating a seemingly endless number of permutations. The work is not shocking, but is certainly powerful in its challenge to a male audience with selective ideas about female sexuality and reproductivity.

The ceramic facsimiles of the folded pads become vaginal in their own right, small-scale echoes of how Rachel Whiteread’s cast spaces speak about the structures that forged them. Their repetition in Levin’s work sustains their message, and her faithful capturing of their variety makes the work totally engrossing.

Some kind of conjunctive phrase is perhaps needed Clarke’s works mostly revolve around a series of labial images fashioned into the sides of toilet roles. The works have an undertone of abjection similar to Levin’s but somehow seem less successful. The exact connection between the medium and what Clarke is trying to communicate seems to have somehow been flushed away. Nonetheless, their quiet rendering in soft grayscale photographs delivers some moments of real beauty, which accords with the stated intentions of the exhibition.

The show, however, stops short of any real revelations about how to recuperate the status of the vagina and its image within a shockingly patriarchal national climate. But it is refreshing to see a commercial gallery take such a forthright stance with this show.