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How to cite this thesis
Surname, Initial(s). (2012) Title of the thesis or dissertation. PhD. (Chemistry)/ M.Sc. (Physics)/ M.A. (Philosophy)/M.Com. (Finance) etc. [Unpublished]: University of Johannesburg. Retrieved from: https://ujcontent.uj.ac.za/vital/access/manager/Index?site_name=Research%20Output (Accessed: Date). REPRESENTATIONS OF DOMESTIC WORKERS IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICAN ART PRACTICE
A full thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of
DOCTOR OF LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY
In the FACULTY OF HUMANITIES At the UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG
by
IRENE ENSLÉ BRONNER
Student No. 201338351
January 2016
Supervisor: Professor Brenda Schmahmann Co-supervisor: Dr Stephen Sparks
Abstract
In this study, I analyse selected examples of South African art practice that represent black female domestic workers, focusing on works of portraiture and performance produced in the post-apartheid years. I argue that this liminal figure is often fetishised or positioned as uncanny because the trope of the domestic worker or servant is a site for the interpellation of self and other and family and nation, serving both material and ideological ends.
A domestic worker in her employer’s home and family circle, and the reproduction of labour that she facilitates and the child-care that she provides, stirs up layers of memories and emotions that speak to historical and structural traumas that constitute South African subjectivities. Post-apartheid culture continues to seek language to express the consequences of migration, urbanisation, racialised and class-based separations and inequalities, community fragmentation and new supportive networks, lost and new opportunities, petty power manipulations, and emotions such as love, anger, resentment, loneliness, anxiety and fear. The art-makers of multivariate backgrounds whom I have selected have sought to facilitate visual rapprochements across these lines of socialised difference, reflecting critically on issues arising from the processes and consequences of representation in their own practice. Informed by feminist analyses of representation, I draw on a socio-historical methodology as well as psychoanalytic work to examine various rhetorical, textual and pictorial elements. These interpretative tools allow me to coalesce a hermeneutics that explores not only the socio-historical context for institutionalised, paid domestic labour, indicating why it is such a potent issue in South Africa, but also why the figure of the ‘servant’ recurs as an archetype in cultural narratives.
ii Declaration of Originality
I declare that the work contained in this thesis is my own original writing. Sources referred to in the creation of this thesis have been appropriately acknowledged by explicit references. Other assistance received has been acknowledged. I have not knowingly copied or used the words or ideas of others without such acknowledgement. This thesis is being submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for Doctor of Literature and Philosophy (D.Litt et Phil) at the University of Johannesburg. This work has not previously been submitted to any other university or institution for examination.
Part of this research has been published as Irene Bronner, 2015, ‘Slow Rhythm with Nomsa Dhlamini in Steven Cohen’s Cradle of Humankind’ in de arte (92), pp. 33 – 48.
………………………………………………..
Irene Enslé Bronner January 2016, Melville, Johannesburg.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………….…... vi List of Illustrations …………………………………………………...………… vii
INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………...……. 1 Scope of, background and approach to the study …………………………..... 2 Subject of the study …………………………………………………………..… 5 Original contribution ………………………………………………………..… 14 Chapter outline ………………………………………………………………... 16
CHAPTER ONE: RE-MEMBERING ‘NANNIES’ AND CHILDREN IN PENNY SIOPIS’S TULA TULA (1994) …………….………….………...... 25 Introduction ………………………………………………………………….…. 25 The ‘Nanny’ in South Africa ………………………………………………...… 30 Tula Tula: Transforming photographs to examine memories ………………. 36 Tula Tula: Reversing colour in photocopies to represent psychic loss ….…... 44 Tula Tula: When painting over photocopies is an act of mourning ………..... 49 Tula Tula: The Frame as commemorative fetish and traumatic wound …..... 55 The Baby and the Bathwater: Representing motherhoods ………………….... 60 Maids: Developing non-mimetic representations of domestic workers ……... 67 Tula Tula: When colour generates subjective connection ………………….... 79 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………...... 83
CHAPTER TWO: DOMESTIC WORKERS MARKING LANDSCAPE IN JANE ALEXANDER’S PASTORAL SCENE (1995) …..………………… 85 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. 85 Situating the African pastoral ………………………………………………… 89 Female servants as boundary markers in colonial space ……………………. 99 Labour in the pastoral landscape ………………………………………....….. 106 Pastoral Scene: The Bench that landmarks separation …..………………..... 115 Pastoral Scene: The Madonna, the Worker and the Widow ………………... 122 – The Pastoral Madonna ……………………………………………………… 122 – The Pastoral Worker ………………………………………………..………. 128 – The Pastoral Widow ……………………………………………………..….. 133 Pastoral Scene: The bitch as witness to dispossession ………………..……... 134 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………..……. 140
iv CHAPTER THREE: QUEERING ‘MAIDS’ AND ‘MADAMS’ IN ZANELE MUHOLI’S ‘MASSA’ AND MINA(H) (2008) .……………….…... 142 Introduction ………………………………………………………………...….. 142 Querying normativity with sexual expression …………………………...…... 149 Asserting presence in photographic portraits of domestic workers …...…… 159 Faces and Phases: Muholi’s LGBTI* archival project ………………...……. 168 ‘Massa’ and Mina(h): Queering ‘maid’ and ‘madam’ ………………...…….. 179 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………...……. 191
CHAPTER FOUR: TRAUMATIC RHYTHMS IN STEVEN COHEN’S CRADLE OF HUMANKIND (2012) ……………....….. 194 Introduction ………………………………………………………………....….. 194 Fetishising the trope of the domestic worker …………………………....…… 196 “Working with you, for you?”: Nomsa Dhlamini in Steven Cohen’s work … 198 Sarah Baartman as a contemporary symbol ………………………………..... 203 Cohen’s self-othering, when extended to others …………………………...…. 205 Baubo as an alternative symbol to Sarah Baartman …………………...…..... 211 The slow time of mourning and presence ………………………………...…... 219 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………...……. 225
CHAPTER FIVE: UNCANNY DOUBLES IN ITERATIONS OF MARY SIBANDE’S ‘SOPHIE’ (2007 – 2013) …...…. 229 Introduction …………………………………………………………………..... 229 Development of ‘Sophie’ …………………………………………………....…. 232 Deploying excess as bloated sartorial fantasy ……………………………...... 242 Development of the domestic-worker uniform …………………………....…. 253 Uniforms in the Women’s Manyano ………………………………….....……. 259 Re-working domestic-worker uniforms ……………………………...….….… 262 Circulating ‘blackness’ on the surface of the skin …………………….……... 269 Uncanny doubling in life casts and death masks …………………………...... 276 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………...….. 284
CONCLUSION ……………………...…………………………………...... ….... 286
BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………………………………...…...….. 295
ILLUSTRATIONS ……………………………………..……...…..Volume attached
v
Acknowledgements
The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation (NRF) from 2012 – 2014 towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed, and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the NRF.
I extend my appreciation to Prof. Natasha Erland, Dr. Stephen Sparks, the Department of Historical Studies and the Faculty of Humanities for providing a way for me to do a doctorate in Art History. I thank everyone who attends FADA research seminars for the input and encouragement they gave me.
I am grateful to Dr. John Gillam and Ms. Liezel Strydom at Postgraduate Funding for the solicitude and advice they offered me as a student at Rhodes University.
With love, gratitude and humility, I thank the people and the practices that have quietened, opened, nurtured, challenged and strengthened me during these years: The dance. Yoga. Freya, my cat, and Brinjil, my rabbit. My dear friends and mentors; here I acknowledge particularly Milton Milaras, efharistó, who also helped me format the Illustration volume. Elizabeth Bronner, my mother (who also spent hours formatting the Illustrations). And those who are not here but whose space I hold.
Finally, I thank Prof. Brenda Schmahmann, for her perspicacity, integrity, tenacity, generosity and kindness. She has been my supervisor and the navigator of my vicissitudes. She believed in me until I eventually decided to try believing in myself.
vi List of Illustrations
Chapter One
Figure 1.1: Penny Siopis. Tula Tula I. (1994). Photocopy, photograph, steel wool, found object and oil on board. 111 x 67 cm. Artist’s collection. (Reproduction provided by Penny Siopis).
Figure 1.2: Ernest Cole. Untitled (Black ‘nanny’ and white child). (1967). Photograph. Dimensions unknown. The Ernest Cole Family Trust/Hasseblad Foundation. (Reproduction taken from Cole, E. 1967. House of Bondage. London: Random House, p. 73).
Figure 1.3: David Goldblatt. The farmer’s son with his nursemaid, on the farm Heimweeberg, near Nietverdiend in the Marico Bushveld (1964) from Some Afrikaners Photographed. 1975. Photograph. Dimensions unknown. (Reproduction provided by David Goldblatt).
Figure 1.4: Unknown. Adele Gould and Nancy Sampson. Photograph. Dimensions unknown. Gould family collection. (Reproduction taken from http://adelegould.com/apartheid-in-south- africa).
Figure 1.5: Maureen de Jager. With Grieta in the garden from Old Photographs. (2008). Photocopy transfer and rust on steel. 100 x 100 cm. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from M. De Jager. 2008. In Sepia. Grahamstown: Maureen De Jager, p. 10).
Figure 1.6: Penny Siopis. Foreign Affairs (Arutma). (1994). Photocopies, convex mirror, perspex letters and oil on board. 100.5 cm x 246.0 cm. Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (W.I.S.E.R.). (Reproduction provided by B. Schmahmann, scanned from slide in Wits Art Library).
Figure 1.7: The Editors. ‘Front Page Comment’ in The Weekly Mail (20 – 26 June 1986). (Reproduction taken from The Weekly Mail, 20 – 26 June 1986, p.1).
Figure 1.8: Unknown. Untitled (A black attendant, with his face obliterated, holding a white child in a studio portrait). c.1870. Tintype photograph. Gregory Fried Collection. (Reproduction taken from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/mar/28/mirror-race-america- slavery-19th-century-pictures).
Figure 1.9: Robert Cruikshank. High Life Below Stairs. c.1820. Hand-coloured graphic etching with aquatint. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. (Reproduction taken from http://imageserver.library.yale.edu/digcoll:976889/1500.jpe).
Figure 1.10: Unknown. Terrorism Memorial. (1988, rededication 1994). Stainless steel and stone. Corner Lilian Ngoyi and Madiba Streets, Pretoria, South Africa. (Reproduction taken from Marschall, S. 2010. Landscape of Memory: Commemorative Monuments, memorials and public statuary in post-apartheid South Africa. Leiden: Brill, p. 153).
Figure 1.11: Penny Siopis. The Baby and the Bathwater. (1992). Mixed media on board. 250 x 800 cm. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction provided by Penny Siopis).
vii Figures 1.12 and 1.13: Penny Siopis. The Baby and the Bathwater (details). (1992). Mixed media on board. 250 x 800 cm. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from Williamson, S. & Jamal, A. 1996. South Africa: The Future present. Cape Town: David Philip, p. 131).
Figure 1.14: Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Documentation III. Analysed Markings and Diary-perspective Scheme (detail). (1975). 1 of 13 Perspex units, white card, sugar paper and crayon. 35.5 x 28.0 cm each. Tate Modern Collection, London, United Kingdom. (Reproduction taken from http://www.marykellyartist.com/post_partum_document.html).
Figure 1.15: Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Documentation VI. Pre-writing Alphabet, Exergue and Diary (detail). (1978). 1 of 18 Perspex units, white card, resin and slate. 20 x 255 cm each. Arts Council of Great Britain Collection. (Reproduction taken from http://www.marykellyartist.com/post_partum_document.html).
Figure 1.16: Angela Buckland. Where’s Nikki?. (2002) Lambda prints. 7 panels, each 4 m high. (Reproduction provided by Angela Buckland).
Figure 1.17: Angela Buckland. Where’s Nikki? (Detail panel 6, featuring Buyi Sithole). (2002). Lambda print. 4 m high. (Reproduction provided by Angela Buckland).
Figure 1.18: Penny Siopis. Maids. (1993). Maids’ uniforms, cake decorations and rice paper with laser print. 144 x 123 cm. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from Williamson, S. & Jamal, A. 1996. South Africa: The Future present. Cape Town: David Philip, p. 134).
Figure 1.19: Penny Siopis. Table Two from Cake Paintings. (1983). Oil on canvas. 152 x 152 cm. (Reproduction taken from http://www.kznsagallery.co.za/exhibitionimages/red_the_ iconography_of_colour_in_the_work_of_penny_siopis.htm).
Figure 1.20: Angela Buckland. Now and Then…. (2004). Photograph composite. Dimensions unknown. Collection of the artist. (Image provided by Angela Buckland).
Figure 1.21: Penny Siopis. Forgotten Family I from Forgotten Families. (1996). 95 x 156 cm. Mixed media. South African Constitutional Court collection. (Reproduction taken from https://ccac.org.za/penny-siopis-forgotten-family-1-1996-0017/).
Figure 1.22: South African Post Office. ZA027.09 - Penny Siopis - Forgotten Family 1 (1996) from Constitution Hill Series. (Issued 5 June 2009). Postage sheet 10 x 10 designs. 5.20 x 3.57 cm each. (Reproduction taken from http://www.wnsstamps.post/stamps/2009/ZA/ZA027.09.jpg).
Chapter Two
Figure 2.1: Jane Alexander. Pastoral Scene. (1995). Plaster, oil paint, clothing, wood, aluminium and velvet. 155 x 209 x 186 cm. Gauteng Legislature Collection. Photo: Kathleen Grundlingh. (Reproduction taken from Alexander, J and DaimlerChrysler. 2002. Jane Alexander: DaimlerChrysler Award for South African sculpture. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz and New York, N.Y.: Distributed Art Publishers, p. 60).
Figure 2.2: Titian (formerly attributed to Giorgione). Pastoral Concert. (1510). Oil on canvas. 110 x 138 cm. The Louvre Museum, Paris, France. (Reproduction taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoral_Concert).
viii
Figure 2.3: Hugo Naudé. On the Steps, Groote Schuur. (circa early 20th Century). Oil on board. 18.5 x 22.5 cm. Private collection. (Reproduction taken from http://stevenson.info/exhibitions/buscat/item11.htm).
Figure 2.4: Unknown. Raw Material and Civilization (photographs on facing pages) in History of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of South Africa. (1906). Plates in book. (Reproduction taken from Whiteside, Reverend J. 1906. History of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in South Africa. London: Elliot Stock and Cape Town: Juta & Co, pp. 296 & 297).
Figure 2.5: Terry Allen. Three Young Nama Women from Maltahöhe, Namibia. (2012). Photograph. Dimensions unknown. (Reproduction taken from http://kwekudee-tripdownmemorylane.blogspot.co.za/2013/06/the-khoikhoi-hottentots-first- people-of.html).
Figure 2.6: Shelley Kjonstad. Abegail Mbokazi. (date unknown). Photograph. Dimensions unknown. (Reproduction taken from Comley, R, Hallett, G and Ntsoma, N (eds.). 2006. Women by Women: 50 Years of Women’s photography in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p.122).
Figure 2.7: Dorothy Kay. Cookie, Annie Mavata. (1956). Oil on canvas. 69 x 57 cm. Pretoria Art Museum. (Reproduction taken from http://artvalue.co.za/kay-dorothy-moss/).
Figure 2.8: Dorothy Kay. Cookie, Annie Mavata (detail). (1956). Oil on canvas. 69 x 57 cm. Pretoria Art Museum. (Reproduction taken from http://artvalue.co.za/kay-dorothy-moss/).
Figure 2.9: Dorothy Kay. Untitled (Annie Mavata). (1956). Photograph. Dimensions unknown. Source for Cookie, Annie Mavata. (Reproduction taken from Reynolds, M. 1989. ’Everything You do is a portrait of yourself’ Dorothy Kay: A Biography. Rosebank, South Africa: Alec Marjorie Reynolds, p.313).
Figure 2.10: Marie-Guillemine Benoist. Portrait of a Negress. (1800). Oil on canvas. 65 × 81 cm. Louvre Museum, Paris, France. (Reproduction taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marie-Guillemine_Benoist__portrait_d%27une _negresse.jpg).
Figure 2.11: Marie-Guillemine Benoist. Portrait of a Negress (detail). (1800). Oil on canvas. 65 × 81 cm. Louvre Museum, Paris, France. (Reproduction taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marie-Guillemine_Benoist_- _portrait_d%27une_negresse.jpg).
Figure 2.12: Beshlie Pool. Untitled (South African bench with stencil ‘EUROPEANS ONLY’). (2010). Photograph. Photographed display in Apartheid Museum, Soweto. (Reproduction taken from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/502010689683339964/).
Figure 2.13: Peter Magubane. Untitled (Girl and ‘nanny’ on a ‘Europeans Only’ bench in Johannesburg, South Africa). (1956). Photograph. (Reproduction taken from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/12/peter-magubane-best-photograph-white- girl-black-maid-apartheid-south-africa?utm_source=esp&utm_medium= Email&utm _campaign=Art+Weekly+main&utm_term=137278&subid=354417&CMP=EMCARTEML6852 ).
ix
Figure 2.14: Unknown (AP photo). Untitled (A white baby with her black ‘nanny’ on ‘nanny’s only’ bench in an all-white park in Johannesburg, South Africa). (1966). Photograph. (Reproduction taken from http://www.citylab.com/politics/2013/12/life-apartheid-era-south- africa/7821/).
Figure 2.15: Jane Alexander. The Municipal Crucifix. (1986) Plaster, oil paint, wood and aluminium. 127 x 200 x 160 cm. Destroyed. Photo: Bob Cnoops. (Reproduction taken from Alexander, J and DaimlerChrysler. 2002. Jane Alexander: DaimlerChrysler Award for South African sculpture. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz and New York, N.Y.: Distributed Art Publishers, p.43).
Figure 2.16: Mark Shapiro (Zapiro). Untitled in Sunday Times. (printed 28 April 2014). Cartoon. (Reproduction taken from http://www.zanews.co.za/cartoons/2014/04/30/when-apartheid-was-in- place).
Figure 2.17: Jane Alexander. Butcher Boys. (1985 – 86). Plaster, bone, horn oil paint, wood. 128.5 x 213.5 x 88.5 cm. National Gallery of Arts, Cape Town, South Africa. (Reproduction taken from http://artthrob.co.za/Artists/Jane-Alexander.aspx).
Figure 2.18: Peter Kennard. Apartheid South Africa. (1974). Photographs and gelatin silver print on paper and gouache. 25 x 21 cm. Tate Modern Collection, London, United Kingdom. (Reproduction taken from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/kennard-apartheid-south-africa- t12473).
Figure 2.19: Jane Alexander. Hit (Poor Walter). (1995). Synthetic clay, oil paint, wood and velvet. 96 x 73.5 x 36 cm. Sandton Civic Gallery Collection, Johannesburg, South Africa. (Reproduction taken from http://artthrob.co.za/08jun/images/as03a.jpg).
Figure 2.20: Jane Alexander. Integration Programme: Man with Wrapped Feet. (1993 – 94). Plaster, clothing, oil paint, glass, leather and wood. 197.5 x 83 cm. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from http://www.legacy- project.org/index.php?page=art_detail_large&artID=443&num=1).
Figure 2.21: Jane Alexander. Black Madonna. (1991). Plaster, oil paint, leather, wood, ammunition box and thorns. 130 cm high. Private collection. Photo: Everard Read Contemporary Gallery. (Reproduction taken from .http://www.artnet.com/magazine/index/robinson/robinson7- 26-7.asp).
Figure 2.22: Jane Alexander. Fragmented Group. (1995). Silver print on fiber-based paper. 22.5 x 18.0 cm. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from Alexander, J and DaimlerChrysler. 2002. Jane Alexander: DaimlerChrysler Award for South African sculpture. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz and New York, N.Y.: Distributed Art Publishers, p.108).
Figure 2.23: Jane Alexander. Beauty in a landscape: Born Aliwal North 19-?, died Boksburg 1992. (1993) Synthetic clay, plastic toys, feathers, synthetic fur, brass, glass and wood. 44.5 x 47.5 x 28.5 cm. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from Alexander, J and DaimlerChrysler. 2002. Jane Alexander: DaimlerChrysler Award for South African sculpture. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz and New York, N.Y.: Distributed Art Publishers, p. 48).
x
Figure 2.24: Unknown. The Three Graces (Roman fresco from Pompeii). c.1st Century A.D. National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy.
Figure 2.26: Jürgen Schadeberg. Untitled (from left: Rahima Moosa, Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, and Sophie Williams at the Women’s March). (October 1955). Photograph. (Reproduction taken from http://www.capechameleon.co.za/printed-issue/issue-2/cover-story/).
Figure 2.27: Keith Dietrich. Mmopeng, Mmamule and Mmathabeng. (1985). Screen print. Dimensions unknown. UNISA Art Collection, Pretoria. (Reproduction taken from http://lsa.unisa.ac.za/news/archive/2004/april/vol3/unisa_art.html).
Figure 2.28: Bill Given. Untitled (Lactating female African wild dog, lycaon pictus, at Mapula Lodge, Botswana). (2009). Photograph. (Reproduction taken from http://thewildsource.com/tws/blog/default.aspx?tag=/african+wild+dog&page=3).
Figure 2.29: Jane Alexander. Infantry with Beast [comprising 27 Figures (2008 – 10) and Beast (2003)]. (2010). Fiberglass, oil paint, cast found shoes and pure wool carpet. 118 x 1200 x 200 cm. (Reproduction taken from http://www.bdlive.co.za/life/entertainment/2014/ 01/23/documentary-realism-contains-the-surreal-fantastical-grotesque).
Figure 2.30: Norman Catherine. Witch Hunt. (1988). Drypoint with watercolour. 25 × 31 cm. Edition of 25. (Reproduction taken from http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/ impressions_from_south_africa/works/witch-hunt-and-warlords).
Chapter Three
Figure 3.1: Zanele Muholi. ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 1. (2008) C-print. 40 x 60 cm. Edition 5 + 2AP. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 3.2: Zanele Muholi. ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 4. (2008) C-print. 40 x 60 cm. Edition 5 + 2AP. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 3.3: Unknown. Capitoline Venus. Copy of Praxiteles’ Cnidian Venus. (4th century B.C.). Height 1.93 m. Capitoline Museums, Rome, Italy. (Reproduction taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitoline_Venus).
Figure 3.4: Praxiteles. Hermes bearing the infant Dionysus. (4th century B.C.). Marble. Height 1.93 m. Capitoline Archaeological Museum of Olympia, Rome, Italy. (Reproduction taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_and_the_Infant_Dionysus).
Figure 3.5: Tiziano Vecelli (Titian). Venere di Urbino (Venus of Urbino). (1538). Oil on canvas. 119.2 cm x 165.5 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy. (Reproduction taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Urbino).
Figure 3.6: Zanele Muholi. Caitlin and I, Boston, USA. (2009). C-print. 33 x 49.5 cm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 3.7: Gustave Courbet. Le Sommeil (The Sleepers). (1866). Oil on canvas. 135 x 200 cm. Petit Palais, Paris, France. (Reproduction taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Sommeil).
xi Figure 3.8: Mickalene Thomas. Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires (Two black women). (2013). Mixed media collage of woodblock, screenprint and digital print. 97.8 × 204.5 cm. Edition of 25. (Reproduction taken from http://museum.cornell.edu/collections/modern-contemporary/mixed- media/sleep-deux-femmes-noires).
Figure 3.9: Zanele Muholi. ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 3. (2008) C-print. 40 x 60 cm. Edition 5 + 2AP. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 3.10: Cartoon in Punch Magazine. 1860s. (Reproduction taken from Huggett, F. 1977. Life below stairs: Domestic servants in England from Victorian times. London: John Murray Publishers, p. 54).
Figure 3.11: Zubeida Vallie. Hadjira ‘Haya’ Isaacs, from the Women’s Portraits Project (1996). Photograph. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from Comley, R, Hallett, G and Ntsoma, N (eds.). 2006. Women by Women: 50 Years of Women’s photography in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p.56).
Figure 3.12: Zubeida Vallie. Myonia Essa, from the Women’s Portraits Project (1996). Photograph. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from Comley, R, Hallett, G and Ntsoma, N (eds.). 2006. Women by Women: 50 Years of Women’s photography in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p.58).
Figure 3.13: Zubeida Vallie. Habiba Adam Rawoot, from the Women’s Portraits Project (1996). Photograph. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from Comley, R, Hallett, G and Ntsoma, N (eds.). 2006. Women by Women: 50 Years of Women’s photography in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p.55).
Figure 3.14: Zubeida Vallie. Sylvia Nomatile Nijili and Daniel Andre Rousseau, from the Women’s Portraits Project (1996). Photograph. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from Comley, R, Hallett, G and Ntsoma, N (eds.). 2006. Women by Women: 50 Years of Women’s photography in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, p. 53).
Figure 3.15: David Goldblatt, Victoria Cobokana, housekeeper, in her employers dining room with her son Sifiso and daughter Onica, Johannesburg, June 1999. Victoria died of AIDS on 13 December 1999, Sifiso died of AIDS on 12 January 2000, Onica died of AIDS in May 2000. (1999). Digital print. 85 x 106 cm. Edition of 6. (Reproduction provided by David Goldblatt).
Figure 3.16: Zanele Muholi. Makho Ntuli, Braamfontein, Johannesburg from Faces and Phases. (2010) Silver gelatin print. 86.5 x 60.5 cm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/faces51.htm).
Figure 3.17: Zanele Muholi. Amanda ‘China’ Nyandeni Yeoville, Johannesburg from Faces and Phases. (2007) Silver gelatin print. 86.5 x 60.5 cm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/faces13.htm).
Figure 3.18: Zanele Muholi. Lerato Marumolwa, Embekweni, Paarl from Faces and Phases. (2009). Silver gelatin print. 86.5 x 60.5 cm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/faces31.htm).
xii Figure 3.19: Zanele Muholi. Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg, 2007 from Being. (2007). Lambda print. 76.5 x 76.5 cm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/being7.htm).
Figure 3.20: Zanele Muholi. Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg, 2007 from Being. (2007). Lambda print. 76.5 x 50.5 cm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/being19.htm).
Figure 3.21: Zanele Muholi. Musa Ngubane and Mabongi Ndlovu, Hillbrow, Johannesburg, 2007 from Being. (2007). Silver gelatin print. 76.5 x 50.5 cm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/being17.htm).
Figure 3.22: Zanele Muholi. Nomonde Mafunda, Key accounts co-ordinator and Tumi Ndweni, Entrepreneur, on the occasion of their civil union marriage, Krugerdorp Home Affairs office, 6 March 2007 from Being.. (2007). Lamba print. 76.5 x 76.5 cm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/being1.htm).
Figure 3.23: Zanele Muholi. Nomsa Mazibuko and Fondo, outside the Hope Unity Metropolitan Community Church, a gay church, during Good Friday. Mayfair, Johannesburg 2007 from Being. (2007). Lamba print. 76.5 x 76.5 cm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/being4.htm).
Figure 3.24: Jean Brundrit. Untitled from Does Your Lifestyle Depress Your Mother?, (1998). Photograph. 10.5 x 15 cm, 1 of 12 photographs in series. (Reproduction taken from http://artthrob.co.za/04mar/images/brundrit09a.jpg).
Figure 3.25: Jean Brundrit. Portrait of a Lesbian Couple in South Africa. (1995). Photographic montage. Dimensions unknown. (Reproduction taken from http://artthrob.co.za/04mar/images/brundrit04a.jpg).
Figure 3.26: Zanele Muholi. Kekeletso Khena, Green Market Square, Cape Town, 2012 from Faces. (2012). Silver gelatin print. 76.5 x 50.5 cm. (Reproduction taken from http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/documenta/faces175.html).
Figure 3.27: Irma Stern. Maid in uniform. (1955). Oil on canvas. 67.5 x 62 cm. Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa (Reproduction taken from http://www.wikiart.org/en/irma- stern/maid-in-uniform-1955).
Figure 3.28: Zanele Muholi. ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 5. (2008) C-print. 40 x 60 cm. Edition 5 + 2AP. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 3.29: Zanele Muholi. Untitled (2006). Lambda print. 410 x 550 mm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/tampon2.htm).
Figure 3.30: Zanele Muholi. Lungile Dladla #2 pointing at the crime scene where she survived a violent hate crime, Swazi section, Daveyton, 2012. (2012). 150 x 230 mm. Edition of 8 + 2AP. (Reproduction taken from http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/muholi/index2012/kwathema7.html).
xiii Figure 3.31: Alice Mann. Thandi Masingwana, Rondebosch, Cape Town, July 2013 from Southern Suburbs (2013). Photograph. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction provided by Alice Mann).
Figure 3.32: Alice Mann. Alice Mann, Rondebosch, Cape Town, July 2013 from Southern Suburbs (2013). Photograph. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction provided by Alice Mann).
Figure 3.33: Alice Mann. Agnes Nozuko, Upper Claremont, Cape Town, June 2013 from Southern Suburbs (2013). Photograph. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction provided by Alice Mann).
Figure 3.34: Alice Mann. Alexander Corder, Upper Claremont, Cape Town, June 2013 from Southern Suburbs (2013). Photograph. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction provided by Alice Mann).
Figure 3.35: Zanele Muholi. ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 6. (2008) C-print. 40 x 60 cm. Edition 5 + 2AP. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 3.36: Alice Mann. Doris Ngwane, Rondebosch, Cape Town, March 2014 from Domestic Bliss (2014). Photograph. Collection of the artist. (Reproduction taken from http://10and5.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Domestic-Bliss-by-Alice-Mann-21.jpg).
Figure 3.37: Édouard Manet. Olympia. (1863), Oil on canvas. 130.5 cm x 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. (Reproduction taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edouard_Manet_-_Olympia).
Figure 3.38: Zanele Muholi. ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 6. (2008) C-print. 40 x 60 cm. Edition 5 + 2AP. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 3.39: Advertisement for ‘Ronuk’ Sanitary Polish. (early 1900s). (Reproduction taken from Huggett, F. 1977. Life below stairs: Domestic servants in England from Victorian times. London: John Murray Publishers, p. 92).
Figure 3.40: Zanele Muholi. Unmeli (The Judge) from Isilumo Siyaluma (2011). Digital print on cotton rag of a digital collage of menstrual blood stains. Reproduction taken from http://hyperheterotopia.com/2014/07/13/zanele-muholi-isilumo-siyaluma ).
Figure 3.41: Zanele Muholi. Abammeli (The Judges) from Isilumo Siyaluma (2011). Patterned menstrual blood on paper, installation view. http://www.temesira.org/zanele-muholi-isilumo- siyaluma-des-mandalas-avec-le-sang-de-ses-lunes
Chapter Four
Figure 4.1: Steven Cohen. The Cradle of Humankind (2011). Performance at Festival d’Avignon, Avignon. Photo: Christophe Raynaude de Lage. (Reproduction provided by Christophe Raynaude de Lage).
Figure 4.2: Steven Cohen. The Cradle of Humankind (2011). Performance at Festival d’Avignon, Avignon. Photo: Christophe Raynaude de Lage. (Reproduction provided by Christophe Raynaude de Lage).
xiv Figure 4.3: Steven Cohen. The Cradle of Humankind (2011). Performance at Festival d’Avignon, Avignon. Photo: Christophe Raynaude de Lage. (Reproduction provided by Christophe Raynaude de Lage).
Figure 4.4: Nelisiwe Xaba. They look at me… and that’s all they think (2006). Performance at FNB Dance Umbrella, Johannesburg. Photo: John Hogg. (Reproduction provided by John Hogg).
Figure 4.5: Steven Cohen. Ugly Girl at the Rugby. (1998). Public Intervention at SA vs Wales, Loftus Versveld Stadium, Pretoria. Photo: John Hodgkiss. (Reproduction taken from http://vweb.isisp.net/[email protected]/stevencohen/public.htm).
Figure 4.6: Steven Cohen in collaboration with Marianne Greber. 2012. Cleaning Time (Vienna)...a shandeh un a charpeh (a shame and a disgrace) Heldenplatz #3. Public intervention at the Heldenplatz, Vienna, 2007. Photo: Mariiane Greber. (Reproduction taken from http://www.mariannegreber.at/).
Figure 4.7: Steven Cohen. Pieces of You. (1998). Digital print on cotton paper, documentation of performance at FNB Vita Dance Umbrella, Wits Theatre, Johannesburg. Image size: 60 x 35 cm. Photo: John Hogg. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 4.8: Steven Cohen. Family (Steven Cohen with Nomsa Dhlamini and Ann Cohen Az di muter shreit oifen kind: 'mamzer' meg men ir gloiben - When a mother shouts at her child: 'bastard' you can believe her). (1999). C-print. 90 x 90 cm. Edition of 5 + 2AP. Photo: John Hodgkiss. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 4.9: Steven Cohen. Maid in South Africa. (2005). Still frame from single-channel digital video, duration 12 min 35 sec. Edition of 5 + 2AP. Director: Steven Cohen, Interpreter: Nomsa Dhlamini, Camera: John Hodgkiss, Edit: John Hodgkiss, Steven Cohen, Costumes: Steven Cohen, Music: Phansi Kwalomhlaba - Miriam Makeba; Fuck Off - Jayne County. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 4.10: Steven Cohen. The Cradle of Humankind. (2011). Panel 1 of triptych, pigment on baryta-coated cotton paper. 112 x 74 cm. Edition of 3 + 2AP. Photo: John Hodgkiss. (Reproduction provided by Stevenson Johannesburg).
Figure 4.11: Penny Siopis. Clay replica of Baubo, one of the objects in the cupboards in Freud’s dining room. (2005). Detail of site-specific installation Three essays on shame. Freud Museum, London. (Reproduction provided by Penny Siopis).
Chapter Five
Figure 5.1: Mary Sibande. Sophie – Elsie, installation at Gallery MOMO (2009). Fiberglass and fabric. Life size. (Reproduction provided by Gallery MOMO).
Figure 5.2: Mary Sibande. Sophie – Merica, installation at Gallery MOMO (2009). Fiberglass and fabric. Life size. (Reproduction provided by Gallery MOMO). . Figure 5.3: Mary Sibande. Sophie – Velucia, installation at Gallery MOMO (2009). Fiberglass, fabric and synthetic hair. Life size. (Reproduction provided by Gallery MOMO).
xv Figure 5.4: Mary Sibande. Sophie – Ntombikayise, installation at Gallery MOMO (2009). Fiberglass and fabric. Life size. (Reproduction provided by Gallery MOMO).
Figure 5.5: Unknown (Scurlock Studio, Washington, D.C.). Madam C. J. Walker. (c.1914). Photograph. Dimensions unknown. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Washington D.C., United States. (Reproduction taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madam_C._J._Walker#/media/File:Madame_CJ_Walker.gif).
Figure 5.6: Mary Sibande. Caught up in the Rapture. (2009). Digital print on cotton rag matte paper. 90 x 60 cm. (Reproduction taken from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/mary-sibande-south-africa-art).
Figure 5.7: Mary Sibande. The Reign. (2010). Mixed media, installation view. Fiberglass, iron and fabric. 330 x 200 cm. Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa. (Reproduction taken from http://www.iziko.org.za/news/entry/recent-additions-2009-2012).
Figure 5.8: Jacques-Louis David. Napoleon Crossing the Alps. (1800). Oil on canvas. 259 x 221 cm. Musée national du Château de Malmaison. (Reproduction taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Crossing_the_Alps#/media/File:David_- _Napoleon_crossing_the_Alps_-_Malmaison1.jpg).
Figure 5.9: Coert Steynberg. Equestrian statue of Louis Botha. (unveiled 1946). Bronze. Dimensions unknown. Photographed 17 December 2005. (Reproduction taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Buildings#/media/File:Uniegebou.jpg).
Figure 5.10: Mary Sibande. Wish you were here, a series of prints from Long Live the Dead Queen, commissioned by Johannesburg Art City Project (2010). Building wrap. Dimensions unknown. Johannesburg. (Reproduction taken from http://www.visi.co.za/the-victorian- postmodern).
Figure 5.11: Mary Sibande. The Reign, a series of prints from Long Live the Dead Queen, commissioned by MAC VAL Musée d’Art Contemporain (2013). Building wrap. Ivry-sur-Seine, Paris. Photo: Marc Domage. (Reproduction taken from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/07/mary-sibande-south-africa-art).
Figure 5.12: Mary Sibande. Lovers in Tango, installation view. (2011). 28 sculptures, fiberglass and fabric. Life size. (Reproduction taken from http://artthrob.co.za/Artbio/Mary_Sibande_by_Anna_Stielau.aspx).
Figure 5.13: Obed Zilwa. Untitled. (The ‘Purple March’, Greenmarket Square, Cape Town, 2 September 1989). (1989). Documentary photograph. (Reproduction taken from http://sthp.saha.org.za/memorial/articles/the_day_the_purple_governed.htm).
Figure 5.14: Mary Sibande. A Terrible Beauty is Born. (2013). Digital Archival Print. 110 x 320 cm. (Reproduction taken from http://www.gallerymomo.com/artwork/a-terrible-beauty-is-born).
Figure 5.15: Mary Sibande. Cry Havoc, installation view. (2014). Fiberglass and fabric. Life size. (Reproduction taken from http://www.gallerymomo.com/artwork/cry-havoc).
xvi Figure 5.16: Mary Sibande. A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1. (2013). Digital archival print of two mixed media sculptures. Each sculpture 1800 x 1200 x 1200 cm. (Reproduction taken from http://www.gallerymomo.com/artwork/a_reversed_retrogress).
Figure 5.17: Francis, S., Dugmore, H. and Rico. Untitled (Madam & Eve cartoon). (1993). (Reproduction taken from Francis, S., Dugmore, H. and Schacherl, R. 1993. The Madam & Eve Collection. Braamfontein: Weekly Mail & Guardian Publishing, p. 23).
Figure 5.18: Mary Sibande. I decline, I refuse to recline. (2010). Digital print on cotton rag matte paper of mixed media sculpture. Sculpture life size. (Reproduction taken from https://ruxandrabp.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/mary-sibande-dressed-to-tell-south-africas-tale/).
Figure 5.19: Unknown. Untitled (Three-piece ‘Duchess’ overall with apron and headscarf, with contrast trim, “royal” in colour). Online advertisement. (Reproduction taken from http://www.azulwear.com/3-piece-overall-royal/).
Figure 5.20: Unknown. Untitled (Morning dress of Edwardian housemaids). (Reproduction taken from Huggett, F. 1977. Life below stairs: Domestic servants in England from Victorian times. London: John Murray Publishers, p. 36).
Figure 5.21: Unknown. Untitled (Black ‘Duchess’ overall with white collar and sleeve trim). Online advertisement. (Reproduction taken from http://www.azulwear.com/products/domestic- garment-black.html).
Figure 5.22: Unknown. Untitled (Afternoon uniform of Edwardian housemaids). (Reproduction taken from Huggett, F. 1977. Life below stairs: Domestic servants in England from Victorian times. London: John Murray Publishers, p. 36).
Figure 5.23: Unknown. Untitled (‘Duchess’ ‘Cindy’ coverall or pinafore). Online advertisement. (Reproduction taken from http://www.azulwear.com/products/cindy-coverall-white.html).
Figure 5.24: Unknown. Untitled (Three-piece ‘Ethnix’ overall with apron and headscarf, with geometric-patterned trim and accessories). Online advertisement. (Reproduction taken from http://shop.pnp.co.za/b2c_pnp/b2c/display/(cpgnum=1&layout=5.1- 6_2_4_86_92_8_3&cquery=overall&uiarea=1&carea=4F3D674E48198570E10080000A050131 &cpgsize=12)/.do?rf=y).
Figure 5.25: J. Leech. Servantgelism (Cartoon in Punch). (Published 1860). (Reproduction taken from Huggett, F. 1977. Life below stairs: Domestic servants in England from Victorian times. London: John Murray Publishers, p. 30).
Figure 5.26: Unknown. Who would be a page? (illustration in Cupid and Crinoline). (Published 1858). Line drawing. (Reproduction taken from Huggett, F. 1977. Life below stairs: Domestic servants in England from Victorian times. London: John Murray Publishers, p. 36).
Figure 5.27: Henri Hubert van Kol. Dienstmeid Willemstad. (1904). Photograph. Dimensions unknown. Collection of Naar de Antillen en Venezuela, door H. van Kol, Leiden. (Reproduction taken from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-e835-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99).
xvii Figure 5.28: Unknown (for the Methodist Church of Southern Africa). Untitled (Meeting of members of the Women’s Manyano, wearing Manyano uniforms). (Date unknown). Documentary photograph. (Reproduction taken from http://www.methodist.org.za/organisations/womens- manyano).
Figure 5.29: Thembeka Qangule. Pages Series: Domestic Work. (2002). Mixed media. Dimensions unknown. (Reproduction taken from Perryer, S. 2004. 10 Years, 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa. Cape Town: Bell Roberts Publishing, p. 304).
Figure 5.30: Marlene Dumas. Martha – Die Bediende. (1984). Oil on canvas. 130 x 111 cm. Collection of Marliz Frencken and Hans Liberg, on long-term loan to Centraal Museum, Utrecht. (Reproduction taken from http://www.marlenedumas.nl/wp-content/uploads/Exhibited- works_The_Image_as_Burden_SM_2014-2015.pdf).
Figure 5.31: Marlene Dumas. Martha – Ouma. (1984). Oil on canvas. 130 x 111 cm. Private collection, The Netherlands. (Reproduction taken from http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/marlene_dumas).
Figure 5.32: Marlene Dumas. Martha – Sigmund’s Wife. (1984). Oil on canvas. 130 x 111 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (Reproduction taken from http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/artwork/6987-martha-sigmund-s-wife).
Figure 5.33: Marlene Dumas. Martha – Die Bediende (detail). (1984). Oil on canvas. 130 x 111 cm. Collection of Marliz Frencken and Hans Liberg, on long-term loan to Centraal Museum, Utrecht.(Reproduction taken from http://www.marlenedumas.nl/wp-content/uploads/Exhibited- works_The_Image_as_Burden_SM_2014-2015.pdf).
Figure 5.34: Mary Sibande. Introspection, installation view (2014). Fiberglass and fabric. Life size. (Reproduction taken from http://geriljakurating.tumblr.com/post/ 123626293049/introspection-the-purple-shall-govern-mary).
Figure 5.35: Mary Sibande. Introspection (detail), installation view (2014). Fiberglass and fabric. Life size. (Reproduction taken from http://www.gallerymomo.com/artwork/introspection).
xviii INTRODUCTION
The extent to and the manner in which domestic work and the relationship between domestic workers, domestic employers and their respective families surface in the public domain in contemporary South Africa, suggests that domestic work is deeply inscribed with social meanings which are powerful in the present. Moreover, the institution of domestic work seems to have a special quality that allows it to carry and encapsulate something of the apartheid moral order that goes beyond the actual practice (Du Plessis 2011: 48).
In an article published in the South African Review of Sociology, Irma du Plessis investigates the connections between domestic labour as a contemporary social practice and a central feature of apartheid ideology. She concludes that this practice presents “a powerful and affective metaphoric and symbolic load in post-apartheid South Africa” (Du
Plessis 2011: 45). I argue in this study that South African art-makers in the post-apartheid period have been drawn to depicting domestic workers because they have felt compelled to explore these deeply inscribed social meanings that cohere around experiences and understandings of labour, family and intimacy that shape everyday relationships today.
Works depicting black women as domestic workers in private households have noticeably increased in number since the end of apartheid. In this study, I contend that images and objects of this type may be viewed as interrogations of conventions pertaining to the representation of domestic workers as well as the naturalisation of the discursive and social frameworks in which such art is produced. I demonstrate how these works may be seen to reflect on the imbalanced power relations that exist in South African society and, specifically, with how the legacy of apartheid affects experiences and identities in
1 domestic spheres and personal relationships. I explore how this concern may be understood in light of a tendency of South African art-makers in the post-apartheid period to be drawn to depicting experiences in the intimate spaces of family and home, to mourn material and psychological losses and to tend psychological wounds, to explore how subjectivities are socialised, and to affirm non-normative relationship patterns. I also examine how art-makers reflect critically on their own involvement in the process and consequences of making the works and the resulting implications for the artist-subject relationship in depictions of domestic workers.
Scope of, background and approach to the study
This is a qualitative, image-based study that provides close readings of selected works of art. My five case studies include paintings, sculpture, mixed-media work and photography and have been chosen because they both prompted and allowed me the opportunity to explore a variety of issues cohering around representations of domestic workers. The works on which I focus are those produced by South African art-makers from 1993 to 2013, but some others – including a few examples from outside South
Africa – are drawn into my study to explore the traditions and histories to which contemporary art-makers have responded. Other visual material that I use for contextualisation includes published images from advertisements, cartoons and documentary photography. This material is selectively used to accentuate details arising from the principal works under discussion.
2 In these circumstances, I use the art historical technique of iconographical analysis
(where one focuses on identifying the meaning of subject matter or specific motifs, normally by considering historical precedents and sources). But my readings are also informed by psychoanalysis, queer and postcolonial cultural theory, and principally by materialist feminist theory which, while employing iconographic analysis, usually seeks to avoid, as Maintz and Pollock (2000: 3) phrase it, “the traditions of iconographical study of work and its images, in which the image is taken to be a more or less transparent carrier of representation”. The authors refer here to the fact that iconographical surveys of thematised work can suggest that work is a human constant and that changes in representation serve merely as external indexes of social change (Mainz and Pollock
2000: 3). It is for this reason that I approach this study through a series of case studies that are historically situated, specific to experience but also theoretically informed.
Similarly, while focusing primarily on work by female artists, I am not advocating a naïve essentialism that asserts a common bond between women on the basis of gender, which thereby ignores the complex intersections of other experiences and affinities that constitute subjectivity.
The time period of my analysis begins in 1993 with the end of South Africa’s transitional government, continues into 1994 with the country’s first democratic elections and the assumption of the presidency by Nelson Mandela. These years saw President Mandela and the then-Archbishop Desmond Tutu introduce the rhetoric of nation-building and the
‘Rainbow Nation’ as the country sought to acknowledge and work through traumas and traumatic legacies from the years of apartheid rule. Many failures of these ideals were
3 gradually experienced during Thabo Mbeki’s presidency from 1999 to 2008 where continuing and deepening socio-economic divides, xenophobic attacks on other African nationals living in South Africa, as well as social crises like the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the Mbeki administration’s failure to respond coherently and in timely fashion to protect the most vulnerable members of society from the pandemic and its consequences, has left many South Africans disillusioned. My study also encompasses the years of Jacob
Zuma’s presidency from 2009 to the present day, where South Africa has been exposed to a greater degree of ethnic nationalist rhetoric, and a promotion of patriarchal heteronormative African conservatism. The urgent need for social and economic transformation, and these in a water-scarce country, has given rise to polemical working- class opposition to the Zuma administration, while an emergent urban black middle class extends its influence. These are some of the issues that to date have shaped South
Africa’s culture since the end of apartheid rule. I have selected my five case studies because the five art-makers – Penny Siopis, Jane Alexander, Zanele Muholi, Steven
Cohen and Mary Sibande – have each, in their own ways and with their own emphases, responded to socio-economic and cultural issues that I have identified as crucial to the representation of domestic workers.
In this study, therefore, I bring together selected works produced post-apartheid that depict domestic workers. My critical analysis examines them in relation to the tropes and conventions that they both stem from and subvert. In doing so, I provide an integrated theoretical framework with which to consider the representation of domestic workers in
South Africa.
4 Subject of the study
The high numbers of migrant black women working in white suburban homes was a highly visible feature of life in South Africa during apartheid. In the 1930s and 1940s, women began migrating en masse (Phillips & James 2014: 427) and from the middle of the twentieth century, influx control laws, pass laws and few educational opportunities served, as Cock (1980a: 37) says, to “trap” women in unregulated employment, usually away from their own families, with no job or housing security and in isolated and poor working and live-in conditions. While migrant black men were channelled into employment in the mining industries, domestic labour became the feminised and low- status sector that arguably it today remains (Ntombela 2012: 132). While comprehensive labour legislation1 in South Africa is intended to improve working conditions and has had some significant impact (such as in prohibiting summary dismissal, and thereby providing some work security), the personal and intimate nature of domestic work can mean that informal mechanisms for negotiating working conditions based upon relationship-management with their employers are often relied upon by domestic workers, which can afford them some agency. Equally, working for several employers may provide a worker with the agency to leave unsatisfactory employment. Domestic workers often have dual-care positions, in that they provide childcare and sometime surrogate-mothering to the children of their employers while living apart from their own
1 A new minimum wage for domestic workers was brought into law in December 2014, stating that those who work more than 27 hours a week should earn a monthly wage of between R 1812.57 and R 2065.47. A living wage for a domestic worker with three dependents, calculated by a domestic-wage calculator (created by data-gathering company Code4SA), was determined to be R 5056 per month, which is double the new sectoral minimum wage. Factors that contribute include the number of dependents in the household, transport costs, healthcare, housing and education (Mnthali 2015).
5 children and families. Domestic workers may also clean, cook, do laundry, iron, care for the elderly and shop for household goods. While domestic workers today are increasingly likely to ‘live out’ rather than on the property of their employers, living-in is still a common practice. The political economy of reproductive labour is a contributing factor to wider social implications brought about by community and family fragmentation.
Sociological and historical studies by Jacklyn Cock (1980a, 1980b, 1989), Deborah
Gaitskell et al (1983), Belinda Bozzoli and Mmantho Nkotsoe (1991), Elizabeth Delport
(1994), Alison King (2007), Xoliswa Dilata (2008), Rebekah Lee (2009), Shireen Ally
(2010) and Rebecca Ginsberg (2011) have been invaluable in providing me with a background to issues concerning women employed as domestic workers in South Africa, to the development of the domestic labour sector, and to the micro-politics and daily lived experiences of women working in and traversing the intimacies of and relationships in the employer’s home.2 I use these resources to contextualise changing experience and concerns in light of the representations of subjectivities. They also provide access on a variety of issues to the voices, opinions and perspectives of women employed as domestic workers which, where appropriate, I have incorporated into my discussion.
While my study focuses on artworks and situating these within the concerns of the art- maker, and thus in short on the representation of domestic workers and domestic labour within the visual domain as well as the voice of the art-maker, I have not wished to replicate in my analysis a silencing of what on the whole remains the marginalised
2 There has not always been scope to explore all of these complex issues. For instance Dilata’s research into the dynamics of black employer-black employee relationships in South Africa’s post-apartheid black middle-class households reveals dynamics different to those of white employer-black employee relationships (Dilata 2008), but this is an issue that has not to date to my knowledge been explored by art practitioners.
6 majority. It has not been my intention to be the authorial voice recreated by bell hooks when she says:
I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own (hooks 1990: 241).
This is not the intention of the art-makers whose work I examine either.
Contemporary South African works of art depicting domestic workers are noteworthy in that they appear to differ from ways in which domestic workers, or servants more generally, in other countries are and have been represented. A ‘loyalty portrait’ is how historian Alison Light (2003) characterises the majority of British portraits where servants are represented as the principal subjects. Usually a commemoration of a long- term employee, commissioned by a wealthy individual or institution, or with a relationship to the artist, motivated by affection or esteem, such works serve, either intentionally or inadvertently, to uphold the icon of the devoted servant and to produce, maintain and legitimise the existing social order. Feudal connotations of a ‘faithful retainer’ may imbue the work, due to the imbalanced power relations that historically inform this type of portrait, where portraits are commissioned by those who can afford to pay for them and who implicitly thus wish to own them; the overriding motivation therefore is the affirmation of the value of the sitter to the commissioner and/or to the artist. On the contrary, recent South African works of art may be said to be concerned not merely to represent domestic workers per se, but also to represent domestic workers as
7 the “subjects of representation” (Nelson 2010: 12). This is because domestic service is so pervasive in South Africa that there are few people who are not directly affected by this labour sector. As Mary Sibande observes, if people do not have a mother or an aunt who was employed as a domestic worker then they probably remember a domestic worker from their childhood (Sibande in Meekison, 2014). While this is not true for all, most have an awareness of paid domestic labour as a practice that is widespread in South
Africa. And because in South Africa in the years since 1990, the anticipated, imminent and actual social change of democracy and its sometimes ambivalent resulting realities has prompted the re-examination of cultural practices and artistic conventions, art-makers have responded by turning their attention to this social practice, as well as to how domestic workers and domestic service has been imaged in South Africa in the past.
Marian Arnold’s contention that “[s]ome of the most problematic visual images in South
African art are those portraying women in service” (Arnold 1996: 90) exemplifies the fraught tradition with which contemporary art-makers engage. This is, in part, because unequal power relations based on race, class and gender existing in the experience of and treatment of domestic workers may be reproduced in representations of them (or during the process of making such works). In her study of the historic representation of black female subjects in western art, Charmaine Nelson comments:
The white artist’s motivation to represent black women overwhelmingly within public contexts of domestic labour locates a desire to re-inscribe the space between black and white experiences and to fix colonial perceptions of difference as biological and racial instead of social and historical (Nelson 2010: 33).
8 In the kind of work she describes, the art-maker appears to naturalise the role and presence of a domestic worker. Another aspect of these kinds of “perceptions of difference” (Nelson 2010: 33) would be that of the domestic worker as inherently vulnerable to exploitation or as truculent and untrustworthy. My purpose in this study therefore is to examine how post-apartheid works of art that represent black female domestic workers specifically seek to denaturalise and to reformulate subject positions resulting from the acceptance and maintenance of racial, gendered and social hierarchies; they seek to reveal, rather than to re-inscribe, “the space between black and white experiences” (Nelson 2010: 33) and to interrogate “perceptions of differences as biological and racial” (Nelson 2010: 33).
In order to examine the various artistic strategies that I identify, an understanding of how power relations operate through ideology in the production of female imagery is necessary. This is because, as Linda Nochlin (1989: 2) notes, “one of the most important functions of ideology is to veil the overt power relations obtaining in society at a particular moment in history by making them appear to be part of the natural, eternal order of things”. Ideology is here defined as “a systematic ordering of a hierarchy of meanings and a setting in place of positions for the assimilation of those meanings”
(Nochlin 1999: 5). For this framework, I use materialist feminist theory that is informed by a socio-historical methodology. I also draw on semiotic and psychoanalytic work. I have chosen to work with these theoretical resources because, through close readings of images (of the kind that I am also attempting), they provide insights into how representations in visual imagery construct and challenge subjectivities. Such approaches
9 were and are often the paradigms in which South African art-makers representing domestic workers were and are themselves working. Studies by highly regarded feminist art historians Laura Mulvey (1996), Nochlin (1989, 1999) and Griselda Pollock (1996,
2004, 2005, 2006) make use of these three approaches to examine various rhetorical, textual and pictorial elements that influence the representation of women. They demonstrate how a gender and class hierarchy produces, what become naturalised as, the signs of sexual and gendered difference, resulting in particular meanings and subjectivities. As Nochlin (1989: 19) claims: “[N]owhere is the work of ideology more evident than when issues of class join with issues of gender in the production of female imagery.” Their examination of images of women working and the fashioning of the work considered appropriate for women is especially pertinent, in particular how, as
Mainz and Pollock (2000: 3) put it, “work serves to define the subjectivity of its performer”.
Mulvey, Nochlin and Pollock focus on how gender and class issues affect representation in a Western European context. In considering how racialised tropes and looking affect images and their reception, Nelson’s study, which examines how racial and social differences between women affect representation and raises questions about how those with the power of representation construct themselves and others, provided a starting point for me in considering negotiations of the differences that constituted ‘otherness’.
Anne McClintock (1995), a literary and visual historian, employs a triangulated analysis to interrogate Victorian imperial culture that I draw on when considering how newly established boundaries of empire, the cult of cleanliness and commodity fetishism in the
10 colonial project influenced the framing of servants in colonial South Africa, which still has implications for contemporary perceptions about domestic workers. Commentary on the debates about representation that occurred in the 1990s between art-makers and critical commentators in South African art circles, particularly Brenda Atkinson and
Candice Breitz’s (1999) collection of essays, discusses constructions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in a South African context. Art historian Tamar Garb’s work (2008, 2011) on contemporary South African photography, particularly her elaboration of what she terms
“the filters of figuration” of ethnography, social documentary and portraiture through which portraits of people have historically been framed and interpreted in South Africa
(Garb 2011: 12), has also been informative in illuminating how the artworks I examine each negotiates the tensions between “re-presenting” and “representing” subjects, which is how philosopher and literary and cultural theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1983:
275) phrases it.
All the case studies that I examine seek a rapprochement between apparent and/or socially constructed differences, whether those be on the basis of ‘race’, gender, class, age, generation, language, cultural traditions, financial and educational background, professional trajectory, geographic location, opportunities and choices, feelings of belonging or alienation, and usually, a combination of these. While a domestic worker is the protagonist in the artworks that I have chosen (or at least, I have interpreted her as such), the relationships explored by the art-makers are always complex and subtle, often those between ‘nanny’ and child, ‘nanny’ and the now-adult child, employer and employee, mother and daughter, art-maker and subject, as well as those between people
11 of different sexual identities. The consequences of these differences are explored and how they may be brought into relation – or not, or unsuccessfully attempted – is central to all the case studies in this thesis.
I draw on selected works produced before 1990 that may be seen as part of what Arnold calls the “fraught tradition” of re-inscribing differences in portrayals of domestic workers in as much as they elucidate key strategies in my case studies. The strategies that I discuss are employed by art-makers to defamiliarise, subvert and complicate the relationships that I introduce. These strategies are inflected by the histories and experiences of their makers as well as speaking about conventions of representation and the social frameworks in which the works were made. An example of such a strategy, seen for instance in the work of Penny Siopis or Angela Buckland, purposely invokes absence and lack of individuality in order to interrogate what Nelson (2010: 28) describes as “the lack of relative individuality or diversity in character and emotion afforded the black female subjects”. Another example is that in works by Zanele Muholi and Mary
Sibande, the art-makers are their own subjects or models as they self-consciously and theatrically stage performances that employ parody and mimicry; in so doing, they challenge ‘truths’ of both public and private histories and memories. The strategies deployed by the art-makers that I have selected allow the reader to journey through the unfolding of conceptual concerns and artistic tactics in South African art production since the advent of democracy in 1994. Alongside resistance art, working through harsh binaries of ‘self’ and ‘other’ was the dominant paradigm in the 1980s, which had a critical influence on the work and rhetoric of reconciliation and nation-building in the
12 early to mid-1990s. As a generation of art-makers has come of age since the end of apartheid, particularly black art-makers who participate in forming the dialogues about contemporary South African art practice, new paradigms have emerged. For instance, performance and role-playing as a means to engage with how African identities, with varying degrees of agency and consciousness, intersect. I trace some of these trajectories through how tropes of domestic workers are negotiated, and through how signifiers of domestic work, such as the domestic-worker uniform and the labour she performs, are portrayed.
What emerges in my analysis is that it is because the ‘nanny’ or domestic worker is othered to the point of invisibility and repression as a subject that she returns in the national consciousness with the force of a fetish. A fetish symptomatically signals itself as a site of psychic pain and social trauma (Mulvey 1996: 12). As a signifier, a domestic worker may be a person onto whom fear, anxiety, fantasy and desire is projected, who may herself wield ambiguous powers drawing on her intimate knowledge of her employer’s family, and whose historical role and agency has not necessarily always been acknowledged. These are all issues with which the artworks I examine engage.
McClintock (1995: 184) maintains that the fetish “stands at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and social history”. In the context of my study, I find that when the trope of the domestic worker is fetishised, it is expressed most significantly perhaps in white fears of the ‘swart gevaar’ or ‘black peril’. The ‘swart gevaar’ refers to the perceived security risk that the majority black population posed to white South Africans; the rhetoric reached a peak of fervour during the 1980s. The black domestic worker, who had
13 access to and knowledge of the vulnerable ‘private’ home and relationships of the white family, and who (together with a man employed as a gardener) might be the only black person with whom white suburban people were personally familiar, was often viewed as a potential threat. Her liminality, often being both familiar and trusted but simultaneously not ‘one of the family’, is central in this regard, and frequently continues to play out in the relationships between employer and employee today. One of the motivating reasons for art-makers for engaging with representations of domestic workers and their experiences and relationships inside and outside of the historically white household where they worked, whether these art-makers are black or white, male or female, queer or straight, descended from or raised by a domestic worker, has been because the issues circulating around domestic workers are frequently raw and unresolved. Because art- making is, as Pollock (2004: 20) contends, a “practice of trauma”, it may afford South
African art-makers the opportunity to return to and to be with these traumas in a generative manner.
Original contribution
While recent and significant sociological and historical studies about domestic workers in
South Africa have been undertaken, any comparative analysis of the representations of domestic workers in South African art and visual culture remains limited to a chapter in
Arnold’s Women and Art in South Africa (1996), which does not intend to be an exhaustive study and is focused primarily on works from the mid-twentieth century.
Published twenty years prior to the year when this study was completed, Arnold’s Women
14 and Art in South Africa cannot speak about more recent shifts and developments in South
African art, including works of art that represent domestic workers. In addition, its strongly socio-historical methodology leaves open other interpretative approaches to the works that it does discuss. My approach, while grounded in a socio-historical methodology, incorporates a hermeneutics of situated psychoanalytic and semiotic insights that draws out the connections between ideologies, material conditions and cultural fetishisms.
Articles discussing works by individual art-makers that represent domestic workers have appeared in the popular press and as journal articles, but no comparative analysis or in- depth research has been done involving a variety of works with this theme or subject matter since Arnold’s publication. Also, while well-known art-makers may produce works representing domestic workers, these have not usually been their works that are singled out for the most critical attention. Indeed, it is only Mary Sibande who has achieved particular critical notice for images and objects on this topic. Additionally, one might note that published interviews with artists, such as Siopis in Coombes and Siopis
(1997), are significant in providing insight into issues raised by domestic work and its representation in South Africa, but these insights have not yet been integrated into a study.
It is worth doing such research because the topic is a potentially valuable contribution to the debates about the experiences and representations of ‘race’ and gender within South
African visual arts and art history. In analysing issues arising from the production and
15 reception of works that represent domestic workers, one may consider how art-makers respond to, and reflect on, changing concepts of identity, in various ways of working through and integrating memories, in the framing of relationships with other people and in projections of self-actualisation and self-perception.
Chapter outline
In the five case studies that constitute this study, I provide a close reading of each work, placing it in the social and political contexts in which it circulates, and situate it within my examination of the visual tropes accruing to domestic workers in South Africa.
In Chapter 1, I examine Penny Siopis’ mixed-media painting Tula Tula (1994), expanding upon how Siopis explores ‘nanny’and child relationships. Siopis was born in
1953 in Vryburg in the Northern Cape Province. She studied Fine Arts at Rhodes
University and Portsmouth Polytechnic and lectured at the University of the
Witwatersrand (Wits) from 1984. She is currently an Honorary Professor at the Michaelis
School of Art at the University of Cape Town. She has received numerous awards and visiting research fellowships. Since the 1980s, her work has been seminal in South Africa in its engagement with various mediums and with issues of gender, race relations, sexuality, memory and belonging.
Siopis’ deployment of figures from classical and contemporary urban mythology, metaphysical archetypes and characters in extremis create identifiable tropes through
16 which the artist explores inter-subjective relationships in the socio-political context of
South Africa. In the 1980s and early 1990s, she consistently references various black female figures with the intention to disrupt colonial and apartheid narratives about ‘race’ and gender. It is from this period that photocopies, incorporated into paint workings, allowed for the mediations and disjunctions of received narratives and memory work. Her use of photocopies was influenced by international materialist feminist visual criticism of the time. I propose that the photocopied analogue photographic negative that forms the base image of Tula Tula, while located within these traditions, may equally be enfolded into Ettinger’s matrixial subjectivity and crystallise uniquely South African issues of trauma and vulnerability.
I propose that, in working with ‘nanny’ and ‘servant’ archetypes, Siopis engages with modes of visual representation in order to create portraiture that does not rely on mimetic imaging but rather seeks, in her process of making (through repeated, built-up, affect- laden paint applications), to build up an empathic and haptic relationship with her subject matter. Working with these archetypes therefore contributes to her development of a language of representation without the intention of what she calls “scopic savagery”
(Siopis in Pollock 2005: 54). Siopis’ attention focuses on how traditional familial structures and patterns narrate concepts of family. Siopis does not do this from the perspective of the ‘nanny’ or domestic worker, or by assuming her place. Rather, by foregrounding alternative narratives of familial relationships, she makes more tangible the incompleteness of the narrative conventions that portray the white, patriarchal family as being structured on the generative triangle of the father, mother and child who are
17 represented as the fundamental figures in familial interaction. I look at how, to do this,
Siopis engages specifically with the socialisation of young white males.
In Chapter 2, in examining Jane Alexander’s mixed-media sculpture Pastoral Scene
(1995), I widen my focus from family relationships to consider how representations of contented servants in colonial landscapes function as fetishised female boundary markers, admitting European colonialists as well as a European artistic sensibility into Southern
Africa’s geographical space. In this, I follow McClintock’s observation that feminising land in the aftermath of colonialism functions as an historical rather than an archetypal strategy for containment (McClintock 1995: 24). Pastoral Scene is characteristic of
Alexander’s oeuvre in its presentation of a quotidian dystopia that is complexly allegorical (both metaphoric and metonymic), but it is also unusual in that the figures represented are not human-animal-object hybrids, the kind of figurative sculpture that usually features in her installations, and I relate why I find this significant, particularly in terms of the identifiable figure of a domestic worker.
Alexander, born in Johannesburg in 1959, received her B.A. (Fine Arts) and M.A. (Fine
Arts) degrees from Wits University in 1982 and 1988 respectively. She currently holds the position of Professor of Sculpture at the Michaelis School of Art. She has received several prestigious South African art awards and has work displayed in South Africa’s prominent public collections. Her work is concerned with issues of migration, security and processes of othering.
18 In the mid-1990s, Alexander made a small number of sculptures and tableaux that contain naturalistic human figures, one of which is Pastoral Scene. This work allows me to explore some of the readings possible when a domestic-worker figure is presented as a participating subject in an allegorical sculptural tableau, rather than as the principal subject of a portrait. I find that this domestic-worker figure speaks to issues of female migration that began during apartheid and that continue today. I detail how Alexander explores this issue principally by complicating the genre conventions of pastoral landscape painting in western academic discourse. Continuing from Chapter 1, where I began discussing how the domestic-worker figure may, in her alterity, stimulate tension by representing the symbolic, the economic, the extra-familial and the class structure within the employer’s family circle (Gallop 1990: 216), I argue that Alexander deploys the liminality of this threshold-crossing figure together with other marginalised characters in order that the viewer may consider ways in which all family groupings in South Africa are interpellated by national governmental policies.
Zanele Muholi’s Massah and Mina(h) (2008) are the serialised works I focus on in
Chapter 3. This series works with the alterity of the domestic worker by creating a queer narrative featuring a ‘maid’ and ‘madam’. Arguably the series does not problematically conflate one marginalised identity for another (‘being queer’ with ‘being a domestic worker’), but rather, the art-maker uses her subject matter and her high-artifice photographed performances to present tableaux that, like Alexander in Pastoral Scene, subvert conventions accruing to art historical genres, amongst other aims. Muholi’s work critiques visual tropes by colonial, neo- and postcolonialist image-makers that influence
19 the representation of black and queer women. She produces what Matebeni (2013: 414) calls “art for political imagination” and calls herself a “visual activist”.
Muholi was born in Umlazi, Durban in 1973, and has worked as a photographer, reporter and community organiser. In 2002, she co-founded the Forum for the Empowerment of
Women (FEW) that creates a safe space for women to meet and organise, and in 2009 she founded Inkanyiso, a non-profit organisation concerned with visual arts and media advocacy by and for the LGBTI*3 community. In 2003, she completed an advanced photography course at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, and in
2009 graduated with an M.A. (Fine Arts) degree in Documentary Media from Ryerson
University in Toronto. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts,
Bremen, and lectures and exhibits extensively.
Here I explain how, by mediating the mimetic image of a domestic worker through an eroticisation of the tasks and interactions that are routinely performed by black women as
‘maids’, Muholi steps with her queer subjectivity into her memories of her own mother’s role (Bester Muholi was employed all her working life as a domestic worker). When
Muholi does so, I argue how her narrativising of an uncharted relationship between
‘maid’ and ‘madam’, while not an analogy, may be read as how a lesbian daughter seeks to negotiate and honour a mother whose life experiences and circumstances are vastly different from her own. I outline how, as a queer agent, Muholi introduces alternate narratives into the spaces of the family and the home, which reflect the increasing fluidity
3 LGBTI*: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, intersex and other individuals who choose to self- identify with the LGBTI movement.
20 of, and tensions between, ‘race’, class, gender and socio-economic situation in contemporary South African society.
Steven Cohen’s relationship with Nomsa Dhlamini in their staged performances is the subject of Chapter 4. Born in 1962 in Johannesburg, Cohen now lives in Lille, France. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in Psychology and English Literature in
1984 and studied at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town. He was conscripted into the South African Defence Force from 1985 to 1987. He produces performance art, staging invited performances in galleries, theatres and at festivals as well as uninvited public interventions. He was the FNB Vita Award winner in 1998 and in 2003, was awarded the Ampersand Foundation Fellowship in New York City. Like Muholi, he specifically references his queer identity as well as the other aspects that constitute his subjectivity. In Chapter 4, I discuss Cohen’s various controversial stage performances with Dlamini, giving sustained attention to their most recent performance, Cradle of
Humankind (2012). Dhlamini is the black Swazi woman whom Cohen describes as a
‘nanny’ and mother-substitute to him in his childhood.
Here I outline how Cohen reinforces Dhlamini’s historic exploitation (and the concomitant degree of his own privilege) by deliberately employing visual means of fetishising her, such as through ethnographic classification systems. He succeeds in prompting discussion around the issue, although I critique the means by which he does so and suggest the opportunities that were missed to explore a different direction in the work, particularly the childhood relationship between Cohen and Dhlamini. His work
21 does however illuminate how the liminal figure of the ‘domestic worker’ crosses thresholds between cultural and economic influences and signifies the interpellation of cultures, power and influence. Her liminality is structurally reinforcing, in that the domestic-worker signifier draws together both the Freudian and the Marxist concept of fetishism (on which I elaborate in Chapter 4). In seeking a language of representation that sketches a way forward in transcending a violent history, I assert, that rather than
Cohen’s framing of Dhlamini as Sarah Baartman, Siopis’ exploration of shame, vulnerability and trauma through the figure of Baubo, a nurse in Greek mythology, allows for a more ambivalent, determining subjectivity. The introduction of Baubo also sees an oblique but significant reference to the role of the servant figure in Siopis’ interest in shame and trauma responses. I detail here how she looks specifically through the archetype in order to consider how the ‘servant’ figure becomes an affective carrier of traumatic renewal and propose the implications that this might have for Cohen’s work.
Finally, in Chapter 5, I examine various iterations of Mary Sibande’s fantasy domestic- worker character ‘Sophie’ in digital prints and mixed-media installations from 2007 to the present. Born in Barberton, Mpumalanga in 1982, Sibande now works in
Johannesburg after graduating with a B.A. (Fine Arts) from the University of
Johannesburg in 2007. She was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist prize in 2013.
Like Muholi, Sibande is representative of a black South African art practitioner whose experience with domestic workers is not through having been mothered by one, but in her case through having come from three generations of women who were employed as domestic workers. As such, she both honours this female line and differentiates herself
22 from them. All Sibande’s work revolves around this figure of ‘Sophie’, the whimsical and poignant, daydreaming domestic worker, who has captured much public and commercial interest. Her popularity, one might argue, speaks to a deeper resonance in contemporary
South African society for escapist depictions of aspirational black womanhood.
In her various iterations, ‘Sophie’ is recognisable through Sibande’s melding of a domestic-worker uniform with grandiose elements of Victorian middle- and upper-class costumes that evoke colonial privilege. In doing so, she acknowledges the uniform as a signifier of apartheid-era servitude that so frequently characterised this labour sector in the past, and still does, in many ways, in actual fact and in people’s perceptions. I take this opportunity to investigate briefly the origins of uniforms for servants and some significances of the domestic-worker uniform in South Africa, in order to better elucidate why transforming Sophie’s uniform has struck a chord with the viewing public. I also discuss how selected art-makers, apart from Sibande, have engaged with the uniform as a signifier of domestic service.
Additionally, I focus on Sibande’s use of life casts modelled on her own body to create the ‘Sophie’ figures, proposing that an uncanny doubling results in the art-maker’s process that she embraces as an ambivalent consequence of the conflation of privilege and consumerism in contemporary South Africa. Sibande positions this conflation as a legacy of the inequalities that institutionalised domestic labour has promoted in this country.
23 In this study, I consider therefore how works of art depicting black female domestic workers involve a particularly potent entanglement of many of the contentious and on- going issues pertaining to the representation of ‘race’, class and gender in South Africa today. I am able to do so by examining artworks where contemporary artists reflect critically on issues arising from the processes and consequences of representation in their own practice.
24
CHAPTER ONE
RE-MEMBERING ‘NANNIES’ AND CHILDREN
IN PENNY SIOPIS’ TULA TULA (1994)
Introduction
Tula Tula (Fig. 1.1) is a mixed-media portrait that draws its source from a photograph of the artist’s young brother seated on the lap of his black ‘nanny’ in the early 1960s. Siopis inverts racialised value-laden colour by photocopying a photographic negative and, in so doing, examines the complexities of the relationships between black ‘nannies’ and white children, particularly boys, in South Africa. The central role that a black female domestic worker in South Africa often plays in the raising of white children, Siopis’ own experiences of mothering a young son, and her memories of having had a ‘nanny’ in her childhood, stimulated her interest in this theme (Coombes & Siopis 1997: 117). As Annie
Coombes notes:
Siopis has long been concerned with the lived and historical relations between black and white women in South Africa and the ambivalent and dependent relationships formed between white, middle-class women and black women working in the domestic labour market during apartheid (Coombes 2003: 271).
25 Today, in the second decade of South Africa’s democracy, there are several artists who have been popularly and critically acclaimed for their examination of domestic worker tropes, how these tropes perpetuate unequal racial and gendered relations, how they play out in the cultural and economic implications for black women, and how they may be transformed and deployed to subvert and complicate power relations. In the early 1990s, however, the years where South Africa knowingly headed toward profound social and political changes with the election of its first democratic government in 1994, and in the aftermath of the testimonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (T.R.C.)4 in the mid 1990s, it is Penny Siopis who was creating works that explored the psychological and socio-political implications for the subjectivities of black and white South Africans who meet in this relationship between employers, employers’ families and women employed as domestic workers.
4 The T.R.C. was a court-like proceeding of testimonies that was set up by the Government of National Unity in 1996 because “a commission is a necessary exercise to enable South Africans to come to terms with their past on a morally accepted basis and to advance the cause of reconciliation”, as Dullah Omar, former Minister of Justice, put it (T.R.C., online). Archbishop (now Emeritus) Tutu, the commission’s chairperson, recalls:
Ours was not to judge the morality of people’s actions, but to act as an incubation chamber for national healing, reconciliation and forgiveness. We were a wounded people, all of us, because of the conflict of the past. No matter on which side we stood, we all were in need of healing (Tutu 2014).
Three committees executed the mandate of the T.R.C.; namely, the Human Rights Violation Committee (which listened to testimonies of witnesses, determined identities and assessed whether gross human rights abuses instigated in service of apartheid ideologies had taken place), the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee (whose envisaged function was to ensure support in healing, rehabilitation and restoring victims’ dignity, for instance, the President’s Fund provided urgent interim financial support) and the Amnesty Committee (which processed applications seeking exemption from prosecution for politically-motivated acts between 1 March 1960 and 11 May 1994). The purpose, merits, limitations and successes of the T.R.C. proceedings have been critically and publically debated, see Tutu (1999) and James and Van der Vijver (eds., 2001). Tutu considers: “By choosing not to follow through on the commission’s recommendations, government not only compromised the commission’s contribution to the process, but the very process itself” (Tutu 2014).
26
First exhibited on Siopis’ solo show Private Views in Johannesburg in 1994, Tula Tula5 serves as a lens through which to consider the works in Siopis’ oeuvre that examine how institutionalised domestic labour has shaped relations between black and white people in
South Africa. This is because Tula Tula is a complex instance of Siopis’ long-standing interest in psychoanalytic perspectives on subject development. Siopis is concerned with how psychoanalytic accounts of subject formation may provide the language with which to speak of the losses that both ‘mother’ and ‘child’ experience as the boy grows into the world, rejecting the mother. Subject development from a psychoanalytic perspective may therefore provide a structuring departure for considering the historical circumstances that have fashioned South African inter-personal relationships. I also examine how the artist’s focus on the ‘nanny’ and child relationship is especially apt in that the historical de- valuation of the surrogate maternal relationship influenced the role (or rather, the elision) afforded the ‘nurse’ in classic psychoanalytic theory.
There is opportunity to contribute here to the literature about Siopis’ work, as existing analysis of Tula Tula focuses on how Siopis uses psychoanalytic theories of subject development to suggest that the social relations formed within the context of domestic labour are central to understanding South Africa’s apartheid past and its legacies of intersecting race, gender and class inequalities that have continued to structurally inform the country. This analysis, as far as I am aware, is exclusively that of Coombes (2003).
5 This is the first of three works that originally formed the Tula Tula series. I shall henceforth refer to this work as Tula Tula, although it is sometimes called Tula Tula I in the literature. The second two works were never exhibited and have long since been destroyed in a flood in the artist’s studio, without having ever been documented (Siopis 2014).
27 She draws her information from an in-depth, unpublished interview with Siopis in 1994, which was updated and published in Feminist Review in 1997. This interview (Coombes
& Siopis 1997) focuses on her works of the 1990s, and much discussion is devoted to
Tula Tula and Maids. I have found that a consequence of this is that Siopis herself offers the most extended critical engagement with Tula Tula, specifically how the work explores the ‘nanny’-child relationship through psychoanalytic theories of loss in subject development. I wish to elaborate therefore on how psychoanalytic theories of subject development do not only provide tools of illustration for Siopis’ work, but that Siopis’ work, through its socio-historical specificity, gives the visual and historically-situated illustration to the discursive elisions that have subsequently been drawn out about psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity within psychoanalytic literature. This has not been written on previously.
I seek to position Siopis’ art about domestic workers more extensively in relation to representations of ‘nanny’ and child relationships in visual discourses than has hitherto been done. My examination encompasses professional projects (such as Ernest Cole and
David Goldblatt), private family collections (such as that of Adele Gould), as well as artworks (of Maureen de Jager and Angela Buckland). I also provide a historical background to Siopis’ reference, in Tula Tula, to the Pretoria ‘terrorism’ monument that has not hitherto been explored, and suggest how its inclusion functions as a fetish of the apartheid legacy. I argue that Siopis’ references to South African censorship laws may be interpreted in Tula Tula as an endemic cultural silencing about the lived experience of
28 black and white people during apartheid. I develop this interpretation by elaborating how censorship references in works such as Foreign Affairs (Arutma: 1994) function.
Several in-depth published interviews or documentaries with Siopis elucidate her working methods and conceptual concerns (in particular Nuttall 2009 and Mbembe in
Smith [ed.] 2005). In the artist’s own essays ‘Domestic Affairs’ (Siopis 1997) and
‘Dissecting Detail’ (Siopis in Atkinson & Breitz, 1998), Siopis positions her work within the critical debates of the 1990s. Siopis, as a prolific, recognised, critically engaged and emotionally subtle practitioner, is well represented in surveys and themed collections of
South African art, and I have drawn on commentaries which have included her works about institutionalised domestic labour (notably Williamson & Jamal 1996). Several substantial essays in her exhibition catalogues (such as Law 2002) and in a 2005 monograph edited by Kathryn Smith (particularly those by Colin Richards and Pollock) draw together and expand upon recurrent themes in her work in the 1990s. These sources enable me to myself position Tula Tula fruitfully in relation to earlier works such as The
Baby and the Bathwater (1992 – 93), an epic mixed-media work about different experiences of motherhood and Maids (1993), as well as Forgotten Family I from the
Forgotten Families series (1996). These works contribute to Siopis’ development of a language of representation that expresses traumatic South African histories, but without the “scopic savagery” (Siopis in Pollock 2005: 54) that has historically underpinned the use of such a trope. Because my focus is on how the ‘servant’, ‘maid’ or ‘domestic worker’ archetype functions primarily as a ‘nanny’ trope in Siopis’ oeuvre, I am able to
29 present a fuller discussion about the artist’s development and deployment of this trope than there has hitherto been space for in the literature on Siopis.
I conclude the chapter by suggesting that it is specifically in the methods, in the light and colour reversal and the affective, layering, repeated, touches of paint, that Siopis’ contribution to the dissolution of the fetishisation of this trope is enacted. I frame this suggestion by referring to the role that Siopis’ paint may play in visualising Bracha L.
Ettinger’s matrixial subjectivities. In doing so, I propose some ways in which the characters of Tula Tula’s psycho-social drama present an opportunity to consider why it is the many intersecting realities of the ‘nanny’-child relationship that Siopis refers to when she says: “I’m completely fascinated by this incredibly powerful constellation of relations and feelings as something that is just so much part of this society and cries for representation” (Siopis in Coombes 2003: 272).
The ‘Nanny’ in South Africa
During apartheid and since South Africa’s transition, as Jennifer Fish has demonstrated in her sociological research, the required migration of women from predominantly deeply impoverished rural regions of origin to urban centres defines the structure of domestic work (Fish 2006: 86). The physical separation from both family and community structures that results from this geographic migration is a factor that intersects with on- going race, class and gender inequalities to create the pervasive form of dependency that is a characteristic of workers’ entrapment within this labour sector (Fish 2006: 86 – 87).
30 The prevalence of absentee parenting, and its relation to social development challenges, is one of many social costs created by institutionalised, live-in, paid domestic work (Fish
2006: 88). The emotional cost of separation from family members, in particular children, is a dominant theme amongst women (Fish 2006: 87). The internal conflict about the absence of their own children is a daily reminder when domestic workers are charged with the direct care of their employers’ children, or the maintenance of these more privileged children’s homes (Fish 2006: 88). That caring for employers’ children often becomes a coping mechanism for domestic workers, in that it may provide the ‘nanny’ an experience of affection and meaningful human connection, is “one of the deepest complexities and most heightened emotional aspects” of South African institutionalised domestic labour (Fish 2006: 89).
Yet this opportunity for relationships where racial hierarchies are mostly non-existent is also a vulnerability for domestic workers, as it may influence their employment choices, where the worker may choose to remain in an otherwise undesirable situation due to her bond with the children of the household (Fish 2006: 89). ‘Victoria’, one of Fish’s interviewees, describes her experience of this situation as follows:
Now you must care for their child, you must give the love you suppose to give to your child, you must give it to them. Like myself, I am very fond of this child, sometimes I feel like taking my things and go, but then it comes to this child, then I decide not to go, because we are very close the two of us (‘Victoria’ in Fish 2006: 88, sic).
This emotional bond and practical maternal surrogacy is not necessarily sustained or acknowledged within the private or social life of the family. ‘Nothando’ recounts to Fish
31 how she was valued for her trust and capability by her employers for her care of their young child, but her presence was considered inappropriate at the young man’s 21st birthday celebration: “[…] now you are nothing in that party. There is something very sad, it hurts you” (‘Nothando’ in Fish 2006: 89, sic).
This particular loss, when the ‘nanny’ loses the child’s affection, is expressed by many writers commenting on South African cultural mores. In his photo-essay collection,
House of Bondage, of apartheid South African society in the 1950s, the time when Siopis and her brother were growing up, Ernest Cole identifies “white homes” as the “crucible of racism in South Africa” (Cole 1967: 70).6 It is in these spaces that people of different colours meet, but do not mix, within rigidly hierarchical and acrimonious “everyday relationships between household domestics and their employers” (Cole 1967: 70). Cole is concerned with how “the lessons they learn at home” perpetuates the “awful heritage of racism” for white children; children observe that it is socially acceptable for them to treat domestic workers in the dehumanising manner that their parents model (Cole 1967: 73).
In these spaces, Cole cites the “visible affection” between the black domestic worker and the employers’ white children (see Fig. 1.2) and considers that “[o]ne of the ironies of the system is the role of the black nanny” (Cole 1967: 73). This irony may be interpreted in this comment by an ANC leader and former domestic worker: “The child is the only thing you can cuddle” (in Fish 2006: 88). As a woman (pictured in Fig. 1.2) relates to Cole: “I love this child, though she’ll grow up to treat me just like her mother does. Now she is
6 Ernest Cole (1940 – 1990) was South Africa’s first black freelance photographer, working for Drum Magazine and the Bantu World (today the Sowetan). He left apartheid South Africa for New York in 1966. House of Bondage was banned in South Africa after its publication by Random House in 1967.
32 innocent” (in Cole 1967: 76). When describing the children of their employers, informants in Cock’s research in the late 1970s say: “They think one belongs to their parents” and “The children are rude. They don’t count us as people” (in Cock 1980a: 14).
This socialisation away from identifying with the black woman’s humanity and reciprocating her affection is the gradual process which Siopis wishes to portray in Tula
Tula. As she says:
What interests me is what happens in that experience [when] that relationship changes as the boy becomes an adolescent and older […] She had something with this child. Then she loses the child. The child quite literally goes away to school and she is structured into a different relationship with it, which involves rejection. That child becomes a person who calls her by a name that is not her name, that orders her around. He might even use her body sexually, and he becomes the boss, the master (Coombes & Siopis 1997: 114 – 15).
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela discusses the complexities of personal choice when an individual’s thinking is fostered within a totalitarian society. This may be experienced particularly in
a deeply stratified society, such as racially divided South Africa, where, starting well before one’s capacity even to make moral choices has been rested, one’s sense of moral obligation toward others is rigidly channelled along lines of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, and the images of the ‘them’ depict a group that exists only as objectified others. Then, choosing to value or not to value another takes on an even more layered meaning (Gobodo-Madikizela 2003: 130).
Cock analyses how the role that domestic workers play in the reproduction of labour
power is overtly that of physical maintenance, through the performance of their duties
33 in the employer’s home, but arguably more significantly, the role that domestic workers
fulfil is to maintain the dominant ideological order (Cock 1980a: 8). Of consequence
here is the socialisation of white South African children and the black women employed
into an asymmetrical experience of interracial contact that inculcates learned racism
(Cock 1980a: 8). As she observes:
Many white South African children learn the attitudes of racial domination from domestic relationships with servants and ‘nannies’. The converse is also equally true in that many blacks presumably learn the attitudes of submission (or at least the semblance thereof) that apartheid requires, and also the resentment it generates, through some experience of domestic service (Cock 1980a: 8 – 9).
The complexities of this particular loss are likely to be laid over an image of an affectionate black ‘nanny’ and white child, if the viewer identifies the context as South
Africa during apartheid. David Goldblatt’s The farmer’s son with his nursemaid, on the farm Heimweeberg, near Nietverdiend in the Marico Bushveld (1964; Fig. 1.3), from the series ‘Some Afrikaners Photographed’, apparently captures such a relationship.
Goldblatt, born in 1930 in Randfontein, is a South African photographer who has documented and interpreted the people and landscapes of his country. The easy affection and mutual trust that appears to exist between the boy and the young girl is implied by how his weight, resting in his left leg, leans in to balance his thigh on her upper back, while her arm reaches around to cradle his standing ankle. While the scene may appear bucolic, the title of the photograph belies this, drawing unambiguous attention to its particular social context, one fact of which is that the young girl, despite her age, is structured in a working relation to the boy (and his parents). Her encircling of his heel
34 and Achilles tendon, the fatal spot of Achilles’ mythic vulnerability, becomes symbolic of the nurturing and affectionate relationship from which he is likely to be subtly or overtly encouraged to withdraw. To the viewer, aware of the social context, the relationship may appear particularly vulnerable and poignant in that it is, if not anomalous, then likely to disintegrate with the girl and boy’s growing maturity.
In the white South African family photographic albums during the years of apartheid, it was not unlikely that the presence of black women, as evidence of racial inter-mingling, would be represented exclusively by the inclusion of women employed as domestic workers and nannies. Photographs of nannies with their white charges exist therefore as an ambiguous counter-point to the other family groupings that would be represented. The source photograph for Tula Tula I is a family album portrait of Siopis’ brother sitting on the lap of his nanny. Family album portraits of domestic workers and children are often characterised by certain recurring elements mostly emanating from the fact that they are outsiders within the family circle. Adele Gould structures her blogs about her experiences growing up in 1960s apartheid South Africa, the same time period as Siopis and her sibling, as a narrative of shame and conversion. She attributes her personalising of her growing political consciousness in her twenties – her “awakening” – to her relationship with the coloured7 woman, Nancy Sampson, employed for 22 years within a family where “apartheid was neither discussed nor questioned” (Gould 2013). As she says: “My story revolves around Nancy, because I believe that the memories I have of my
7 ‘Coloured’ is in common usage in South Africa to describe a person who is of ‘mixed race’, often with African, Afrikaner, Asian and/or other European ancestry. It is a remnant of apartheid’s racialised classification system but many people self-identify with the term (for instance, the Cape Coloured community is the dominant ‘population group’ in the Western Cape). It is not necessarily an offensive term, as it is in the United States.
35 relationship with her epitomize what later fuelled my hatred of Apartheid” (Gould 2013).
The shame she retrospectively feels at having been uncritically accepting of the privileges afforded a white South African, revolve around her interaction with Sampson, such as frequently refusing to help her as a teenager or being insensitive about Sampson’s living conditions (Gould 2013). The relationship dynamic that concerns Siopis – of the woman who introduces racial difference and the labour economy into the family home – is expressed here by Gould: “I loved this woman so much – my whole family did (and she knew that) – yet the South Africa in which I grew up did not teach me to look beyond my own self-serving needs when interacting with ‘non-white’ people” (Gould 2013). Gould has only one photograph of Sampson (Fig. 1.4) to recall their relationship, aside, tellingly, from the identity shot of Sampson in a copy of her passbook. This lack leaves her “mortified” (Gould 2013). This image is much like the photograph of Siopis’ source picture would prove to be: a woman of colour, identifiably a domestic worker through her overall, appears holding a young white child and looking down with affection at the young child. Their relationship ensures her presence in the frame, as her gaze at the child might seem to indicate her own awareness of a more politically and racially-inflected
‘mother and child’ portrait than might otherwise exist in the family album.
Tula Tula: Transforming photographs to examine memories
By transforming a photographic negative in Tula Tula, Siopis deliberately engages
herself and the viewer with the experiential traces and memories apparently captured in
36 photographs.8 In other works in the early 1990s, she paints over photocopies, keeping
fragments and traces that are as much in conflict with the paint that enfolds them as they
are a part of the whole work. Working over existing documents as photocopies,
incorporated into paint workings, allows for the mediations and disjunctions of received
narratives that may be said to be the basis of conscious memory work. Ingrid de Kok, in
her poem ‘Small Passings’ included in a volume edited by Stella and Frank Chipasula
(1995: 182), points to the experience of black women who are not able to bring up her
own children, while they care for her employers’:
And this woman’s hands are so heavy when she dusts The photographs of other children They fall to the floor and break (Chipasula & Chipasula 1995: 182).
Siopis’ source image is such a photograph: the biological, white mother is absent and the black mother’s own children are absent. In Tula Tula, it is Siopis who chooses to ‘break’ the image by querying these defining absences. Interacting directly with photography and using the body in photography is a technique frequently deployed by South African artists who have lived both before and after apartheid. Works exploring these themes were prevalent in South Africa’s tumultuous 1990s: this was during the transition to democracy, the early years of democracy and the process and testimonies of the T.R.C..
8 The mechanics of photography may appear to make clear the relation between that which exists in the moment and is captured by the lens, and the resulting image as a representation of that moment in time and place. As Roland Barthes writes, “Every photograph is a certificate of presence” (Barthes 1984: 87). A photograph allows a viewer to experience time, however subjectively, as a singular and unrepeatable event.
37 Many scholars and creative practitioners, beyond the South African community, turned to the study of memory as a form of counter-history in the 1990s.9 Marianne Hirsch saw the understanding of ‘memory’ studies of those years as
a means to account for the power structures animating forgetting, oblivion, and erasure and thus to engage in acts of repair and redress. It promised to propose forms of justice outside of the hegemonic structures of the strictly juridical, and to engage in advocacy and activism on behalf of individuals and groups whose lives and whose stories have not yet been thought (Hirsch 2012: 16).
This kind of critical attention in South African scholarship and creative practice of the time was often inspired by the TRC and the wider rippling cultural effects that it exerted on the national psyche. Unlike Holocaust survivor testimony, which stressed an ‘open wound’ approach to seeing trauma as unspeakable and incommensurable, the justices, commissioners, and scholars of the TRC framed a discourse of ‘truth-telling’ as forgiveness if not reconciliation (Hirsch 2012: 19). This discourse was “a pragmatic
9 The scholarly boom in memory studies in disciples such as cultural, literary, sociological, anthropological and historical studies began in the 1980s with the publication of Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora’s “Between Memory and History”, the introduction to an anthology Lieux de memoire (1984) (Klein 2000: 127). ‘Memory’ was elegiacally posited as a mode of being that presented an understanding different from modern historical and historicising consciousness (Klein 2000: 127). By 1989, a translation of Nora’s essay demonstrated “the crystallization of a self-conscious memory discourse” that precipitated the critical vocabulary and the scholarly literature of the next two decades (Klein 2000: 127). Folk, popular, public and oral history and mythology have come to be spoken of under the vaguely philosophical term, ‘memory’ (Klein 2000: 128). In The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (1993), Young proposed the idea of “counter- memorials”; the ‘counter-histories’ that such memorials gave presence to were histories not recognised by dominant national and official narratives, histories that seek social recognition of what is avoided, and address issues of trauma, failure and loss in the past (Crane 2006: 105). The power of memory, in its formation, retention and sharing, in individuals and communities, and how it shapes individual and public interpretation and knowledge about the past, has been extensively explored. The fallibility, truths and multiplicity of memories, Klein points out (2000: 135), assert tropes of identity, core, self and subjectivity in historical discourse.
38 process to serve a ‘democratic future’ within a space in which former victims and former perpetrators need to coexist” (Hirsch 2012: 19). Seeking conscious new attachments across lines of difference, that do not, for example, result in over-identification or victimisation and that attempt to be cogniscent of how long-internalised power differentials may influence perception and experience, became central. Gobodo-
Madikizela saw ‘empathy’ as instrumentalising these attachments:
We are induced to empathy because there is something in the other that is felt to be part of the self, and something in the self that is felt to belong to the other. Empathy feels with the other in a reciprocal emotional process in which one asks for it, or his very situation seems to ask for it, and the other responds by offering it. Empathy reaches out to the other and says: I can feel the pain you feel for having caused me pain (Gobodo-Madikizela 2003: 127).
Siopis discusses the zeitgeist of these years in terms of the “crises and opportunities for the renewal of selfhood” that the advent of democracy brought about (Siopis in Nuttall
2010: 457).
Maureen de Jager may be said to explore how these crises and opportunities are acted out through, and with, very personal and familial reflections, in her series Old Photographs.
Born in 1973, De Jager is an art practitioner, writer and lecturer at Rhodes University.
With Grieta in the garden (Fig. 1.5) is one of ten works in de Jager’s Old Photographs series (2008). A photocopy transferred onto rusted steel, the original photograph has the artist and her sister Sarah, lined up to be photographed in the family garden next to a young woman, identifiably a domestic worker. Named in the work as Grieta, her slightly awkward body language implies tentativeness about the requirements of her employer in
39 posing in this scene. As Brenda Schmahmann points out, Grieta is an outsider, a marginal figure admitted temporarily to the familial unity created by the photographic act
(Schmahmann 2008: 11). Kneeling on her heels, hand still extended to the bucket of washing and the task whose requirement allows her conditional presence, which in being photographed she might seem unsure of whether or how much to relinquish her role, she smiles pleasantly alongside the young girls lined up next to her. Her anomalous inclusion is also suggested by the title, where it is Grieta’s presence (rather than Maureen’s or
Sarah’s) that warrants distinguishing mention.
De Jager describes how her source photographs, dating from the 1970s, are deteriorating with time and turning sepia-coloured (Schmahmann 2008: 8). She interprets this photographic corrosion as “a visual equivalent of rusting” (De Jager in Schmahmann
2008: 8). This process of erosion prompted her decision, in her words, “to ‘draw’ the photographs onto steel through actual processes of rusting, where rust functions both literally and indirectly as a metaphor for change, for corrosion over time, and for a gradual and inevitable erasure” (De Jager in Schmahmann 2008: 8). As Schmahmann discusses, the corrosion and partial obliteration of the image finds its conceptual counterpart in how human memories work: “To fix an image that is in the process of rusting is to endeavour to keep grip of an unanchored and partly formulated recollection before it is lost” (Schmahmann 2008: 8). It is also to complicate the memory with the understandings provided by hindsight. While de Jager remembers the town of Kuruman in the Northern Cape, where she spent her early childhood years from 1973 to 1980, and which is the setting of nine of the ten photographs of this series, as “mythical in [her]
40 imagination” (De Jager in Schmahmann 2008: 8), she is also aware, as an adult, of how her race and class were the factors that overwhelmingly determined her “halcyon” experience in apartheid South Africa (Schmahmann 2008: 8). Metal and rust are harsh mediums, especially when paired with the gentle melancholy and nostalgia that may be generally associated with disintegrating sepia photographs. Transposing the medium into corroded metal may allow the expression of the conflicted nature of white South African childhoods and the hard underpinning of the social realities to be recorded, in addition to enacting the futility of attempting to retain fading memories. De Jager finds that she may engage in memory work through the transformative qualities of a tactile and material process – recognisably the kind of motivation that Siopis describes in the making of Tula
Tula.
Accepting that domestic spaces are both “geographic and architectural alignments and social relations to power” (McClintock 1995: 34), the colour reversals in Tula Tula foreground the binary and artificial structuring both of racial categories and of hierarchising people into these categories. They thus politicise a complicated surrogacy relationship that would appear to have been originally photographed as uncontroversially quotidian. For the artist, this value-laden reversal is about rejecting identity premised upon binaries and oppositions from a time in history where “we lived on the surfaces of our skins” (Siopis in Williamson & Jamal 1996: 130). The end of apartheid signalled a time when, Siopis felt, “people are trying to get underneath the skin and that means having to look at a psychic reality […] the psychic invariably finds its way in the form of the body in one way or another – as surfacings, as lesions, as tracings of a promise”
41 (Siopis in Williamson & Jamal 1996: 130). Representing the “sense memory of trauma” on the skin and through the marked skin is characteristic of feminist preoccupations with the subjective, the private and the daily as points of memories (Hirsch 2012: 23).
Exploring how unconscious processes manifest themselves through the material form of the human body is central to Siopis’ work and provides much of the motivation for her approach in Tula Tula. Siopis terms exploring this unconscious and its expression with an awareness of its situatedness as a “politics of the unconscious” (Siopis in Williamson &
Jamal 1996: 130). The end of apartheid brought a greater, not diminished, responsibility to acknowledge and explore inter-personal relations: “Because things have changed… we are also much more implicated… and have a personal and complex relation to our history
(Siopis in Williamson & Jamal 1996: 130). It is specifically in the domestic environment that Siopis feels this “politics of the unconscious” may be fruitfully explored: “… it is often in the domestic domain that some of the most complex, most intimate questions around sexual and racial difference and commonality have been and continue to be played out” (Siopis 1997: 58).
By using a photocopied photographic negative in Tula Tula, Siopis inverts colour laden with racialised power associations. As she explains:
Because it is a photographic negative, she’s in fact white, if you like, colourwise, and he’s black, but his eyes are white. I’ve tried to invert value- laden colour. His eyes are in some ways absent or blank because in the original photograph they would have been black (Siopis in Coombes & Siopis 1997: 117).
42 In the source photograph, the male child is looking out at the photographer and viewer, and the black woman is looking down at him. By blinding or “blanking” the eyes of the white male child, and the racialised apartheid ideology that he is to be read as representing in this moment, Siopis offers a space to consider how vision is a psychoanalytic, politically-situated process of subjectivity. She emphasises how vision is at the behest of ideology and language as the infant’s autoerotic body yields to a speaking subject (Coombes & Siopis 1997: 117), rather than using language to explore its own formation. This process of socialisation for Siopis “might be a ‘perverse’ but useful metaphor for articulating the shift from the space of fixity to that of complexity” (Siopis
1997: 68). It is this shift, and the responsibilities attendant to it, that she explores in Tula
Tula.
In this inverted image, Siopis does not ‘reinstate’ the nanny’s gaze however, as arguably this may be visually akin to ‘speaking for’ her, thereby disallowing both the difficulties of her situation and the agency she may have exercised within that sphere. It would be disrespectful and ahistorical to reductively invert the power hierarchy by retrospectively
‘giving’ the ‘nanny’ apparent agency in the scopic and ideological realm. Rather, it is in the white painting marks that Siopis feels that she works through her personal understanding of the nuances of this kind of situated, surrogate maternal relationship, in which she herself participated, as a child who was ‘nannied’ and in reflecting on her own maternal relationship with her young son (Siopis in Coombes & Siopis 1997: 113 – 14).
Using white oil pigments to paint into the ‘blank’ white spaces of the photographic negative is a subtle intervention in the existing document, one that results in an overall
43 surface that, arguably, is more to be touched than to be looked at. This painting is a gestural meditation that occurs in a separatist society where the racialised ‘colour’ of skin was all-determining. As such, it seeks an expression of acknowledgement for the experiences of ‘others’ who are not the artist’s ‘self’ that nonetheless does not participate in this scopic separatism. The viewer may note that the artist’s use of colours not ‘black’ or ‘white’ in this work is confined to the depth of field, which is suffused with the blood reds and placental purples that recur in Siopis’ oeuvre. The artist’s working into the image is therefore a conscious and sensitive consideration of how the ideologies of racialised skin were maintained by circulating on the surface, while soaking deeply into perceptions of self and other.
Tula Tula: Reversing colour in photocopies to represent psychic loss
Siopis sees the relationship between a black ‘nanny’ and a white (male) child as characterised by loss (Coombes & Siopis 1997: 114 – 15). It is the loss of the affection that existed between ‘nanny’ and child as the child grows up to distance himself from her, as he is socialised into apartheid South Africa, and it is the paucity of emotional opportunity that always shadows a relationship that is based on “both dependence and subjection” (Siopis in Coombes & Siopis 1997: 115). This loss has levels other than those for which psychoanalytic theories of loss in subjectivity formation classically account.
The figure of the ‘nanny’ or ‘nurse’ has a particular (i.e. occluded) place in the formation of Freud’s theories on the development of subjectivity (specifically of the heterosexual middle-class male who is the subject of the Oedipal complex). Theoretically, the nurse’s
44 presence disrupts the Freudian familial triangle; as a visual metaphor, Siopis deploys the nanny figure to examine psychoanalytic subjectivity formation, which is apt for a context that is specifically South African.
In Tula Tula, Siopis works closely with “the contradictions of her own familial experience by acknowledging the complicity of her own upbringing” (Coombes 2003:
273). Specifically, she is articulating the complexities of the ‘nanny’-child relationship, between the black woman employed as a domestic worker, caring for the white children of her employers. She characterises this relationship as one of psychic loss: loss by the black woman of the child’s affection and the relationship they shared, and loss of the small amount of authority she possessed in relation to the white mother (as having this relationship with the child), and, on the other side, as loss for the white child, of the affection and respect for the black woman (Coombes & Siopis 1997: 114). Siopis concentrates on the experience of a white boy, as she feels that the complexities of the power relationships between white maleness and black femaleness are greater for a male child: “The experience of having a black nanny would have meant more to my brothers or to men and to my white male child” (Siopis in Coombes & Siopis 1997: 114). I therefore outline now some of these complexities in order to propose why a psychoanalytical structuring may be elucidating not only because of Siopis’ stated interest in its theories of subjectivity but also, specifically, how it is relevant for considering the ‘nanny’-child relationship.
45 Sigmund Freud’s Oedipal theory, Anne McClintock (1995: 88) argues, is a screen theory, one that elides the structuring of the middle- and upper-middle class household and overrides the child’s historically variant experience within that household. The historical role, and agency, of working class maidservants, nurses and governesses are childhood memories that Freud himself could neither ignore nor allow himself to realise fully, thereby leading to the ritualistic, fetishistic insistence with which they haunted his own dreams, personal letters, analyses and patients’ cases (McClintock 1995: 88 – 89). This is due, McClintock (1995: 89) proposes, to Freud’s own “incapacity to recognise and resolve his split maternal imago, a split that emerges not from some archetypal division in the psyche but from the class doubling of the Victorian household”. This split to which she refers is not the separation from, and following (hetero)sexual attraction to, the biological mother (that is central to Freud’s Oedipal theory), but rather to the adult man’s abjecting of memories of his sexual attraction to and rejection by the ‘nurse’/‘nanny’
(McClintock 1995: 87).
This substitution erases the ‘nanny’ from the family romance altogether; it is a
“displacement across class [that] effects an inversion of gender”, resulting in the safeguarding of “the male’s historical role as sexual agent” (McClintock 1995: 88).
McClintock’s argument is indebted to Jim Swan’s analysis of Freud’s theoretical elision of the ‘nanny’ (Kinderfrau) from his personal experience. Swan examines Freud’s correspondence, which records memories of his first sexual experiences in boyhood, which involved his sexual impotence with his Kinderfrau. As Siopis points out anecdotally (Coombes & Siopis 1997: 117) and Shireen Ally (2010: 7) confirms through
46 her sociological work, sexual interaction in many forms may occur between female domestic employees and males in the household, whether it be in nineteenth-century
Europe or colonial and apartheid households. The Oedipal theory becomes a retrospective obscuring of Freud’s childhood experience of humiliation, shame and confusion:
In recording his childhood memories, Freud assigns the nanny a potent role as sexual agent, but when he elaborates his Oedipal theory a few days later, he not only banished the ‘prime originator’ from the scene altogether, but replaces his memory of sexual impotence (lack of sexual capacity with the nurse), with the theory of sexual aggression (excess of sexual capacity with the mother) (Swan in McClintock 1995: 88).
McClintock (1995: 94) argues that, by removing the presence and the ambivalent power and agency of the historical ‘nurse’ from classic Freudian structuring of infant and social identity, and thereby removing class and monetary imbalances as contaminants from the family triad, Freud reasserts paternal familial authority as “a natural, universal and inevitable fait accompli” at the moment in history – 1897 – when the symbolic political power of the father-image was being overtaken by imperial bureaucracy. Yet even as he writes the ‘nurse’ out of his theory of subjectivity, in his correspondence, Freud identifies himself strongly with his Kinderfrau, declaring “I = She” (McClintock 1995: 94, sic).
Thus without repressing the boy’s earliest identification, both sexual and psychological, with a working-class female, and without erasing the historical presence of the female domestic worker as a primary originator of sexual and economic identity, Freud could not have structured his theory. Instead, he ascribed to the father the originating power of psychosexual development and identification and named the mother (and following her,
47 the wife) as the object of desire. But if, historically, the boy’s earliest identification is with the ‘nurse’, then theoretically “the scenario of individuation will arguably be significantly altered; the boy has to individuate himself from two women, in very different ways” (McClintock 1995: 94). The resulting “fragility and uncertainty of identity” is managed by referring primarily to class as a structuring power (McClintock
1995: 95). Projecting racial ideology onto working-class women also ‘othered’ any identification with them (McClintock 1995: 95). This tactic also manages them as unseemly representatives of women’s paid work within the domestic space (McClintock
1995: 165). At the same time, a need for ritual affirmation of this precarious masculinity, which identifies with the ‘nurse’, may account for the systematic ascription of masculinised qualities to her in Victorian literature (McClintock 1995: 95).
This scenario of individuation from two mothers, the significance of one disregarded by his nation’s narrative and perhaps within his community and family as well, is what
Siopis works with in articulating emergent masculine subjectivity in Tula Tula. Just as the reinstatement of the historically situated presence of the ‘nanny’ into the family triad complicates how masculine subjectivity is classically theorised, transforming her source photograph allows Siopis to examine the nuances, and find a means of mourning the losses in, the South African ‘nanny’-child relationship. She simultaneously both references and exposes the elisions that her subject matter – the relationship across class and gender as well as ‘race’ between a ‘nanny’ and child – references and exposes within the Freudian structuring of subjectivity. Siopis’ empathic and respectful rapprochement between these different characters involves exploring her personal memories of her own
48 ‘nanny’ and her retrospective consideration of how socialised gender roles impact the formation of white children, particularly male children, and the black women who cared for them. The black ‘nanny’ is rejected (by the male child who is seeking his individuation) twice. Once: rejected as a substitute for the biological mother, as the male child reaches social maturation, according to the male’s psychosexual development in the classic Freudian theorising of subjectivity; and twice: rejected as an individuated subject
(and potentially claimed, sexually or in other ways) as the objectified, racially marked surrogate of the biologically Caucasian mother. This second rejection, where historically situated ‘race’, gender and class privilege intersect, is the silence in classical Freudian psychoanalytic accounts of subject formation that (particularly feminist) scholars have shone light on. Siopis uses its own visual cues to undo its partial vision, and deploys its language to bring forth the silences between its own words.
While it is classic Freudian psychoanalysis that is scopically structured, it is Lacanian subjectivation that privileges the acquisition of language as the child’s initiation into the
Symbolic order of socialised power. ‘Tula Tula’, the Zulu lullaby from which the series takes its title, may be understood as ‘Be quiet’ or ‘Be still’: it may be interpreted as a soothing and/or a smothering of the white male child, or of the black female ‘nanny’. In this metaphoric scenario, the nanny tells (sings) of her own future silencing by the emergent personality that she is at this moment nurturing; as Siopis puts it, she loses her voice and her authority (Coombes & Siopis 1997: 115). The song becomes a warding off, even disavowal, of the loss that she may suspect that she (and the child, to a less impactful extent) will likely suffer. Understanding the socio-political context of the
49 gendering of the two subjects’ directed gazes is the visual counterpart. Siopis’ interpretation is that both suffer loss from this rejection, as individuals, and as socialised subjects in a wider and fractured community that needs to learn to mourn a loss that is not given emphatic voice in national discourse. It is because the ‘nanny’ or domestic worker is othered to the point of invisibility as a subject that she returns with the force of a fetish, expressed most significantly perhaps in white fears of the ‘swart gevaar’ or ‘black peril’.
Tula Tula: When painting over photocopies is an act of mourning
Pointing out that psychoanalytical accounts of subjectivity focus on “the image, the visual, the imagined” (Siopis in Atkinson 2005: 58), Siopis finds ways to take it away, outside and beyond this stranglehold. This is done by “(be)labour[ing] the painting process itself into a kind of identificatory gesture of extreme intimacy, making tiny white paint marks in the spaces left blank through the photocopying process” (Siopis in
Coombes & Siopis 1997: 117). By drawing attention to the scriptal slippage of labour/belabour, she positions the artist’s gestural labour as contemplative. The tactility of the painting process builds up a “strong point of identification” with the female subject that is not specular or mimetic (Siopis in Coombes & Siopis 1997: 117). Her intention is not to perpetuate inadvertently the hyper-visibility of black female bodies. Painting’s longevity, for Siopis, is the association of the painted mark with “a human, embodied trace in a time of hypermediation, of excessive remediation” (Siopis 2009). In a painting process that is “deliberate” and “painstaking”, Siopis sees painting as a conscious act where the physical presence of working up the surface tends to create an affective
50 relationship which may help shift the terms away from harsh binaries of self and other
(Siopis in Coombes & Siopis 1997: 117). It may thus be interpreted as a visual language of the empathic process of which Gobodo-Madikizela speaks.
Siopis explains that building up the surface examines the surface as a construct, specifically the relation between self/other and black/white, when being black or white ensured that
our lives stressed the exteriority of experience, when we lived on the surface of our skins, when institutionalised racism made it extremely difficult for skin colour to signify anything more or less than the possession or lack of power, when we needed to recognise friend and foe (Siopis 1997: 60).
This painting process works to dissolve the ideology of surfaces at a time when surfaces
“could not be penetrated too deeply for fear of losing sight of our ‘selves’, for fear of finding out what we feared” (Siopis 1997: 60). Some things that Siopis is ‘fearing’ or meditating on are ways in which her own, characteristically white South African childhood of having a ‘nanny’ has formed her. Siopis remembers as an adult, for instance, her childhood confusion about her ‘nanny’ being experienced as a “split subject”, as both
‘friend’ and ‘foe’ (Siopis in Coombes & Siopis 1997: 117). Reaching down into the depths of memory and personality thus arguably involves remaining on the material surface. For Siopis in the 1990s, working this surface becomes an opportunity to take responsibility in “an unprecedented position to watch over ourselves through a matrix of images, images not least to do with matters of truth, of a divided history, of current impulses toward reconciliation” (Siopis 1997: 60).
51
When Siopis combines this affective, painterly contemplation with working over photocopies, Pollock points out that
[t]he touch of paint repeatedly on a surface that already contains traces of an other – a history, another person’s image, a place, a cultural sign – becomes a new kind of process which takes us to the borderline of one subject and another that can become a threshold for new understanding” (Pollock 2005: 59).
In Tula Tula, Siopis uses a photocopied photographic negative from her personal archive, but other works of hers from the late 1980s and early 1990s reap images from a wide variety of sources in the public domain. Her layering of photocopied fragments of images from colonial history, of confronting and transforming, what she terms the “scopic savagery” of these images (Siopis in Pollock 2005: 54) becomes an acknowledgement of the subjects of the cultural images that bear, as Pollock (2005: 54) puts it, “the burden of representation which is not self-representation”. Using existing images means retaining the referent as well as the iconographic image. This allows for a clear material disruption.
Siopis explains this process in an interview for her 2009 exhibition Paintings:
By holding on to reference, and hence to a form of the iconographic, and insisting on a disruptive materiality, I seek to create a slippage between the two, a tension between figure and ground. This parallels the slippage between pictorial reference and abstraction. This creates a space which is crucial for opening the visual field for projection and triggering affect (Siopis 2009).
52 This technique also characterises works such as Foreign Affairs (Arutma) (1994; Fig.
1.6). Here images of the medieval iron gadget known as a ‘scold’s bridle’ that was used to hold the tongue (literally) and clamp shut the mouths of women are interspersed with images of torture of black detainees during the 1980s. The contemporary South African
‘bridle’ was the information blackout effected by the state censorship laws. Some of the ways in which official censorship was negotiated have become cultural reference points.
One of these, in print media, involved literally blocking out lines of text, acts that the
Weekly Mail newspaper chose to reveal by publishing copy with the censor’s erasures left visible (Fig. 1.7). In a front page editorial in the paper for 20 – 26 June 1986, that provided the reader with an explanation for the black-outs throughout the edition, “The
Editors” drew attention to the fact that their copy had had to be self-censored by being
“vetted by our lawyers in terms of an agreement with our printers and distributers”
(Weekly Mail 1986: 2). This visually powerful strategy, that revealed the expurgation of information, resulted in sentences such as “If it is subversive to speak out against aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa we plead guilty” (Weekly Mail 1986: 1). Siopis uses these texts in her
Arutma collage to speak about silencing. A convex mirror at the centre of the work reflects both the viewer’s own face, thus making him/her one of the circulating images and implicated in looking, seeing, knowing and being looked at. From the depths of (or beneath) the mirror, an image of Sarah Baartman’s face, and the long legacy of intersecting racial and gender exploitation that she represents, insists on this self- inclusion as a reflective act (Sarah Baartman’s history as a woman and as a signifier is discussed at more length in Chapter 4).
53 Re-presenting blackening out may thus serve to subvert dominant narratives in recent
South African history. However, when Siopis whitens out the black woman’s face in Tula
Tula, it might be read as obliterating her identity in a manner similar to how the face of the black male attendant (servant and slave) in the studio portrait from the United States
(Fig. 1.8) is blackened out. No information has been recorded about the relationship between the man and child in this tintype photograph from the 1860s (Mirror of Race
Project 2014). It is not common, in photographs of this period, or of slave portraits in general, to erase the distinguishing face of the subject (Mirror of Race Project 2014).
That the identity of the slave was intended to be obscured is obvious, although this could conceivably have been done to protect the identity of a run-away slave. What appears to be an act of violence against the individuality of the subject might not, necessarily, be the historic intention.
There are racial caricatures that employ an emphasised ‘blackness’ of skin, usually to signify racial degeneration. Such an image is the aquatinted etching ‘High Life Below
Stairs’ (circa 1820; Fig. 1.9) by Robert Cruikshank, the brother of George Cruikshank who illustrated Charles Dickens’ ‘Sketches by Boz’. The simian black servant leads the servant hall in Christmas revels of drunkenness, debauchery, lust and lechery where anxieties about class and race reinforce each other. Light on his feet, adept at licentious dancing, his ‘true nature’ of moral depravity is revealed in his black face and ape-like features, of which the English servants, to their ruin, appear unaware and unconcerned.
This caricaturing clearly intends to perpetuate tropes of racial stereotyping for perceivedly comic social commentary. This caricaturing does not so much deliberately
54 obscure the man’s individuation as never intend it to begin with. The erased face of the
American slave reads across history as more riddling and ambiguous.
The manner in which Siopis ‘whitens out’ the face of her photographic subject is intended to be deliberately ambiguous. When Siopis paints over the nanny’s face, she explains the decision as gestures of affective empathy. Yet the gestures simultaneously obliterate the woman by denying her an individuated face – the psychosocial focus of recognition – and re-create her as monstrous, potentially expressing the confused feelings
Siopis retells that she experienced as a child, when she loved her ‘nanny’ and could not reconcile the relationship she knew with overheard stories from her parents of the ‘swart gevaar’. Arguably however it is, again, in the reversal of the black/white colour polarity that Siopis encourages the viewer to consider how value-laden surface colour circulates ideologically to determine depth.
Tula Tula: The Frame as commemorative fetish and traumatic wound
This drive toward connection must acknowledge the phallic subject’s mourning of the split within it. The objet a is the psyche’s unconscious trace of this ‘lostness’. The objet a’s wounds of severance are the subject’s scarred boundaries, the accumulation of which comes to define him/her (Pollock 2004: 51). In Tula Tula, the gilded Victorian frame – the frame inside the unframed pasteboard work – may be considered as the wound of severance in the racialised ‘nanny’-child relationship. The traumatic wound is given expression in violence and fear and is ‘framed’ or institutionalised in the phantasies that
55 were initiated by colonial policies and given contemporary effect by apartheid’s divisive, phallic logic. The “terrorisme” or terrorism to which the word fragment refers is the literal concretising of this wound: a stainless steel and concrete sculpture erected in 1988 at the height of the State of Emergency to commemorate the (white) victims of (black)
‘terrorism’. The Brillo pads on which the word fragment rests in Tula Tula is a metaphoric scouring. The retrospective mourning of control and the phantasy of the now diminished ‘whole’ ‘One’ subject, as expressed through collective state power, is the objective of these wounds of severance. The phantasies are expressed here through the politicised commemorating of human victims that may be said to result from these severances. These are the phantasies that “fuel the social structure and energise political violence and violation” (Pollock 2004: 18). It is thus explicitly outside this frame, even as she acknowledges and incorporates its homunculus presence, that Siopis chooses to attempt the rapprochement between self and other, and the holding together without conflating differences in gender, race, class, privilege, memory and experience. It is done in a way that de-phallicises the subject on a deeply structural level, where difference – “a sexual difference in the feminine” (sic) – is conceived of as “neither essence nor a hole in meaning nor an endless fragmentation” (Pollock 2004: 53).
The frame is like a tombstone, a fetish, commemorating disavowed knowledge. Siopis may be said to be undertaking what Pollock calls “deep excavation” (Pollock 2006: 10).
She examines the remains for the way of life they have come now to commemorate.
‘Commemoration’, Pollock writes, is the ambiguity central to Freud’s later theory of fetishism, in that commemoration “attempts to disavow unbearable knowledge while
56 simultaneously placing at its traumatic site a memorial marker, the fetish” (Pollock 2006:
10). Pollock invites her reader to consider the cultural forms which are excavated as the
“lost culture’s mnemonic” (Pollock 2006: 10), as
those elements, ideas, or beliefs within a culture significant enough to call forth or necessitate a cultural form for their remembrance, and to initiate a cultural practice that is the basis of the secondary and non-derivative, non- mimetic, but poetic world of representation (Pollock 2006: 10).
A mnemonic device as a pattern of letters, ideas or associations, assists in remembering something deemed of significance. It can be a pattern of associations, a poetics, or an apparently disparate collection of memories that, when associated in a series of visual metaphors, leads to an understanding of the present. A mnemonic device may stimulate memory for something that the adult has forgotten from the child, that the artist has forgotten, or that the artist is aware of on a level of consciousness not within rational, accessible memory. The frame in Tula Tula and its contents is an externalisation of the fetish, freeing the artist and the viewer to engage affectively with the development of self on another level. There is no frame on the pasteboard of the work; it is frameless, boundless. The frame is within, around the fetish. The fantastical, ersatz-Victoriana of the frame is the elaborateness of the cultural construction.
Within the frame are Brillo or coarse scouring pads, such as are used in domestic cleaning. Being hard on the hands, they exemplify the physical labour performed by domestic workers. As a different form of labour to the artist’s gestural labour, and a different surface to the smooth mimesis of the artist’s traditional oil paint, Siopis
57 represents the domestic worker’s labour metonymically rather than metaphorically, arguably to permit such experience its own voice.
Laid over the Brillo pads is a metonymic scrap of paper bearing the word ‘terrorisme’.
Siopis indicates (Coombe & Siopis 1997: 117) that this refers to the Pretoria ‘terrorism’ monument (Fig. 1.10). This was erected to honour “residents of Pretoria who lost their lives as a result of acts of terrorism, or in preventing or combating terrorism”, as the official City Council Newsletter announced at the time of dedication in 1988
(Anonymous 1988 in Marschall 2009: 154). From a rock symbolising “the infallibility of
God’s Word” rises a stainless steel arch, denoting “the triumph of a people living by
God’s principles”. The apex of the arch is broken, referring to “the untimely death of the victims of terrorism”. In 1988, the biblical verse “Vengeance is mine: I will repay”
(Romans 12:19) and the dedication “To our victims of terrorism” was inscribed on the structure, which was also surrounded by a water feature, encouraging “calmness and reflection” (Anonymous in Marschall 2009: 154). As Mabandu points out, ‘our’ victims are without question those aligned with the politically dominant minority (Mabandu
2012). That this monument is a block away from where the J.G. Strijdom memorial used to be, where Barend Strydom went on a shooting spree in 1989 that killed eight black people,10 is not an act of victimisation and terrorism that, at the sculpture’s dedication a
10 Strydom was sentenced to death for his actions, but released from prison after the 1994 elections, along with other political prisoners (Freedom of Expression Institute, 1997). Strydom applied for, but later withdrew, an amnesty application from the T.R.C., for an indiscriminate attack against people based entirely upon race (black Africans), eight of whom were killed and several others injured (South African History Archive, 2008 – 10). He claimed to be a member of a right-wing Afrikaans nationalist group, the ‘Wit Wolwe’ (‘White Wolves’). The Afrikaans daily Beeld reported that it had sources that asserted that this organisation never existed, but rather was
58 few months previously, would have been seen as warranting inclusion in the commemoration (Mabandu 2012).
The semantic irony is that the exclusionary emphasis of ‘our’ implies the unspoken acknowledgement that there exist ‘their’ victims. In September 1994, after the May democratic elections, the ANC-dominated Pretoria city council opened the debate to alter the intention of the memorial, and it was decided, over the objections of the Conservative
Party councillors, to re-dedicate the memorial to ‘all’ instead of ‘our’ victims of terrorism and to remove the vengeful biblical quote (Marschall 2009: 154). Siopis’ reference to this memorial may be seen as referring specifically to the significances of the re-dedication, and with it, to the conflicting awkwardnesses that, on the surface, describe the attempted forging of a new and more cohesive and inclusive social identity, beneath which, rests the
‘public unconscious’ that is both more willing and more resistant to change. The inter- play of these awkwardnesses, especially in the aftermath of the T.R.C. hearings as
Gobodo-Madikizela (2003) elaborates, are frequently given expression in creative practice.
A politically current and ‘correct’ reading of the memorial seeks to depoliticise its original ideological associations. The curating of the “new public memory” (Mabandu
2012) through objects of cultural heritage involves the attempt to collapse the dichotomous ‘them’ and ‘us’, ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’. The monument may be seen as an example of the Freudian frozen fetish, of which the alteration is an extension. Siopis’
a propaganda project of the Vlakplaas police hit squad unit, and that racial crimes were retrospectively claimed in its name (‘Wit Wolwe “was Vlakplaas project”’, 1997).
59 metonym may be seen as a reclamation and release of that fetish. Referring not to a datable public event, Tula Tula opens up a quotidian moment in the long process of socialisation and identity formation that solidified South African race relations. As a mnemonic device, the aide de memoire is of the will to change and of the external markers of a more rooted psychological history that does not change so expediently. The fetish is released through being represented (or visually named). The awkward re- dedication of the Pretoria monument might be read as attempting to represent the identity proposed on what Siopis, in 1997, calls “the ideal of what we might become” rather than
“what we are” (Siopis 1997: 60). To Siopis, it is through the excavation of loss that desires emerge; loss is the necessary condition of desire and thus the production of new subject identities (Siopis 1997: 60).
The Baby and the Bathwater: Representing motherhoods
In The Baby and the Bathwater (1992 – 93; Fig. 1.11), Siopis creates an eight-metre long collage of photocopied images of slave women threatened with the loss of their infants as well as photographic negative images of Siopis and her young son Alexander. These images are embedded in paint and overlaid with fragments of Alexander’s first,
‘nonsensical’ attempts at speech in his ‘mother’ tongue, rendered in flowing, wrought- iron, cursive forms (Fig. 1.12). The Baby and the Bathwater, like Mary Kelly’s Post-
Partum Document that I examine later in this chapter, explores the subjectivity of mother and child. Tula Tula does this too, but its focus is between the surrogate mother – the employed domestic worker rather than a biological mother – and the child for whom she
60 cares. It is in The Baby and the Bathwater that Siopis creates a shared narrative of differing experiences of motherhood.11
Like Tula Tula, The Baby and the Bathwater uses copies of photographic negatives. Its title also, like Tula Tula, is a fragment of a phrase that takes childhood as its vehicle for metaphor, referring to silencing and caution. While in Tula Tula, Siopis explores the implications for both subjectivities of the black ‘nanny’ and the white boy, precipitated by their interaction, in The Baby and the Bathwater, she explores how the different experiences of mothering of herself and of slave mothers may exist in relationship with each other.
Siopis whitens out or works up the blank spaces in the scaled-up images of both Tula
Tula and The Baby and the Bathwater. In The Baby and the Bathwater, the white blank spaces are filled with white processed sugar (Siopis 2014). Sugar as a trace across history of colonial slave labour, production and commodification finds its antecedent expression in the apartheid institution of domestic labour represented by Tula Tula’s Brillo scouring pads. In The Baby and the Bathwater, the gritty unresolve of the graininess of the sugar can be seen to contrast with the affective connective feather strokes Siopis describes for
Tula Tula. The incorporation of sugar, the product most commonly associated with the slave trade, into the foundation of the work, creates the material foundation for Siopis’
11 Rankin (1992) focuses on the details of The Baby and the Bathwater in her essay ‘Motif, Medium and Meaning’. Pollock’s text (2005) lucidly situates this work in the unfolding of Siopis’ conceptual concerns and technical developments in her work from 1985 – 94. The work tends to be critically discussed and surveyed in the context of South African female artists who explore expressions and experiences of maternity, such as Kurgan (ed., 1998) in the exhibition and accompanying catalogue Bringing up Baby: Artists survey the Reproductive Body. Siopis first exhibited it as a work-in-progress in Grahamstown in 1992.
61 contention that the trauma suffered by particularly slave mothers and children is a crucial aspect of acknowledging the experiences of slavery. Siopis uses “materials ‘open’ to projection – bearing historical and symbolic burdens” such as mirrors, sugar, blood, oil, paint, perfume, bottles, mothballs, human hair and milk (Siopis in Atkinson 2005: 57). In
Tula Tula, the affective, repetitive touches of paint on the woman’s face are intended to speak more of the integration of mourning and acknowledgement across historic lines of difference.
In The Baby and the Bathwater, Siopis’ hands in the photographic negatives and positives of herself and Alexander are spread in atavistic protection and affection over or holding the body of her young son, who was born in 1988 (Fig. 1.13). These images are pasted into the collage of the photocopies of the slave women and children, honouring the different expressions of maternal desire to protect the child as well as their insurmountably different maternal circumstances.
Siopis’ work might be examined in relation to the well-known Post-Partum Document
(1973 – 79) by Mary Kelly.12 In this complex work, Kelly documents the first six years of
12 Post-Partum Document has been shown twice in all six Parts, at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 1984 and at the Generali Foundation in Vienna in 1998. Part I was first exhibited in 1975 at the Northern Arts Gallery, Newcastle and Parts I – III were first exhibited in 1976 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The complete work has been reproduced and documented in Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document 1973 – 77. Footnotes and Bibliography (1977), in Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1983) and The Tate Gallery 1984 – 86: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions (1988). Kelly has herself written on this work for Control (1977 & 1979) and Kunstforum International (1979). Conversations between Kelly and Maloon (Artscribe, 1978) and Smith (Parachute, 1982) discuss issues arising from the work. Early critical discussion of the work includes Mulvey (Spare Rib, 1976) and Jane Kelly (1977). Significant critical contributions include those of Iversen (1981 & 1983) and Pollock (1986). Rereading Post- Partum Document (Breitwieser [ed], 1999) includes substantial texts by Graw and Pollock.
62 her son Kelly Barrie’s life, tracing the shifts and developments in their relationship in a six-year, six-part series of 135 units of framed texts, images and indexical signs.
Describing the work as “my lived experience as a mother and my analysis of that experience” (Kelly 1983: xv), the artist writes on her son’s baby clothes, drawings and attempts at writing, and presents detailed analytic texts in tandem with these items. This allows her both ‘to speak back’ to Lacanian psychoanalysis that is silent on the complexities of maternal experience, and ‘to speak more fully’ with that discourse’s conception of the unconscious as structured like a language for her own exploration of her and her son’s subjective experiences. In Documentation III: Analysed Markings and
Diary Perspective Schema (Fig. 1.14), Kelly represents her son’s first speech in three ways: first as typed transcriptions of extracts of his conversations; secondly, a transcription of the mother’s internal speech on hearing the recorded playback of her son’s speech; and thirdly, an additional revision of the conversation, contextualising it within her adult perspective. Over these analyses and confessions, are Kelly Barrie’s scribblings, contrasting with his mother’s alternate form of expression. This analysis of her son’s first uses of language gives the woman a maternal voice, and a perspective from the position of the maternal, to allow the observation of a child’s initiation into language, the symbolic expression of a masculinised social order. Her voice is present, and her body is absent, thereby reversing the typical representation of woman as a sign within phallocentric representation. Documentation VI: Pre-writing Alphabet, Exergue and
Diary (1978; Fig. 1.15), where the boy learns to write, resembles both the Rosetta Stone and a tombstone. As the break with the mother, and the beginning of her fetishisation, written language represents the culmination of a psychoanalytic account of subject
63 formation. This project portrays maternal subjectivity through diverse media and registers
– autobiographical, medical, psychoanalytic, educational – that explore how femininised roles are informed and created.
While Kelly’s project focuses exclusively on the lived and discursive relationship between biological mother and child, Siopis’ concern, precipitated by her own maternal experience, is on how perceptions of race determine different historical experiences of motherhood. In this context, Alexander’s transcribed vocalisations (Fig. 1.12) may be read in context as alluding to the miscommunication between racial and cultural groups.
They may allude specifically to how language, as a medium of communication and purveyor of identity, imparts lessons on the value-laden differentiation between ‘self’ and
‘other’.
In her works of the 1990s, Siopis recalls that her interests were to express “how lived
experience complicated identities, psychologically as well as socially”, and “how
identification might be possible across the racial divide through other subject positions
that stressed, amongst other things, gender, sexuality, motherhood” (in Nuttall 2010:
459). Siopis does not associate herself, as a white, middle-class woman in possession of
authorial or artistic authority, in a reductive essentialism with the positions or histories
of slave women. As Fish (2006: 18) details, the intersections of unequal social positions
show how women’s race, class, sexuality, nationality, religion, language, citizenship
and geographic locations describe different life experiences of phallocentric
domination. With this consciousness, Siopis seeks out the experiences that may serve as
64 points of identification, if they remain respected as rooted in their own particularities.
Referencing the experiences and relationships between black women who are employed as domestic workers and the white women who are their employers is significant in this context because, during apartheid, and to some extent today, these roles, within the white home, would likely be the most significant inter-racial communication (Cock
1980a & 1980b; Fish 2006). Once the pass laws, or the control of migration between the
‘homelands’ and the rest of South Africa, were tightened, African women were only permitted to leave the homelands if they obtained work in domestic or farm labour (Fish
2006: 32). Since white people predominantly would therefore have interacted with black women only within their private homes, as black women performed an extreme level of service as domestic workers, learned expectations based upon limited conceptions of race and gender were normalised. As Fish (2006: 2) viscerally puts it, this normalisation “reinforces the privilege of leaving the ‘dirty work’ to black women”.
Cherryl Walker (1991: 14) points out the tensions in how some degree of personal interaction may develop through close and daily contact, yet remains circumscribed within the racialised employer-employee relationship.
In this context, motherhood as a subject position is more a marker of difference than shared experience, more demonstrative of how race determines these experiences. Tula
Tula focuses specifically on the implications for the subjectivity of the surrogate mother, the employed domestic worker, and the child for whom she cares. The biological white mother is absented. Her structuring presence is however present in
Siopis’ own awareness of her position as artist, mother, employer of a domestic worker
65 and adult whose own ‘nanny’ was central to her childhood. Unlike Kelly’s work,
therefore, the economic and psychosocial implications of paid domestic and maternal
labours are Siopis’ main concern.
Identification through some shared maternal experiences, an emotional and conceptual
“place of mothers” as Ingrid de Kok phrases it (De Kok in Chipasula & Chipasula 1995:
182), may be a powerful starting point of identification. Angela Buckland’s Where’s
Nikki? (Fig. 1.16) is a work that explores the experiences of six families, known to
Buckland, who have a disabled child. Buckland, born 1962, is a Durban-based, freelance commercial and editorial photographer, who exhibits her personal photographic projects.
The work is ‘organised’ into the seven stages or experiences of grief identified by popular psychology: shock, grief, rage, confusion, relief, acceptance and hope. Buckland’s is the fourth, confusion, and Buyi Sithole’s is the seventh, acceptance (Fig. 1.17). Buyi
Sithole’s child Bongiwe is disabled. She worked as a domestic worker for Buckland, and after Buckland’s own child Nikki was born with an undiagnosable disability, the two women grew very close (Buckland 2011), Sithole helping Buckland to reformulate the question Where’s Nikki?. Here then employer and employee are represented in a context where other subjectivities and roles are the primary determinates of relationship. Where’s
Nikki? seeks to visualise and articulate, as Buckland describes, “the gamut of fragile human experience around disability” (Buckland 2011). The scale of the work in the gallery, in its dramatic enlargement, is, in this, significant (Schmahmann 2004: 20). The cropped, unfocused, fragmented images trace perceptions and overwhelming everyday realities. As Schmahmann (2004: 22) says: “Cropped in such a way that the specifics of
66 their content remains allusive, and incorporating elements that are out-of-focus, these black-and-white images are suggestive of fragments of memory that surface and disappear.” While apparently gridlocked into the burden of their own experience,
Buckland inserts images from one family’s story into another’s narrative to express common experiences. Here the material testifies in its visibility – what Buckland calls a
“visibility without didacticism” – where ‘secret’ experience and ‘guilty’ emotion seek to be seen and acknowledged. Subjectivity is organised around a common experience in a mediated and selective relationship with mimetic traces of experiences and objects. Here the photographic process itself testifies as a literal index of lost, reflected light and time.
Maids: Developing non-mimetic representations of domestic workers
Maids (Fig. 1.18) is not overtly concerned with personal memories; rather it explores how and why non-mimetic representation (‘maids’ overalls’ as indexes of domestic work in
South Africa) is sensitive and appropriate to the representation of institutionalised domestic labour.13
Two questions about South African portraiture that arise for Garb, firstly “Does insight arise from distance or is spectacle the inevitable result?” and secondly “Does aesthetisation amount to dehumanisation?” (Garb 2012: 27) have been central to Siopis’
13 Maids was first exhibited in Leeds on Absent Bodies/Present Lives (1993). This work, its themes and media, are comprehensively discussed in Coombe’s published conversation with Siopis (Coombes & Siopis: 1997) and situated in relation to Tula Tula’s themes. When Coombes includes Tula Tula and Maids in her consideration of Siopis as a post-apartheid South African artist who has made a contribution to examining cultural memories, she draws on this interview (Coombes 2003).
67 development of her representational strategies. Making the issue of South Africa’s institutionalised paid domestic labour her subject was also sensitive in light of the extended and sometimes vitriolic debates about the ‘rights of representation’ within the
South African art community that unfolded in the 1990s. As Siopis recalls at the end of the decade:
The perceived ‘othering’ of black bodies (as subjects) by white practitioners became a heated issue because white artists and photographers controlled the means of representation. This situation was particularly difficult for women as it continued the racial divide where there might have been gender identification. Things would only shift when the material conditions of black women’s lives changed, and this has only really begun now (Siopis 2000: 12).
Patricia Hill Collins (1990) describes how black womanhood is constructed in a process of ‘othering’, in a “matrix of domination” where mutually reinforcing, simultaneous oppressions of race, class and gender (to which Fish [2006] adds geographic migration) intersect to maintain power hierarchies where black women are placed in the least privileged social groupings. These perceived differences are considered in terms of binary opposites and manifest as forms of objectification, manipulation and control, such as derogatory images and cultural tropes specific to black women, like the ‘maid’ or the sexualised exoticised ‘other’.
Hill Collins, who examined the ‘othering’ of black women employed in domestic households in the United States, singles out the “deference ritual” of black domestic workers being called ‘girls’ or by their first names as enabling “employers to treat their employees like children, as less capable human beings” (Hill Collins 1990: 69). Such
68 objectifying appellations stem from the ‘othering’ that allow the domestic worker to be treated as literally invisible and ignored while present in a room (Hill Collins 1990: 69).
The infantalisation of adult women through, for example, the appellation of ‘girl’ or a generic Anglicised name, has been a consistent means by which servants in many countries are denied individuality and thereby rendered ‘invisible’. This form of infantalisation also perpetuates the equation of domestic workers with children, thus affirming their ideological and economic position as family dependants, although ‘one of the family’ is rarely an objective assessment of such workers’ situations (Cock 1980a:
11).
The government pamphlet ‘Your Bantu Servant and You’ from the Non-European Affairs
Department in 1962, proffered advice to employers that sought, from within a paternalistic, apartheid ideology, to establish “a harmonious relationship between the
European and the Bantu in this country” (Non-European Affairs Department 1962: 1).
How an employer addresses an employee is considered crucial, and by inference abused enough, to warrant its own point:
Every person has a name dear to him, because in his mind he identifies himself with his name. Therefore, never address your servant in any other way or by any other name but the one originally given to you as his name. ‘Boys’, ‘Jim’ (or ‘Mary’ to females) as a form of address gives much more offence than is generally realised (Non-European Affairs Department: 1962: 2).
This pamphlet is concerned primarily with what is deemed the appropriate etiquette for white female employers to interact with black male employees (government fears of
69 miscegenation or rape apply to white female employers not black female employees) as well as with explanations of how the pass laws relate to the hiring and termination of domestic servants. The domestic household is presented as a private but interpellated microcosm of the state and the employer is held accountable to improve race relations.
The pamphlet advises:
Much of the tension which exists between the different racial groups in the country can be eased by you playing your part in giving serious attention to the human relationship factor in the handling of your Bantu domestic servant (Non-European Affairs Department 1962: 2).
This admonishment to white employers would seem a legitimate cause for concern for the apartheid government. This is because, as Cock’s research in the Eastern Cape in the late
1970s concludes, “the institution of domestic service inflames rather than dissipates such tensions” (Cock 1980a: 13). In this system, many white children who are raised within this environment would come to expect the obsequious address of ‘klein baas’ (‘small boss’) and ‘nonnie’ (‘small madam’) (Cole 1967: 73).
When Siopis sews Anglicised names into the pink uniforms in Maids, she is therefore referencing how deeply rooted is the South African custom of ascribing names to domestic workers that disavow their own individuality and cultural-linguistic heritage.
These ‘servant’ names actively promote colonial, deferential master-servant relations (on an overall in Maids, there is ‘Polly’), Christianised virtues (‘Hope’ and ‘Mercy’), and feminine ideals (‘Goodness’, ‘Beauty’). That these names are ‘embroidered’ onto the cloth not in thread, but with pink cake icing (Siopis 2014), draws in the references to the
70 labour production of slavery to which, in The Baby and the Bathwater, white processed sugar testifies. The sugared cake decorations therefore suggest the indebted servitude that constituted labour realities for domestic workers during apartheid (Cock 1980a & 1980b
& 1989).
Like the framed fetish that references the Pretoria terrorism sculpture in Tula Tula, Maids also centres a reference to a monument that represents Afrikaner apartheid ideology. In
Maids, the Voortrekker mother and child is a laser-printed image that comes from part of the frieze of the Voortrekker Monument (Coombes 2003: 273). Printed over the image in confused disconnection are fragments of verse from the English translation of ‘Die Stem’
(‘The Voice’), the South African national anthem during apartheid, referring specifically then to the ideological building of a nation whose political foundation was based upon exclusion and silencing. The choice of the mother and child icon maintains Siopis’ focus on the complex maternal relationship that the ‘maid’ often assumes in a white South
African family.
Surrounding this mother and child icon are the housecoats or overalls that are widely worn by domestic workers in South Africa. Neatly framing the mother and child icon, the arrayed uniforms represent the unacknowledged legions of women who maintain the order of the white family unit. Siopis deliberately works with these externalised associations and indexes of ‘maids’. As she reflects: “I consciously exhibited just the traces of these women, the outward signs of women who worked as nannies in white households” (Siopis in Coombes & Siopis 1997: 113). She does this not to negate their
71 interior lives or individualities, nor to imply an unconsidered identification of theirs with the role, but rather out of respect for their different historical subject positions. Siopis also acknowledges and examines her own experience of participation in this system without negating it. In this, she tries to sidestep the – sometimes reductive – accusation of essentialism (Coombes & Siopis 1997: 113). This reflexivity is necessary when acknowledging and negotiating such overt yet subtly complex relationships as exist when paid domestic labour is structured through assumptions of service that are both feudal and racialised (a result of the colonial legacy). Within institutionalised domestic labour, Fish
(2006: 19) demonstrates, the norm is that “employers ‘other’ workers to distance themselves from the conditions of their own oppression in the private sphere”. Therefore when Siopis critically engages with invisibility as a representational strategy, she consciously replicates the systemic invisibility and lack of individuality that largely characterises institutionalised domestic labour. In doing this, Siopis draws on the non- mimetic conceptualism of western female artists working in a feminist tradition, such as
Mary Kelly.
Siopis describes two trends of critical art practice, influenced by western feminist work, which addressed selfhood through the body in the 1990s: either the avoidance or the claiming of mimetic imaging of the body. On the one hand, the “scripto-visual tradition”, typified by Mary Kelly, involved a conceptual avoidance of mimetically imaging the body that critiqued the classed, colonial and gendered power relations written into representations (Siopis in Nuttall 2010: 458). On the other hand, artists embraced mimetic imaging, as Cindy Sherman did, in high artifice lens-based work where
72 spectacle, masquerade and fetishism multiplied subjectivities and critiqued fixed concepts of self-hood as well as the authenticity of what might be an essentialised identity associated with the documentary photographic tradition (Siopis in Nuttall 2010: 458).
Siopis suggests that the turn to self-representation through the body by South African artists was influenced by the opening to the global art world and discourses of representation, and a strong consciousness about the ethical and power relations within representation due to South African history, and “the utopian yearning for release from a very malignant experience of history” (Siopis in Nuttall 2010: 458). Siopis points out that this self-representation tended to be in the specular, spectacular, performative mode characterised by Sherman, where identity was marked by multiple proxies rather than the apparent authenticity of the black and white documentary ‘struggle’ tradition. Yet a result of “all this dressing up” Siopis suggests (Siopis in Nuttall 2010: 458) was that reflections about the nuances of everyday experiences could not be fully explored in a public context. She further suggests that the “heat in the kitchen” of the representation debates in
1990s both continued in new forms the violence that progressive artists had faced during apartheid, and caused some artists to retreat into “self-scrutiny”, rather than making work that examined the (mis)communication between communities (Siopis in Nuttall 2010:
460).
Exploring these nuances is what Siopis attempts in Tula Tula. Tula Tula is characterised by a transformation of the mimetic qualities of photography. Incorporating the frame and lettering fragment as found objects into her work places Tula Tula within the ‘scripto- visual’ tradition and relates to Siopis’ installations of found objects in the mid-1990s. Her
73 photocopying recalls her interventions in history painting and narratives in the 1980s.
Rather than being only embedded in paint however, Tula Tula’s painterly, haptic, affective engagement with personal memories and ideological issues through the painting of the woman’s face suggests more the development of the materiality of paint as an affective carrier that her work in the first decade of the twenty-first century explores.
The pinkness of the housecoats is a complex metaphor. Pink may highlight heteronormative sexuality while colouring it as a nurturing femininity that does not threaten the institutionalised, gendered hierarchies that it supports. The reproduction of domestic labour by black women as a response to the naturalisation of gendered expectations of women as providers and nurturers in the home has allowed mainly white, middle-class sections of South African society to purchase their way out of negotiations, usually within their own families and intimate relationships, about household labour
(Cock 1980; Fish 2006: 130). The abject viscosity in pink, red and white of Siopis’ 1980s
Cake paintings is a precedent for the elaboration of the pink garments and cake icing name badges in Maids in ways that may be said to explore feminine roles expressed specifically between women. Paint as a medium acts like clay, or dough, built up and laid on with instruments from the artist’s father’s bakery (Pollock 2005: 47). In Table Two
(1983; Fig. 1.19), a tablecloth whose squirrelled paint comes in this context to simulate another feminine handicraft – crochet – is presented on a small table for scopic assessment like a sculpture might be positioned on a plinth. That the cloth overflows the white square, and that the pink chunks of flesh-like meat resemble Maenad-style dismemberment of the female body, might be read as the artist using the force of the
74 Kristevan abject to disrupt phallocentric narratives about females and femininity. This table setting is not decorous and is too ambiguous to be uncritically celebratory of female creativity. As such, it may be interpreted as a South African response, in the decade of explosive national race relations, to the essentialising sisterhood advocated by the table settings of Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1979).
In Now and Then… (Fig. 1.20) by Angela Buckland, the art-maker who shares a similar culture of gender, race and class with Siopis, uses clothing indexes and pinkness as a signifier in a different context. This relates to Maids, but like Tula Tula, it is working through mourning and the child’s inheritance, here the children of the domestic worker
(Buckland 2011). In Now and Then…, Buckland creates a memorial for Buyi Sithole, who was employed for twelve years as Buckland’s domestic worker, who died of an
AIDS-related illness and chose to spend her last days in Buckland’s house under her care.
Sithole’s two sisters subsequently also died. The title derives from an expression of
Sithole’s for when life was difficult: ‘trouble happens now and then’. Clothing – a dress from each sister – serves as an index of past presence and present absence. Sithole’s love of pink, a ‘feminine’ ‘uniform’, was a long-standing joke and affectionate bond between her and Buckland (Buckland 2011). The association of pink with femininity began as an
Americanised, distinctly post-World War II phenomenon, driven by retailers and marketers. Until the mid 1980s, influenced by the feminist movement of the 1970s, gender neutrality in children’s clothing was the norm. Here pink is presented as a multi- layered ideal of girlish innocence, which for the surviving children will be difficult to obtain. Buckland’s process in Now and Then…, where she got the dresses, took them into
75 the sea, and photographed them as they moved around and away from her framed aperture, also suggests her own process of dealing with loss and memory. Like Siopis in
Maids, Buckland’s authorial presence seeks to be self-reflexively non-intrusive. Each sister’s three children are photographed through their distinct body language – fidgets, posture – reduced in stature and burdened with the shared loss of their mothers. They are vulnerable in, yet protected by, their lack of identifiable individuality. Here the focus is not on Sithole’s relationship as ‘nanny’ to an employer’s children, but on loss, on
Sithole’s own family, and on the subtext of the very high numbers of HIV-positive people in South Africa, especially in KwaZulu-Natal, especially amongst vulnerable women.14
14 Young adult women are the demographic most likely to be infected (with an HIV prevalence of 24.5%), as inter-generational sexual relations between young women and older men is a common pattern of sexual networking in sub-Saharan Africa (Quarraisha et al 2010: S124). The risk factor for contracting HIV is almost seven fold increased where the age difference between partners is 5 – 7 years; this is because older male partners are most likely to be already HIV-infected, or engaging in concurrent or multiple partnership patterns that increase HIV risk (Quarraisha et al 2010: S124). It is an estimated eight-fold higher transmission risk from males to females than from females to males (Quarraisha et al 2010: S124). In South Africa, widespread “circular migration” fosters relationship instability and increases HIV risk (Quarraisha et al 2010: S124). This is where rural men are employed in the urban mining or trucking industries, or who work in other occupations in cities, and maintain relatively long-term, concurrent partners in multiple locations (Quarraisha et al 2010: S125). For women where poverty, gender-based violence, social instability, and limited access to education, economic autonomy and sexual and reproductive health services is the norm, sex becomes a commodity that may be exchanged in a variety of transactions to facilitate their and their children’s survival (Quarraisha et al 2010: S125). Condom usage is typically low; for instance, a review of studies suggested that only 20% of adolescents use male condoms consistently (Quarraisha et al 2010: S125). Studies suggest that obstacles to condom use include peer pressure and stigma about transforming traditional gender and sex roles and power imbalances between men and women, that condom use is associated with promiscuity and a lack of trust in relationships, and that the price and limited availability of female condoms hampers a woman-initiated method of infection control (Quarraisha et al 2010: S125).
The HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa at the turn of the millennium was precipitated by a number of socio-political factors. The Thabo Mbeki administration (1999 – 2008), and prominently the health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, denied, actively disseminated and tacitly encouraged false information about the cause of the virus and about appropriate treatment and non-discriminatory support for HIV/AIDS sufferers. This resulted from, firstly, a deep distrust amongst South Africa's politicians of its establishment scientists and science system (which were seen as part of an apartheid and colonial vanguard, rather than as independent researchers, such that there was no consensus about how scientific knowledge relates to policy
76
Like the works I have examined by Siopis, Buckland’s memories in Now and Then…, are represented as mediated mimetic traces or indexes; her individual photographs are discrete slides making up a moving and partial whole. Buckland purposely invokes absence and lack of individuality in order to respond sensitively to making work that takes cogniscence of herself being in the position – as employer, as historically white in
South Africa, as middle-class – that gives her more access to the means of representation and expression through photography. In this, her stylistic choices share similarities with
European and American feminist art of the 1970s that deployed a “negative aesthetics”, which is, as Pollock (1996: 285) describes, “a radical distanciation from any aspect of the spectacle and visual pleasure, a distrust of the visual image, of the iconicity especially of women”. By evoking absence to describe loss and mourning, loss within families and societal loss of faith in governmental moral and political accountability, Buckland interrogates what Nelson (2010: 28) describes as “the lack of relative individuality or diversity in character and emotion afforded the black female subjects”.
processes and public discourse); secondly, from a desire for Africans to find an ‘African solution’ (resulting in a strong focus on traditional nutritional systems); thirdly, a deep suspicion of the role of multinational pharmaceutical corporations and the antiretroviral drugs they offered; and fourthly, from a governmental denial about issues relating to common sexual behavior of South Africans, such as multiple and concurrent partners, gender-based violence and coercion, and low cultural tolerance for condom usage (Bawa 2005).
This led to bitter, public confrontations between the government and civil organisations such as the Treatment Action Campaign (T.A.C.). The T.A.C. had to initiate court proceedings to force the health ministry to make available the drug nevirapine, which limits risk of mother to foetus transmission during pregnancy (Schmahmann 2010: 34). The slow rollout of antiretroviral (A.R.V.) drugs, begun by the end of 2003 but still delayed in many areas (Schmahmann 2010: 34), was too late to assist the absent subjects of Buckland’s work, Buyi Sithole and her sisters.
77 Siopis’ Forgotten Families series (1996) similarly brings attention to African families through portraits. The works in this series are the artist’s interpretation of a recognisable kind of collaged portrait that was common in the mid-twentieth century. It is included as a significant example of Siopis’ work – along with Arutma, The Baby and the Bathwater,
Maids and other mixed media works – in Sue Williamson’s and Ashraf Jamal’s survey of contemporary South African art, in the immediately post-apartheid period (1996). The
African family in the photograph would not have been able to come together to the studio to sit for a portrait, because of how the apartheid migrant labour policies drove the separation and disintegration of black family life. Headshots of individual family members would therefore be collaged onto bodies deemed appropriate (usually wearing festive clothing like striped suits and party dresses) and these would be arranged together in a family group in the photographer’s darkroom (Williamson & Jamal 1996: 134). In
Forgotten Families I (Fig. 1.21), the aspiration to a unified family triad, despite overwhelming oppositional forces, is respected even as the harsh blocked colours and the faint photocopied faces emphasise its constructed realities. Siopis again uses photocopies, here directly of photographs, a technique that becomes an expression of witnessing, facsimileing but not creating lives other than her own (appropriate in 1996 when made during the TRC hearings). This family is imagined, not invented. The ‘invention’ is the maps of Africa and the vision of territory and resources – but not the stories of contemporary human inhabitants they present – which collage the background of this family. Taken from collectable cereal boxes of the 1990s (Constitutional Art Collection,
2014), these images would be absorbed at domestic (white, suburban) breakfast tables, a different domesticity to and one that elides that experienced by the black family members
78 portrayed. That this work was selected as part of the South African Post Office’s
Constitutional Court artwork stamp series (Fig. 1.22), issued on 5 June 2009, expresses how central and painful the subject remains in the national consciousness. Migrant labour, just like HIV/AIDS that alters the families that Buckland represents in Now and
Then…, has been definitive in structuring the experiences of African community life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Having discussed briefly the effects of geographic migration in the domestic labour sector and the emotional burdens it brings, it would not be inaccurate to suggest that this kind of ‘imagined’ family that is seen in the assembled portrait may be representative of how the ‘nanny’ in Tula Tula experiences her own family life.
Tula Tula: When colour generates subjective connection
Siopis has a distinctive use of pigments, particularly red, across her oeuvre, so much so that a major retrospective of her work was themed Red: The Iconography of Colour in the work of Penny Siopis (KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts, 2009). She uses red in its many variations, as “blackened carmine crimson, rusty ochre, deep purple, metallic oxides of iron and mercury, bright pink, red lead, hints of a barely-perceptible blush, brilliant vermillion, alizarin and brazilin, scarlet” (KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts, 2009). The artist interprets the colour as connective, that of Eros, emotion and somatic fragility
(Mbembe 2005: 128). For Siopis, “hot” colours “reflect the fragility of the body and the emotional states that we connect very directly to the body” (Siopis in Mbembe 2005:
128). More than that, however, she asserts:
79
I think I love hot colours because they express my need to assert Eros over Thanatos, even though I know they are metaphorically joined at the hip. I am driven by life and energy in the face of counter-pressure to balance, or return to, stasis or inertia (Siopis in Mbembe 2005: 128).
This suggests a catalyst place for meaning and reflection, often set in domestic settings and personal relationships. Experiencing how the iconographic elements of the sourced photographic negative interact with the formlessness of the affect-laden paint is central to
Siopis’ workings. Saturating the visual field with red, enveloping Tula Tula’s ‘blank’,
‘background’ spaces or depth of field with this colour, holds a space through affect-laden paint. Connective use of colour is also seen in The Baby and the Bathwater. This deliberate painting as an aspect of connection might have significance when seen in the context of subjectivity formation, as in the matrixial womb membrane Ettinger theorises.
In 1994, Siopis held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Leeds, during which time her most recent work was shown in Absent Bodies/Present Lives. Pollock’s essay (2005) draws on her notes about the works from this exhibition. Pollock mentions how Siopis’ feminist project, which integrates socio-historical situatedness with the modernist understanding of the emotive potentials of paint and painting, may be interpreted in relation to Ettinger’s process of ‘metramorphosis’, which introduces “a feminine specificity into both the operations of the symbolic in language and theories of the unconscious” (Pollock 2005: 60).15 I propose bringing attention particularly to Siopis’
15 I was drawn to consider Siopis’ work in light of Ettinger’s theories because of what I saw as the fruitful similarities between Siopis’ Tula Tula (1994) and Ettinger’s Eurydice series (1992 – ongoing). Subsequent to discovering this conceptual framework (as deployed principally by Pollock [2004] in the interpretation of Ettinger’s art work and more broadly, issues of visual representation), I found that Pollock has suggested that Siopis could be looked at in relation to
80 libidinous colour as a “borderlinking mechanism”, a visual expression of Ettinger’s proposed outro-phallic subjectivisation.
Central to Ettinger’s theorising of a connective, rather than a castrated, individuated subjectivity, is her expanding of pre-birth or uterine memory, a lesser-developed area of the remnant of the undifferentiated unconscious (Ettinger 1999: 89 in Pollock 2004: 9). It is in the aesthetic art object that the Thing finds embodiment, since the individual psyche renders it inaccessible through originary repression (Ettinger 1999: 89 in Pollock 2004:
9). But the individual psyche always mourns its separation (Ettinger 1999: 89 in Pollock
2004: 9). This is theoretical rather than psychological. But the move to transforming and integrating the Thing into the subjective plane is the move towards theorising the Matrix as the signifier of a “different difference”, one that does not operate by the logic of phallic substitution (Pollock 2004: 11). It is, in other words, a process of deconstructing the blind domination of the subjective field without becoming a rivalling, phallic contender (Pollock 2004: 11). Pollock asks how the Thing may push itself out into the world, out of the unconscious mind, from the place of trauma and violent differentiation.
When setting out an explanation, she quotes Ettinger:
What if this elusive, intra-psychic remnant of the body, matrix-figure, objet a, or gaze, operated in a transferential unconscious field stretched between several individuals known to each other, or between several uncognized partial-subjects – part individuals who do not know each other? (Ettinger 1999: 89 in Pollock 2004: 9).
them in her 2005 essay. This essay in Siopis’ catalogue introduces a discussion of ‘metramorphosis’ as one lens through which to theorise Siopis’ work. At the time of writing, however, Pollock has only mentioned this but not undertaken such an investigation.
81 This “transferential, unconscious field” is symbolised as unconscious, uterine, connective memories. Siopis’ smothering, enfolding, connective red in Tula Tula symbolically becomes, in this context, a sense of another kind of looking. By placing the memory object (the source photograph) within the body (womb), it is being fertilised and co- created in the artist’s past and present memories. When perception is an embodied thing, when the gaze is anchored in the body’s eyes, it becomes an “intra-psychic remnant of the body”. By obliterating both characters’ gazes and conscious subjectivities, even as she references and acknowledges them, Siopis may open up, what Pollock calls “a painting practice rooted in historical trauma” (Pollock 2004: 12).
Cultural theories of the gaze and the field of vision situate the subject within the highly scopic imaginary that is dominated by an Oedipal, Foucaultian, mastering gaze (Pollock
2004: 32). Ettinger joins Freud’s passage on the uncanny aesthetic effect of womb phantasies (Mutterleibsphantasien) with Lacan’s re-theorising of the gaze in his 1964 seminar. Here he repositions the gaze as a phallic objet a, as “a non-optical psychic inscription of a trace of what came to be felt to be lost as the subject emerges through its successive severances from archaic unity with the m/Other” (Pollock 2004: 50).
Ettinger’s proposal is for a matrixial gaze, theorised further as a matrixial objet a, that is
“not the psychic inscription of what is forever lost whose scar forms the incitement to desire, but as a borderlinking mechanism that is never totally lost as it is not phantasized in retrospect as being had or being submerged in” (Pollock 2004: 50). This is significant because the gaze proposed is not essentialising, nor utopian, nor based upon the creation and opposition of differences, but rather on the relationships that exist between even
82 ambivalently connected individuating subjectivities. What Siopis calls the Eros of her affect-laden, somatic, frequently red paint may be deployed as the “screen” or
“transferential, unconscious field” that spreads itself out between the shared thing and lost object (Pollock 2004: 50). This field becomes “the transport for affects generated in this libindinized textile of connectivity and dissemination” (Pollock 2004: 51).
It is this connective field that allows the semi-digested glut of images in works like
Foreign Affairs (Arutma) and The Baby and the Bathwater to speak to and with each other, rather than only pile upon each other. They may swim in the paint’s glue-like, membraneous connectivity that may allow the expression of violence and violation as well as generative force. In Tula Tula, the artist’s ‘soft eyes’ on her work and its wide- reaching representations similarly find expression in the blood-purple, placental colours that draw this moment, and the relationship that it holds, out from its context for further contemplation.
Conclusion
There is a retrospective relevance and continuation of this connective field in Tula Tula in its diffusing of traumas that are not wholly absorbed, which ultimately has significant relevance for Siopis’ “poetics of vulnerability”, the epithet most frequently and recently bestowed upon her oeuvre (Smith 2004; Michael Stevenson 2015). In the mixed-media portrait Tula Tula, Siopis seeks expression for the complexities of the traumatic wounding and repression that occurred during the years of apartheid, as seen through the
83 ‘nanny’ trope, through the relationship between black women and the white children for whom they care. In this, she is giving voice to the unconscious as well as unexamined memories generated by apartheid. This desire does not aspire to the forming of relations with the memory or historical person or real-life person, but rather to the re-positioning of the figure from her childhood memories in the artist’s own adult frame of reference. For some of these reasons, it is fruitful to consider, as Fish does, “the institutionalised nature of domestic work as the mostly deeply embedded and complex endurance of apartheid’s legacy” (Fish 2006: 7). Siopis feels that representing, mourning and integrating these losses may be done by painting the photocopied photographic negative and by exploring how the iconographic interacts with process-driven affects of paint and painting. The materiality and colour of paint create empathic identifications that are not representational. They become a means to articulate ways in which lived experiences complicate psychological and social identities.
In the next chapter, I examine works by Jane Alexander, also focusing on the early years of the 1990s. My interpretation, however, moves from considering how domestic workers are implicated in subjectivity formation and how they are present in intimate family spaces and relationships to considering how socio-historical contexts of labour and migration were significant in how tropes of domestic workers and servants developed to ideologically frame colonial and apartheid landscapes. In this way, I propose the interpellation of the family unit and the nation state as central to this study.
84 CHAPTER TWO
DOMESTIC WORKERS MARKING LANDSCAPE
IN JANE ALEXANDER’S PASTORAL SCENE (1995)
Introduction
Pastoral Scene (1995; Fig. 2.1) is a sculptural installation now in the Gauteng Legislature
Collection that places three disparate, particularised, female characters, on a cast apartheid-era park bench. One, a middle-aged black woman, appears to be a domestic worker; she is seated alongside a younger, nursing black woman, as the two are approached, seemingly tangentially, by an elderly white woman. I name this triad the
‘Pastoral Worker’, the ‘Pastoral Madonna’ and the ‘Pastoral Widow’. At their feet is a small, lactating bitch reminiscent of an African wild dog. As apparently disconnected fragments of the displaced, migrant society created by apartheid, this tableau forms a characteristic part of Jane Alexander’s oeuvre, an oeuvre that explores human vulnerabilities and engages obliquely with socio-political themes through riddling allegories and deferred meanings. This work allows me to explore some of the readings possible when a domestic-worker figure is presented, not as the central subject, as in a portrait, but rather as a participating subject, in an allegorical sculptural tableau. Rather than ascribing specific meaning to the figures, in attempted accord with the artist’s own
85 critical silence about her work (which she consistently maintains, see a statement in
Subiros 2011: 71), I contend how three elements in this work – the bench, the bitch and the three female figures – may function as a foundation for examining how Alexander would appear to mobilise representations of domestic workers beyond the constraints of conventional portraiture.
Following the subversions and alterations of genre traditions within pastoral landscapes that may be seen in Pastoral Scene, I propose that the creation of a racialised servant class as boundary markers in the nineteenth century in the Cape Colony was instrumental in establishing the possibility of Europeanised domestication in colonial South Africa. As boundary markers, when depicted as servants or domestic workers, black African women were frequently portrayed according to certain existing European conventions that rendered them embodied allegories of a quiescent ‘nature’ that had been ‘civilised’ by benign European influences. This resulted, for instance, in obfuscation of the reproductive labour as well as the geographical displacement experienced by many black
African women.
The figures in Pastoral Scene are naturalistically rendered, like a number of works produced by Alexander during the early 1990s that deploy realistic figures that have not been overtly hybridised. Speaking of this period, Ivor Powell notes:
At a certain point – in the early part of the democratic era in South African history – Alexander’s figures began gradually to metamorphose. The implicitly external violence (in works such as Butcher Boys [1985-6]) that is registered in the early work gives way to a more internal process
86 no longer carrying the immediacies of violence, but instead are born out of a traumatized and tainted reality (Powell 1995: 35).
Much critical discussion of Alexander’s work explicates and theorises the human/animal/object hybridisation characteristic to works such as Butcher Boys –
Virginia McGee (2007), for instance, coins the term “humanimals”. The visceral appeal/repulsion of the human/animal/object mélange, as well as its extensive elaboration in her work, makes this, I propose, a cohesive point around which to establish a critical analysis. This human/animal hybridisation, first widely discussed in the Butcher Boys, as
Lize van Robbroeck (2011: 40) says, “threatens both our perception of animals and humans [sic]”. This is because they, as representatives of Alexander’s hybrid bestiary, challenge the “foundational binary between human and animal and thus collaps[e] accompanying barriers between culture and nature, rational and instinctive” (Van
Robbroeck 2011: 40). This hybridisation is often identified in Alexander’s early 1980s work as expressions of South African resistance art (see, for example, Williamson 1989).
As van Robbroeck explains:
In her student years Jane Alexander launched (and has since, with remarkable consistency, sustained) an unflinching exposure of the human animal’s practices of domination and control. Her sculptural and photographic tableaux not only raise doubts about the authority and legitimacy of most commonly held liberal modernist presuppositions about “human nature” but also strip bare the last vestiges of faith in the grand narrative of progress, the rationalization of society, and the utopian embrace of technology (Van Robbroeck 2011: 36).
I argue here that Alexander’s sculptural and photographic tableaux that are not overtly characterised by cross-species hybridisation (and/or inter-species communication) also
87 expose “the human animal’s practices of domination and control” and examine them with reference to Alexander’s tropes of domestic workers. In discussing this suggestion, I focus on work produced primarily during South Africa’s transition to democracy in the early 1990s – mainly until 1995 (the year in which Alexander won the Standard Bank
Young Artist Award and Pastoral Scene was produced) – which appear often to detail instances of quiet, everyday violence. Alexander comments on her earlier work: “I discovered the more horrific my work, the more readily people looked at it” (in Peffer
2004: 77). For my purposes, Pastoral Scene is not “horrific” or overtly aggressive in its presentational choices, nor is Black Madonna (1991), Beauty in a landscape: Born Aliwal
North 19-?, died Boksburg 1992 (1993), Integration Programme: Man with Wrapped
Feet (1992-3), Integration Programme (Man with TV) (1995), Hit (poor Walter) (1995),
Fragmented Group (1995) or even Municipal Crucifix (1986). They are also not as elaborately or theatrically staged as the artist’s later installations in the 2000s.
Pastoral Scene has been discussed in some detail in Powell’s essay “The Angel and the
Catastrophe” in his catalogue of Alexander’s early work Jane Alexander – Sculpture and
Photomontage (1995), in Arnold’s Women in South African Art (1996) and in Fiona
Couldridge’s MA thesis from the University of the Witwatersrand, “Christian thematics in the work of Jane Alexander” (1999). Monograph exhibition catalogues focusing on her work in the 2000s Jane Alexander: For the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African
Sculpture (2002), Pep Subiros’ Jane Alexander: On Being Human (2009) and Subiros’
Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope) (2011) are substantial contributions in assisting us to see how the artist’s themes develop as well as relate back
88 to her early work. My approach therefore – where I discuss how Alexander allows the figure of a domestic worker to exist differently in relation to conventional pastoral landscapes, and so open the possibilities of re-interpreting the obfuscating utopianism that frequently cloaks figures in such landscapes – is indebted to observations made by these authors, but takes the opportunity to discuss the subject with more depth and breadth across Alexander’s oeuvre, specifically with reference to depictions of labour.
Situating the African pastoral
Pastoral Scene: The title of the work draws the viewer’s overt attention to the conventions of pastoral art in Western Europe. ‘Pastoral’ paintings were a favoured subject during the Renaissance, especially in Seicento Venice. The thematics resonated with the conscious imitation of classical aesthetic patterns and classical values of reason, harmony and balance, seen as centred in the eternal human condition. This classicism is characterised by “a high fidelity to nature and a search for the perfect form” (Osborne
1970: 968 – 69) and imitates the style of ancient Roman frescoes. Harold Osborne explains that in these Roman frescoes
pastoral or idyllic landscape was common, painted in an apparently spontaneous manner but often with a studied elegance and incorporating the standard motifs of rustic shrines under leafy trees, domestic animals grazing around and wayfarers in attitudes of reverence. The pastoral scenes create an imaginary and deliberately artificial world fraught with poetic glamour (Osborne 1970: 820).
89 In contemporary poetry, Virgil’s Latin Eclogues imitated Theocritus’ third century B.C. poems about Sicilian shepherds and in so doing established the model for the pastoral, being “a deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban poet’s nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other rural folk in an idealized natural setting” (Abrams 1993: 140). Fraught with the “poetic glamour” of languid shepherds and nude nymphs, pastoral conventions sought deliberately both to create and to balance a dialectical tension between ‘life’ and ‘art’, between artistic interpretations of life and everyday, lived experiences (Arnold 1996: 119).
The descriptions of the ‘idyllic’ landscapes in Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), which show the Renaissance’s interpretations of classicism, inspired Giorigione and his followers
(Osborne 1970: 820). Titian’s Pastoral Concert (1510; Fig. 2.2) is illustrative of pastoral conventions. In this painting, a nobleman (dressed in fine, contemporary clothing) caresses a lute, with his head bent in apparent conversation with another man, whose more rusticated clothing suggests him to be a peasant. Seated in a vast Italian landscape, where in the middle distance, a shepherd approaches with his flock, the two musicians appear unaware of the presence of two voluptuous nude women, one of whom collects water in a pitcher from a well alongside the men, while the other, with a flute hovering in front of her lips, is seated directly in front of them. The women’s apparently unself- conscious semi-nudity and invisible presence would suggest them as attendant muses to the men’s absorption in their musical expression. As Schmahmann (1996: 215) points out, the female figures are not so much inhabitants or participants in the scene but, in their nudity, are embodied expressions of harmony and pleasure of this natural, rural
90 landscape. The viewer is thus encouraged to identify the male figures as protagonists, and to identify with the male figures, while simultaneously allowing the female figures to sink into the landscape as elements of the natural world (Schmahmann 1996: 215).
The women in Alexander’s tableau are not generic nudes; they are highly individuated characters who, by their dress and the setting on a municipal bench, are situated in a contemporary South Africa. Yet no scene of rural harmony or creativity is being enacted.
The characters are ambiguously participatory, with each other and the viewer, whose space and proportions they share. Unless site-specific, sculptures are more limited than oil paintings in their ability to locate figures within a landscape (Schmahmann 1996:
222). This functions ironically, perhaps intentionally ironically, in Pastoral Scene.
‘Pastoral’ conventions are genre fabrications that are intentionally, unattainably Arcadian, from which all ‘real’ human experience is exiled and excluded; as Arnold says, “Pastoral existence can only be conjectured as harmonious through knowledge of its antithesis – conflict” (Arnold 1996: 120). That Alexander’s particularised figures would appear to express dispossession in twentieth-century South Africa (Couldridge 1999: 48) – and that within their ‘idyll’, “the only 'timeless' characteristic appears to be one of eternal suffering” (Couldridge 1999: 48) – thus positions them as the antithesis of the genre and testifies to the lived consequences of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid utopian ideologies. Situating the pastoral within landscape as a genre, specifically within how it plays out through the frames of colonial settlement and extended white rule, may illuminate some of the intricacies of Alexander’s allusions. The production and presentation of ‘acceptable’ African servants played a role in the domestication of
91 African ‘wilderness’ into a Europeanised agrarian utopia and is arguably evident in paintings such as Hugo Naudé’s On the Steps, Groote Schuur (Fig 2.3) as well as in nineteenth-century mission accounts. These ‘visible’ servants were significant in creating a servant class as boundary markers in the Cape Colony.
When W. J. T. Mitchell (1994: 13) asks: “Is landscape painting the ‘sacred silent language’ of Western imperialism, the medium in which it ‘emancipates’, ‘naturalises’ and ‘unifies’ the world for its own purposes?”, he contends that the conventions through which artists from Western Europe codified their visual impressions of place “disclose both utopian fantasies for the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance” (Mitchell 1994: 10). These coherences and tensions derived from representing vast and geologically specific sub-
Saharan African landscapes through imported classical perspectives and typographical schema; they were the artists’ responses to deeply unfamiliar and often hostile regions
(Garb 2008: 17). These settler landscapes, Bunn observes, establish “a noncontradictory colonial presence”, accommodating the settler family, which is conceived of as “a centre of gentle patriarchal control far removed from the violence associated with the actual colonial process” (Bunn 1994: 143). These landscapes, as with pastoral conventions, harmonise and soften contrasts – so as to construct “a Nature reduced to quiescence” – and to present time as ahistorical – because to a European in Africa “the past is the domain of the Other”, where “history is the history of dispossession” (Bunn 1994: 143).
92 This unease is discerned by many observers of South Africa’s Europeanised arts and culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the late 1980s, J. M. Coetzee found an antagonistic confrontation between poet and landscape in English language poetry from South Africa of the mid-twentieth century. Landscape – ‘Africa’ – is represented as silent and empty and it is for the poet to fill and interpret it. As Coetzee (1988: 177) puts it: “Silence, the silence of Africa, cannot be allowed to prevail: space presents itself, it must be filled.” This need is felt urgently; landscape writing in English is “a project […] dominated by a concern to make the landscape speak, to give a voice to the landscape, to interpret it” (Coetzee 1988: 177). Writing during South Africa’s turbulent 1980s, Coetzee
(1988: 177) foresees: “The poetry of empty space may one day be accused of furthering the same fiction.” It has indeed been so accused, and an emergent emphasis on visibility accompanied it.16
To speak broadly therefore about the colonial and apartheid-era landscape conventions in
South Africa, it has been not so much the absence of the (white) self that is covered over, but the presence of the (black) other. The absence of the (black) other affirms the
16 As Nuttall and Micheal (2000: 16) note: “[C]ultural debates, particularly in South Africa, have been tied to an identity politics based on visibility: a visibility largely reliant on the marks of race.” The contemporary framing of art around an affirmed presence that seeks to give voice to the historically interpreted silence of South African landscape can been seen in approaches such as Garb’s interpretation of Berni Searle’s work:
Searle is part of a new generation of South African artists whose reclaiming of the past involves a renegotiation of the land and a recovery of the silenced voices of its subjugated population […] Searle undermines familiar topographies by invoking the human presences they harbour. Unearthed and restaged, these subjects become visible participants in a reframed landscape (Garb 2008: 25).
The landscape paintings of, for instance, J. H. Pierneef may be seen as furthering “the poetry of empty space” (Coetzee 1988: 177) and are part of the tradition that Garb highlights contemporary artists as compassionately re-investigating.
93 presence of the (white) self. This absence is discursive and representational as well as literally reflective of political policies. For example, in early colonial South African landscapes what Bunn calls (1994: 140) the “trope of the excursive eye” is characteristically in operation. By this, he refers to the viewer as armchair traveller who may gaze with proprietary power over vast spaces. As Bunn describes it, these representations address themselves to “an enquiring self that is unencumbered, free to enter into exchanges, inhabiting a space full of exotic interest but cleared of obstacles”
(Bunn 1994: 133). In the representation of such landscapes, the eye/I can stroll at leisure and with impunity, can consider with scientific interest flora, fauna (including ethnographic ‘specimens’), may map and survey the landscape with acquisatory avidity, may lose itself nihilistically in the sublimity of empty Africa, may, in short, frame the landscape as it chooses.
When indigenous peoples are represented in colonial South African landscapes, rather than deliberately omitted, they are habitually present according to a regimented typography; Garb observes that “[l]ocal inhabitants functioned alternately as ethnographic specimens, a species of wild life, or as noble savages in idealised and remote settings” (Garb 2008: 17). What Garb does not discuss, in her analysis of the conventions of early South African photographic portraiture, is how African servants are represented by European artists. I propose that when indigenous South African peoples are represented as servants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they function mnemonically as legitimating a European claim to the spaces that they are shown as moving within.
94
Hugo Naudé (1868 – 1941, South African) painted On the Steps, Groote Schuur (Fig.
2.3) sometime in the early twentieth century. This work may be interpreted as a bucolic scene in which the figure of the servant plays a crucial role. The bounty of nature on the cultivated estate is manifest in the golden dappled groves in the middle distance and the riotous blue hydrangea blossoms whose presence in swirls of paint is so fecund as to exceed any realistic scale proportions. This abundance is on the estate, and there is thus the sense that the estate has brought it forth, that this domesticated harmony is one of
‘culture’ shaping ‘nature’, of Western European imagery – Impressionist-style brushwork and Cape Dutch architectural space – that has aesthetically and materially ‘domesticated’ a section of Africa. That Cecil John Rhodes purchased Groot Schuur in 1893 places the estate firmly within the ideological purview of the colonial project in Africa. Originally bought as a plot of land by the Dutch East India Company in 1657, the estate in
Rondebosch, Cape Town had been in private ownership when Rhodes first rented it in
1891. Rhodes had the house converted and refurbished by Sir Herbert Baker, the British architect who designed numerous governmental buildings, schools and residences across the then British empire. Groot Schuur was the official Cape residence of Prime Ministers from 1910 until 1984; today it is preserved as a museum open to the public by appointment. Brooke Simons (1996: 40) tells how the “spectacular flowering around
Christmas” of the roses, hydrangeas, cannas, bougainvillea and fuchsias planted originally on Rhodes’ orders brought “thousands of visitors” to the estate in ‘English stately home’-type excursions from 1893 to the early 1970s, when the beds deteriorated
95 and heightened security concerns ended the practice.17 That the work cannot be dated18 is ironically appropriate in that the scene itself is unplaceably ahistorical; depending on a historical timeframe (slavery was abolished in the Cape Colony on 1 December 1834), the woman might be a servant or a slave. If time is proposed as eternal, and perfect in its eternity, then recorded time is implicitly proposed as beginning when the Groote Schuur estate, and the colonial rule that it showcases, was established.
‘On the steps’ is a threshold position, and the servant is a liminal figure; her placement here is therefore doubly appropriate. As an African, she appears to have been integrated into the paternalistic service of the estate and its governing authority. Her dusky pink dress and white head cloth harmonise her with the colours of the landscape. Her light traipsing on these steps suggests her affiliation with the blossoms that seem to rise up from the ground. A female nude in a pastoral landscape may give embodiment to idyllic, timeless bliss; a contented servant in a colonial landscape admits European colonialists as well as a European artistic sensibility into the geographical space. McClintock postulates that “the representation of the land as female is a traumatic trope, occurring almost invariably, I argue, in the aftermath of male boundary confusion, but as a historical, not archetypal, strategy of containment” (McClintock 1995: 24). The cultivating of the
African landscape into a Europeanised agrarian Eden finds its expression of containment
17 This information on the historical background of Groote Schuur Estate has been sourced from Wikipedia, which draws on M. Martin’s Diamonds Gold and War (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), pp. 251 – 54. 18 The approximate dating is surmised by Brooke Simons (1996: 40) because the “broad brushstrokes suggest that Naudé painted this work in the early years of the twentieth century when his impressionistic renderings of the Cape landscape were bold in execution” (This information in P. Brooke Simons’ Groote Schuur: Great granary to stately home (Fernwood Press, Vlaeberg, 1996, p.40) is provided by Stevenson Gallery at: http://stevenson.info/exhibitions/buscat/item11.htm).
96 in the unindividuated African woman. As “objects of fascination”, colonised people in photography were often assigned conventionally recognisably stock positions, such as those of shepherds, pagans, gypsies and so on, in order for the European viewer to negotiate confrontations in an awkward and potentially alarmingly different colonised landscape (Hight & Sampson 2002: 4). As Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson (2002: 5) note: “For the British, and eventually for other Europeans and Americans, such written and pictorial representations reconfigured and ordered the unfamiliar and often raw terrain according to the pictorial conventions of the picturesque view.” The female figure in Naudé’s painting would not appear to be any of these stock characters. If anything, she may be interpreted as an instance of Garb’s “species of wildlife” in her harmonisation with her environment. If, however, she is viewed as a servant (as her clothing, her task and her position on the stairs – a liminal space – may lend themselves to interpreting), her containment in a serving and subservient role becomes a fetishised personification of the cultivated European estate in Africa. McClintock notes: “Female figures were planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact, at the borders and orifices of the contest zone” (McClintock 1995: 24). The European estate is such a contested place, its domestication requiring constant vigilance. Therefore, by identifying the female figure with the represented environment, by evoking an idyllic harmonisation between African female figure and cultivated, Europeanised estate, the woman is in service to an ideological hierarchy as well as in daily employment. McClintock explains that:
Through the rituals of domesticity, increasingly global and more often than not violent, animals, women and colonized peoples were wrested from their putatively ‘natural’ yet, ironically, ‘unreasonable’ state of ‘savagery’ and
97 inducted through the domestic progress narrative into a hierarchical relation to white men (McClintock 1995: 35).
Jane Gallop points out that, as a servant, the “maid” is a threshold figure, existing between ‘within the family’ and ‘outside the family’ (Gallop 1984: 215). The fetishising of the perils of the ‘swart gevaar’ reveals the white anxiety of boundary loss in the confines of the (white, suburban) family home, in the increasingly violent and volatile society of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. Gallop (1984: 216) explains the situation succinctly: “Sexual seduction (ritual homogenizing assimilation) is not sufficient to reduce the stimulus tension.” The maid in her alterity stimulates tension by representing the symbolic, the economic, the extra-familial and the class structure within the composure of the family circle (Gallop 1990: 216). Desire for her is murderous in that she must be both seduced (assimilated) and abandoned (expelled) (Gallop 1990:
216). The black ‘nanny’ and domestic worker, arguably in particular, serve as a boundary marker of white settlement. The ambiguity of her own interests and allegiances leaves those who would align both with or against her questioning whether her overriding role is
“to contest or conserve” the prevailing social order (Gallop 1990: 214). In On the Steps,
Groote Schuur, the black woman’s position ‘on the steps’ positions her in the threshold, liminal space that her (assumed) employment would also situate her in. Naudé may therefore be interpreted as evoking the ambivalent ambiguity of an African servant’s position, only to resolve it by so strongly identifying her with painterly elements that, as suggested, position her as a liaising ambassador. If she serves to balance a dialectical tension and resolve potential conflicts between (Europeanised) artistic interpretations of life and everyday lived experiences (in this case, in Southern Africa) which are the aims
98 of pastoral conventions, as Arnold (1996: 119) discusses, then this work may be read as an example of a European artist’s African pastoral.
Female servants as boundary markers in colonial space
The mission station, McClintock (1995: 24) notes, was a “threshold institution” for cultivating a domesticity rooted in European gender and class roles, which was brought into service for transforming and controlling colonised peoples. In competing national narratives and struggles, Nira Yuval-Davis and Flora Anthias (1989) suggest that women’s relation to nationalism takes at least five major forms. McClintock summarizes these roles. Women serve
As biological reproducers of national groups (the biological mothers of the people), As symbols and signifiers of national difference in male discourse, As transmitters and producers of the cultural narratives themselves (mothers, teachers, writers, playwrights, artists), As reproducers of the boundaries of the nation (by accepting or refusing sexual intercourse or marriage with prescribed groups of men), As active participants in national movements, in armies, congresses, trade unions (McClintock 1991: 105).
To explore further how colonial spaces were ‘domesticated’ and how domestic space became racialised (McClintock 1995: 36) through allocating women the roles of the new boundary reproducers, I shall speak briefly about one mission station, the Lovedale
Mission, established in 1824 by the Tyme River, Alice, in the Cape Colony (in an area now the Eastern Cape Province, where the indigenous African peoples were/are predominantly isiXhosa speaking). My focus is particularly on how the establishment of a
99 school for girls is narrated by contemporary, colonial historian, Robert Young, in his
1902 book African Wastes Reclaimed: The Story of the Lovedale Mission. This is because in his emphases and framing of his subject matter, one may interpret how these initial colonial encounters between black African women and European peoples create the ideological and material foundations of the domestic service/labour sector in South
Africa.
A church school at Lovedale began in 1838, concentrating on skills training for male students and by 1855 it offered agriculture, masonry, blacksmithing, wagon making, carpentry, and printing and bookmaking (to develop ultimately into the respected and prolific Lovedale Press). From 1866, Miss (later Dr.) Jane Waterson was appointed as superintendent to establish an Institution for Girls at Lovedale Mission. It taught housekeeping, sewing and cooking, in accordance with European gender roles. Skills training for girls focused on domestic service as potential employment in European homes; at the end of 1871, ten girls were in training specifically with the intention of employment as domestic servants or seamstresses (Young 1902: 134). Miss Waterson is quoted as believing that this “training school for young women” taught the virtues of
“cleanliness, industry and application” as well as the “higher and real aims”, which were
“the training of their hearts and the conversion of their souls to God” (Waterson in Young
1902: 132). Because there was no “hired help” at the Institution, the young women rotated necessary work, working in the pantry, the kitchen, washing room, mending and gardening. It was hopefully anticipated that when (or if) the young women returned to their families, they would be the reproducers of these ideas in their communities.
100
The missionaries’ pre-formed opinions and direct experience predisposed them to consider women as having “more docility and proficiency than the male scholars” in learning Christian teachings and European culture; they were also considered to have a greater pedagogical influence over their children (Young 1902: 128). Missionaries’ belief in women’s roles, therefore, as “transmitters and producers of the cultural narratives” and as “reproducers of the boundaries of the nation” (McClintock 1991: 105) warranted attention to their European education. Young describes this education as “occup[ying] much of the attention of the missionaries and their wives” (Young 1902: 128). The first step of this education was to encourage the adoption of “suitable” European clothing; for this purpose, “ladies in Scotland” sent out “suitable articles of clothing, quantities of prints and other stuffs, as well as sewing material” (Young 1902: 128). These donations enabled the establishment of sewing classes at Lovedale and outstations, where numbers attending ranged from twenty to sixty, and included “boys” who sewed shirts for themselves (Young 1902: 128). The ideological significance of the production, as well as the wearing, of European clothing is emphasised: “These sewing classes are an important factor in the uplifting process” (Young 1902: 128).
Intellectual aptitude and moral rectitude are externalised into visual markers, in particular, clothing. As Young observes approvingly:
The clean, coloured print dresses of the pupils, their upright bearing, graceful carriage, and general look of intelligence, seldom fail to impress the casual observer as in striking contrast to the condition of the native females in their heathen state. It is an object-lesson and deserving of careful study on the part
101 of those who are but too ready to decry the education imparted to the natives by the various missionary bodies (Young 1902: 141).
The framing approach of European missionaries is that African women as a gender are exploited by their male kindred within their traditional cultures. As Young puts it:
The conditions of the female Kafirs in their heathen state is one of peculiar hardship. Working in the fields, carrying home the crops, doing whatever requires to be done of a laborious nature, they are practically slaves to the other sex, and in very many cases are subjected to much persecution (Young 1902: 123; sic).
The evocation of slavery in gender relations, although polemical, is not necessarily to be dismissed. Missionaries were directly involved in the anti-slavery movements in the Cape
Colony. Another contemporary, self-appointed historian, the Reverend J. Whiteside, suggests that the legacy of slavery was experienced in South Africa in the nineteenth century as disrespect towards those employed in manual labour in European South
African society. As he phrases it: “The taint of slavery still clings to South Africa in the widespread contempt of menial labour as the employment of an inferior and semi- barbarous race” (Whiteside 1906: 71).
In respect to African women’s positions in traditional cultures, much concern is expressed at forced marriages in particular, and stories of missionary interventions are narrated approvingly by Young (1902). It is noteworthy how often it is through stories about clothing that resistance and religion are structured. According to Young:
102 [W]hen a Red Kafir girl or woman begins to attend the Sabbath service or the weekly prayer-meeting, the first thing she does is to cast aside her ochre- painted dress, which is a badge of heathenism, and to procure a few articles of decent clothing. Her heathen father or husband, as the case may be, fearing she is about to become a Christian, not unfrequently burns or otherwise destroys such new clothing to prevent her attendance at the services (Young 1902: 123, sic, original italics).
Teaching and encouraging a model of European domestication was therefore crucial to altering indigenous cultures in order to produce customs and beliefs “considered to be natural and universal in the first place” (McClintock 1995: 35). As McClintock goes on to elucidate:
In the colonies, in other words, European culture (the civilizing mission) became ironically necessary to reproduce nature (the ‘natural’ divisions of domestic labor), an anomaly that took much social energy – and much domestic work – to conceal. The idea of progress – ‘nature’ improving itself through time – was crucial to managing this anomaly (McClintock 1995: 35 – 6, original italics).
Young’s work, although devoting a chapter (entitled “Female Degradation and
Upliftment”) to the Christian conversion of African women and the Lovedale Institute for
Girls, does not, however, include any photographs. For a visual illustration of
McClintock’s naturalising process, I turn therefore to the reproduction of two photographs published in Whiteside’s 1906 History of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of
South Africa, which narrates the founding of various Wesleyan Methodist mission stations in Southern Africa. These photographs (Fig. 2.4) are exemplary in presenting women as boundary markers for European culture in the Cape Colony. Here three young women are photographed as visually transformed from wearing traditional Xhosa blankets to European cotton dresses. Women’s ideological function is to embody values
103 rather than actively produce anything. The layout of these images is significant. They are presented on facing leaves (Whiteside 1906: 296 – 97).19 They have no captions particular to the individuals portrayed, nor do they relate in any way to the text in which they are embedded. In traditional clothing, lined up before the camera, the young women are captioned “RAW MATERIAL” (sic) and in their mission clothing, posing more
‘gracefully’ according to European conventions, they are presented as “CIVILISATION”
(sic). As McClintock discusses, ‘nature’ is improved upon to produce ‘civilisation’, in gender expressions that are considered to be more in line with an individual’s ‘nature’ and therefore a triumphantly successful “domestic progress narrative”. The text on these pages, and this chapter as a whole, is an anecdotal and chronological account of events that lead to the formation of Wesleyan missions in the Cape Colony. None of the images in the book are captioned or correspond specifically to the text. There is a suggested inference that both images may record the same three young women, a few years apart.
The indistinctness of the photographs makes the clarity of features uncertain.
In an unintentional reiteration of the point about women being the visual signifiers of a domesticated nature rather than individuated, human protagonists, there is, despite the inclusion of this photograph in the published book, no sustained discussion of African women and their relation to the Wesleyan missions in the text, apart from the occasional emotive conversion story. This is because the text primarily individuates male European missionaries, as well as European wives and tribal chiefs through their association with the male missionaries. This literal absence extends to an absenting of presence, where the
19 I am indebted to Cock’s inclusion of these two photographs (Whiteside 1906) and a reference to Young’s 1902 publication, in her doctoral thesis, which drew my attention to these sources in the Rhodes Cory Library.
104 (black) other is present but invisible or silent. McClintock describes colonial discourse as representing the journey through Africa as “proceeding forward in geographical space but backward in historical time” (McClintock 1995: 30). Travelling into Africa is travelling back into time; the presence of any indigenous peoples is only allowable as “the living embodiment of the archaic ‘primitive’” (McClintock 1995: 30), thereby shifting their contemporary presence into an incidental anomaly – “a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire” (McClintock 1995: 30) – and into what she terms “anachronistic space” (McClintock 1995: 30). Discourse temporally and spatially absents presence. African women are also, I argue, permitted into colonial landscapes when to a Europeanised eye they have come to embody in dress and demeanour a domesticated wilderness, in an apparently ahistorical narrative.
I conclude this section by drawing this female triad into the present, by noting briefly how three young women from Maltahöhe, Namibia (Fig. 2.5) show how the
Europeanised dress that was originally imposed upon African people has been interpreted and incorporated into this Nama community. Maltahöhe is a rural, largely impoverished village with a population of about 2000 located in the Hardap Region, in southern- central Namibia close to the Swartrand escarpment. In 1884, Germany colonised the area known then as German South-West Africa, resulting in sporadic but consistent conflict until the signing of a peace treaty in 1907. Namibia, as it became known, achieved independence in 1990, after years of administration by apartheid South Africa and the
United Nations. In Maltahöhe, among the Nama people, there is a strong community tradition for sewing their own clothes in distinctive styles that continues today although it
105 is more prevalent amongst women (Hartman, Linskey & Stoyle 2010: 109). In an interview with 68-year-old Sabina Garises in 2010, the first Nama woman in the South to drive a car and become a teacher, Hartman, Linskey and Stoyle (2010: 96) record that traditional Nama clothing is usually hand-made patchwork and that different types of dresses are worn for different occasions such as weddings, housework, special occasions, shopping, and church (Hartman, Linskey & Stoyle 2010: 64). In Figure 2.5, designs of brightly-coloured gingham, floral-sprigged and isishweshwe material are colour-blocked and patchworked in dress patterns that, while slimming down the billowing of late
Victorian dress patterns, retain the waisted form, puffed sleeves and pleats that characterise the original design introduced by European missionaries. Colour-blocking with different strips and squares of fabric arranged vertically or horizontally, such as those worn by the three young women pictured here, identifies dresses worn for
“shopping” (Hartman, Linskey & Stoyle 2010: 96). Shopping may, perhaps, have a broader meaning of being out-and-about in public on everyday occasions. The young women display three distinctly different and individual personalities to the photographer,
American Terry Allen. Their appraisal of the camera lens and their contemporary individuality arguably do not permit the viewer to co-opt them into a Europeanised allegory of domesticated wilderness.
Labour in the pastoral landscape
The presence of the black domestic worker in Alexander’s Pastoral Scene draws out how labour is obfuscated in traditional pastoral landscapes. This is because an analogy may be
106 drawn to the role of a domestic worker who conventionally ‘invisibly’ reproduces labour in the white home that may be frequently disregarded and naturalised (in the sense that the family may not notice or value what she does until she is not there to do it, and then may consider her to be easily replaceable). Just as there is no conflict, there is no labour in a pastoral landscape; conflict or labour is framed as impossible when humanity and nature live in complete harmony with and unity in time and place (Arnold 1996: 120).
This characteristic extends to classical landscapes: landscape, Mitchell (1994: 15) notes, is represented as “a source of pure, inexhaustible spiritual value”. According to Ralph
Waldo Emerson, the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist and essayist, landscape “has no owner” and therefore all considerations should be taken to preserve this fiction, such that “[y]ou cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if labourers are digging in the field hard by” (in Mitchell 1994: 15). Considering therefore how, by examining representations of work and workers, work may be seen to define the subjectivity of its performer (Mainz & Pollock 2000: 3), I argue that Alexander’s sculptural installation Pastoral Scene, produced during South Africa’s transition in the
1990s, is an attempt to make visible these occluded dimensions of the experience of our relations to the social practices in which labour is performed or skill is exercised as
‘work’. The complex consequences for the representation and obscuring of labour in
‘servant’ portraiture, especially between artist and sitter, give me an opportunity to expand upon the ambiguous presence of Alexander’s domestic worker in this tableau by first examining two different portraits of South African domestic workers.
107 Shelley Kjonstad’s photograph of Abigail Mbokazi (date unknown; Fig. 2.6) may be viewed as a contemporary portrait that utilises pastoral conventions, specifically the absence of labour, for the artist to pay tribute to the sitter. Abigail Mbokazi retired to her home of origin after many years of working for Kjonstad’s family (Comley, Hallett &
Ntsoma 2006: 122). Kjonstad is now a photographic editor based in Durban. She recounts that Mbokazi was a significant carer for her as a child. She photographed her former
‘nanny’ on a visit to her home in the Ingeli foothills of southern KwaZulu-Natal (Comley,
Hallett & Ntsoma 2006: 122). The photographer captures a moment when one of the roosters appears to pause, body arched towards Mbokazi, as if unconsciously compelled by the power of his owner’s presence. She, rather than a male hero as in classical conventions, is the protagonist of this scene. The other rooster, a blur of movement, highlights her stillness. Her ostensive contemplation of her birds would seem detached and yet grounded enough to imply thoughts that stretch beyond the materiality of the present moment in which she is represented. The warmth of the light towards which she turns and the earthy tones of her walls, her armchair, her clothing and skin establish a reciprocal harmony between herself and her space. She is not, however, a nymph, muse, goddess or other embodiment of ‘nature’ or stimulus to masculinised creativity: she is elderly (not youthful), Black (not Caucasian) and well-wrapped up in what may be winter
(not nude in an eternal summer). The rural landscape beyond the walls of her home is implied, rather than shown. While she is sitting for a portrait, and the scene is likely to have been arranged to accommodate the photograph, the deferential cues, initiated either by artist or sitter, which characterise a ‘loyalty portrait’, are not obviously apparent.
108 I discussed in the Introduction how many portraits of people employed in domestic labour have the elements that Light identifies as characterising a ‘loyalty portrait’. I contend that
Kjonstad’s portrait is an example of a work that contains some of these elements, such as respect and affection for the sitter, but it also draws in other associations, and attention to these provides a nuanced response. I propose that the portrait may be viewed as drawing principally on one crucial element of pastoral conventions: the absence of labour. The lived realities of Abigail Mbokazi’s everyday life are unlikely to be utopian (however that concept may be defined). Her life now retired from labour refers specifically to her role as domestic worker and ‘nanny’ in Kjonstad’s family. It is Kjonstad who, in an act of symbolic respect, borne out of affection for Mbokazi, has reversed the migratory journey that many women working as domestic workers in urban areas have undertaken (and continue to do so). Kjonstad has photographed Mbokazi in her own home in the Ingeli foothills.
Dorothy Kay’s Cookie: Annie Mavata (1956; Fig. 2.7) would appear as a more standard instance of Light’s ‘loyalty’ portrait, where the absence of labour enhances the position of the artist/employer, rather than the sitter who is a domestic worker. Dorothy Kay (née
Elvery) was born in County Wicklow in 1886, studied art in Ireland and emigrated to
South Africa to marry her fiancé who practised medicine in Port Elizabeth. She was active in art circles in Port Elizabeth and the Cape until her death in 1964. In a composition study of the figure in Kay’s oil painting, Kay wrote “ANNIE MAVATA
FOR TWENTY YEARS A FAITHFUL FRIEND & HELPER” (Kay in Reynolds 1989:
312, sic). In this sense, the servant and the portrait of the servant enhances the employer,
109 as is standard in servant portraits (Light, 2003). Her good relations with her employer are characterised by loyalty (“faithful friend”), her purpose to assist Kay, as a “helper”. My intention is not to cast aspersions on Kay’s esteem for and reliance on Mavata; in South
Africa in the 1950s, these terms were certainly chosen to highlight her respect for
Mavata, rather than the various disparaging epithets that were in common circulation.
Kay valued the finished work for her associations with Annie Mavata as the portrayed subject and also for her own skill in portraying her. It was catalogued as not for sale at its initial exhibition and was not sold during Kay’s lifetime as she wished to be selective about its ownership (Reynolds 1989: 318). For Kay, the mimetic ‘likeness’ to the sitter, what she calls “pure realism”, is her tribute to her subject: the more successful the artist judges her work, the more reflected value adheres to her subject. Kay’s primary enthusiasm is for the technical aspects of the painting process, as an extract from her diaries suggests:
[A] very steely crisp one of Cookie – sitting with basin in her lap – big white apron all stiff, & cap & specs & all – Meticulously painted – I do enjoy meticulous painting (at the moment anyway!) like the Venetian & Early Dutch – every little stitch & crease – all exquisite! (Kay in Reynolds 1989: 312)
Kay is not overtly socially or politically conscious in her work; the Women’s March in
1956 for instance, the year in which Cookie: Annie Mavata is painted, is not something about which Kay records any opinions or knowledge.20 In the finished portrait, Mavata’s
20 On 9 August, 20 000 women from around the country marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria to protest again the introduction of pass laws for black women in 1955. The women held silent vigils in Parliament and plastered the then Prime Minister J.G. Strijdom’s vacated office with their petitions. A subsequent urban rumour was that the women were not met with police
110 authoritative presence is enhanced through her steady, steely gaze, the anchoring of her solid figure against the dark background, and in the quiet movement between the variously textured white objects and ellipses that form the composition around her, suggesting her assurance and familiarity within the represented space.
The viewer’s attention may, however, be drawn to the empty enamel bowl (Fig. 2.8).
Mavata’s left hand seems awkwardly positioned, not balancing the bowl but holding something not present. In Kay’s source photograph (Fig. 2.9), it is clear that she is cutting up beans or shelling peas. So it is not that the bowl is empty, but that the beans are absent. Rather than being represented performing a specific task, Mavata is portrayed with her ‘tools of trade’, the objects that establish her skills and position in the artist’s household. Shelling peas is an established trope to depict ‘the Cook’ in early genre paintings of servants (Light 2012: 40). Kay considered but rejected having a background of hanging pots and pans, as she made a pencil sketch of the portrait with this background
(Reynolds 1989: 314). One may infer therefore that Kay was drawn to conventionalised precedents of representation for servants, portrayals that put a person ‘in place’ in the social (and racial) hierarchies of the day and gave social and creative licence to honour that person without disrupting the hierarchies. At the same time, however, Kay’s desire to portray Mavata in her own creative way would seem to have led her not to duplicate exactly established precedents. In the finished portrait, the result is that the subject’s labour is dispersed into the rendering of the image itself; it is Kay who performs the
violence because many were ‘nannies’ who were carrying their white employers’ babies on their backs (Siopis in Comley, Hallett & Ntsoma 2006: 14).
111 artist’s creative labour here.21 If the artist’s sketchbook may be read as a visual unfolding of the artist’s thoughts and associations, it is not insignificant that three pages of studies of Annie Mavata follow immediately after a drawing of Kay’s hand in her sketchbook
(Reynolds 1989: 314). It may be interpreted that Kay were symbolically asserting her own labour power, as represented by her hand that holds her artist’s brush.
The ways in which representations of hands and the labour they metonymically perform express power dynamics that circulate between artist and sitter may be further explored in
French aristocrat Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist’s Portrait de Negrésse (Portrait of a
Negress) (1800; Fig. 2.10). In this portrait, the sitter’s hand has a similar, odd emptiness that Mavata’s hand in Kay’s portrait does. The sitter’s right hand (Fig. 2.11) that rests in her lap, as described by Helen Western (2000: 60), is an “amputated hand, reduced to a cloven hoof” and “inelegant and bestial”. It stands in contrast to the clear contouring of the rest of the figure, and the painting of hands in her other portraits, especially the
21 A division of labour is central to Kay’s understanding of the respective roles of herself and Mavata: Kay’s reaction to meeting the black artist George Pemba, for instance, as recorded in her letters is a mixture of benevolent and uneasy condescension, and a conviction that innate social and racial differences must prevent black people from developing the conceptual and technical abilities required to be great and/or successful artists. This is how Kay recounted the evening with Pemba in a letter, demonstrating how unhabituated and confused white South Africans were to socially equal interaction with people of colour, and how internalised racist attitudes were:
The Art Circle met here on Sat. night – & it was a jolly evening – Pemba, the Bantu, came!!! & his effort ‘In a Mirror’ was almost the best of the lot […] & his remarks were all highly cultured & full of sense & vision !! Most strange to have him sitting amongst us, having tea & cake, & talking Art!!! Birds of a feather flock together, & I don’t believe they’ll ever flock together between black & white – Yellow & white perhaps yes – or yellow & cream!! But the jet black is so different, it was almost as if a unicorn was amongst us! (or so it seemed to me) He came in his own car, & behaved like any other man – His picture was a native woman holding a small piece of mirror – & he said ‘we cant afford big ones in the location’ & I said at once ‘you see how your bad fortune can be your good fortune’ – & he laughed a lot! (Kay in Reynolds 1989: 312; sic).
112 delicate hands of the artist’s self-portraits (Weston 2000: 61). This hand may symbolically refer to the amputations and mutilations inflicted on caught runaway slaves
(Weston 2000: 60). For Weston, however, the sitter’s hand functions “to provide a poignant support of the signatures of the artist who did hold the brush for painting and who wrote the letters above it” (Weston 2000: 61). The black sitter and the white artist are juxtaposed in the “cultural space of the artist’s studio”, as continuous with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraiture that contrasted whiteness favourably with blackness (Weston 2000: 61). The subject’s representation tallies with an observation by
Nelson (2010: 28) that historically “for the most part the black women were represented as overwhelmingly melancholic. Despondency and submission intermingles with introspection and intelligence”.
When one compares the rendering of the hand of Kay’s Annie Mavata with that of
Benoit’s Negress, knowing that Annie Mavata was originally holding an object (a string bean or pea) in her hand, could conceivably explain the “cloven hoof” that Western perceives (Western 2000: 60). The slight pressure applied if the thumb (just visible) were to be pressed against the curled index finger of the Negress’ right hand might account for the apparently anomalous and awkward raising of the index finger away from the middle finger. The sitter may have been holding or gripping something that has subsequently been erased. What is potentially lost is individuality through labour, production and action; the servant’s labour is obfuscated as the artist’s labour is enhanced.22
22 Weston contends that Benoist exploited the sensational value of difference with a black subject. The painting stood out amongst the Salon entries of that year, and her ‘blackness’ was referenced, almost exclusively unfavourably, in reviews, but Benoist nonetheless was singled out for notice (Weston 2000: 54). The sitter is not contextualised in any manner, which reflects her
113
Through being represented as servants, black African women have been co-opted into a colonial visual idiom that sought to create what I have termed an ‘African pastoral’. In the examples I have examined, I have detailed some ways in which artists drew on the conventions of the pastoral genre from Western Europe in order to naturalise the presence and the domination of European settlers. Some consequences of this have been a positioning of Europeanised African women as boundary markers in the African landscape. They are signalled (such as being depicted as servants) as being under paternalistic European patronage, thereby not threatening the privileged position of
Europeans (such as that of missionaries, colonial governors, settler-farmers and artists) in this African pastoral. Yet while being depicted as a socio-economic subordinate whose place in this Europeanised landscape was permitted due to the service that they performed, actual depictions of that service in the form of labour was potentially problematic in that the absence of labour is central to pastoral landscapes. The solution was therefore to naturalise and render ahistorical the labour that African people performed. This may be seen in portraits of servants as well as in landscape works.
Unresolved tensions about power relations and labour (re)production may result in the elision of labour. Alexander’s ambiguously waiting domestic worker subverts these conventions. Demonstrably a servant or domestic worker, this woman bears the marks of age and work, yet she is not now performing her labour of domesticating the (suburban)
history as removed from her cultural origins; the sitter is thought to have been brought to France from the West Indies by Benoist’s naval officer brother-in-law, who employed the sitter in his family as a domestic servant (Weston 2000: 54). Contemporary commentary focused on opposing the ‘ugliness’ and ‘blackness’ of the sitter with the imagined whiteness and the beauty of the artist, therefore the painting’s referent is not the person of the sitter, but rather the artist and her egoistic “individuality, beauty and talent” (Weston 2000: 60).
114 landscape (materially and ideologically). As all three disconnected human characters wait, time seems to stand still not because it does not exist but because it is interminable.
What emerges from the interaction between the characters and elements Alexander conceives as inhabiting this pastoral ‘landscape’ is what I now explore.
Pastoral Scene: The Bench that landmarks separation
That Alexander’s three disparate characters are temporarily held in community by the bench so much a part of apartheid’s landscaping of public spaces is the defining element of Pastoral Scene. ‘The bench law’ is how the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act
(Act No. 49 of 1953) was colloquially known. It enforced the segregation of all public facilities, which included transport buildings and medical and legal facilities open to the public; it also stipulated that the availability and quality of facilities provided for different
‘races’ need not be equal. ‘The bench law’ – where park and public benches (Fig. 2.12) and also staircases, entrance doors and toilets – became, and continues to be in public memories, a visual icon of the day-to-day impact that separatist laws had on South
African society. ‘European’ and ‘Non-European’ signs ubiquitously signalled prohibitions when traversing the spaces of segregation, ensuring that all contact between people designated Caucasian Europeans and other races was eliminated. The Native Laws
Amendment Act (Act No. 54 of 1957) prevented ‘non-whites’ from entering any public building or organisation situated in white areas, including clubs, churches, hospitals, or liquor stores. The Population Registration Act (1960) necessitated the registration of
South African peoples into stipulated ‘racial categories’ as determined by municipal
115 authorities, so that spatial segregation, amongst other things, could be enforced. An anachronistic exception to the demarcation of public benches as ‘European’ and ‘Non-
European’ (Fig. 2.13) was the ‘Nannies only’ bench (Fig. 2.14). Appearing in retrospect poignantly and degradingly absurd, this manifestation of how bureaucratic regulation tied itself into knots to circumscribe the everyday interactions (such as that between carer and child) that the systemic policies of apartheid itself facilitated and encouraged (such as the channelling of black women into domestic service).
While Alexander’s tableau was made in 1995 in a new political dispensation, one may nevertheless infer that it refers to petty-apartheid regulations – and that the two black women are seated on a ‘Non-European’ bench. This has been affirmed by Alexander who remarks: “The experience and structure of apartheid as a social system was a significant source in my early work” (in Subiros 2011: 71). She specifies that references to this law, through representations of a bench, occur in The Municipal Cross (1986; Fig. 2.15) and
Pastoral Scene. As she says:
The benches in these works are replicas of those used in municipal parks (green) and at bus stops (‘Transport Red’) in Johannesburg in the second half of the 20th century. Typically they were labelled in white stencilling text ‘Whites only/Net Blankes’ or ‘Europeans only/Alleen vir Europeane’ [sic] in terms of the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, No. 49 of 1953. The Act was repealed in October 1990 (Alexander in DaimlerChrysler (ed.) 2002: 115).
The Separate Amenities Act had been repealed for almost five years, therefore, when
Pastoral Scene was completed in 1995. The bench as a prominent feature of Alexander’s tableau, and the racial division between seated and standing women, may seem to suggest
116 that the dismantling of apartheid would appear to be a far more complex and long-term project than initially envisaged. Nonetheless, these characters are all present here, on the velvet dais that holds the tableau. Arnold points out how “[s]culptural space provides a meeting place for reference to fragments of society, dislodged from social contexts, and they speak eloquently of disjunctions in time and space” (Arnold 1996: 119). This is arguably central to engaging with Pastoral Scene.
The ‘bench law’ is a reference point for the divisions of apartheid in cultural consciousness, as may be seen, I argue, in a cartoon by the well-known, respected South
African cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro (publishing as Zapiro) that appeared in the Sunday
Times on 28 April 2014 (Fig. 2.16). This cartoon is intended to honour and mark the twentieth anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections, when Nelson Mandela was elected in the general election on 27 April 1994, and which is marked by the country as the public holiday Freedom Day. The setting is what may be considered of importance.
The narrative is the poignant gag of the two born-free23 inter-racial friends who imagine the worst exigencies of apartheid were the inexplicable lack of social media and digital technology. As they wander off, arm in arm bromance-style,24 to hang out, they represent the present, that is now to be the future, unburdened by the weights of the past. They are witnessed by a black woman, who in her suit with smart phone and briefcase, is positioned as a generic professional. She is by turn curious, nonplussed and then heart- warmed, and who, unlike the boys, is consciously aware that she herself is as much a
23 Born-free: an individual born into a generation after South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994 (www.oxforddictionaries.com); frequently referencing the promise or hope, rather than the realities, of socio-economic and psychosocial freedoms. 24 Bromance: a portmanteau of ‘brother’ and ‘romance’ to describe a non-sexual relationship between two (usually heterosexual) males that is unusually close (www.urbandictionary.com).
117 testimony to the changes wrought in the country over the preceding twenty years as they are. This narrative might have played out at a school or a home and been witnessed by any thirty-something or older adult. I would suggest that the scene being on a park bench is significant because it is no longer significant; institutionalised racial separation for amenities – be they parks or malls – is now unimaginable. Access and exclusion function now in other ways. The black woman on the bench now has employment opportunities beyond what was available during apartheid. She is as much a resident of contemporary
South Africa as the two boys, and it is she who may sit on this bench, in her autonomy not connected to the children as carer, who may witness the everyday significance of the moment, and suggest to the reader that it is in the unremarkable quotidian moments that apartheid exacted its grinding of the spirit, and that are now not manifest the same way.
Strangers may come together in a public space.
In Municipal Crucifix, two figures sit on this ‘Transport Red’ bus bench. One, apart from facial scarring as from acne, has the preternaturally smooth and symmetrical anatomy of a classical sculpture if it were allowed to reach middle age, to fill out and to develop a more slumped posture. He looks intently to his right, brow slightly contracted, either coincidentally or deliberately leaving the other figure out of his field of vision. This emaciated, abused figure is in its shadow side; he slumps back against the bench, head hanging forward. Although his seated weight is held by the bench, the hanging torso, the arms weighing on the bench’s back support, and the extended feet tucked together as if nailed to a cross, all evoke the image of a crucifixion. Bruised ribs protrude through an emaciated body, flesh is exposed in a thigh, its pubis is roughly stitched up. These figures
118 wait quietly in the spaces between South Africa’s experiences of separation, which were becoming increasingly violent as the 1980s unfolded.25
One figure waits with anxiety, one with resignation. They may be identified as the pain signatures of both victim and violator. Quiet ghouls, they lack the visceral menace of the impotent Butcher Boys (1985 – 86; Fig. 2.17). They very literally lack the Butcher Boys’ presence: Municipal Crucifix has been destroyed while Butcher Boys is on permanent display at the South African National Gallery. Like the Butcher Boys, these figures are so ambiguous in their waiting that the responsibility placed on the viewer is deeply destabilising. Municipal Crucifix, however, with its identifiable bus stop bench (unlike
Butcher Boys where the figures sit on a rough, featureless bench) and with its undemonstrative, grey, yet more identifiably ‘human’ figures, may be more easily insinuated into the everyday experiences of apartheid South Africa. One may readily ask,
Do they incentivise or witness the violence of the everyday? Are they in their everyday actions, on trial? Is this bench a dock? If they leave the bench, the public space, where do they go, and are they yoked together? Their relationship is arguably more complex than victims and victimisers, crucified saint and brutal dog, and an antagonistic dichotomy, which clearly frames Peter Kennard’s Apartheid South Africa (1974; Fig. 2.18).
A British photomontage artist born in 1949, Kennard describes himself as an activist making work that advocates social justice through visual means. His work is
25 On 6 March 1986, the National government lifted the State of Emergency that had been imposed in 1985 in response to widespread and growing protests at apartheid policies from within the country, but by 12 June 1986, it was reinstated (to be known colloquially as the second State of Emergency) and lasted until 18 October 1990.
119 confrontational and literalist. He explains his motivation: “By trying to be as direct and honest about what’s going on around the world today, there is an implicit assumption that things have got to change” (Borromeo 2011). In the 1970s, he began working with photomontage rather than painting: “I’m using montage to get people to think critically – montage does this by cutting together images that are usually separate in our commercial culture” (Borromeo 2011). He was thus drawn to the icon of the European-only bench as a symbol of decadence when he made a work critiquing apartheid in 1974. Dogs tearing apart the skeletal, abject body of a black man is intended to depict the brutality of the
South African police state. These are not dramatic hellhounds but hungry, scraggly strays.
In this interpretation, South Africa is populated by crucified innocents and vicious dogs.
The iconography of men’s outstretched arms and bound, pierced feet in Christ-like persecution is employed here by Kennard, and is repeatedly referenced by Alexander. I have suggested how it is deployed in Municipal Crucifix. Her Hit (Poor Walter) (1995;
Fig. 2.19) also presents a man so neatly crucified in dapper suit that there is no unsightly or extraneous ‘mess’. The agony and chaos of death is visceral when it is so seemingly downplayed. A young librarian was senselessly and accidently caught and killed in crossfire; Alexander’s response to one person’s history, as Powell (1995: 32) says,
“creates and sustains strongly the effect of the secular martyrdom”.
Kennard’s activist stance is directed specifically at the contrast between the experience of the white woman, who is seated such that the viewer may see the ‘EUROPEANS ONLY’ stencil that brands the bench, and the tortured black man. The implication is that she is
120 (deliberately) unknowing of her leisured privilege, just as she ignores the implications of the stencilling, which opens out to the abject tableau, ever present yet ignored, at her feet.
However, although her privileged position on the bench may appear leisured, as her arm is draped over the back, she appears to be looking intently outside the frame of the photograph while her arm firmly grips her bag, shield-like, across her body. Threat therefore infuses the leisure. There is much situational similarity to Alexander’s
Municipal Crucifix, where two figures ignore their proximity to and implicit relationship with each other, where one more demonstrably privileged figure turns away uneasily from the other’s suffering. Alexander’s two figures, however, in their grey hairless non- humanness, seem to slip into and speak out of the national unconscious, and arguably are a more suggestive critique of the insidiously subtle, quotidian realities of apartheid, the splits and violent meldings that the experience of apartheid twisted into the nation’s psyches.
Pastoral Scene may not be less violent than other works of Alexander’s of the period, yet it may appear so (Couldridge 1999: 46). Arguably this is because its high fidelity realism does not allow for the unsettling hybridisation of Butcher Boys or Municipal Crucifix and its characters’ undemonstrative and/or non-iconic gestures and stances do not have the iconographic, emotive qualities of works such as Hit (Poor Walter). How Alexander’s characters in Pastoral Scene, which unlike those of Municipal Crucifix are both modelled in a life-like manner and are dressed in found clothing, appear to move through reductive polarisations of persecutor and martyr by using this realism, is discussed in the following section.
121
Pastoral Scene: The Madonna, the Worker and the Widow
In Alexander’s ‘pastoral scene’, three women – a middle-aged black women dressed in the manner of a domestic worker, the barefoot black nursing mother who is also symbolised into an African Madonna, and the elderly white woman – represent three individuals, in ambiguously detached relationship. It would imply a unity that they do not overtly possess to describe them as a female triad, and yet that, arguably, is not an inappropriate means by which to describe them.
– The Pastoral Madonna
The ‘Pastoral Madonna’ may appear as a humanised African Madonna. Her head hangs heavily on her neck, but her head is lifted slightly and her one visible eye (the other is concealed by her head cloth) looks both beadily and deliberately but also vacantly a few metres ahead of her. Waiting as the infant feeds, this birth doesn’t seem to have been experienced as miraculous, although the infant is shrouded in a royal purple; it appears to be another bundled burden to be carried. Because one breast is uncovered to nurse the infant, she most resembles, arguably, a Quatrrocento ‘Nursing Madonna’ (Madonna lactans).
Increasing naturalism in religious imagery meant that an icon of the Virgin Mary cradling and breast-feeding an infant Christ presented the viewer with an anatomically accurate
122 and vividly rendered female breast (Holmes 1997: 167). While little is known about the specific conditions of production, display, and use of these paintings (Holmes 1997: 171), as a religious image, the Nursing Madonna “could have stimulated meditations upon spiritual nurture – a common Madonna lactans theme within a monastic context”
(Holmes 1997: 171). Symbolic expressions of “nourishment and dependence” were likely attractive at a time of instability in Florentine society, characterised as it was with
“chronic malnutrition and anxiety over food supply” (Miles 1993: 29). A “devotional gaze”, as opposed to an erotic one, was formalised by standardising (by monastic patrons, painters’ guilds and popular religious tracts) iconographic signifiers for representing the
Virgin. Such signifiers included a hand partially covering the breast, the breast being flat so that the nursing breast appeared rather like an appendage, and the dress having a slit for a nursing breast like a wet-nurse’s gown and not being disarranged, as in contemporary erotic domestic paintings (Miles 1993: 34; Holmes 1997: 173). A wet- nurse might even appear alongside the Madonna (Holmes 1997: 188).
The wet-nurse (balia) was a crucial figure as pregnant patrician women were discouraged from the practice, since it was believed that breast-feeding for the standard two years would not allow them to become pregnant again during that time, and that a pregnant woman’s breast milk was harmful to the nursing infant (if a patrician woman were, once again pregnant, to nurse her own infant) (Holmes 1997: 188). The Nursing Madonna may have served as an exemplum for wet-nurses to follow (Holmes 1997: 190). The correspondence between the Madonna nursing Christ and a wet-nurse providing for her charge (Holmes 1997: 187) and the delicate issues of contractual labour and class
123 difference in this social practice were handled indirectly by Florentine commentaries.
Holmes (1997: 191) observes that the Nursing Madonna “effectively fused together the splintered mother figure into an idealised image of the milk-giving blood-mother”.
Scopic control of an image of the nurturing mother allayed anxieties about the ‘balia system’, which, even at its best
was predicated upon two potentially traumatic separations. The first separation occurred when the child was taken from its ‘blood parents’ shortly after birth and placed with a wet-nurse and her husband – its ‘milk parents’ – often outside Florence, in the country. The second separation usually came two years later, when the child left its nurse and returned to the home of its biological parents (Holmes 1997: 190 – 91).
Furthermore, fears of ‘dirty milk’ passed to a patrician infant from a morally reprobate wet-nurse abounded, of which this popular tract warns: “If the one who cares for him has evil customs or is of base condition, he will receive the impress of those customs because of having sucked her polluted blood” (in Miles 1993: 30). And the wet-nurse herself was likely to have been separated from her own infant, especially if she resided with a patrician family, as social and medical wisdom discouraged the sharing of a wet-nurse’s milk between infants.
Changing social practices, refrigeration and milk formula has meant that black South
African women do not breast-feed white children; however, as a metaphor, it is appropriate in many ways. The unidentifiable bundle that the Pastoral Madonna appears grimly to hold to her breast may be read as representing the succor that a black ‘nanny’ may provide to a white employer’s child, likely at the expense of her own child who
124 might well have been left with a relative in a distant area, as outlined in Chapter One.
This nurturing has broader connotations of the support that the black labour sector provided to white South Africans, both in and beyond the domestic household. This reliance could nonetheless be conflicting for both employer and employee, through which fears of the contamination and danger of the swart gevaar may have been channelled.
The white infant was likely also to suffer, sooner or later, from a confusion or rejection of the split or dual maternal caregiver.
Arnold (1996: 118) suggests that the halo transforms the Madonna not into a martyr, but into a symbol of motherhood. She has a similar halo symbol to Poor Walter where a male figure evokes innocence and martyrdom, and to the halo which the martyred and bound man lies on/has died on/has died with in Integration Programme: Man with Wrapped
Feet (1993 – 94; Fig. 2.20).26 In Pastoral Scene, the Pastoral Madonna figure is an elaboration of the character in Alexander’s earlier sculpture Black Madonna (1991; Fig.
2.21). A devotional ‘Black’ Madonna statue, the figure is mounted on a wooden ammunition box, standing surrounded by thorns, reminiscent of barbed wire fencing.
Unlike many Madonna figures however, she appears to be pregnant, therefore fertile and impregnated. Alexander subverts conventional Christian iconography – the Madonna is black as well as pregnant – so that she may speak, perhaps, about the visual containment of the historically pregnant female body, and, specifically, of how the Virgin Mary’s
26 The Integration Programme series draws an analogy with the ‘reintegration program’ attempted in New York where, through facilitation, mentally disturbed patients were assisted in re-joining mainstream society (Legacy Project at the Visual Arts Library, 2001). This comparison is Alexander’s observation that South Africa, after the euphoria of the 1994 democratic elections, would need to heal the deep psychosocial wounds and divides in South Africa. In Integration Programme: Man with Wrapped Feet (1993 – 94), this integration was not possible, or too late.
125 chastity does not traditionally approve of depictions of her body in a gestating, pregnant state. Powell (1995: 10) contends that her gestation serves to “sanctify the motherhood rather than the virginity”. Bearing in mind the similarities between the Black Madonna and the nursing Pastoral Madonna in Pastoral Scene, one may infer that Alexander here pays homage to forms of mothering more complex than the conventionally sanctified maternal figure.
The Black Madonna appears in one of Alexander’s montages, Fragmented Group (1995;
Fig. 2.22). Alexander feels that her sculptures need to be installed in a location, so that spatially they give additional resonances and layers of history and meaning (Alexander in
Subiros 2011: 71). She asserts:
Throughout my production, the integration of the sculpted figure into an actual living environment has been important. One of the ways I have consistently explored doing this is through the medium of photomontage, a method enabling the placement of the sculpted figures in image form into any location (Alexander in Subiros 2011: 71).
Van Robbroeck draws attention to Alexander’s dual meaning in phrasing “origin” where she describes the scenes in which her figures are placed as both backdrop and site of origin, when she says they form a “contextual backdrop against which the origin of the sculptured figures can be considered” (Van Robbroeck 2011). This may be done through site-specific installations, and in-situ photographing of objects, but also through her photomontages and collages. Fragmented Group is arguably unlike Peter Kennard’s
Apartheid South Africa, where the two collaged elements – the tortured man and the leisured woman – may be seen as a crude juxtapositioning, despite a co-relation that
126 provides the prompting of apparently unassociated images and lives. Alexander’s in-situ photographing allows for the subtle layering of associations which is characteristic of her work. An image of the Black Madonna, not to scale, is “superimposed on an exhibit from the Natural History Museum in Cape Town” in which “are displayed life cast moulds used to create standardised ethnographic modules” (Powell 1995: 14). Here the
Madonna’s belly holds the pregnant fermentation of the images and ideologies of ethnographic typography and anthropological display practices, which have historically silenced the cultures they purported to represent. This fermentation process may be interpreted as similar to the deployment of Siopis’ affect-laden red paint.
Christian iconography and ideology, when placed in the context of an ethnographic display, may be harnessed in the oppression of women and may bear little relation to the lives of its believers (Alexander bleaches out the mask-objects as if to protest the means by which they are displayed). However, as Couldridge (1999: 58) points out, it is also fruitful to consider that women have worked through and with ideologies surrounding motherhood. Without suggesting a manifest destiny of heteronormative maternity,
McClintock points out how “African women have embraced, transmuted, and transformed the ideology in a variety of ways, working strategically within traditional ideology to justify untraditional public militancy” (McClintock 1990: 115). One instance that she discusses are the organisation of pass protests for African women in the 1950s, where slogans like “As wives and mothers we condemn the pass laws and all that they imply” were intended to promote solidarity among black women as well as provide them with moral authority in a conservative environment. Another instance is how a racially
127 inclusive image of motherhood fostered non-racial alliances with white women; Albertina
Sisulu, in organising protests in 1986, would make the call that “[a] mother is a mother, black or white. Stand up and be counted with other women” (Sisulu in McClintock 1990:
115). Making positive use of the image of motherhood was practical in that women activists in detention, apart from the sexualised abuse to which they might have been subject, were likely to be verbally abused by police who would make negative use of a concept of motherhood and burden women with parental guilt (McClintock 1990: 116).
– The Pastoral Worker
The ‘Pastoral Worker’ wears the button-through overall, jersey and skirt beneath, headscarf, and worn shoes that may be seen as the uniform of many South African domestic workers. She is modelled on a woman known to Alexander, identified as
‘Beauty’; Alexander asked her to be a model for a body cast because of her physiological resemblance to the character that Alexander envisaged (Couldridge 1999: 15). Alexander would rather work with models who have a personal connection to the work’s subject matter, but this is seldom a choice (Couldridge 1999: 15).
Beauty is the subject of another tableau, where she figures in the work more in her own identity – Beauty in a landscape: Born Aliwal North 19-?, died Boksburg 1992 (1993;
Fig. 2.23). Beauty here inhabits a space of desolate scrubby grassland that is not empty terrain but populated with electrical pylons and a procession of police and military personnel and vehicles as they march, ant-like, over the land. The ambiguous
128 monkey/dog/cat is an unsettling harbinger or ‘familiar’. As in Pastoral Scene, Beauty is dressed in a pale blue domestic worker’s overall, with blue shawl and stockings. She wears an Ndebele headdress (amacuki), which serves to give her the halo effect that I have suggested, in Integration Programme: Man with Wrapped Feet and the Madonna figures, prompts the viewer to consider the figure as carrying the burdens of different ideologies. Not a box-framed painting, this framed, hang-able tableau is an installation within a frame. The frame here, metaphorically, is the one that is put around pastoral ideals; the work’s portable quality becomes an ironic comment on the realities of rural migration. Beauty herself moved from Aliwal North in the Eastern Cape to Boksburg in
Gauteng (then the Transvaal), as the work’s title shows to be part of her story, as well as situating her in relation to place and time.
In Pastoral Scene, the evocation and simultaneous denial of pastoral conventions is, as
Arnold (1996: 119) puts it, “a reminder that in South Africa people were arbitrarily moved to rural ‘homelands’, or else left these areas to seek employment in cities”. More than anything, ‘the pastoral’ refers to an artistic conceit (Arnold 1996: 119). In Beauty in a landscape, the conventions of the pastoral landscape, and the artistic landscaping of landscapes in Africa, that I have introduced in this chapter, may be seen as the picture that opens out from Pastoral Scene. While critical analysis of Pastoral Scene assumes that the setting is an urban one (Powell 1995: 11) – because a town/country divide would be in line with pastoral conventions, and to situate elements like the park bench and the meeting of disparate characters – seeing Beauty’s landscape as the setting for Pastoral
129 Scene is an incentive to visualising the realities of migratory workers. It also renders significant the presence of the Pastoral Worker.
Domestic work has, and continues to be, a significant area of employment for internal and cross-border female migrants (Peberdy & Dinat 2007: 188). Indeed Peberdy and
Dinat highlight how Census 2001 showed that domestic service was the largest sector of employment for black South African women who had moved to Johannesburg from other provinces and other countries from the Southern African Development Community
(SADC) (Peberdy & Dinat 2007: 190). Census 2001 data obtained from South Africa shows that 42 percent of employed black women from the SADC who lived in
Johannesburg worked in private households, although they comprise only 4.9 percent of women employed in private households in the city (StatsSA 2004 in Peberdy & Dinat
2007: 188). The overwhelming majority of domestic workers, however, are internal migrants from South Africa’s provinces, rather than from other countries (Peberdy &
Dinat 2007: 190). Census 2001 also showed that 35.6 percent of employed black South
African women born outside Gauteng province who lived in Johannesburg worked in private households compared to 9 percent of employed black women who were born in
Gauteng and lived in Johannesburg (StatsSA 2004 in Peberdy & Dinat 2007: 188).
Migrant workers from areas outside of Johannesburg, and outside South Africa, are more likely to work more hours and days, while non-migrant domestic workers are more likely to work a five-day week (Peberdy & Dinat 2007: 194). While migrant workers are less likely to live in, on their employer’s property, this is not to be interpreted automatically as implying more agency and scope for workers’ personal lives, as this statistic points to the
130 fact that migrant workers are more likely to have been employed for a shorter time or only part-time (Peberdy & Dinat 2007: 196).
I argue that the Pastoral Worker speaks symbolically to the migrations that are part of many domestic workers’ experience. Another, more literary, reference that positions the
Worker in relation to the landscape in which she is placed, is that of the ‘Three Graces’.
One of the ‘Three Graces’ in Greek mythology is Beauty, but there is no direct analogy in this work; if ‘Charm’ and ‘Joy’ are expressed by the other two figures, it is not in any conventional manner. The ‘Graces’ and the ‘Fates’ are commonly portrayed as three women, Caucasian and desirable according to the conventions of the day. Like the pastoral landscape theme, they are represented in Pompeian frescos (Fig. 2.24). As in
Raphael’s Three Graces (Fig. 2.25), the landscape of hills and lake are only background to the allegorical figures. They are embodiments of virtues, brought forth from the timeless Arcadian landscape. Their shadows so lightly inhabit the landscape as not to touch the ground. It is not insignificant that the notional background landscape to the three (or possibly six) young women of the Wesleyan Mission (Fig. 2.4) is cast in a similar light. To the colonial eye, the alien “raw material” of landscape and peoples has been domesticated into the semblance of “civilisation”, where the three young women, in their billowing European cotton dresses and wrapped hair, stand with their arms clasped around each other, now apparently comfortable to pose in a manner that visually echoes the Three Graces.
131 Unlike Jurgen Schadeberg’s photograph of Rahima Moosa, Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, and Sophie Williams at the Women’s March to the Union Buildings in October 1955
(Fig. 2.26), who present an image of solidarity in collective action, the four females in
Pastoral Scene do not display any unity, either compositionally or through shared feeling.
The strength of collectivity in a labour sector that is frequently an isolated experience –
Alison King (2007: 175) describes those in domestic service as “atomised workers” – is, in contrast to Pastoral Scene, apparent in Keith Dietrich’s Mmopeng, Mmamule and
Mmathabeng (1985; Fig. 2.27). Born in 1950, at the time he made this screen print
Dietrich was a lecturer at the University of South Africa, having studied graphic design, painting and the visual arts in South Africa and Belgium. This work is as confrontational as Kennard’s more literal rendering of apartheid culture. Dietrich’s portrait, however, draws its power from its engaging with the quotidian environment of white, suburban
South Africa at the time of the State of Emergency, where domestic workers may have been seen as interlopers and potential threats and yet supposedly crucial components of the home.
Seemingly both powerful and angry, these women evoke the threat from within (the
‘swart gevaar’). These domestic workers are not isolated in a place of employment but rather are in community with others. They are not identified by Anglicised names – some significances of which are discussed in Chapter One – and may therefore appear as alternate, even startling, personae to the putative white employer. Their eyes are irritated by the light manipulated by the photographer, which causes their wrinkled noses and squinting eyes, yet these expressions also read as disdain and cool appraisal. These
132 ‘maids’ are not shown as traversing the thresholds of their employers’ homes, facilitating the invisible production of domestic labours. The social and economic contracts that may exist between employer and employee are not, in this image, sufficient to establish their persons as the boundary markers of harmonious inter-racial relations in the domestic sphere, a microcosm of the nation. The women’s bodies loom over the low camera angle; their bosoms would barrel through the fencing and their arms and hands would grasp and reach easily over the barrier. The setting is implicitly suburbia, since the women are identifiably domestic workers, augmented by the background foliage and the green fencing. This design was often seen surrounding suburban properties or swimming pools in the 1980s; its strength is notional rather than practical. A (sub)urban Arcadia has been disturbed by this female triad; it has been revealed as already disturbed.
– The Pastoral Widow
The elderly, standing, white, female figure I call the ‘Pastoral Widow’ because her black lace is reminiscent of Sicilian widow weeds or those of older Eastern European women.
Arnold (1996: 118) also follows this line of interpretation by identifying her as a
European immigrant. She is not unlikely to be the employer in the suburban home described as the setting of Dietrich’s screenprint. Yet, in this context, she is also perhaps someone who has experienced spatial and cultural displacement. That this is an apartheid bench is strengthened by the two black women being seated and the white woman standing. It is not her bench. While she may appear to be approaching the two seated women, especially because of her outstretched arm, she is neither facing nor looking
133 directly at the two women and nor are they acknowledging her. Her outstretched arm holds a small plate on which is a slice of bread and fish. Holding a plate with a piece of bread on which are three sardines may be seen as referencing the biblical miracle of multiplying loaves and fishes (Arnold 1996: 118). Whether the Widow is proffering the contents of the plate to the other women, or is herself seeking a miracle, is characteristically unclear, but her secular offering is poignant in its humanness, more so due to the apparent disengagement between the women. In a quiet act of civil disobedience, the two black women may indeed be appropriating a “Europeans Only” bench. Alexander may be presenting the Widow as not only seeking reconciliation but as serving the two black women, in a reversal of roles that addresses past wrongs.
Pastoral Scene: The bitch as witness to dispossession
The lactating bitch and how it stands in relation to the seated female figures may seem to share provocative associations with the “havoc” created by the loosed “dog(s) of war”
(Julius Caesar Act 3, Scene 1, line 273), which make repeated appearances in South
African resistance art, but this bitch remains nonetheless unamenable to any categorical reading. It is modelled on the artist's own pet (Powell 1995: 11), congruent with
Alexander’s working method of casting from individuals with whom she has an existing relationship. Yet its physiological resemblance to the African wild dog (Fig. 2.28), together with its evolving, hybridised appearance in various installations such as Infantry with Beast (2008 – 10; Fig. 2.29), as well as Pastoral Scene, may suggest that its presence is as both a witness to and an avatar of the three human characters and the
134 setting itself.
Dogs are frequently the animal motif reached for when violence is sought to be allegorised. It is not unlikely that this derives from the inability to train certain dogs that are nonetheless brought into the home. Police dogs become indexes of riot police and soldiers, and the disrespect for social restraints that function to uphold human dignity and safety. It is these canine representatives that rip apart the innocent man in Kennard’s
Apartheid South Africa. Couldridge (1999: 74) quotes Marrow (1979: 36 – 37) who notes how, in Passion iconography, Christ “the Lamb” was led to his judgement by Herod by
“cruel dogs […] crying and howling”. Dogs are also, simultaneously, ‘elevated’ to humanised victims in their allegorisation as loyal martyrs for humans – Whiteside, in his history of Methodist missions, employs a similar metaphor in describing early Wesleyan persecution: “The Methodists were mobbed and stoned, and cast into prison, and were treated, as Wesley says, ‘as if they had been mad dogs’” (Whiteside 1906: 19). In the works I have introduced, the victimised iconography is associated directly with Christ- like imagery rather than the perceived innocence of lambs, but the associations with dogs, viciousness, violence, betrayal, and – significantly – domesticity remain.
The dog-like creature, in hybridised forms, makes appearances in a few of Alexander’s installations. This canine hybridisation, in addition to a mimetic representation of a dog, occurs consistently in various creative forms. There are many hybridised dogs in western mythologies, such as Cerberus, the creature with three dog heads, a serpent’s tail and a lion’s claws. The isiZulu and isiXhosa myth of the Inkanyamba, a giant eel-like creature
135 that eventually separated out into the elephant and the eel/snake, is a similar monster that devours people (Strauss 2010). Norman Catherine’s Witch Hunt (1988; Fig. 2.30), a hand-tinted drypoint etching, unleashes a hybridised dog to speak of the violent presence of military and police forces in civilian communities in South Africa’s 1980s.
Zoomorphic, this giant chimeric creature with its avian-taloned feet, its snake tongue, and its police helmet with its cyclopean searchlight eye, breathes destruction and rips apart its victims, whether they resist or not. Alexander’s recurrent presence of dog-figures, as they are elaborated in various works, suggests the convention in the Middle Ages of positioning a dog in the lower half of a painting’s frame; an artist who exemplifies this is
Hieronynous Bosch (Couldridge 1999: 49). In so doing, however, Alexander is not affirming the dog as tormentor in Pastoral Scene, but, in line with the ambivalence of the work, may suggest it as a figure of suffering itself (Couldridge 1999: 49).
The potential significances of the bitch’s resemblance to the African wild dog (Fig. 2.28) warrant some brief natural history about this animal, in particular in relation to its collaborative and nurturing social behaviour.27 Long-legged, standing about 76 cm at the shoulder, with large jaws and large, rounded, erect, bat-like ears, the African wild dog is
‘painted’ (hence lycaon pictus, ‘painted wolf’) with yellow, black and white patches. The most social of all canines, they have elaborate hunting and breeding patterns and rituals for mourning their dead. Their effective group hunting behaviour where prey, usually medium-sized antelope, rarely escapes and is often torn apart while still alive
27 Information on African wild dogs sourced from: Mills, G & Hes, L. 1997. The complete book of Southern African mammals. Cape Town: Struik Winchester ; http://www.painteddog.org (2015); http://www.outtoafrica.nl/animals/engafricanwilddog.html (2015); http://www.krugerpark.co.za/africa_wild_dog.html (2015).
136 demonstrates involved organisation and co-operative strategies. No aggression is shown towards members of the pack during hunting. Their elaborate social life is organised around an alpha breeding pair and their offspring, which the whole community is involved in raising. Pack allegiance allows the young to feed first from a kill (the only carnivores to do so) and means that the pack cares for sick, injured and old members.
Their wide range of vocalisations include the twittering and whining of their greeting rituals, a bark of alarm, a rallying howl and a carrying, bell-like contact call. The species is endangered by ignorance and unfounded prejudices about them as stock thieves and baby killers, by domestic canid diseases, traps and snares for the poaching trade, weakening gene pools and diminishing habitats. The loss of one dog can devastate a pack, and a dog infected with rabies or distemper will pass it to its whole pack. It is estimated that there are about 6 000 wild dogs living in Africa, fewer than 4 000 in the wild. Once found across much of sub-Saharan Africa in savannah, wooded and bush country, the wild dog is today one of Africa’s most endangered animals, extinct across
Western and Central Africa and confined to low-human-inhabited areas of Eastern and
Southern Africa. They are found in South Africa in the Kruger Park, around Phalaborwa
Gate, Toshokwane and Skukuza and south of Afsaal, and on a few game farms.
Both Arnold (1996: 119) and Couldridge (1999: 52) draw analogies between the prejudice against and persecution of wild dogs on the basis of their perceived nature and the discrimination against women with a biologically determinist stance, in order to suggest a shared predicament between these females.28 Couldridge (1999: 52) positions
28 Negative analogies may also be racially motivated. Whiteside, in describing relations between Nama people (in this older source, called Namaqua) and Afrikaaner settlers, recounts: “The
137 the dog as ambivalent, as “both predator and scavenger as well as hunted”, which also augments the ambivalence of the human females. The bitch in Pastoral Scene is lactating, with prominent and full teats. Her primary role at this moment in time would appear as the suckler of the pack’s pups. Yet at the same time, as part of the breeding pair, she is the alpha female of her pack. But her pups are conspicuously absent, at a stage in their development when she would not by choice leave them. The potential consequences of such an absence endow her with a vulnerability that her alertness to the viewer only enhances. Perhaps like the domestic worker, certainly like many migratory women, this female’s offspring are elsewhere.
The bitch in Pastoral Scene bears a resemblance to the canid-like figure in Infantry with
Beast (2008 – 10; Fig. 2.29). This installation consists of a phalanx of 27 marching hybrid figures on a red carpet before a small dog-beast-creature. The Beast of the title is literally the harbinger of the infantry figures, since it was made four years earlier (2003).
The beast’s mottled hide seems skinless; its elongated, crouched position suggests it as regurgitated. Here the beast heralds or witnesses the infantry formation, whose humanoid bodies have wild dog heads. The tight unity and uniformity of the infantry is ambivalent, both a strength and a weakness. The sexuality of the Infantry’s dog-creatures and
Pastoral Scene’s bitch also has differing emphases. Rosalind Morris (2014: 88) notes that the overt display of pre-pubescent male genitalia, on the dog-creatures and also in other recent works of Alexander’s, leads the viewer to consider the role of desire as a motivator in the works: “Is it a force to be harnessed for violence? Or is it a resource for resisting
neighbouring farmers were frequently heard to say, no doubt in scorn, that the Namaquas were ‘a species of wild dogs’, and had no souls” (Whiteside 1906: 42).
138 social logics?” (Morris 2014: 88). These questions also take on different meanings depending on the location and context of the installation; at the time of Morris’ viewing,
Infantry with Beast was installed in the Cathedral of New York.
In Infantry with Beast, Alexander elaborates on the allegorical significance to her of the
African wild dog, which her dog-creatures physiologically resemble:
The work alludes to structured social organisation as in the military through which men and sometimes boys are constrained to a system of physical and psychological control by an unaccountable authority, with the appearance of the parading figures reminiscent of African wild dogs. The work refers to the hunting strategies of the wild dog or Lycaon pictus, 'cursorial hunters' which live in socialised hierarchical packs of about 20 members, bound by systems of co-dependence and co-operation, not unlike the military (Michael Stevenson 2012).
Mentions in critical discussion on the resemblance of the Infantry to African wild dogs, perhaps following Alexander’s statement, and perhaps responding to the unsettling presence of the hybrid creatures, emphasises the hierarchical structure of a wild dog pack.
As Mertens (2011: 87), in a review of Alexander’s exhibition Surveys, puts it: “Their strict hierarchical organization in packs of about twenty individuals might be compared to a military unit subservient to the chief’s authority.” These characteristics of the wild dog are singled out in Infantry with Beast, but are more overtly latent in Pastoral Scene. The lactating bitch in Pastoral Scene is, as Arnold (1996: 119) points out, the only presence to display awareness of the viewer, her ears pricked; in this sense, like Infantry’s Beast, the bitch is an intermediary to the viewing audience. There is a sense in which the bitch, as a wild dog, is displaced from its natural habitat, is separated from its pups, and as another
139 species, provides a physiologically different, witnessing perspective on how these issues may be experienced by the other three characters.
Conclusion
Pastoral Scene does not make any concessions to naturalism. This is done in obvious ways like the inclusion of a halo on the nursing Madonna’s head (despite the realistic modelling of the figures and the found clothing that they wear) and in their un-naturalistic composition that emphasises disconnection rather than unity (Powell 1995: 5). This is also done in more implicit ways, such as by “the absence of an attempt to render the
Aristotelian unities of time and action [and] the absence of any eye contact or interrelation among the figures” (Powell 1995: 5). The attention to naturalistic and realist detail, Powell (1995: 5) suggests, encourages the viewer to read the tableau “in terms of more direct references to the world of experience”.
The bench is the point of reference for the psycho-geographic drama between the characters, a spatial expression of unsettled internal landscapes and external lives. In
Alexander’s tableau, all three human characters seem enfolded within their own existence. The relationship between the domestic-worker figure and the other characters is open-ended and disconnected. The domestic worker is the only character who may be visually identified as allied to a labour section within the reproductive economy. In this
‘pastoral scene’, there is segregation, urbanisation, migration, loss of community and potentially poverty and unfulfilling or no employment. I contend that this is named a
140 ‘scene’ rather than a ‘landscape’ because Alexander wryly subverts the conventions of the pastoral genre, presenting staged and curated elements that speak to a contemporary
South African socio-political context. The viewer is encouraged to consider how ideologies of the colonial and apartheid social-engineering projects underpin what I have termed an ‘African pastoral’. In this, the role of African servants has been crucial in legitimating a European claim to the spaces that they are shown as inhabiting.
I move forward now into South African art practice in the 21st century as I examine the work of Zanele Muholi. I discuss how this art-maker, in her high-artifice photographic tableaux, brings a queer lens and a questioning of oppressive phallocentric and heteronormative values to bear on issues of depicting domestic workers.
141 CHAPTER THREE
QUEERING PORTRAITS OF ‘MAIDS’ AND ‘MADAMS’ IN
ZANELE MUHOLI’S ‘MASSA’ AND MINA(H) (2008)
Introduction
In her ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) series (2008), Zanele Muholi chooses to re-stage conventional iconic portraits of South African domestic workers by photographing herself in several consciously performative tableaux, playing the black ‘maid’ who fantasises about her white ‘madam’ – not about being her, or being in her position, but about sexually possessing her. In ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 1 (Fig. 3.1) the ‘maid’ temporally
‘blinds’ the ‘madam’; physically controlling the other’s vision, but also enacting her own oppression in an enveloping tenderness towards a woman who does not ‘see’ or respect her. This queer maid/madam storyline gives an opportunity to consider different ways in which domestic spaces may be inhabited and the ‘maid’ as an individual outside of her role. By creating narratives that give the ‘maid’ the evaluation that desire holds, Muholi implicitly speaks to the more conventional intimacies to which a domestic worker may routinely be privy, such as the washing of underwear, or insider knowledge about family relationship dynamics. By mediating the mimetic image of a domestic worker through an eroticisation of the tasks and interactions that are routinely performed by black women as
142 ‘maids’, Muholi also steps into her memories of her mother’s role of domestic worker, through her own queer subjectivity.
As both experiences that she feels are not conventionally given voice or respect, she draws an analogy between the housework performed by black women for white families, and of black lesbians’ love relationships. In ‘queering’ the gaze, Muholi presents her black, female-bodied, lesbian-identified self in attitudes, poses and settings that ironically reference and potentially re-signify the accrued visual history of the portrayal of women within various westernised framing devices, with particular focus on the representation of black and lesbian women for the delectation of phallocentric, heteronormative viewing pleasure. I begin by suggesting that Muholi deliberately references the Venus pudica trope in order to unleash – literally and discursively – its explosive and subversive potential. I propose that Muholi harnesses the power and agency embodied in black queer sexuality and challenges. I am mindful in this approach of how mainstream public discourses frame female, black and queer bodies. As Desiree Lewis puts it:
[R]acist legacies that fixate on the sexuality of black women have meant that black women's responses have often involved suppressing or dissembling discussion about bodies and sexuality, this leading to the continued dominance of racist, heteronormative and patriarchal public discourses (Lewis 2005: 11).
As a self-identified ‘visual activist’, Muholi’s creation of a photographic archive29 documenting LGBTI*30 individuals has produced portraiture that conveys both agency
29 Muholi has also lost five years of the archive of documenting stills and video footage that she had shot and amassed. On 20 April 2012, her flat in Vredehoek, Cape Town that she shared with
143 and vulnerability. The priority, in the early 2000s, of agitating and establishing visibility and acknowledgement for LGBTI* people in South Africa, was at a time when, as
Gabeda Baberoon (2011: 403) puts it, “the reverberating effect of sexual violence was to drive an already neglected community even further from public attention”. As Baderoon quotes Muholi: “Basically we were just erased. There were no images anymore. Women did not like to be photographed because they would be exposed” (Baderoon 2011: 403).
In creating these portraits, Muholi engages with two genres with strong traditions of conveying ‘authenticity’ – those of didactic photo-realism and aesthetic as well as ethnographic portraiture. She therefore positions herself as practising both social activism through aestheticism and an activism of aestheticism. She produces what Zethu Matebeni
(2013: 414) calls “art for political imagination”. However, it is in ‘Massa’ and Mina(h), the first series that draws on Muholi’s personal memories (Ngcobo, not dated), that the
her partner was burgled and vandalised and a laptop and more than 20 hard drives were sought out and removed. The flat was rifled but little else was removed, despite other electronic equipment being in the flat. This suggests an apparently targeted attack of herself and her work (Jones, 2012; Curtis, 2012). Muholi was out of the country at the time of the burglary, which was discovered by her partner. Muholi says of the experience: “I’m still traumatized by the burglary. It’s hard to fall asleep in this place, which is now a crime scene, as I dealt with many crime scenes before” (in Curtis, 2012). 30 LGBTI*: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, intersex and other gender-variant individuals who choose to self-identity with the LGBTI movement, such as asexual persons, and acknowledging, for instance, that not all transgender people are lesbian or gay. The contexts of publication and the academic language or ‘authorised terms’ used in queer theorising of and to describe LGBTI* life experience may bear little resemblance to ways in which working-class black South Africans position and describe themselves. As Muholi (2004: 117) points out: “I have had to learn a language that is foreign to me, that is more the language of the colonizer than the colonized.” She considers though that she has learnt through the process the potential for “reciprocal dialogue” (Muholi 2004: 117). More specifically about naming, Baderoon, paraphrasing a conversation between herself and Matebeni, says Matabeni speaks of “ongoing attempts to reclaim often- compromised local terms such as stabane and moffie as examples of an indigenous language for sexual and gender diversity” (Baderoon 2011: 392). Matabeni points out that the dangers of an “adopted language” are that “it goes along with perceptions of us being unAfrican. It means the homophobes get away with it” (Matebeni in Baderoon 2011: 401).
144 art-practitioner turns to self-consciously performative and fictitious narratives in order to negotiate and transform these memories.
Several contemporary South African artists have responded to the weight and elisions of photographic traditions, as well as to personal experiences of South African history, by incorporating elements of self-consciously staged performance in their work. Muholi, I argue in this chapter, employs this strategy in ‘Massah’ and Mina(h) specifically to deploy representations of sexuality that subvert what she identifies as conventionally circulating visual tropes of domestic workers and their positions and experiences working in white households. In doing so, she claims to address “the still racialised issues of female domesticity – black women doing house work for white families” (Muholi in
Michael Stevenson 2009). Muholi acknowledges the sexualised abuse, usually heteronormative, which may exist across unequal power differentials in the context of real-life domestic work, but she chooses, rather than engage with those experiences, to create what she sees as radically different narratives of intimate interactions. As she says of the series:
In the past and still today we hear the stories of the female black domestic worker being raped or having an intimate relationship with the white male Massa. But let’s queer it and imagine that those white Madams may have loved their black maids, been intimate with them. Maybe because they shared something simply as two women in love, or maybe it was a purely carnal relationship based either on mutual erotic desire, or on the unequal power and labour relations that exist(ed) between black women and white women, that the white Madams, like the white Massa, took advantage of the situation. We don’t know (Muholi in Abid 2010).
145 This is the power of performance, to act out and so to embody and consider different modes of being, and different meanings surrounding tropes and symbols of power, desire, intimacy, work and service. By examining several of Muholi’s works and series, with the central insights I find in her domestic-worker series, I contend that Muholi’s consistent aim – to enlarge the quality, quantity and diversity of representations of queer people – imaginatively employs several photographic strategies in order to depict “how experience that is deemed unspeakable can enter representation” (Thomas 2010: 117).
The series ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) has at the time of writing generated very little critical attention. In her excellent 2013 article ‘Intimacy, Queerness, Race’ in Cultural Studies,
Matebeni discusses the portrait Caitlin and I and ‘Massa’ and Mina(h), drawing primarily for her source material on her extensive interviews with Muholi and young lesbians living in Johannesburg. Ngcobo, in her undated article for Africavenir, an online site,31 discusses the evolution of the series and offers some pertinent analysis. Neither author, however, delves more extensively into the provenance of the symbols and tropes evident in the series that constitute an engagement by Muholi with historical representations of lesbian sexuality, nor do they contextualise the relationship between ‘madam’ and ‘maid’, as proposed here, by dwelling on staged, self-consciously performed portraits as choices that in themselves that explore identity and relationship possibilities.
Muholi’s work has been extensively covered in the popular and art press and her work widely showcased in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. It is frequently
31 See http://www.africavenir.org
146 used in newspaper and journal articles as visual illustration and a discussion point in the social sciences, in fields such as sociology and social anthropology (such as Thomas
[2010] in her enlargement of the implications of ‘passing’ to discuss memorial photography and gender movements), in feminist and queer theorising and activism, in
LGBTI* issues and in black sexualities. Lewis (2005), in her article for the feminist periodical Agenda, and Pumla Dineo Gqola (2006) in her essay for the catalogue of
Muholi’s first solo exhibition in 2006, Only Half the Picture, both discuss Muholi’s imagery insightfully in relation to issues of queer and black sexualities. Henriette Gunkel
(2009) and Sylvia Tamale (2011) are also noteworthy. Raél Jero Salley (2011) and
Andrew van der Vlies (2012) focus principally on the ongoing series Faces and Phases to speak of queer archival construction and activist photography. Garb (2011) engages with these issues as well, with a particular emphasis on Muholi’s medium, photography, situating her work within her discussion of the broader South African tradition and contemporary interpretations of this medium, in the genre of portraiture. Baderoon (2011) is particularly elucitory about Muholi’s series documenting transpeople, and has written an essay speaking to the works collected in Muholi’s most recent monograph Faces and
Phases 2006 – 14. Muholi herself has been interviewed online and has written passionately and lucidly about her work, such as her 2004 Agenda article “Thinking through Lesbian Rape”; much of her writing about her works is available at http://www.stevenson.info/artists/muholi.html.
Perhaps because of Muholi’s strongly activist self-positioning, critical discussion of her work has not given as much attention to ‘Massa’ and Mina(h). However, this is the
147 direction in which I have chosen to take this chapter because, as Matebeni (2013: 414) says, “Muholi’s rich visual archive is not limited to black queer politics, but has wider traction on identity politics and visual aesthetics” (Matebeni 2013: 414). This reason is also why I have not chosen to be overly concerned with examining the works in the sequence in which they are numbered. This is also because Muholi has only made some of her images available (Correspondence with Michael Stevenson 2015), having abandoned the series soon after beginning it – which I expand upon later in the chapter.
Ngcobo describes the putative, early series as the narrativised rapprochement and deepening intimacy of a “love affair” between Muholi performing the role of the ‘maid’ and the woman who was her partner at the time (Ngcobo, not dated) as the ‘madam’.32
32 Before the photographic series was developed, according to Gabi Ngcobo (not dated) Muholi dressed in a domestic worker’s uniform and used this persona to gatecrash a feminist conference, demonstrating both the ‘invisibility’ of domestic workers when seen to be acting on behalf of their employers, and then subverting this ‘invisibility’ by calling attention to it, in her ‘performance’ or persona, by speaking out at the conference (with the assumption that a middle- class audience is not taking appropriate cogniscence of women who work on their behalf). Ngcobo describes the incident:
In November 2008, a young black woman dressed in a maid’s uniform entered the Cape Town International Conversion Center (CTICC) claiming to be in search of her ‘madam’, a claim that was her ticket through the security gate. There is nothing strange about this for in such a scenario it is the ‘madam’ who must require the presence of the maid, not the other way round. By letting her in, the guards did so in deference to the ‘madam’ and to the disregard of the ‘maid’. Once inside, the maid, still in her ‘working’ clothes did the inconceivable, she reached inside her bag for a camera and began taking pictures of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) conference delegates, capturing the general mood of the gathering sometimes even including herself posing in different parts of the building. In a hall packed with feminists and woman’s rights activists from all over the world, the ‘maid’ rose to say something. This being the last day of the conference, delegates were on a reflective mode, processing the last three days and giving testimony of a fruitful gathering. The ‘maid’ then asked all the people present to acknowledge and thank all the domestic workers that had cleaned their toilets that morning. The ‘maid’ performed by photographer Zanele Muholi had made her point and from this public intervention a series of ongoing work titled ‘Massa’ and Mina(h), has emerged in both performative and photographic formats (Ngcobo, not dated).
148 Querying normativity with sexual expression
Muholi’s ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 4 (Fig. 3.2) presents a heavily opulent domestic interior where the ersatz-Venus pudica sculpture contrasts with the unconstrained, ironically
‘slovenly’ sexuality and disregard displayed by the servants. The symmetry of the curtains and chairs and the plush old ‘respectability’ is disturbed by the ‘unruliness’ of the lounging servants, with the self-consciously performative, sexually suggestive hands positioned between legs, over crotches and on breasts. Sexuality is the disruptive element, implying that any behaviours not underpinned by respect and preservation of hierarchical power within the upper-middle-class domestic environment are potentially deeply threatening to that environment, because of the servant’s intimate knowledge of and access to the people cushioned herein.
A Venus pudica depicts, as Nanette Salomon (1996: 70) describes, “an idealised female nude who covers her pubis with her hand”. This endemic and normalised pose may be said to signify, if anything at all, an embodiment of western ‘high’ aesthetics, of a generic classicism (Salomon (1996: 70). It is understood to originate in a sculpture by the Greek
Praxiteles, about 350 B.C. and is known by a variant of the Knidian Aphrodite. Three centuries after the first monumental nude male sculpture, Praxiteles’ was the first monumental sculpture of a wholly nude female form and also, the first female nude sculpture to be positioned with her hand over her pubis (Salomon 1996: 70). Until then, young women (korai) had been draped in clothing while athletic youths (kouroi) were represented as heroically nude, reflecting the different dress codes and social practices for men and women in the city-state of Athens (Salomon 1996: 70). More fundamental than
149 these though, are the differing understandings of females and males, exemplified by these representations of male and female nudes: compare the Roman Capitoline Venus as a copy and an interpretation of Praxiteles’ original sculpture (Fig. 3.3) with Praxitiles’
Hermes bearing the infant Dionysus (Fig. 3.4). The female figure is depicted as exposed, vulnerable and exhibited in self-conscious nakedness, sexually defined by her pubis, to an intrusive and voyeuristic viewer. The defining characteristic of this female figure is of one who does not wish to be seen, since being seen equates with being violated (Salomon
1996: 73 – 74). Salomon points out that while Greek sexual relations were characterised by dominance and subordination, this expression is found only in the female form, not in portrayals of adolescent youths, therefore positioning “the female as the opposite of the aggressive unseen male” (Salomon 1996: 75). Whether she gestures to her pubis to indicate her powers of fertility, or to titillate coyly, or whether she covers herself in fear or shame before an intruder is a moot point, since “the hand that points also covers and that which covers also points” (Salomon 1997: 73). The male form (such as Fig. 3.4), however, is explored in varying poses indicating dynamic, powerful and subtle movement, as internally logical and self-assured, and as unified in mind and body.
Pudica, derived from pudenda, simultaneously means both ‘shame’ and ‘genitalia’.
Aidos were philosophies and social codes taught as part of a young boy’s education to balance out hubris or arrogance; for girls and women, aidos meant only chastity. Aidos is related to sophrosyne: “the Greek notion of soundness of mind, sobriety and self-control, the trait which allows one to master one’s desires by exerting rational control” (Salomon
1996: 75). As Salomon elucidates:
150
Aristotle makes clear that for the man sophrosyne is rational self-control, for the woman it is dutifulness and obedience. For the man, control comes from within, of the woman, since she cannot control herself, it must be exerted from the outside. He finds that women are equally incapable of possessing adios, and that society must work to impose modesty on them (Salomon 1996: 75).
By the Roman era, from which the Capitoline Venus dates, the abstracted covering of the breast and pubis without any apparent facial expression or narrating gesture can be interpreted as vacuousness and passivity, rather than pride or shame; this then being a defining attitude of women (Salomon 1996: 77). The attitude of a pudica pose, as indicating a ‘modest pose’, developed as the sixteenth-century Renaissance Venetians,
Giorgione and Titian, expanded the Venus pudica into a reclining figure – the odalisque – characteristically tilting the body and pelvis and overtly presenting herself for the delectation of the (male, heterosexual) patron and viewer. Titian’s Venere di Urbino
(Venus of Urbino) (1538; Fig. 3.5) is such an example. Although the woman’s gaze may certainly be interpreted as passively complicit with the viewer, few artists before him had shown a woman, particularly a nude, viewing the viewer so openly (Geffen 1997: 5).
Moreover, details such as the cassoni (marriage chests) and the servants’ dress place this nude in a contemporary Florentine domestic setting, not a classicised past, bringing her eroticism all the more firmly into the present moment (I discuss this work more later in the chapter).
The ‘Sleeping Venus’ type literally and metaphorically presents the female figure as passive. Muholi in her Caitlin and I, Boston, USA (2009; Fig. 3.6) may be seen to
151 reference critically French Realist painter Gustave Courbet’s Le Someil (The Sleepers)
(1866; Fig. 3.7), and further, the display of (lesbian) women for the enjoyment and sexual gratification of a heterosexual masculine gaze. In Muholi’s photograph, the women’s positions have been arranged for the camera and they appear to be observing the reaction of the viewer to a staged display of intimacy. Divided into three parts, the photograph
Caitlin and I becomes a triptych and as such encourages the reverence of contemplation that may be given to subject matter in religious settings. This contrasts to, and parodies,
Courbet’s painting, where the subjects contort their bodies for maximum scopic perusal by the viewer, all the while ‘sleeping’, arguably condoning an expression of sexuality that in waking consciousness would not be socially acceptable in nineteenth-century Paris.
The established erotic trope of two women, one fair and one dark, allowed the viewer to delight visually in each female ‘type’ and invited him to consider the darker, more
‘masculine’ woman as a surrogate for himself. Muholi, by placing the white woman on top of her own black body, makes a literal reference to the privilege of whiteness, as well as to unspecifable and subtle relationship dynamics between friends and/or lovers. On the other hand, as Matebeni (2013: 412) points out, ‘Zanele’ supports ‘Caitlin’, leaving the white woman, not the black woman, exposed to the viewer’s perusal of her naked body; it is the black woman, not the white, who appears (literally) to be strong. But Muholi also uses parody to critique these tropes. For Hutcheon (2010: 6), ironic repetition emphasises difference from, not similarity to, the original context, while being clearly attributable to it, by using imitation of style and ironic reversals of meaning; a parodic response is “an imitation, but imitation characterised by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text” (Hutcheon 2010: 6). The critical, queer gaze proposed in Muholi’s work
152 facilitates which she calls “movements through visual histories” (Muholi in Michael
Stevenson, 2012). Muholi’s intention is consistent with that of many other South African photographers – as Garb (2011: 76) puts it, to “create new taxonomies of difference to counter the specular orthodoxies and clichés of previous image regimes”. Muholi’s intention is not to exoticise black bodies or eroticise queer ones, but rather to parody the fetishistic representation of black women and of queer black women.
In her mixed-media collage, Sleep: Deux femmes noires (Two black women, Fig. 3.8),
Mickalene Thomas33 also references Courbet’s Sleepers specifically, and the weighted tradition of the odalisque and ‘Sleeping Venus’ trope generally. Here the collaged background breaks apart into generic scenes of sky, foliage, water and fields, interspaced with more patterning more overtly manufactured by people. The effect suggests the female figures to be as pastiched as the landscape, to be an ironic repetition of tropes of black and queer women.
Thomas, born in 1971, is a New York-based artist and filmmaker. She creates monumental, splendidly coloured, mosaiqued and photo-collaged portraits of African-
American women in bedroom interiors and landscapes, exploring themes such as femininity, sexuality and power. She makes liberal use of rhinestones and enamel to emphasise “an element of artifice and performance” (Thomas in Zimmer 2011). Thomas seeks, according to Murray (2014: 12) “to utilise the black body (and the visual culture of
33 Thomas curated an exhibition Tête-à-Tête, showing works by African and African-American artists, which included a selection of Muholi’s Faces portraits. Both artists are represented by Lehmann Gallery in New York. Mickalene Thomas is not K. Thomas, whose article on Muholi I cite in this chapter as Thomas (2010).
153 blackness) as image – not in an overtly political manner but, rather, as an image of mythical resplendence”. In line with his positioning of Thomas as a ‘post-black artist’,
Murray (2014: 12) argues that she is more overtly interested in an empowered, black female gaze, less so with “a specifically male-viewer/female-viewed matrix that has been a linchpin of women’s oppositional aesthetics” and less so with heteronormative definitions of blackness such as those of the civil rights and Black Power movements.
The unapologetic, aggressive painterly investments in discourses of form evident in her work – the desire “to radically colonise the formal” (Murray 2014: 12) – are motivated by a manifest pleasure in the visual. These formal investments, as well as her subject matter in her historical art series, both parody the conventions accruing in art history, specifically those representing black and female bodies. As Murray says: “The irony in
Thomas’ painting, for example, has a dual function – to expose the hypocrisies of racial fetishism and to liberate the work from identity politics that have become outdated”
(Murray 2014: 12).
Both Muholi and Thomas bring a black, female, queer lens to view their art practice.
Unlike Thomas, Muholi produces photographic series that are clearly in a social documentary tradition and engaging with contemporary South African issues. Both art- makers, however, when seeking to counter what Garb calls “the specular orthodoxies and clichés of previous image regimes” (Garb 2011: 76), turn to art history with a playfully imaginative, overtly performative and parodic attitude that nevertheless expansively asserts their own presence through, but not limited to, sexualities and bodies.
154 In ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 3 (Fig. 3.9), Muholi depicts herself naked alongside a white- haired Maltese, tagged and so a pet. Her hand around the dog is deliberate, rather than affectionate, linking a ‘white’ and a ‘black’ body, creating a self-conscious ‘performed’ artifice. Muholi parodies the Renaissance trope of including dogs in odalisque boudoir paintings that were produced to be displayed in private contexts, often as bedroom erotica. A dozing lapdog in conjunction with a reclining nude woman was a signifier of matrimony and marital fidelity because the viewer (in proxy for the unseen person at whom the woman gazes) has right of access to her private quarters, and to her body. As
Goffen (1997: 68) explains: “Such a dog may sleep because the person who has just entered is not an intruder, he is the master of this household.” Titian’s Venus of Urbino contains such a dog curled asleep at the woman’s feet. The passivity of the animal may be interpreted as a symbolic externalisation of the woman’s sexuality as amenably inviting scopic perusal and fantasy. In Muholi’s ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 3, however, the dog’s presence, with its tongue licking its nose, in conjunction with the black woman’s nude body may be read as parodying the supposed lasciviousness and hyper-sexualisation that is ascribed to black and African women in early western discourse. On the other hand,
Muholi’s physical presentation – with dreadlocks, unsculpted eyebrows, unmade-up face, tattoo of a female biological reproductive system on her bicep, and lack of acknowledgement of the viewer – does not conform to conventional ideals of feminine beauty. She could be seen as reclaiming these associations of a black (and queer) woman’s sexual self-expression, but as powerful and ungoverned. The dog’s tongue draws the viewer’s attention to its eyes that look up to the left of the frame, while Muholi
155 looks out to the right; the integrity of the image is in its fracturing, as is Thomas’ collaged
Sleep: Deux femmes noires.
What Muholi also does is to depict how these potentially primitivising stereotypes manifest in the context of attitudes about paid domestic labour. In ‘Massa’ and Mina(h)
3, Muholi draws attention to how, in a (white) employer’s household, a pet may be absurdly pampered with food, luxuries and amenities while it is the domestic worker who is considered ‘other’, treated with disregard or even resentment and fear. Walking, feeding and cleaning the pet (and cleaning up after the pet) are also duties that, like the care of young children, may likely fall to the domestic worker or gardener. A domestic worker’s liminal, threshold position within a white family and the unprecedented access to the vulnerable white family unit, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, was a source of anxiety during apartheid when fears of the ‘swart gevaar’ (‘black peril’) were at their height in the politically turbulent 1980s. In this image, Muholi appears to ask: Who is the animal? Who is treated like an animal? There is also, nonetheless, an uneasy affinity between a pet and a domestic worker, as both are beings that may be treated as necessary
‘accessories’ to demonstrate a privileged lifestyle.
In ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 4 (Fig. 3.2), as I have suggested, Muholi ‘queers’ (art) history by using tropes of sexuality unconcerned about respect for socially-established hierarchies to estrange the servants from their allotted role within the workings of their employer’s home; these servants do not ‘accessorise’ or work to uphold their employer’s privilege, unlike the servants at work in the background of the Venus of Urbino, for instance. While
156 servants may be ‘feminised’ or sexualised as a sign of subordination, the danger to the established phallocentric social order posed by the unconstrained sexuality supposedly attributable to the purportedly inferior gender/class/race/etc – as I have discussed,
Aristotle implicitly wrote it and sculptors imaged it in the Venus pudica and its variations
– is here deployed as a targeted and potentially subversive assault on and exposure of the values and beliefs underpinning the privilege that Muholi critiques. Because of the generically European furnishings of the ‘room’, the scene becomes a floating signifier that may apply in various locations and times in the last century.
Muholi’s use of sexual tropes as signifiers of agency and re-evaluation is especially significant given how imagery of servants, from pornography to orientalism, often uses sexual tropes to implicitly or overtly shame, exploit or devalue the subjectivities of people working thus. In this late nineteenth-century Punch cartoon (Fig. 3.10), for instance, all three characters are shamed and ridiculed by the mistress catching the master and maid leaping out of an embrace. The purportedly functional pieces of furniture and identifiable tools of the servant’s trade are simultaneously, instantly transformed into symbols that alienate the mistress from a room – and, following that, a more symbolic space of authority – within her own home. The mistress throws open the door, throwing light onto a scene of debauchery. The maid and the master are caught in illicit sexual relations, her apron is pushed between her legs, each with a foot squarely and suggestively over the now phallic broom. The table with tablecloth takes the role of a sheeted bed and the chairs are upturned on each other in a ‘69’ position. A mounted statue of a Venus pudica provides a fleshed mirror in the servant girl. The painting of a
157 nymph fleeing a centaur’s grasp echoes the position of maid and master and the painting of a wrathful god descending on huddled lovers provides a counterpart in the mistress exposing the master and maid. One is not necessarily encouraged by the cartoonist to consider the maid and master tête-á-tête to be coercive abuse, but rather an easy, cruel laugh to contrast the slack-jawed young plumpness of the maid with the gaunt, older mistress, who in her night attire is presumably seeking out her inexplicably absent husband, and the emasculated and outmaneuvered husband. What emerges in a purportedly comic form is an expression of fears about intimacy, access, respect and the maintenance of prescribed roles in the middle-class home; underscoring the liminal role of the servant or domestic worker. The house is now disturbed, the home sullied and disordered as personal relations are complicated.
The manner in which Muholi deploys her sexual tropes I consider significant in that she does not so much celebrate sexual expression, queer or heterosexual, in and of itself, as
Thomas does in some of her work. Rather, she uses sexual tropes both to critique conventional social and image regimes and, as I shall discuss, to introduce the possibility of queer narratives into the public sphere. These staged portraits and scenes are notably different from her previous, and concurrent, social documentary works. In the next section, I discuss Muholi’s photographic portraits within the context of South African portraits of domestic workers to suggest that the connecting thread between these two apparently different photographic approaches and framing is Muholi’s concern not only to represent individuals, but also creative possibilities for individuals.
158 Asserting presence in photographic portraits of domestic workers
As I discuss in the Introduction, it is still overwhelmingly African women, migrants and
South Africans, with little formal education, who form the domestic work sector in post- apartheid South Africa, experiencing widely varying situations, such as in formalised and stable terms of employment and day-to-day interactions and expectations in individual places of employment (Ally 2010). While it is noticeable that since the end of apartheid, there have been a number of works produced that would give expression to this South
African social practice, to the relationships formed and to individual women who work in this sector, it is not common for actual women who are employed as domestic workers to be represented by art practitioners. To represent a person who is visually identifiable as a domestic worker is to represent someone in a role, and a role that, historically, has generally commanded little agency and dignity for workers in South Africa. To avoid naturalising the role, the art-maker somehow signals, in subject matter, medium and process of making, that the work does not represent a transparent cohesion between external appearance and implied identity. In the more demonstrably ‘worked’ surface and volume of a painting, sculpture or installation, the art-maker may disrupt the surface to signify the conceptual disruption.
As a genre, portraiture is particularly raw and vexed. An artist handles another’s image, in whose representation an overt economic and ideological negotiation takes place. Value and authority conventionally adhere to each person’s individuality and accomplishments.
Ernst van Alphen (1997: 239) points out that portraiture affirms this twice over. Artists
159 both portray and produce the ‘essence’ of their subjects: they actively consolidate the subject’s self by portraying an apparent unity between the subject’s outer form and inner self (Van Alphen 1997: 240). In so doing, artists act out an affirmation of the uniqueness of the subject as well as proving their own abilities (Van Alphen 1997: 240). The portrait then retrospectively bestows authority on the represented individual (Van Alphen 1997:
240). In South Africa during colonial and apartheid rule, the most ubiquitous form of
‘identity portrait’ was that in the passbook (dompas) that every ‘non-white’ South
African was bound to carry, which was used to restrict, police and punish people’s movement (Baderoon 2011: 404). As she says: “This is the history of the image as arrest, as capture” (Baderoon 2011: 404).
Arnold’s contention that “[s]ome of the most problematic visual images in South African art are those portraying women in service” (Arnold 1996: 90) exemplifies the fraught tradition with which contemporary artists engage when representing domestic workers in
South Africa. This is, in part, because unequal power relations based on race, class, education and gender existing in the experience of and treatment of domestic workers are frequently reproduced in representations of them (or during the process of making such works). Valerie Maintz and Griselda Pollock note that when thematising visual representations of work, iconographic or figural works of workers conventionally have three characteristics: they suggest the worker as a more or less transparent carrier of representation, as identified by his or her outward appearance, secondly, iconographic works frame work as a human constant, and thirdly they seldom serve to define the subjectivity of its performer (Maintz & Pollock 2000: 2 – 3).
160
The self-consciousness about a burdened tradition with which contemporary South
African photographers approach the depiction of domestic workers means that their works differ from how domestic workers, or servants more generally, in other countries are and have been represented. As discussed in the Introduction, for instance, the majority of British portraits (painted or photographed) of individual servants have been, and continue to be, what Light (2003) terms the “loyalty portrait”. As I have noted, this is commissioned by a wealthy individual or institution to commemorate a long-term and faithful employee, and serves, intentionally or inadvertently, to uphold the icon of the devoted (and implicitly deferential) servant and therefore to maintain class distinctions.
In South Africa in the years since 1994, the anticipated, imminent and actual social change of democracy and its sometimes ambivalent resulting realities has prompted the re-examination of cultural practices and artistic conventions. South African photographic works by Vallie and Goldblatt in the 1990s may be said thus to be concerned not merely to represent domestic workers per se, but also to represent domestic workers as the
“subjects of representation” (Nelson 2010: 12).
In her study of South African photography, Garb identifies three dominant categories of representation, or “figures of filtration” that comprise, and compromise, the body and traditions of South African photography: ethnography, social documentary and portraiture (Garb 2011: 11). The ethnographic is closely associated with racial essentialism and grouping ‘types’; the documentary has a sober, activist, and supposedly objective frame; while the portrait purports to portray a unique individualism in the
161 subject, drawing on European conventions in portraiture (Garb 2011: 11 – 12). Vallie’s
Women’s Portraits Project and Goldblatt’s Victoria Cobokana (1999) may both be said to be examples of the ‘documentary’ frame of representations of domestic workers.
Vallie’s Women’s Portraits Project (Figs. 3.11 – 3.14) collects iconic portraits that portray women in different environments, all speaking in a crucial way to the women’s self-identification, and to their pride in it. There are occupational images, such as teacher
(Fig. 3.12), office cleaner, Anglican priest, shop keeper (Fig. 3.13), or personal ones, a woman relaxing at home, a woman displaying her mastectomy scars. Vallie had had the idea of a “women’s project” “for a while” before its completion in 1996 (in Comley,
Hallett & Ntsoma 2006: 51). Siopis proffers that “Vallie’s images of women proudly representing themselves in work and home contexts are compelling pictures of transcultural femininity” (Siopis in Comley, Hallett & Ntsoma 2006: 14). Vallie values photography’s access to and prevalence across social class in its medium and subject matter and considers that a common challenge for women photographers is “balancing work and family”, a significant hurdle of which is the lack of role models and mentors
(Vallie in Comley, Hallett & Ntsoma 2006: 51). All of the subjects were known personally to Vallie. Visibility and honouring are thus central to her women’s projects.
Hadjira ‘Haya’ Isaacs (1996; Fig. 3.11) is a portrait of a woman in the environment where her labour – which is visible – is performed. ‘Aunty Haya’ ironed for the Vallie family every Thursday (Vallie 2012).34 The photograph was taken as Aunty Haya was
34 Vallie recounts of Hadjira ‘Haya’ Isaacs:
162 ironing; she has paused for a moment, in a moment, before the iron burns the garment, to be photographed (Vallie 2012). Vallie’s intention is therefore different from Kay’s portrait of Annie Mavata (Fig. 2.7), discussed in Chapter 2, in significant ways. Kay’s portrait uses her own skill as an artist to render and to place the sitter. Arguably, Kay’s artistic labour, and her generative authority, is asserted by her painterly act which omits her sitter’s labour, even as Kay honours her subject.
Vallie’s Sylvia Nomatile Nijili and Daniel Andre Rousseau (Fig. 3.14) from the same
Women’s Portraits Project series, presents a similar portrait, that of a woman employed as a ‘nanny’ and her young charge, and the demonstrable affection between them, that while heart-warming and genuine, as has been suggested in Chapter 1, also represents complex South African social dynamics between the ‘nanny’ and her employers’ child.
In this series, Vallie reflects on her social environment at a time of unprecedented changes in South African society.35 By grouping the women together, the frames in which the person’s identity is portrayed are broadened; they are conceptually realised as being a photographic image in community with photographs of other women. By framing paid domestic work as outside the context of ‘service’, including the connotations of a
An old family friend, Aunty Haya began ironing for the family in 1981. Our families were neighbours when we all lived in Newlands. She and her family were once tenants on my grandfather’s property and babysat me when my parents went out. Due to the Group Areas Act she and her family moved to Parkwood Estate. Aunty Haya passed away in 2002 (Vallie in Comley, Hallett & Ntsoma 2006: 51).
The photograph propped up on the dresser is of the family’s nephews and nieces (Vallie 2012). 35 These include the first democratic elections on 27 April 1994 and the adoption of the first democratic constitution (with its wide-ranging legalisation of gender equality) on 8 May 1996, States of Emergency in the early 1990s and other events of social upheaval and cohesion.
163 feudalised ‘servitude’, and representing women in varied contexts, Vallie arguably sidesteps the accusation of essentialising roles. Her framing device is the same as that of trade union activists, who emphasise paid domestic labour as a contracted labour occupation, not as a patronage: ‘Domestic Workers are Workers’, as the South African
Domestic Service and Allied Workers Union campaigns (Witbooi 2011). While an individual may receive respect and derive self-esteem from her employment, a position historically entirely dependent on the patronage of the employer frequently entails de- individualisation, in the forms of long hours, social isolation, remuneration below the living wage, exploitation and job uncertainty. The surface irony is arguably that, as the
Union claims, “[t]here is no other job in this country that so many other jobs are dependent on” (Witbooi 2011). As Grossman’s sociological focus puts it:
Can [care as the core of domestic work] be done without a gendered division of labour and without oppressive and exploitative relationships between people? Can it be organized – and, more importantly, socially viewed – as an essential public service? (Grossman 2011: 137)
These are some of the issues about domestic labour that South Africa continues to negotiate, and its photographers to represent.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, David Goldblatt’s series In the Time of Aids documents quotidian South African landscapes, often devoid of human subjects, always with an
HIV/AIDS ribbon integrated somehow into the scene.36 It conveyed the associated fear,
36 HIV/AIDS ribbon: The looped red ribbon, or beaded shape, worn on lapels and integrated into designs and advertisements, has become a signifier of awareness of the human experience of
164 stigma and discrimination against sufferers of a society during the height of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic, before widespread availability of anti-retrovirals. Victoria
Cobokana (Fig. 3.15), as only one of two figural portraits of HIV-positive people that
Goldblatt has photographed, is an anomaly in terms of Goldblatt’s social activism around this issue (Wienand 2013: 9).
This activism is wholly communicated through the title; the image itself ceremonially positions a domestic worker (“housekeeper”) in her employer’s dining room, alongside the tools of her trade – broom and dustpan, the conditions under which she is accepted into this space. Annabelle Wienand (2013: 9) explains that Goldblatt took the photograph intending it for a story about ordinary South Africans who were victims of crimes; he was working with a journalist, Charlene Smith, whose housekeeper had recently been robbed, and this led him to photograph Cokokana, the housekeeper, at Smith’s house. He would later title a photograph from that sitting Victoria Cobokana, housekeeper, in her employers dining room with her son Sifiso and daughter Onica, Johannesburg, June
1999. Victoria died of AIDS on 13 December 1999, Sifiso died of AIDS on 12 January
2000, Onica died of AIDS in May 2000 (Fig. 3.15). The only person whom Goldblatt has knowingly photographed for public display as an HIV-infected person is the AIDS activist Zackie Ahmat for the New Yorker in 2003 (Wienand 2013: 9). While Goldblatt did not know Cobokana and her children’s HIV status in 1999, and nor did he know if
Cobokana herself knew of her and her children’s HIV status (Wienand 2013: 9), the photograph would become widely disseminated and seen as speaking of and honouring
being affected by HIV/AIDS as well as a socio-political statement. It was first used by the New York-based Visual AIDS Artists Caucus in 1991.
165 victims of HIV/AIDS. For instance, the multi-disciplinary volume AIDS and South
Africa: The Social Expression of a Pandemic edited by Kyle Kauffman and David
Lindauer (2004) is dedicated “In memory of Benjy,37 Onica, Sifiso and Victoria whose images appear in this volume and who are four of the over one million South Africans who already have died of AIDS” (Kauffman & Lindauer 2004: v). A family, since deceased, is now known only, or primarily, as victims of HIV/AIDS, which was not the original purpose or condition of photographing them.
The posthumous knowledge of the family’s HIV-positive status and their death from
AIDS-related illnesses, reforms the signifiers in the space around them, so that the trio’s future is brought into their present, and is always the viewer’s past. The children’s gummy innocence would seem to be buttressed by their mother’s still body and solemn expression. As Emma Bedford (2004: 96) explains: “Reframed in this context, she evokes the grave Madonna of quattrocento paintings who foresees the death of her child.” The wobbly cloth and wood candelabra descends as if to anoint the Madonna either in the moment of the Annunciation – the foretelling of her future – or in the Ascension – where as the mother of Christ, her unsullied body is drawn up to heaven. The round window creating a halo around her head gazes out, portal-style onto the landscape, where, what to many would seem like a biblical pestilence, stalked the country. It may be said to exemplify what Garb describes as “the sobriety and gravitas associated with social documentary photography, until recently regarded as the privileged pictorial means for revealing injustice through the representation of lived experience” (Garb 2011: 11). The
37 Benjy refers to the HIV-positive man in Sue Williamson’s From the Inside: Benjy, also included in the volume.
166 use of hindsight-based signifiers of mortality and martyrdom allows the viewer to come to such conclusions him/herself. Cobokana, through her image as captured by Goldblatt, has indeed become a modest symbol of the human toll of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.
Death may seem as out of place, and yet simultaneously as ‘invisibly present’ in a comfortable suburban living room as a domestic worker in South Africa. This allows the moral and human claims of the situation to be foregrounded because, as Garb phrases her remarks on social documentary photography, “the reality that it constructed is beginning, itself, to be understood as partial, interested and particular” (Garb 2011: 12). The death toll in the narrative-style title also, as Wienand points out, takes a social activist stance in underscoring the demographic – sexually active women and girls – who are most likely to be infected with HIV and, in so doing, it counters the cultural stereotypes of the time that
HIV and AIDS affected only social and sexual ‘deviants’ (Wienand 2013: 9). The statistics provided by the 2012 Survey on HIV/AIDS indicate that with a national HIV- prevalence rate of 12.2% (Shisana et al, 2014: 35), black African females aged 20 to 34 years recorded the highest incidence of HIV among the population groups analysed
(Shisana et al 2014: 113). Women are more likely to be affected by HIV/AIDS than men, with factors such as sexual debut before 15, multiple sexual partners, age-disparate and transactional sexual relationships and limited knowledge of HIV and sexual risk prevention being significant factors in creating this vulnerable demographic (Shisana et al
2014: 115 – 16). But before government-sponsored antiretroviral treatment became available in 2003, being HIV-positive and unable to afford private heathcare was a death sentence, as it was for the family in Goldblatt’s photograph.
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Both Vallie and Goldblatt have included women who are employed as domestic workers in portraits with a strong social documentary tradition, intending to render with dignity the nuances of intersecting experiences. This is the tradition with which Muholi herself came to national public attention as an art practitioner, with her documentary series recording and rendering visible to many communities the lives of black LGBTI* individuals. By introducing and contextualising her Being and Faces series, I may then suggest how, in engaging fantasy and role-play, Muholi’s ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) series is both a departure from and a continuation of her depiction of black queer subjecthood.
Faces and Phases: Muholi’s LGBTI* archival project
Muholi is arguably best known for her Faces and Phases and Being portrait series that represent black, queer, female and trans* individuals. The Faces and Phases series (Figs.
3.16 – 3.18) is a project begun in 2006 that continues today. Muholi photographs individuals in black and white, usually three-quarter length, where each person’s individuality testifies in its visibility; in contemporary South Africa, acknowledgement for LGBTI* individuals without fear, hiding or stereotyping continues to be an act of political agitation and solidarity.
In 2009, the then Minister of Arts and Culture Lulu Xingwana walked out of an exhibition featuring Muholi’s work, objecting to intimate photographs of black lesbians, citing them as degrading and inappropriate representation of ‘the’ (assumed as
168 homogenous/collective) black female body. She rejected any representation of African homosexuals. This populist homophobia amongst a majority of Africans of conservative religious and/or cultural views may be found in many exhibition guest book comments, asserting that Muholi’s “images of the Black female body are either degrading for all
(Black) women or alternatively, are demeaning for the community, the nation, or the race” (Gunkel 2009: 80). Black working class lesbians in South Africa are routinely ostracised, harassed, and subject to violence, sexual assault and torture, ‘curative rapes’ or murder. Muholi’s “positive queer visibility” therefore involves the deliberate creation of both an archive and an audience.
In 2004, Muholi passionately affirms:
I write as a proud daughter, Zulu, and lesbian living and working in urban Gauteng. I am a community worker and organizer. I spend most of my time with the women who live their lives as lesbians, as lesbian men, as femme and butch mothers, as women loving women who push against the boundaries of who is, and what is, an ‘African’ woman. We have taught each other about our experiences. My community is those women who are too poor and ‘uneducated’, too African to some and too un-African to others to be entrusted with any meaningful participation as citizens of this country. I locate myself as both an insider and outside of this community. I am an insider as it is here where I find my past, where I find some of my own life experiences reflected back to me, where I find legitimization for loving women. But I am also an outsider as I am currently employed and tertiary educated, both of which afford me a degree of (unfair) access to social, economic and cultural resources not available to the vast majority of my sisters (Muholi 2004: 116).
This is a community for whom photography may be used as a language of expression and affirmation, in wider communities where, as Muholi recalls: “Gallery was not in my vocab; even to spell museum – m.u.s.e.u.m. – was not part of my vocab” (Muholi in
169 Difficult Love 2010). Muholi has made LGBTI* activism a vocational path for herself: before her professional artistic career as an art practitioner became dominant, she worked as a reporter and photographer for the online African LGBTI* magazine Behind the
Mask, co-founded the black lesbian organization, the Forum for the Empowerment of
Women (FEW), and became involved with other empowerment projects and organizations. Muholi mobilises community members to come to her gallery exhibitions to discuss what it’s like to be black and female and lesbian; telling them “you are more than one thing” (Muholi in Difficult Love 2010). Her creation of this visual archive and her fostering of an audience outside of the historically white, middle-class, art-conscious,
South African community, as well as engaging the non-LGBTI* community, while still providing a discussion platform and visual icons for the LGBTI* community, is central to her work. A guiding principle for her could be said to be Jacques Derrida’s outlining of a democratic archival project:
There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its construction and its interpretation (Derrida 1996: 4).
Muholi’s Being series, begun in 2007 and continuing today, depicts individuals and couples in different settings and activities speaking to everyday life, moving between public and private realms, being queer and at ease. This portrait series was conceived because, she explains: “Despite the fact that, in contrast to most other African states, our
South African Bill of Rights guarantees us legal protections against homophobia, there
170 are still no loving, intimate photographs of black lesbians” (Michael Stevenson, 2006).
The series becomes then a dialogue around the way black, queer people represent themselves. Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta from Ext. 2, Lakeside,
Johannesburg (2007; Figs. 3.19 & 3.20) are shown embracing on their bed and bathing in their tin bucket by candlelight, apparently self-contained in their habitual affection, appearing poignant only if youthful and marginalised love and relative poverty are accepted as vulnerabilities. This couple is photographed several times, so that no one image serves to define their identities or relationship. Musa Ngubane and Mabongi
Ndlovu from Hillbrow, Johannesburg (2007; Fig 3.21) are also embracing in the nude, but this couple’s open yet wary appraising of the viewer, through the camera lens, suggests self-conscious awareness of how they present themselves. Nomonde Mafunda,
Key accounts co-ordinator and Tumi Ndweni, Entrepeneur, on the occasion of their civil union marriage, Krugerdorp Home Affairs office, 6 March 2007 (Fig. 3.22) shows a couple making an intimate but significantly public display of social and legal union.
Similarly, Nomsa Mazibuko and Fondo, outside the Hope Unity Metropolitan Community
Church, a gay church, during Good Friday. Mayfair, Johannesburg 2007 (Fig 3.23), presents a family at church on Good Friday, a centrally significant Christian commemorative day, on which day Christ is understood to have died to release the burden of humanity’s sins. This couple is embracing the values of family life and religious faith, and in so doing, as Wienard points out about Goldblatt’s image of Victoria
Cobokana as a young, hard-working, HIV-positive mother, Muholi is countering prejudices of LGBTI* people as ‘deviant’ and ‘immoral’ people, unintegrated into and uninvested in community-building organisations and activities, such as church and
171 family, that are traditionally valued by many African communities. As she says about the series:
The work is aimed at erasing the very stigmatisation of our sexualities as ‘unAfrican’, even as our very existence disrupts dominant (hetero)sexualities, patriarchies and oppressions that were not of our own making. Since slavery and colonialism, images of us African women have been used to reproduce heterosexuality and white patriarchy, and these systems of power have so organised our everyday lives that it is difficult to visualise ourselves as we actually are in our respective communities. Moreover, the images we see rely on binaries that were long prescribed for us (hetero/homo, male/female, African/unAfrican). From birth on, we are taught to internalise their existences, sometimes forgetting that if bodies are connected, connecting, the sensuousness goes beyond simplistic understandings of gender and sexuality (Muholi in Michael Stevenson 2006).
As Matebeni (2013: 414) writes: “The image of two female bodies against each other intimates to the possibility of a future without fear or threat, but intimacy and desire.”
Having lost two personal friends to AIDS-related illnesses in 2006 and 2007, Muholi says that in creating images for lesbians loving, she is also seeking “to create awareness around how we as lesbians need to take precautions when we engage sexually with other women” (Muholi in Michael Stevenson 2006).38
When Muholi photographs black lesbians intimately, she engages specifically with intersecting issues of sexuality, race, class and cultural mores in contemporary South
Africa. A photographer who, before Muholi, arguably had the most visibility as documenting the lives of South African lesbians, is Jean Brundrit. Her series ‘Does your
38 Muholi’s exhibition, Only Half the Picture, in 2006 showcased anonymous portraits of lesbians in the aftermath of hate crimes perpetrated against them, such as close-ups of hospital tags and knife scars, and engaging in safe-sex sexual and intimate practices, such as fitting a (white) condom over a strap-on dildo.
172 lifestyle depress your mother?’ (1998; Fig. 3.24) is one of the first serialised documentary projects that photographs lesbians to circulate in the South African public domain. Drawn from the artist’s middle-class, Capetonian, white lesbian community, the wryness of the series’ title both highlights and masks the pain of being othered within familial relationships while at the same time, in its quotidian intimacies, it seeks to assert a normativity and a shared vulnerability with which its (assumed as mainly heterosexual) audiences would identify and so be receptive to (Gunkel 2009: 78). Like Muholi’s Being series, these are loving and lovingly photographed portraits of couples.
In Portrait of a lesbian couple in South Africa (1995; Fig. 3.25), Brundrit graphically erases the two women, cutting them out of the frame, demonstrating the negation of individuals and relationships as well as, implicitly, the expressions of homophobic violence and alienation to which LGBTI* individuals have been subjected in South
Africa. It was only in 1996 that the new South African Constitution prevented unfair discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Cape Town as a ‘pink’ destination with a thriving queer scene (although it is quite distinctly divided by race and class, as many aspects of South African life remain) is referenced ironically by Brundrit in her colour choices, in its dissonance with more mainstream tourist promotional literature and political landscapes. On 1 December 2006, when Muholi was creating the
Being series, the Union Bill legalised same sex marriage, the first African nation to do so, allowing same sex spouses to make decisions on each other’s behalf, receive alimony and adopt children. However, as Muholi demonstrates, there is a deep chasm of marginalised and violated individuals when legal rights are not supported by cultural attitudes.
173
Considering Brundrit’s alongside Muholi’s photographic series also highlights the potentially different experiences of race and class. One of the portraits in Faces and
Phases that may be considered as encouraging a interpretation that manipulates the tropes of authenticity in a photographic subject’s presentation, and thereby foregrounding issues of subjectivity as a negotiation of identity ‘masks’, is Kekeletso Khena (Fig. 3.26). As the image caption records, she was photographed in Green Market Square in Cape Town. In
2012, Khena was the Skills Summit & BBQ Awards Director at Cape Media, and has been a senior project manager for Kqaola Media Radio presenter, director, activist, and
PR manager (Who’sWho 2012). Made during her studies at the Big Fish School of
Digital Film-making, Khena’s documentary short 30 Seconds, which has been screened at international film festivals, takes the perspective of a lesbian couple caught in a triangle with a jealous male and draws its title from the statistic that a woman is raped in South
Africa every thirty seconds. She grew up in Soweto and recalls:
I was raped because I was a butch child. I was 13 years old the first time it happened. My mother walked into the room soon afterwards and said to me ‘this is what happens to girls like you’. It didn't occur to me then what she meant, but looking back now, that's not the kind of thing you expect from a mother (Khena in Mufweba 2003).
In the present, she says:
I hate going back to Soweto, people stare at you as if you are an abomination. The minute I walk into the township, this alarm bell goes off in my head. I feel even worse when I look at my mother and you can see in her eyes she's
174 thinking ‘this is my child’. I left the township because I refuse to feel threatened on a daily basis (Khena in Mufweba 2003).
As a teenager, she was raped by a boyfriend because she refused him sexual intimacy, and was last raped when she was 18, by a “family friend”, who, in her words “said to me that I had to be taught how to be a black woman” (Khena in Mufweba 2003). She says that this rape afforded her “a lot more sensitivity and support because [her family] knew the perpetrator” (Khena in Mufweba 2003). She says that now, years later, she and her mother have come to an understanding of her identity (Mufweba 2003).
Muholi photographs Khena in Greenmarket Square, a busy flea market, upgraded and pedestrianised in 2007, which hosts traders of many nationalities from South, Southern and all of Africa, who sell a variety of goods, especially curios. Located in the centre of
Cape Town’s business district, close to the House of Parliament, this site was established in 1696, with a Burgher Watch House built on it in 1719. Since then, it has been, amongst other things, a slave market, a fruit and vegetable market and been the scene of anti- apartheid political protests. Placing Khena in this layered and hustling environment, against a backdrop of a display of carved, generically ‘African’ masks for sale, Muholi allows her subject’s facial features to be repeated in the shapes of the masks behind her: here perhaps not alluding to an ertsatz-Africanness, but, as in the community of her Faces and Phases series, to solidarity with others, for whom space is held in the empty eyes of the masks, in an acknowledgement both painful and triumphant of the various identities that LGBTI* individuals and Khena herself negotiate. Muholi believes that “The face has
175 a voice. The face means a presence and an existence” (Muholi in Baderoon 2011: 412).
As Baderoon suggests:
This investment in the face, the body, and the spaces they inhabit, as well as the larger imaginative realm that encompasses them all, is part of the utopian impulse of Muholi’s work. On the other hand, it can also mean asserting the right of gender-variant bodies to occupy spaces that have previously been occupied by straight bodies (Baderoon 2011: 413).
The wariness that may be read in Khena’s eyes, the negotiation between herself and the viewer as she lifts her chin and eyes level to meet the future viewer even as she tilts her head slightly into herself, has a visual echo in an earlier South African portrait – to the woman painted by Irma Stern (1955). In Maid in Uniform (1955; Fig. 3.27), Stern’s subject displays an apparent truculence and denial of the viewer (or the situation, or the artist) in her folded arms and averted gaze, which Stern has arguably interpreted into the subject’s mask-like face through the artist’s own, self-proclaimed confusion about how to connect with and represent her sitter’s individuality. Stern’s portrait may be seen to exemplify Arnold’s “problematic portraits of servitude”. Stern conceived of people as exemplifying racial and cultural ‘types’; for her black people embodied a primitivist ideal of the exotic other, and consequently, she was ambivalent about urbanised black people.
As Stern records in her journal, about painting portraits:
They [European sitters] are usually so pre-occupied as to what they should look like, they put on one mask after another, and don’t allow one to have any personal touch, no mental touch, nothing. It is like one big fight. That is why I have been painting natives. They keep still. They are completely contemplated – up to the point when I really did not paint natives any more.
176 One reason was that I could not penetrate that point. You cannot go further with them, you cannot get to, what you might say, their soul […] there is always the exterior only and perhaps their expression, or their mode of living. And I sought always for the most primitive because I don’t like the dressed up native for painting (Stern in Dubow 1991: 100).
In this portrait, perhaps the artist’s reading of a stifled, innocent, ‘primitive’, or perhaps her acknowledgement of her own limitations to convey subjectivity for a person whom she experienced as so radically other, is imaged through a mask-like face. The facial stylisation, shifty eyes and truculent posture imply a “dark and enigmatic form of contained energy”, according to Arnold (1996: 97), imperfectly ‘contained’ and
‘domesticated’ by the maid’s uniform and role. In this, the servant as a liminal threshold- crosser, as a lurking and latent threat within the employer’s home, is played out. The pane of glass behind her offers no reflection. At the risk of romanticising the subject’s agency, one might say that she actively absents herself, refusing to collude with the artist and the viewer.39
An averted gaze is a stylised device that Muholi repeatedly evokes as, arguably, a symbol of self-care and self-containment, and as a stylised allusion to the staged artifice of the scene, rather than a ‘modest’ invitation for the viewer to see and read what s/he desires, as in western academic tradition. Muholi’s ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 5 (Fig. 3.28), in this context, might present as a domestic worker sitting on a sofa, with averted gaze. Yet the precision and self-containment of her feet alongside each other, her hands clasped and shoulders slightly rounded in on herself, when paired with the subtly looming camera
39 Stern’s Maid in Uniform was hung to create a dialogue with Muholi’s ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 2 at the exhibition Beguiling: The Self and the Subject at the Irma Stern Museum, curated by Kirsty Cockerill, in 2011.
177 angle, give her gaze a disquieting agency. This perhaps is the worker, who, unlike
Sartre’s waiter, is not wholly identified with her role. The feet are clean, the uniform neat, the house spotlessly bland, but the person before the camera is suggested as not being present in any conventional way. The power of this averted gaze may be seen in a photograph such as Untitled (2006; Fig. 3.30) – where Muholi photographs herself
‘smoking’ a tampon ceremoniously dipped in menstrual blood, drawing the viewer’s gaze, with hers to the side of the frame – may be paired with an image such as Lungile
Dladla 2 pointing at the crime scene where she survived a violent hate crime, Swazi section, Daveyton (2012; Fig. 3.31) – where Dhladla marks the place where she was raped. Muholi uses blood to ‘speak’ in a language, of a situation, that is not photographed, namely violence and violation against LGBTI* individuals. In this, I do what Ariella Azoulay does in her meditation on photography – to stage “an implicit contrast between photographs that exist and those never taken” (Azoulay 2012: 10).
Azoulay makes a case for photography as an act of “political imagination” (Azoulay
2012: 3). Although there is no evidence that she references Azoulay here, Matebeni
(2013: 414) calls Muholi’s work “art for political imagination”. “Political imagination” –
Azoulay argues – is “the ability to imagine a political state of being that deviates significantly from the prevailing state of affairs” (Azoulay 2012: 3) and is “that form of imagination that exceeds the grasp of the individual mind – it is a form of imagination that transcends the single individual alone and exists between individuals and is shared by them” (Azoulay 2012: 5). It can be a force for tyranny, or for good, or for utopianism, as it “is evident in situations that have been naturalised as conventional and routine for us”
178 (Azoulay 2012: 6). So that she may engage with a body of photographs that do not exist – namely the rape of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers close to the period of the establishment of the state of Israel – Azoulay intends “to undermine the identification between the indexical function of the photograph and its status as representation”
(Azoulay 2012: 10) such that her “intervention distinguishes between the event of photography and the photographed event” (Azoulay 2012: 10).
In Muholi’s creation of an archive of LGBTI* images in South Africa, she both takes portraits in a social documentary style, presenting and asserting LGBTI* presence, as well as taking more reportage-type, in-action photographs where events such as LGBTI* hate crimes are both indexed and alluded to in an attempt to find a visual language for what cannot be photographed. As Baderoon describes:
Muholi’s work is deeply conscious of its antecedents. Looking at her photographs, I immediately think of other photographs, even when they do not exist. By this, I mean that Muholi is driven both by the absence and a certain compromised presence of LGBTI lives in the visual archive. As a result, one can discern a simultaneous assertion of presence and a sense of mourning in her photographs (Baderoon 2011: 403).
‘Massa’ and Mina(h): Queering ‘maid’ and ‘madam’
Muholi’s ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) series would seem to complicate the still racialised South
African employer/employee and madam/maid relationship by representing the servants as mimicking, rather than maintaining, the assuredness, decadence and indolence that may
179 be read into a plush domestic interior. The homes that photographer Alice Mann depicts in her series Southern Suburbs would seem to be such interiors.40 A space in a white home in one of Cape Town’s affluent, historically white, southern suburbs is photographed twice, with the person who owns the space, and the person who maintains it. The space takes on a distinct tone with each individual, and each individual, consequently perhaps, appears equally disconnected from this space, as well as both intimate with and disconnected from the other person. In this series, Mann includes herself and her family’s domestic worker in one of these split, doubled portraits, thereby turning the camera on her own participation in this South African social practice (Figs.
3.31 & 3.32). Mann points out the routine dynamic of such homes, the social milieu with which she is familiar, is that the domestic worker will maintain the home and occupy the space during the working day, leaving as the family returns, resulting in a potentially
40 In 2014, Alice Mann, as a recently graduated student from Cape Town, came to the attention of the national media after she published Domestic Bliss, a series of photographic portraits of domestic workers. Mann was viewed as not communicating sufficient self-reflexivity about her practice as a young, white, privileged, South African woman photographing ‘maids’. She was considered as re-inforcing, not critiquing, the power relations of interest to her. The hyperbole of the blogosphere not withstanding, the popular media by and large received Alice Mann’s Domestic Bliss project as insufficiently expressing awareness that in a conventional portrait, the artist or photographer handles another’s image, in whose representation an overt economic and ideological negotiation takes place. Some opinion considered that Mann’s female subjects are not sufficiently differentiated from their roles and contexts of employment, and from their relationship to the artist who is acquainted with their employers (who are contemporaries of Mann’s, sharing similar racial and socio-economic backgrounds), and as such, that the photographs appear to be quasi-ethnographic ‘type’ photography. These opinions were formed especially since the photographs were not originally published with accompanying names of the subjects; Mann has subsequently made clear her intention to me to include them. I would suggest that these portraits represent domestic workers in a way that serves, inadvertently, to uphold the icon of the devoted servant, and to produce, maintain and legitimize the existing social order. The series’ title, the ‘domestic bliss’ that these women create for their unseen employers, is an irony that is insufficiently communicated. Between an intention to honour these women, and a desire to draw ironic attention to the social practice, these images arguably fall somewhat flat. In this context, Mann may be interpreted as presenting domestic workers as individuals, rather than individuals who are domestic workers. In consciously re-presenting her own white, upper-middle class interaction with the subjects, that of domestic workers in her social environment, she may be inadvertently suggesting that visibility is in her gift to bestow.
180 ignored but “underlying tension in the social dynamic between employer and employee”
(Mann 2014). She continues:
The deliberate way in which the scenes are constructed, and the apparent sense of isolation in my subjects due to the way in which they inhabit these spaces, are elements which I hope enhance these scenes and are suggestive of the façade that is presented to society [… The domestic worker’s] presence in the home is almost a spectral one – everyone depends on her being there, but often she is not directly involved in the family dynamic (Mann 2014).
In the pair of images photographed in Mann’s family home, Thandi Masingwana and
Alice Mann are positioned on the outside of the facing circle – and the warmth and intimacy of communication between friends and family – that the three sofas form behind them. As in Goldblatt’s Victoria Cobokana, the photographed subjects are implicitly isolated from their living spaces. Mann posits this isolation for both employer and employee is due in part to the overlapping but discrete experiences of ‘maid’ and
‘madam’ in upper-middle-class South African households. In Agnes Nozuko,
Upper Claremont, Cape Town, June 2013 (2013; Fig. 3.33) and Alexander Corder,
Upper Claremont, Cape Town, June 2013 (2013; Fig. 3.34) from the Southern Suburbs series, Nozuko and Corder are photographed at the apex of the leading diagonals made by a towering and ornately carved four-poster bed, a dresser and a painting of a cottage by the sea, with Nozuko’s head-wrap picking up the colour of the artfully strewn blanket and
Corder’s shirt drawn out by the painting’s colours. Each individual inhabits the setting and ghosts the other, the employee her employer and the employer his employee, with the bed signifying the ambivalent intimacies played out in these roles.
181 Muholi (in Michael Stevenson 2012) speaks of a taboo about articulating possibilities of intimacy between employer and employee, but – sexualised abuse across unequal power differentials notwithstanding – intimacy is frequently evoked as a sexual metaphor in this context. Mira Hamermesh, the Polish-British film maker whose 1985 documentary commissioned for Channel 4 about black domestic workers and wealthy white ‘madams’ in Johannesburg, has several South African interviewees using a version of a metaphor that connected social silence and ‘privacy’ around issues of sexual relations to similar expectations of privacy about relations with domestic workers. One ‘madam’ tells the documentary crew: “You’re going to get into a lot of trouble because when you talk about domestic workers, you are really coming into the bedroom” (Maids and Madams 1985).
A young, white, liberal woman comments:
I think it’s very difficult to ask white madams to talk about their maids. It’s almost like asking them what happens behind their bedroom doors. It’s such an intimate relationship. And I have met very few white madams who are honest about the working conditions and pay of their maids (Maids and Madams 1985).
Du Plessis, following McClintock’s outlining of metaphors and symbols connecting the microcosm of the nuclear family with the macrocosm of the nation state, suggests that
the family as the domain in which the nation is reproduced and, as a realm of intimacy and intimate relations, connects the institution of domestic work very powerfully to anxieties about South African nationhood and the remainder of the past in the present (Du Plessis 2011: 49).
182 Sexual relations, defined in the broadest and most varied terms, have been a consistent theme, both as a driving narrative force and alluded to as undercurrents, in discourse about servants and domestic workers, wherever they are a cultural staple, certainly since the late nineteenth century. Sexual relations between employer and employee are explored in forms from European dramatic, tragic and popular literature to pornography to autobiographical recollections of childhood (such as Freud’s memories of his
Kinderfrau, as discussed in Chapter 1), to sociological investigations by religious organisations and sociological and legal enquiries.
In Muholi’s ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 6 (2008; Fig 3.35), Muholi performs a scene with gestures and props that may be read as layering two potential story lines over the image presented – therein the potential for the subversion of the dominant authority. The ‘maid’ may be fantasising about being the ‘madam’, or possessing the ‘madam’ or idling in her chores. The unmade bed may be the result of habitual, careless privilege on the part of the employers, or illicit pleasures, or coercions – the deshabillé of white linen and lingerie is a standard symbol of sexual titillation and availability. Like the Punch cartoon, the setting takes on at least two sets of overlapping and very different symbols and meanings; unlike the cartoon, Muholi’s scene opens up rather than reinforces the status quo and is not demonstrably at the expense of her character. The openness of Muholi’s narrative potentials forecloses a reductive reading of the scene, and the essentialising of the domestic worker’s role, and her interiority, which, finally, is emphasised, through a performance of a situated identity, as unknowable. Mann’s Doris Ngwane, Rondebosch,
Cape Town March 2014 (2014; Fig. 3.36) from her Domestic Bliss series, depicts
183 Ngwane lying on a single bed with white soft furnishings. When interpreted alongside
Muholi’s ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) 6, reading Ngwane’s slightly pursed lips, raised chin, drawn-back shoulders and arm across torso might suggest a subtle challenge to a cursory, visual dismissal of a domestic worker’s presence within her employer’s home, in a way that Mann intended with the series, but that arguably was not successfully conveyed or enough developed. Both photographs may be said to reimage tropes of the servant attending the leisured mistress in bed who is the principle subject of the scene, the servant being the attendant to and augmentation of the mistress’ sexual allure. Such an example may be the nineteenth-century Realist painter Édouard Manet’s Olympia (Fig. 3.37), where the allusion to and simultaneous subversion of the rhetoric and formulaic representation of the Orientalised boudoir (intended as an exoticising and thus distancing device) presents the contemporary French tension between prostitution and other transactional forms of sexuality and a sentimentalised, highly stylised and supposedly desexualised visual language more acceptable to influential circles of the time. Much of the visual tension is communicated through the ironic repetition yet subversion of the odalisque nude such as the Venus of Urbino who, here, confronts the viewer and clamps down on her pubis. In contrast to, for instance, Manet’s Olympia, in Muholi’s series, the
‘maid’ is given the gaze that narrates the image. The servant in Olympia is positioned as an accessory to Olympia; her gaze, directed towards her mistress, encourages the viewer similarly to focus on Olympia. Muholi’s character, whose person is positioned in the centre of the composition and whose ambiguous gaze is more directly appraising of the mistress, is more overtly the protagonist of the scene.
184 In ‘Massa’ and Minah 2 (Fig. 3.38), Muholi as the ‘maid’ looks up from scrubbing the floor to gaze appraisingly at the legs of the ‘mistress’. The maid could be eroticising the legs, or seeing them as a dismembered synecdoche for her employer and the careless intrusion of walking over the newly polished floor, for her conditions of employment, or something else altogether: the ambiguity reinforces the maid’s subjectivity and agency.
She is on a threshold, kneeling in the doorframe, both inside and outside of the framing tropes that police her presence in this environment. This ‘maid’ is not the maid of the turn of the twentieth-century Ronuck polish advertisement (Fig. 3.44). The Ronuck maid is a self-less, empty-vessel servant of both the employer whose floor she polishes and the emergent consumer market that she metatextually inhabits. Her elbow grease rewards her with a mirror image of herself, explaining that the servant’s vanity is satisfied by the accomplishment of her prescribed duties, not through an adornment of herself through embellishment in costume or cosmetics. The gaze of Muholi’s ‘maid’ however is turned upon her employer.
Garb’s 2011 study of contemporary South African photography does not include any art- makers representing domestic workers, as alluded to in Chapter 2; however (and also, therefore), I have taken the opportunity in this chapter to consider her description of two frequent characteristics of contemporary figural photographic portraiture and how these characteristics – utilising self-consciously staged performance and evoking community – may be seen to have had an impact on Muholi’s deploying of domestic-worker characters.
185 Firstly, Garb points out that the veracity of the figural is deliberately undermined by “the performative nature of posing and the possibility of fabricating a fictitious and fabulous self for the camera […] so that portraiture too may become sites of projection, fantasy and play” (Garb 2011: 27). Secondly, that “much contemporary figural photography veers between portraiture and typology, mobilizing sets in which to situate subjects, diminishing individuality in order to register the shared markers of the social” (Garb
2011: 27 – 28). In ‘Massa’ and Mina(h), I have discussed how Muholi has created a fictional and unconventional figure in ‘Mina’ the ‘maid’ who has an ambivalent sexual relationship with her ‘madam’, a story line that encourages the viewer to self-consciously evaluate how narratives from various origins may be imposed upon both ‘maid’ and
‘madam’. But why Muholi should choose domestic workers and their relationships to their employers as the tropes to be explored through fantasies, projections and performative characters, rather than through a social documentary frame where individuals are serialised into community with others, the framing device for the majority of her work, is due to her personal connection to domestic workers, through her mother,
Bester Muholi.
Muholi specifies that the series ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) is a personal tribute to her mother,
Bester Muholi, who was a domestic worker. As she says: “The project is based on the life and story of my mother. I draw on my own memories, and pay tribute to her domesticated role as a worker for the same family for 42 years” (Muholi in Michael Stevenson 2012).
Muholi tells that she “wanted to tell her story as well as highlight the parallels of her story” (in Abid 2010). An important archival source for Muholi is a newspaper cutting
186 from 2002 that gives a sentimentalised and uncritical account of her mother’s years of service to the Harding family.41
She is adamant that her mother supported her more than anyone (Muholi 2010). Within the family, this support meant, for one thing, as Muholi’s sister recounts, that when
Zanele came out as a lesbian, their “brothers could not kick her out of the house”
(Difficult Love 2010). Nonetheless, Muholi says: “My mother never had the opportunity to attend any of my shows. Even if she did, I don’t know what she would have thought of the work that I do” (Difficult Love 2010). As a child she hoped that her mother’s more privileged employers would adopt her (Muholi 2010). Her memories and emotions about her relationship with her mother, with herself, and with her mother’s occupation, account in part for her decision to abandon the series. Her reason for abandonning it is one shared by many South Africans: “The wounds of the past keep on opening when we think of the
41 The article, by an unknown author, appeared in the Sun News on 13 December 2002, titled ‘Work as Usual for Bester’.
Bester Muholi (67) has worked for the Harding family for 41 years. Bester became part of the family when the Wentworth government village became a coloured area, under the former group areas act, in 1961. The Hardings had lived in the area for some time and Bester worked for the family next door. “I was always looking over the fence thinking, “I like that missus there”,” said Bester. When the Harding family moved from Wentworth to Woodlands they asked Bester to move with them. Bester currently works for the eldest Harding son, David, in Montlaire. Once a week she works for Mickey and Kathy Harding, recently retired to Athlone Park. According to Kathy Harding, her children adore Bester. “In our time there were very few factories and the only option open to women was to clean houses” said Bester. “I like working, I have no plans to retire.” Bester was born in Ladysmith and moved to Durban with her mother. Here she married her late husband Ashwell, a Malawian. Bester has six surviving children 20 grand children and three great grand children. Bester currently lives in Umlazi. Bester is incredibly proud of her children. “I was always worrying about my children but Mr. Harding would say that I mustn’t because I was part of their family” said Bester. “They took me into their hearts and I thank them for this.” Bester has no immediate plans to retire, even though she went on pension two years ago (Reproduced in Ngcobo, not dated).
187 past, and where we are right now” (Difficult Love 2010). The self-conscious enactment of multiple roles in practitioners’ work and the use of parody, play and performance is a response to this personal and national trauma. Zayd Minty (2008: 438), writing in the same time as the production of ‘Massa’ and Mina(h), feels that performance art, as time- based interventions that leave no material traces, resonates particularly well with South
Africa in these times of social flux because they can allow “for a laboratory of thought to emerge and be debated before new ideologies are inscribed into an already scarred landscape – a valuable space for re-imaginings”.
While arguably all histories require a nuanced and fully-realised archive to document those whom they represent, Muholi’s blood paintings I feel contribute a significant layer to the ‘queer gaze’ with which her works look back out at their context, and what Muholi
(2010) calls “[o]ur queer black aesthetics in South Africa”. Muholi’s long-term ongoing series of prints made with her menstrual blood Isilumo siyaluma (Figs. 3.40 & 3.41) suggest how blood speaks to witness humanity, in its violence, violation, pain, dignity and sacredness. Each patterned piece in this series represents a 'curative rape' survivor or a victim of hate crimes. As with Faces, the images testify individually and collectively.
This series may be seen to interpret what Jack Halberstam observes: “The archive is not simply a repository; it is also a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory, and a complex record of queer activity” (Halberstam 2005: 169 – 70). Like
‘Massa’ and Mina(h), Isilumo siyaluma is arguably a more personally interpretative series.42
42 Like Faces, this is an on-going project for Muholi: “As long as there is a war on women’s bodies, especially lesbians’, I will keep on” (Toxic Lesbian 2012). Their symmetrical delicacy
188
As the daughter of a domestic worker, as an art-maker speaking from a personal, second- generation position, how Muholi holds her own memories and how she chooses to excavate and transform them aligns, she feels, with her on-going re-evaluations of how due to “centuries of European exploitation and oppression, black women were never allowed, taught, or socialised to capture their own (positive) images or explore their own sexual and erotic freedom, and to look back, stare back” (Muholi in Michael Stevenson
2009). The re-imaginings she explores is around acknowledgement for under-represented and under-acknowledged communities or groups. She explains: “The series is meant to acknowledge all domestic workers around the globe who continue to labour with dignity,
evokes a classical, aestheticized beauty and, according to Muholi, metaphorically represent the beauty of the South African constitution, and the betrayal that communities and medical, legal and religious institutions do not live these principles, how difficult it feels for black lesbians to live in the spaces they do, and to continue to do so after they have been violated within their own communities (Toxic Lesbian 2012). Isilumo siyaluma translates as dysmenorrhea, a medical condition of extreme pain and heavy blood loss during menstruation or more generally as ‘painful periods’. Muholi wishes to communicate that these are painful periods to be queer in Africa. Writing and speaking about these works, she explicitly names pain, grief, anger and fear as emotions with which she imbues these works, along with the literal “my own piece of flesh” (Toxic Lesbian 2012). She calls this work, “my artistic approach to hate crimes”. Since Muholi does not often use the word ‘artistic’, in this context, the self-expression seems uncharacteristically vulnerable: a personal, introspective, emotive response to her own experience of being a witness to survivors and victims of queer traumas.
Muholi has spoken of being influenced by female performing artists from the 1970s such as Carolee Schneeman, who used “radical performing arts to deal with issues of inequity and social justice” (Muholi 2010). Muholi highlights they use the body to do so (Muholi 2010). Muholi is the only South African artist in the public arena of whom I am aware who has used menstrual blood to create a serialised work. Other international artists, such as Vanessa Tiegs in her whimsical Menstrala (2013), who do use this medium, do not share Muholi’s political agenda and if they do, don’t engage so overtly with the complexities of speaking about homophobic hate crimes. Because of this, I think it might be fruitful to consider these works not only in the field of radical feminist performance artists but in trauma and survivor narrative. I would suggest that while Muholi’s oeuvre may be seen as courting controversy on some levels, her use of menstrual blood as a medium does not pander to a conventional distaste for female bodily fluids, but rather deals deliberately in an ambivalent, unstable signifier to express her ambivalent feelings about a personal and intimate psychological and somatic vulnerability in a so frequently hostile public context.
189 while often facing physical, financial, and emotional abuses in their places of work”
(Muholi in Michael Stevenson 2012). But while the work may be contextualised within a socio-historical framework, the fabrication, fantasy and role-playing suggest a self- conscious acting-out of roles in a personalised rapprochement between the mother’s and daughter’s different life experiences. As Gabi Ngcobo says:
Muholi is trying to come to grips with her mother’s story by locating herself within it, even if this does not bring her close to her experiences. Her mission is to historicise, to put into context the invisible figure of her mother and many other black women who were under the system that to this day continues to control black female labour (Ngcobo, not dated).
Ally discusses domestic workers’ deliberate participation in “cultivating a work culture that relied heavily on intimacy” (Ally 2010: 18) as the means to secure their positions with employers in ways that bypassed state legislation and intervention, which are not always able or to be relied upon to act on their behalf, and which “constructed domestics as too ‘vulnerable’ to effect change themselves, and thus requiring the benevolent state to act on their behalf” (Ally 2010: 18). This stepping out of the binary between dominance and submission allows the sociologist to examine with more nuance the “practices of power” (Ally 2010: 18) exercised in the relationships formed between participants. By queering her narrative, Muholi brings her own offering to the interpretations of and possibilities of the “practices of power” in these relationships. Also, by reinterpreting intimacy by narrowing it to intimations of sexual intimacy, she allows the viewer to bring attention to and acknowledge the wider spectrum of intimacies shared, or not, in these relationships, particularly between ‘maid’ and ‘madam’, and the blurring of positions of
190 privilege and power that these may entail. In so doing, she also seeks to (re)claim agency in visual narratives featuring queer women.
Conclusion
Masah and Mina translates as “Master and Me” (Abid 2010) and it is through this ‘maid’ that Muholi visualises queer histories for domestic workers and their employers or so- called ‘masters’, and in so doing, uses imaginatively generative, parodic fantasies to subvert deeply entrenched tropes of power and privilege. While her social-documentary work is prominent in her oeuvre and critical discussion of her work, Muholi does not purport to represent women employed as domestic workers in this series, but rather to honour the dominance of cultural circulation of tropes of ‘maids’ and ‘madams/masters’ as speaking at least to the number of black women who labour in this occupation in South
Africa, as her own mother did. As Du Plessis points out, in her own authorial approach, she
does not deal at all with the ways in which domestic workers (both former and current) understand and articulate their experiences and interpretations of employers of domestic workers. This is because the argument turns, in part, on the idea that the representation of practices in the social imaginary does indeed amount to an appropriation of the practice in ways that exceed the control, experiences and intentions of both actual domestic workers and actual employers of domestic workers (Du Plessis 2011: 47).
In seeking to create works that depict relationships or issues around domestic workers, without replicating historical privilege dynamics, Muholi stages theatrical tableaux, signaling their performed qualities by the artist’s recognisable presence, by what I
191 interpret as ironically referential gestures and an averted gaze that opens up interpretative possibilities. Her personal, emotional connection to domestic workers is in memories, which Muholi has chosen to leave unexpressed in any literal manner.
In creating a queer narrative for domestic workers, Muholi’s series may be seen as part of her wider critique of spectacular assumptions and visual tropes by colonial, neo- and post- colonialist and traditionalist ideologues who influence the representation of black women, becoming a celebration of the diversity of human experience. As Gqola illumines: “Muholi’s work is less about making Black lesbians visible than it is about engaging with the regimes that have used these women’s hypervisibility as a way to violate them” (Gqola quoted by Smith 2006: 75). ‘Massa’ and Mina(h) places the employer/employee dynamic as the central conceit, serving as a reminder of how issues of representation in post-apartheid South Africa continue under delicate negotiation, reflecting, as they do, the layered social relationships that form within the terms of employment for domestic work. Muholi is driven, ultimately, to create for queer history what Ann Cvetkovich calls for, which is “a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, sexuality, love, and activism” (Cvetkovich 2003: 241).
Both Muholi and Steven Cohen work explicitly through an interpretative framework that incorporates their queer sexuality. This is arguably however their only commonality. In discussing, in the following chapter, Cohen’s performances with his childhood ‘nanny’
Nomsa Dhlamini, I examine some of the representational issues that arise from his work.
192 CHAPTER FOUR
TRAUMATIC RHYTHMS
IN STEVEN COHEN’S CRADLE OF HUMANKIND (2012)
Introduction
Cradle of Humankind43 is a shuffling ‘ballet’ describing a particular collaborative relationship, that between a white South African man and the black woman who raised him. In 2011 and 2012, Steven Cohen performed this work with Nomsa Dlamini, a
Swazi-born nonagenarian, Cohen’s childhood ‘nanny’, his family’s former domestic worker and, since 1998, his frequent collaborator and ‘muse’. In four parts, they amble slowly around the stage, murmuring inaudibly to each other through a series of choreographed tableaux vivants that relate Cohen’s story of human evolution, innovation
43 Cohen’s exhibition Magog, at Stevenson Cape Town, from 18 October to 24 November 2012, drew together the works featuring either Nomsa Dhlamini’s image or documentation and video of her as a participant in Cohen’s performance art works.
In 2011, Cradle of Humankind was performed at Théâtre Garonne (Toulouse, France), Danae festival (Milan), Festival d'Automne (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Dampfzentrale (Bern, Switzerland), La Bâtie - the Festival of Geneva (Switzerland), C/U (Body Mind) Festival (Warsaw, Poland), Latitudes Contemporaines festival (Le Phénix, Scène nationale Valenciennes, France), Troubles festival, (Les Halles de Schaerbeeck, Brussels), Un Pas de Trop festival (La Maison Folie Mons, Belgium), and Festival les Anticodes 2011 (Brest, France). In 2012, it was performed at La Rose des Vents, Scene nationale Lille Métropole Villeneuve d'Ascq (Lille), Oktoberdans festival (Bergen, Norway), Novart, La Biennale des Arts de la Scène – 'Les Inventeurs' (Bordeaux, France), Festival d'Avignon (France), and National Arts Festival (Grahamstown, South Africa).
193 and exploitation, through and with a person with whom he demonstrably has a deeply emotional and non-biological maternal relationship.
The work uses this personal relationship to enact Cohen’s stylised interpretation of the historical relationship between black and white peoples, resulting in two conflicting languages. One is narrative-driven and symbolic, enacted through new media and costume, problematised through Cohen’s incorporation of another person into his characteristic display and testing of his own bodily limits. The other is slow, tender and somatic, the unscripted interaction between the two performers, so known to each other, as they move around a stage. It is this second language that arguably is the richest and, in
Cohen’s oeuvre, the more unusual.
To elaborate on this slow rhythm, I describe specifically how it disperses the fetishistic viewing gaze encouraged by Cohen’s other representational language. For this, I draw on
Mulvey’s concept of fetishism in spectatorship, with an emphasis on how issues of ‘race’ and gender intersect in South African relationships between domestic workers and their employers’ families. I situate this performance in relation to Cohen’s other works in which Dhlamini participates, and consider how Dhlamini’s person and image in Cohen’s work has been interpreted in the context of contentious representational issues, which continue to be explored in South African contemporary art. In light of these representational issues, I introduce the Greek mythical character Baubo, through Penny
Siopis’ work with such a figurine owned by Freud, as an unresolved, ambivalent symbol
194 of agency, and, as such, suggest that it may serve, other than Sarah Baartman, as a point of comparison for Dhlamini’s performances.
To concentrate on the dynamics of the relationship between Cohen and Dhlamini and to draw out issues of representation arising from their collaboration, reviews of Cradle of
Humankind that discuss it at some length – namely Andrea Buys (2012), Wendy Gers
(2012) and April Sizemore-Barber (2013) – have been significant in acknowledging and teasing out some of the ambivalence within the work. Cohen and Dhlamini’s history of collaboration in Cohen’s work, beyond Cradle, is contextualised in Cohen’s exhibition
Magog, and reviews of it, such as especially Anna Stielau (2012) and also Sean O’Toole
(2012), discuss works such as Maid in South Africa (2005). The work has also been briefly reviewed online and in print, for instance Kennedy (2012), Blignaut (2011b), but I take the opportunity in this chapter to discuss in more extended detail these ambivalences, with reference particularly to the representation of domestic workers and black and African women, in a South African context. This approach is pertinent, as
Cohen’s work has been principally critically discussed in the framework of his earlier work, and of his queer and Jewish identities, and how these intersect with being a white man in South Africa. His earlier work has been considered in relation to issues of blasphemy, desecration and his Jewish identity, such as Robyn Sassen (2004), and to issues of being queer in South Africa and representing queerness in performance, notably
Charl Blignaut (1999), Liese Van der Watt (2004) and Alvaro Luís Lima (2012). A 2003
Taxi monograph, Steven Cohen, introduces Cohen’s work up to that date (Carmen (ed.)
2003) and Cohen’s monograph Life is Shot, Art is Long (2010) collects work from 1988
195 to 2010, with an essay on the work Golgotha and an interview with Cohen by Ivor
Powell. The artist’s personal reflections on the work have been instrumental in shaping my analysis; I sourced these from several video and radio interviews that Cohen has given, at La Bâtie Festival in Geneva in 2011 (Presse Bâtie 2011), Extra 11 Festival in
Annecy, France in 2011 (Dance-tech TV 2011), at the Avignon Festival in 2012 (Festival d’Avignon 2012) and at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2012 (CueTV
2012; Flynn 2012), as well as interviews published in print online (most significantly,
Jolly 2012). Cohen’s oeuvre may be considered simply as critically problematic and exploitative – as Sassen (2004: 120) puts it “scatological, offensive and invasive” – so
Cohen’s vulnerabilities and abilities (and inabilities) to express what he is doing in the work’s process are a crucial element of my approach to giving critical expression to some of the, arguably, more subtle dynamics and implications of Cohen and Dhlamini’s work together.
Fetishising the trope of the domestic worker
A fetish symptomatically signals itself as a site of psychic pain and social trauma
(Mulvey 1996: 12). As a signifier, a domestic worker may be a person onto whom fear, anxiety, fantasy and desire is projected, who may herself wield ambiguous powers drawing on her intimate knowledge of her employer’s family. She is a liminal person who traverses thresholds between cultural and economic worlds that may be considered by invested players as seemingly discrete. As a fetish, the figure of the ‘domestic worker’ signifies the interpellation of cultures, power and influence, making it, I argue, a fetish
196 that is “always haunted by the fragility of the mechanisms that sustain it” (Mulvey 1996:
8). The domestic-worker signifier is a structurally reinforcing fetish, in that it draws together both the Freudian and the Marxist concept of fetishism. As Mulvey explains:
For Freud, the body that is the source of fetishism is the mother’s body, uncanny and archaic. For Marx, the source of fetishism is in the erasure of the worker’s labour as value. Both become the unspeakable, and the unrepresentable, in commodity culture: repression of the mother’s body, repression of labour power as a source of value (Mulvey 1996: 14).
The ‘invisible’ reproducible labour that a domestic worker performs every day or week is arguably by its nature erasable (Marxist fetishism). A woman employed as a domestic worker, particularly perhaps a ‘live-in’ full-time ‘nanny’, may have an established relationship with her employers’ children that does not necessarily transition into the child’s maturity; the ‘other’, black mother’s body is discarded, in a variety of possible circumstances. Lacking a social framework within which to articulate and maintain this relationship, memories of play, learning, discipline and comfort may be fragmented and dispersed with only disconnected details remaining (Freudian fetishism).
Conceptually, Cohen would appear to treat Nomsa Dhlamini as he treats himself, and consider that treatment as a sign of respect, trust and affection. He ‘exhibits’ her as he
‘exhibits’ himself; as he says: “I throw Nomsa out there like that because I ask the same of myself” (Cohen in Dance-tech TV 2011). He resists, in interviews at least, the possibility that in performance, as Sizemore-Barber (2013: 262) points out, the manner in which he acknowledges with self-awareness his facilitation of the objectification of
Dhlamini’s body is critically different from that of his objectification of himself. That
197 Dhlamini worked as a domestic for his mother, and that her first role for him was as
‘nanny’ and maternal substitute, is not an inter-personal dynamic which may, arguably, be explored by either obfuscating the domestic worker role – there are no overt references to Dhlamini’s personal history with Cohen – nor by re-inforcing images and symbols of a more generic colonial exploitation. Mary Corrigall (2012) points out that in contemporary
South Africa, racial power relations are negotiated in arenas other than between “master and servant”, and that in Cradle, Cohen re-treads well-worn discursive terrain. She makes a point here, however, that that does not mean that the feudalised employer-employee relationship is not still negotiated in contemporary South Africa, nor, poignantly, that that relationship has not framed the lives of many South Africans. Then again, it also does not follow that Cohen’s is the most nuanced dramatisation of these tropes. Of South African performance artist Thando Mama’s self-portrayals, Makhubu (2012: 49) asserts:
“Although he is an object of scrutiny, he remains a determining subject.” This distinction
– of displaying a determining subject – is, I argue, compelling in Cohen’s Cradle of
Humankind, precisely because it results despite, not because of, the work’s choreography.
“Working with you, for you?”: Nomsa Dhlamini in Steven Cohen’s work
Steven Cohen and Nomsa Dhamini have toured Europe and South Africa, playing festivals to financially and visually complicit audiences. The work’s South African première was at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2012. Cohen claims that the European response to Cradle is different to the South African one, asserting that he may speak more freely about body politics in Europe (Cohen in Jolly 2012), but disquiet
198 is voiced on both continents: in reviews and with feet.44 Cohen plays responses off against each other; when in France, for instance, saying: “They complain here that it’s too brutally done. I tell them, look, we’re South Africans” (Cohen in Blignaut 2011b) but also claiming: “In South Africa I am quickly dismissed as a drag queen, a shock artist, a fraud, an arsehole” (Cohen in Jolly 2012).
While making no concessions to the audience’s ‘entertainment’ in terms of the performance’s pace, Cohen’s elaborate originary story for himself and Dhlamini – where a white man, having been ‘birthed’ from a Perspex bubble into the Symbolic social order by a loin-clothed ‘Khoisan’ woman (Fig. 4.1), then rejects and humiliates this maternal figure. This oppression is principally literalised by Cohen attaching manacled lion paws to Dhlamini’s hands while screened footage of his contracting anus ‘sings’ the apartheid national anthem ‘Die Stem’. Video footage of a chimpanzee killing and eating a baby monkey and a slowly pensive, gesturally ritualised dance with a baboon ‘tutu’ (a baboon stuffed with mouth tensely agape, legs stiffly splayed and anus vulnerable) also feature.
This descent/ascent from apes appears to suggest humanity’s propensity for
‘animalistically’ violent behaviour, but potentially identifies empathy as well. Cohen’s stage direction, props and projected images detail constructed differences between the two characters, derived mainly from ethnographic classification systems. These are queried, until the male figure ultimately reconciles with the female figure in a slow, simple, lunar ballet in transcendent costumes of fibre optic light (Fig. 4.2), as their performance on-site in the Sterkfontein and Swartkrans caves is screened overhead.
44 I noticed a few people walked out of the performance on 3 July 2012 at the National Arts Festival. Walk-outs at other performances have been noted by Blignaut (2011b).
199 Cohen would appear to suggest that the transcendence of a violent history, and the honouring of close relationships not socially acknowledged during the times that they are formed, is conceivable only by going as far back as is possible, to the human species’ conscious awakening.
References to Sara Baartman or the ‘Hottentot Venus’ (or in French, the Vènus
Hottentot) in conjunction with Nomsa Dhlamini consistently recur in local and international reviews and interviews and with audience members. Cohen both provocatively promotes this comparison and denies it. In an interview for the Extra 11
Festival in Annecy, France (Dance-tech TV 2011), for instance, he declares: “She is my
Saartjie Baartman and I brought her to France […] and I’m proud of being guilty for making a 90-year-old woman walk naked for money.” But he is at pains to point out that such a comparison is not anatomically accurate, emphasising that “this idea of the Venus
Hottentot is in our regard, it’s not in her physiognomy” (Cohen in Dance-tech TV 2011).
However, the context of the comparison is usually intended to evoke ‘Sarah Baartman’, the woman known by this name,45 as a signifier of the historic exploitation of black
45 The contestations and debates about the variant naming (and contexts) of the woman known as Saartjie/Sara Baartmann/Sarah Bartman are not dealt with here (see Abrahams 2007). Sara Baartman (1789 – 1815) was a Khoisan woman sold into slavery, who worked as a domestic servant, until deceived into travelling to Europe in 1810 to be exhibited for entertainment purposes. She was displayed half-naked in a cage in circuses to a public fascinated by her different colour and anatomy and studied by naturalists as a specimen of a lesser race. After her death, a plaster cast was made of her body and her brain and genitals were embalmed at the Musée de l’homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris, where they were on public display until 1974. In 2002, her remains were returned to South Africa for burial. Abrahams writes about Baartman’s historiography through her own identity as both a Khoekhoe and a researcher. As a “Brown woman” (Abrahams 2007: 450) she reflects: “It is the hurt I feel when any of my people are objectified which forms the meeting between auntie Sarah Bartmann and myself […] Ultimately, all that is going to matter is that we can be Khoekhoe again” (Abrahams 2007: 450). Also, she considers: “As an academic, my particular part in this process has been to write the history of dehumanised colonial imaginings, but also the history of humanness against all odds. The former
200 African women, specifically in relation to scopic intrusion and visual display. Dhlamini’s age and poor eyesight conferred a slow gait, blinking eyes, and limited movement that seemed to require her to be led around the stage in a manner that appeared to visually suggest a lack of agency that would have been instrumental in prompting such opinions.
Many found the conditions of Dlamini’s near-nudity troubling (rather than her body itself).46 The re-occurring question by reviewers was: “Is Dhlamini a 21st-century
Saartjie Baartman, albeit one who has voluntarily opted to be displayed to a public ravenous for post-show dinner-table conversation?” (Kennedy 2012). Cohen objects to some commentators’ assumption of Dhlamini’s exploitation. Elsewhere in Christina
Kennedy’s review, for instance, her concerns about the representational issues arising from the work are expressed in language that may appear patronising or primitivist, such as: “Somehow this African Eve retains her dignity as she plods around the stage, breasts and buttocks exposed like a primitive Madonna, her genital modesty shielded by a novelty-store wig” (Kennedy 2012). It is the prospect of Dhlamini’s infantalisation that enrages Cohen, who does not necessarily take the opportunity to engage with the issues such questions seek to raise.
matters only because it measures the obstacles which we have overcome” (Abrahams 2007: 450). Rather than claiming – literally or analogously – the experience and suffering of Sarah Baartman and continuing the cycle of representation, suggesting an alternative mytheme becomes a matter of significance to me in this chapter. 46 As Corrigall (2012) emphasizes, stripping down allows for an unconcealed intimacy to be expressed through their bodies by the two performers, but it uncovers other socio-political histories written deeply into these same bodies. How Cohen interprets these other histories as he seeks to express how he and Dhlamini are both a part of and apart from them, is the focus of the ambivalence in reviews such as Buys (2012), Corrigall (2012), Gers (2012), Kennedy (2012), O’Toole (2012), Sizemore-Barber (2013) and Stielau (2012).
201 Because of these prescient concerns about performer input and agency, the conditions under which the work was conceived, developed and performed are relevant in discussing the performance. The costumes, the degree and conditions of nudity and the limited show runs are, according to Cohen, negotiated between Cohen himself and Dhlamini (Blignaut
2011b, Jolly 2012). In an interview with CueTV (2012), Cohen describes himself as “a controlling old Jewish bitch”, saying that consequently “it’s difficult for me to let things happen, and it’s difficult for me to, when things do happen, accept them”. It is not insignificant then that this is how some of the choreographic process developed, as he tells Cue Radio:
It was much more me imposing my desires on Nomsa and Nomsa setting limitations about what she would or wouldn’t do. But there’s a definite input from Nomsa in every respect. She does things I say I didn’t ask her to do and she says well I want to and I will and she does (Cohen in Flynn 2012).
In an interview at La Bâtie Festival in Geneva (Presse Bâtie 2011), Cohen’s French- speaking interviewer apparently unintentionally reflects these concerns about Cohen and
Dhlamini’s respective roles by asking: “She has been working with you, for you, I don’t know how you say it?” In the glaring light of the overt dramatisation of historically compromised positions, the distinctions to be made between ‘with’ and ‘for’ are more than grammatical syntax. Performed under the aegis of Cohen’s reputation as a professional performer and visual artist, with a person who, due to age, physical abilities, gender, race and education would appear to exist, in relation to her co-performer, on the under-side of hegemonic privilege, the collaboration between these two individuals is complex and complicated, as well as unique in the South African arts. As Cohen reflects
202 on CueTV (2012): “I made the work because because it wasn’t there [sic].” This is only true, however, if a critical and emotional awareness about the politics of display is explored and such that normative privilege is questioned, rather than hyperbolically re- enforced.
Sarah Baartman as a contemporary symbol
In the past fifteen years, there have been several black South African female dancers and choreographers who refer to Sarah Baartman. Like Cohen, Nelisiwe Xaba uses elaborate costumes that interact with her body as performers and objects in their own right. In her performance piece They look at me… and that’s all that they think (Fig. 4.3), Xaba begins with her own experiences as a dancer across African and European cultures and translates
Sarah Baartman’s story into a semi-autobiographic performance of a contemporary black
African woman’s body. In this, she is motivated by her disillusionment with touring in
America and of being viewed as an exotic object transported to westernised cultures. As she says: “Before you leave, just like Sarah Baartman, you’re promised that you’ll make money and everything’s going to be fantastic when you arrive” (Xaba in Piccirillo 2011:
71). By “re-dancing” (Annalisa Piccirillo’s phrase) the objectified sexual image of the black female body, Xaba interrogates the scopic obsessions of colonial confrontations with ‘the exotic’. She creates bold social metaphors with a garment of structured wire and fabric, where images of racial stereotyping may be projected onto it as a screen, where the billows and folds of the material accentuate breasts and buttocks. Both Cohen and
Xaba potentially perpetuate, even dictate, stereotypical tropes by invoking them. The
203 main difference arguably between the two performers is that Xaba represents herself, working only with her own body, in a self-consciously theoretically-informed manner.
Cohen’s work is awkward and challenging in that unequal power relations between performers are humanised, and are both reinforced and overcome.
Of Cradle of Humankind, Nelisiwe Xaba says: “It is amazing to see such an old woman’s body on stage, but the representation of her made me uneasy. The important thing is how
Nomsa feels” (Xaba in Blignaut 2011b). To be concerned with how Nomsa Dhlamini
‘feels’ about her involvement in the work is to highlight how much the extent to which the rounds of artists’ interviews, whether in print or subsequently posted on digital social platforms or streaming video or audio sites, dissimulate and extend the visibility of the performer. So Cohen appears to speak for Dhlamini even if he relays her choice not to speak, such as in an interview during the Festival d’Avignon in 2012, where he answered, in response to the same question as posed by Xaba: “I wish Nomsa was here to talk to you but this morning, when I asked her to come, she said talk and talk and talk for nothing” (Cohen in Festival d’Avignon 2012). Nomsa Dhlamini’s apparent impatience with interpretative machinations, and yet her simultaneous vox-pop-friendly one-liners, is consistently evident. For instance, the journalist Charl Blignaut retells this response – at
Cradle’s première at the Pompidou Centre, an eminent critic from Le Monde asks: “Why do you do this?” to which she replies: “Use your brain, lovey. It’s your job” (Dhlamini in
Blignaut 2011b). Of her presence on stage and her relationship with the audiences, in full houses, she tells Blignaut: “They come to see me. They love me, lovey. Me” (in Blignaut
2011b). Although audiences are not necessarily more likely to come to see her than to be
204 drawn to Steven Cohen’s established reputation, Dhlamini’s enjoyment in her performances appears to be real and constant.
Cohen’s self-othering, when extended to others
Cradle of Humankind is identifiably Cohen’s work, choreographed within his characteristic idiom, a self-expression that centres around self-othering. When inviting
Nomsa Dhlamini into that visual language, his relationship with this much-loved woman is seen through his relationship with himself as a self-identified “white, Jewish faggot”
(Cohen in Van der Watt 2004: 6). In his performances, he consistently enacts abuse upon his own body by subjecting himself to physically demanding or socially abjected performances, soliciting or daring the abuse – either social exclusion, bureaucratic entanglements or physical violence – that he fears. In his various personas, Cohen can be said to insist on himself as the abject that is rejected, yet never discarded. He views his work as both a confrontation of issues of homophobia and perceptions of masculinity, whiteness and Jewishness in South Africa (and abroad, since he lives now in Lille and travels internationally), and also as a celebration of his position within these categories.
Cohen’s personas and performances have the provocativeness and hyperbole of Judith
Butler’s characterising of drag, in that “it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discursive conventions that it also reverses” (Butler 1993: 232). His various costumes use and re-use corsets, tutus, stilettos and platform heels (including a pair of custom-made human skull stilettoes), leather fetish wear, gas masks, military belts, animal horns and heads and an anally-inserted dildo, frequently with lit sparkler attached. His performances as various
205 personas are frequently taken out of the protected space of the art gallery and into the public sphere as interventions. In 1998, for instance, in the intervention Ugly Girl at the
Rugby (Fig. 4.5), his persona ‘Ugly Girl’ appeared at the hyper-heteronormative and masculinised Loftus Versfeld stadium dressed in ginger wig, feathers, corset, leopard- skin stockings, black leather gloves and jock strap and red platform heels and was menaced by drunken on-lookers. Of the incident, he recalls on CueTV (2012): “I expected them to kill me, but I heard one of them say: ‘Don’t touch him, he’s full of
AIDS blood’. I was monstrous enough to scare them with my fragile beauty.” Cohen pushes himself and his own imperviousness by performing in personas, in costumes, with actions, and in locations that he knows will likely be hostile to him.
In 2007, in Cleaning Time (Vienna)...a shandeh un a charpeh (a shame and a disgrace)
(Fig. 4.6), Cohen, being in Vienna, sought to confirm his grandparents’ account of
Viennese Jews being forced to clean the streets with toothbrushes after the annexation of
Austria by the Nazis in 1938. In two performances, Cohen danced and cleaned the pavements and streets of the Albertinaplatz and then the Judenplatz and Heldenplatz in
Vienna, each for fifty minutes, with a giant toothbrush, in a costume that included a corset, military belt, gas mask, diamond dildo, animal horn, authentic yellow Jewish star from the Holocaust period and platform heels. For Cohen, the work is “a visual declaration” intended to denounce Nazis’ initiatives that murdered homosexuals while it also ironically “exploits the anti-Semitic myth that would have it that Jews are rich, have horns and hoofs, are monstrous and perverted” (Cohen in Heure Exquise 2009; my translation from French). This hyperbolic self-othering is also a form of self-critique:
206 noting that the Nazis took care to strip Jews of and appropriate their possessions, Cohen feels that he also denounces the excessive accumulation of wealth (Heure Exquise 2009).
In a performance witnessed as “beautiful, gruesome” (La Rocco 2009), Cohen dances race and gender as a Jewish homosexual man. As Van der Watt notes, he re-signifies his status as an ‘invisible’ abjected being by forcing his presence into and onto the mainstream public. His visibility, characterised by defiance and resistance, transgresses the classed heteronormative system, while nonetheless existing in relation to it and his status within it as an abjected being (Van der Watt 2004: 6). His disturbance of it is therefore, arguably, ambivalent. This then is the visual language into which Cohen invites
Dhlamini.
Cohen’s exhibition Magog, at Stevenson Cape Town, from 18 October to 24 November
2012, drew together the works featuring either Nomsa Dhlamini’s image or documentation and video of her as a participant in Cohen’s performance art works.
Cohen has worked with Nomsa Dhlamini’s image since making silkscreen prints in the early 1990s, and she has featured in his performance pieces since 1998. She first performed on stage at the Dance Umbrella festival in Pieces of You, which was the impetus for the work for which Cohen was awarded the 1998 FNB Vita Art Prize (Fig.
4.7). Dhlamini’s relish in performance is palpable in Family (When a mother shouts at her child: 'bastard' you can believe her) (1999; Fig. 4.8). Here the bond implied between
Cohen and Dhlamini, one of a delight in the body, body alteration and performance, appears to exclude Cohen’s biological mother. Dressed as a kind of elegant centaur, posing like a startled faun (or cat – he wears leopard-print stockings and heels), Cohen
207 twists toward Dhlamini, hand on her shoulder, as she gleefully applies powder to his chest. His mother, Ann Cohen, however, lights a firecracker that has been inserted in his anus, her face stiff; both face and action are ambiguously expressive. The title is a reference to Cohen’s complex relationship with both himself and his biological mother, an alcoholic whose perpetual drinking during several years of his childhood meant that her maternal role was, according to him, filled by Dhlamini. Although both mother-muses wear drab shapeless dresses, Dhlamini’s is of a print and colour that to a South African viewer signifies the uniform of a domestic worker (I elaborate on the uniform signifier in greater detail in Chapter 5). This ‘family’ triad where the (historically at least, often white and middle-class) employer’s child has an emotionally significant yet socially complex relationship with a black ‘nanny’ is one that many South Africans may recognise, and one that Cohen explores in costume and performance.
In the twelve-minute video Maid in South Africa (2005), an aged Nomsa Dhlamini enters her place of employment wearing traditional Swazi clothing and gradually strips down to gaudy underwear as she performs the daily duties of her job as a domestic worker in
Cohen’s mother’s house. Her choreographed stripping emerges as a blunt signifier of the subservient, dehumanising labour of “her daily housekeeping ritual” (Cohen in Jolly
2012) and the sexualised, controlling gaze and expectations of the maid-master-madam relationship. Her stripping before the camera overtly, meta-textually implicates the viewer as well. The camera’s seemingly random and swooping eye moving over the body of the ‘maid’ is intended to mimic the way that Cohen, as a young boy, observed that black women were regarded in the homes of his friends, as he recounts to Dance-Tech
208 TV (2011). The title’s pun of maid/made frames how the camera, or the overtly exploitative, hegemonically privileged gaze – what Cohen calls “a hard, sexual, racist, controlling regard” (Cohen in Jolly 2012) – ‘makes’ a ‘maid’ in South Africa. Dhlamini’s deadpan absorption when ironing, sweeping, collecting cigarette butts and cleaning the toilet in Cohen’s comparatively run-down, ‘tired’ childhood home, stresses her self- containment in her role as a domestic worker. Cohen considers this video work the most important of his interpretations with Dhlamini, expanding:
I cringe when I watch it and that's how it should be, not because Nomsa is near naked but because I am flooded with all the wrongs that I have done, and all the cruelties and dehumanisations of society that I have wittingly or unwittingly been a part of […] We are unable to enjoy the luxury of not looking. We look. We see Nomsa's life, without glamour, spending her time cleaning the uncleanable, and her dignity in the face of exploitation (Cohen in Jolly 2012).
Cohen bombastically re-inforces Dhlamini’s exploitation (and the concomitant degree of his own privilege) by consciously employing visual means of fetishising her, in order to draw critical and emotional attention to it. In Maid in South Africa, the intention of costume tropes of sado-masochistic and bondage fetishism and lingering shots of, for instance, isolated body parts and holes in worn-down shoes, visually build a sexualised fetish persona for Dhlamini – fetishes are easily sexualised (Mulvey 1996: 5) – and would appear to make an overt symbolic exchange between labour power and human life and dignity. Although when viewed from within Cohen’s idiom, the work would appear arguably to honour Dhlamini, the video also serves as a vehicle for Cohen’s self-othering.
A refusal to expiate his privilege-guilt is carried by and through the body and performance of another, a loved and respected mother-figure, because it causes a more
209 acute and chronic pain-response from Cohen himself. Likening himself to the belief in the Jewish Gollum, Cohen says: “[F]or me it’s more of a practical monstrosity. I think in every one of us there’s a monster capable of the most obscene acts against God, nature and each other” (Cohen in Presse Bâtie 2011).
Even as she carries the weight of these personal and species’ burdens for Cohen’s performances, in the final frames of the video, Dhlamini lifts her head, turns into the camera and laughs (Fig. 4.9), the camera gazing slightly up at her, her figure suddenly, seamlessly monumental and in those moments, as Stielau (2010) puts it, “her agency as a performer can’t be called into question”. She laughs soundlessly, from behind her teeth, rhythmically pulsing pink neon light flashes, as if fleetingly to reveal her inner self, to the viewer at least. The same amused lip-pinch and limpid eye assessing or engaging that of the camera may be seen in panel one of the triptych of studio photographs that document
Cradle of Humankind (Fig. 4.10). Here Dhlamini, stooped and vibrant, nonchalantly holds an outsized ‘measuring stick’ signifying, in the performance, intrusive ethnographic racial categorising, its jaunty angle and her posture rendering it useless. Dhlamini’s glee, relish and self-awareness in her performances would thus appear to be consistently evident through the years of her and Cohen’s professional relationship. I propose therefore that, rather than Sara Baartman, the figure of Baubo might be a signifier for which interpretation may be reached when an icon of ambivalent agency is sought.
210 Baubo as an alternative symbol to Sarah Baartman
The South African artist Penny Siopis installed her 2004 exhibition, Shame in the house of Freud, in three rooms of the Freud Museum, ideologically and literally re-arranging
Freud’s London home, where he died. The dining room installation formed around the figurine of Baubo that she found in a cabinet of Freud’s study, but that is not listed in his catalogue of collectables. Siopis made a clay replica of the figure (Fig. 4.11), which fits into the palm of a hand, and depicts a squatting female figure who touches, or holds open, the labia of her vulva. Siopis’ interest was piqued by this figurine whose existence Freud
(as the founder of the psychoanalytic method) would appear to be disavowing by not incorporating into his personal archive, and also by the figure’s exposing gesture (Siopis
2004: 241).
Baubo is a seldom-discussed third woman who features in the story of Demeter and
Persephone, from the Homeric ‘Hymn to Demeter’. Homer tells of Persephone’s rape by
Hades and her abduction to the Underworld, Demeter’s grief and search on Earth for her daughter, her subsequent neglect of her role as goddess of the harvest, and her persuasion of Zeus to act as an emissary to Hades to negotiate a partial return of Persephone, thus inaugurating the cyclical death and renewal of life as represented in the seasons. In her grief, Demeter neglects her responsibilities towards the turning of the seasons and, consequently, an apparently eternal winter settles on the earth. This death and fear
211 continues until an old woman (a servant or ‘nurse’)47 named Baubo, in distress at
Demeter’s listless and destructive grief, exposes herself to the goddess, inducing in her laughter and subsequent action. The purpose of this exposing of her vulva (rather than concealing her genitalia as in westernised convention) is not titillation but rather an ambivalent agency, done through unspecifiable emotion (compassion, irritation, or fear) to induce a specific reaction.
Demeter and Persephone as archetypal characters are central figures of the Eleusinian
Mysteries that predate the Olympian pantheon and have received much popular and critical attention. Hirsch, for instance, in her 1989 modernist literary study, singles out the story of Demeter and Persephone as a woman-centred myth which, in contrast to the
Oedipal story, offers an alternative narrative of mother-child relations specifically from the perspectives of mother and daughter (Hirsch 1989: 4). For her, the characters operate within a narrative framework premised upon the intervention of the male authority figure
(the husband/father, here, Hades and, in response, Zeus) to initiate and plot the narrative, which requires the progression of chronological time (Hirsch 1989: 34 – 36). Thus
Hades’ kidnapping of Persephone ruptures the blissful, timeless setting that the ‘hymn’ introduces mother and daughter as inhabiting, thereby intruding lack, desire, grief, violence, and wrongdoing into what is now an archetypal myth. The Demeter-Persephone story becomes, for Hirsch, an opportunity to read narrative conventions of contemporary
47 Baubo is referred to variously as a servant, or a nurse. Nurse as a generic honorific for older woman is possible in translation. Freud, with his source as Salomon Reinach’s Culte, Mythes, et Religions (1912), gives Baubo as the wife of Dysaules with whom Demeter takes lodgings; Baubo is Demeter’s ‘hostess’. Baubo is also described as the local queen of Eleusis, wife of Celeus and mother of Demophoon (Georgeopoulos, Vagenakis & Pierris 2003: 72).
212 literature through psychoanalytic theories of subject-formation in order “to reframe the familial structures basic to traditional narrative, and the narrative structures basic to traditional conceptions of family, from the perspectives of the feminine and, more controversially, the maternal” (Hirsch 1989: 3). She points out how the Homeric ‘hymn’ records the reactions and responses of Demeter (bereavement, anger, desire) as part of its narration, thereby granting her a characterisation not done by the Eleusian mysteries, which instead celebrated this mother-child connection as a union of opposites (light and darkness, life and death, death and rebirth) (Hirsch 1989: 4). So Hirsch examines how the availability of this mother-daughter plot to contemporary and modernist female writers, such as Toni Morrison, results in work that “both inscribes the story of mother and daughter within a patriarchal reality and allows it to mark a feminine difference” (Hirsch
1989: 4 – 5). This ‘feminine difference’, in the Demeter-Persephone story, is signified by the complicated affinitive patterns that express the cyclical resolution, more than murder or reconciliation, of Persephone’s time, in that she spends part of the year with her mother on the earth and part with her husband in the underworld. This difference, Hirsch argues, does not “simply reverse heterosexual plots of disconnection in favour of a model of female connection” (Hirsch 1989: 36). She proposes, however, that revisions, where the stories of mothers and daughters are told, do not reframe the generative triangle (of father, mother, child) as the static basis of the family structure and familial and narrative patterns (Hirsch 1989: 10). Rather, women’s plots continue to adhere to the terms of classical mythology and psychoanalytic theory (Hirsch 1989: 10).
213 Hirsch’s search for a ‘maternal subjectivity’ (Hirsch 1989: 29) leads her to reject the story of Oedipus as the privileged and paradigmatic example of the maturing of a (male) individual within a family – the paradigm of Freudian family romance – because, as she puts it “the Oedipus story is the story of the son’s relation to father and mother, male and female origin” (Hirsch 1989: 28). The generative triad can be opened up by telling the archetypal familial narrative through incorporating the participation of a character outside of the protagonists in the family triangle, in this case, the servant.
Siopis (2008: 240) ponders: “Quite why Demeter found Baubo’s vagina funny is anyone’s guess.” Her conclusion is: “There is however a dangerous power in the exposure of the vagina” (Siopis 2008: 240). Arnobius, a fourth-century Numidian (North
African) Christian apologist relates in his Adversus Nationes that Baubo caressed her pudenda, which had the shape of a “nondum duri atque hystriculi pusionis (a little boy’s, not yet hard and rough with hair)” (Georgopoulos et al 2003: 73). If Baubo possessed an enlarged clitoris – masculinised external genitalia that gave the appearance of a pre- pubescent phallus – hers could be a case of female pseudohermaphrodism (Georgopoulos et al 2003: 73 – 74).48 Baubo’s genitalia may be interpreted symbolically as a
48 Investigating Freud’s references to the character Baubo in his writings, Siopis found a context for his figurine of Baubo, in his notes on a case study ‘A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession’. The visual obsession is described as belonging to a young man who, in Freud’s analysis, struggled with obsessive thoughts and images and against his feelings of “genital eroticism”. At one time, seeing his father enter a room gave rise to a repeated word – “vaterarsch” (‘father-arse’, a jocularising of the German honorific ‘patriarch’) – and image – his father represented as “the naked lower part of a body, provided with arms and legs, but without the head or upper part. The genitals were not indicated, and the facial features were painted on the abdomen” (Freud 1916: 337). Freud recounts that the young man loved, respected and feared his father but considered him debauched and reveling in material pleasures, and considered the image to be an “obvious caricature”, recalling “representations which, with a derogatory end in view, replace a whole person by one of his organs, e.g. his genitals” (Freud 1916: 337). Freud’s
214 reconciliation and unification of conventionally binarised opposites, ultimately, of the life- and death-drives.
Estès, a senior Jungian analyst and storyteller, in her interpretative study of mythologies and stories about women, interprets Demeter’s unconstrained belly laughter to Baubo’s self-exposure as an interaction of sacred sexuality, specifically, an instance of
“obscenity” (from the Old Hebrew for ‘wizard’ or ‘sorceress’) (Estès 1992: 335). She links Baubo’s action to the expression ‘she speaks from between her legs’ (Estès 1992:
336), proposing that “as for ‘speaking from the vulva’, it is, symbolically, speaking from the primae material, the most basic, most honest level of truth” (Estès 1992: 340). Baubo told Demeter a lewd, life-affirming story that has been narrativised – ‘figured’ – as the exposure of her vulva. Estès’ focus is on the engendering and the quality of Demeter’s laughter: “Laughter is a hidden side of women’s sexuality […] that does not have a goal, as does genital arousal […] It is sacred because it is so healing” (Estès 1992: 342 – 43).
Obviously and crucially there is a difference between a mytho-fictional account of a woman choosing to expose her (perhaps, non-binary) genitalia and the real-life historical exploitation of Sara Baartman’s concealed but perceived and purportedly enlarged labia and buttocks (her so-called ‘Hottentot apron’). I evoke Baubo as a signifier of illustration of this image is, as Siopis describes it, “a simple line drawing of a female figure schematised as genitals – a ‘V’ shape on legs, simultaneously invoking a smile and perhaps an ‘absent penis’” (Siopis 2004: 240). The “mythological parallel” Freud draws is to the “Greek legend” of Demeter’s search for her daughter and her encounter with Baubo. He notes that terracotta figurines were excavated at Priene in Asia Minor, showing “the body of a woman without a head or chest and with a face drawn on the abdomen: the lifted dress frames this face like a crown of hair” (Freud 1916: 337). Freud assumes Baubo’s self-exposure is assumed to “explain a magic ceremonial which was no longer understood”. Estès’ interpretation and contextualisation of the Baubo myth provides, I believe, a valid alternative reading.
215 ambivalent, potentially transgressive agency however in order to suggest a discursive alternative to a reductive argument of Dhlamini’s performances as simplistically exploitative. This agency is demonstrably expressed by Dhlamini and Baubo in different ways. Dhlamini does not consider frontal nudity acceptable – as Cohen puts it, “Fanny- flashing is non-negotiable” (Cohen in Jolly 2012) – but, like Baubo, she is complicit, arguably, in using her body and actions, in another person’s story, which becomes, and is, her story too.
Baubo does not expose herself in a feeling of shame or to induce shame, yet retrospective commentary – by Arnobius and others – shames her for her actions. Siopis thematises this self-exposure as a manipulation of social codes and an ambivalent assertion and wielding of the power of shame, and to shame publically. The artist links to it to the actions of a group of black women in Soweto in July 1990, who stripped naked to prevent the destruction of their makeshift homes in an established shack settlement near the black middle-class suburb Dobsonville by armed police and defence forces, following their disobedience to an eviction order.49 Shame is momentarily transferred from, and shared between, their bodies and the bodies of the policemen.
In Siopis’ interventionist exhibition in Freud’s London house (the Freud Museum), newspaper accounts of these women’s actions were included among the objects and artefacts documenting South African histories with which Siopis filled the cupboards of
49 For more information on this action, see the documentary To Walk Naked/ Uku Hamba ‘Ze. 1995. [Documentary film]. Directed by J. Maingard, S. Meintjies & H. Thompson. New York, USA: Third World Newsreel. The documentary includes historical footage and interviews with the women who stripped in protest, recounting their ambivalent feelings and memories of both power and pain about their self-exposure.
216 Freud’s dining room, whose door she had flung open. Siopis responds to Freud’s provocative assertion that “shame is a feminine characteristic par excellence” (Siopis
2004: 242). For Siopis, the symbolism of shame is explored as situated within South
Africa’s history. The Baubo figurine “facilitated these floating associations” (Siopis
2004: 244). As she explains:
All this material spoke to the boundary between reality and fantasy, and involved phantasmagoric projections connecting with the psycho-social state of shame. Neither labeled nor categorised, these objects ‘floated’ and associated freely like so many of the more arcane objects in Freud’s collection (Siopis 2004: 244).
In imagined dialogue with Freud, she stages, in three parts, traumatic histories through expressions of South African shame, as she invites the visitor to consider whether there is anything alchemic and transformative in experiences of shame, involving, as it does,
“extreme humiliation, psychological nakedness, [and] traumatic loss of face, of voice”
(Siopis 2004: 240). She explores ways in which South African collective experience inhabits and embodies its trauma.50
50 In her exhibition, Shame in the house of Freud, Siopis creates artistic interventions in the study, the dining room, and the attic. She traces a situated evolution of South African shame, following the process initiated by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (T.R.C.), in which the hurt and complicity of the recent South African past was staged “in public shows of shame, expressed in the languages of human suffering, apologetics, confession, protestations of good faith, and exposures of bad faith” (Siopis 2004: 242). In the exhibition’s first part in Freud’s study, Siopis installed a soundscape of voices of South Africans exposing themselves publically by narrating stories of personal shame. The disembodied oral testimonies layer over the visual counterpart of Freud’s personal and professional possessions, all recalling the categorisation that his method employed for interpreting the human unconscious.
In the exhibition’s second part, in the dining room, Baubo was brought out into a prominent position to draw together associations between various colonial and apartheid South African documents.
217
Baubo, as an unsentimental metaphor for the conditions and agency in nudity and its actions, could be discussed in relation to Dhlamini’s performances. I find it richly and yet authentically ambivalent because, as Siopis interprets it, “Baubo’s self-exposure rests on a knife-edge between self-affirmation and negation, lying somewhere between agency and victimhood” (Siopis 2008: 240). Dhlamini claims her own partial nudity; Cohen enjoys recounting a confrontation at the Reichstag in 1998 with the German police,
The final part was a display, in the house’s attic, of small paintings on board, Siopis’ Shame series. These works figure the child, specifically the child violated by implicit and sexualised abuse, as a means to figure shame more broadly, as “a deep psychological condition manifest in the early development of ‘the self’, and to which we, as adults, seem destined to return in our quest for identity” (Siopis 2004: 245). In this, the child represented in Tula Tula, Siopis’ work discussed in Chapter 1, is also a figure to explore the early development of the ego-identity, this time, in specific relation to the woman who is his ‘nanny’. Interested in exploring the urban legends that, after the historical moment of the T.R.C. hearings, have emerged which “bespeak the state of shame, legends connecting the most public of political events to the most private and intimate of individual experiences” (Siopis 2004: 245), Siopis brings her attention to the resurfacing of the mytheme of Pinky Pink, an ambivalent creature said to assault girls in public toilets, spaces socialised as intensely private for abjected elimination, poised uneasily in public, communal spaces. Siopis explores how the symbolism of Pinky Pink speaks to themes of childhood, secrecy and sexualised shame, and to a processing by pre-pubescent children of deeper issues of societal uncertainty and change.
In Thank you for sharing this special day with us’ from the Shame series, the formless, deformed face of Pinky Pink peers out of a girl’s vagina. Like early depictions of Baubo that locate her face in her lower abdomen, this face appears to be emerging from, or resident within, the female’s womb. But rather than repositioning the womb as a place generative of laughter rather than hysteria, as in interpretations of the Baubo representations, here in this context, violation and shame are arguably unambiguous, in whatever protean expression it may take, such as the cultural shame around the commencement of menses, sexual expression or sexualised violation. With the conventionally bland, sentimental and empty repetition of ‘Thank you for sharing this special day with us’ suggests, like the setting of the public toilet, whatever has happened has been at an unacceptable interface of public and private, witnessed by what is challenged as participators. The stamping, a stereotypically suburban female crafting expression of creativity, suggests social rituals that do not have the wording to narrativise the girl’s experience. Pinky Pink says ‘Thank you for sharing this special day with us’. From inside the female body, this squatting, vaginal tapeworm and the experience he has been attracted by or has precipitated, now eats her from the inside.
218 during an impromptu performance, where Dhlamini shouted at them: “Bums is nothing.
My mother walked like this” (Dhlamini in Stielau 2012). It is the meanings that attach to the vulnerability of South African nudity – Dhlamini’s and Cohen’s – during the performance that are significant. As Buys points out, about Dhlamini:
A simplistic, but likely, criticism of Dhlamini’s performance is that she is reduced to a stereotypical “mammy” figure, a slave-mother who exists to nourish, validate and ultimately be spurned by the object of her care […] The exposure of Dhlamini’s breasts makes her age, her years of mothering and her co-option into a ‘pornography’ of identities in post-apartheid South Africa unavoidably plain (Buys 2012).
The slow time of mourning and presence
Cradle of Humankind is choreographed to accommodate and emphasise age and physical frailty: the movements are slow, circumscribed and limited. Cohen claims: “It’s about
Nomsa, it’s about me keeping up with Nomsa, it’s about me taking the pace from
Nomsa” (Cohen in CueTV 2012). This is a development of the slowly gestural choreography that Cohen has employed in past performances, as Corrigall points out
(2012). Cohen has usually worn precipitous shoes that limited and made precarious his movements, creating a performance style that Dhlamini, whose “ageing body simply isn’t capable of any fast, or grand, gestures” is able, arguably, to interpret, even as Cohen takes his physical cues from her movement (Corrigall 2012). Cohen views the resulting performance as “unshocking, minimal, and quite placid and banal” (Cohen in Flynn
2012). The work has tended to disappoint those cultural commentators who were seeking
219 a work and idiom more in character with Cohen’s previous performances. Sean O’Toole recounts in a RMR radio interview:
You’ve got that sense of occasion. All the contemporary art elite was there and very proud to come out to see this provocative art performance […] I left with a sense of boredom and more than a few people I spoke to said the same thing (O’Toole in Flynn 2012).
In a later review for the Mail and Guardian, O’Toole (2012) expands upon his contention that the video work Cradle of Humankind is more affective when seen separately from the tableaux and dance scenes featuring the live performers. But this would destroy the opportunity for the pendulous rhythms that the choreography follows, which are, I contend, crucial to how interpretative time is used as a tool in this work of performance art.
The slowing and stilling process that is possible for film with the assistance of new media allows the individual viewer to draw out new significances, even to create new scenic loops that function outside of the film’s dominant narrative (Mulvey 2003: 139). This spectator, Mulvey (2003: 139) warns, is also fetishistic in that s/he experiences pleasure in fragments and privileged moments that may be obsessively repeated. Yet this still image would appear to be the way in which the illusion of life and narrative thrust that adheres to a celluloid film may be suspended so that the viewer may “reflect and experience the kind of reverie that Barthes had associated only with the photograph”
(Mulvey 2003: 138). In the absence of this cinematic punctum, when a video is extended into a live performance, as in the performed scenes in Cradle, it is the slow pace that may
220 grip the viewer, and that pierces the viewer with the knowledge of forthcoming death. It pierces, but arguably it does not paralyse. If it does not paralyse, fixing into vision a bestowed and dominating identity, it does not fetishise (at least, not in a conventionally established symbolic system). There is always interpretative movement.
The staged performance scenes of Cradle of Humankind extend Cohen’s elaboration of an originary relationship between himself and Dhlamini by creating a corporeal base for their bond. In telling his narrative of ‘evolution’ on stage, Cohen incorporates sequences of filmed footage into the performance. In his exhibition Magog, these sequences are shown as a twelve-minute film. In them, costumed as subterranean lunar beings, the two meander around the Sterkfontein caves (where the first hominid Australopithecus remains have been found, giving evidence for a common African ancestry) and the Swartkrans site (where burnt bones, considered to be evidence of the first human use of controlled fire, which Cohen interprets as the first performative actions, have been documented).
Cohen creates a story of origin and transcendence of collective history, not only for humanity, but for his relationship with Dhlamini, which, with its complex context of the black South African ‘nanny’ and the white child, is not a biological maternal-filial bond.
Their origin story is written in a kind of enacted anthropology. Through Cohen’s creating and celebrating of this story for Nomsa Dhlamini and himself, Cradle may be understood in terms of a trauma narrative: that of structural as well as historical trauma.
Recounting the trauma story’s purpose is integration, not exorcism; a narrative that does not include the traumatic imagery is considered barren and incomplete (Herman 1997: 3).
221 Integration “is not the same as re-enactment because the task of facing danger is taken consciously, in a planned, methodical manner” (Herman 1997: 3). In this trauma story,
Cohen uses the strength of their affectionate bonds to use their relationship as the safe space from which to act out, see, and potentially release the more degrading practices of the colonial and apartheid projects. This may appear to be at odds with his emotional and personal connection to the work, even disrespectful toward or limiting of his relationship with Dhlamini. One may ask why the framing of racialised, gendered exploitation was not told more particularly, with the assistance of supporting media, through the life stories of Dhlamini and Cohen: would Cohen, from his perspective, have considered those kinds of personal revelations as a vulnerability too intrusive? As it is, the work unfolded with the emphasis on Dhlamini’s presence (and her body) in the present, holding the space for a series of metaphoric encounters to unfold. Cohen comments of the work to RMR radio that:
It’s about apartheid, it’s about evolution, it’s about repeated colonial plunder and rape but me and Nomsa are not experts on that. Our story is the story of our relationship and I hope that’s what people get, without it being didactic or sentimental or explicit. I don’t know; I’ve often read in reviews of the work that’s a little bit obscure, but I like things to be semi-obscure and totally explicit (Cohen in Flynn 2012).
He may be seen as acknowledging this (arguable) remission in personalising Cradle’s narrative and instead relying on what seems to be presented as the innocence and authenticity of the love between Dhlamini and himself as the balm with which their traumas may be soothed.
222 Cohen tells CueTV: “It started with an immense desire to let Nomsa express herself.
Because I’m afraid Nomsa will die even though she will probably outlive me” (Cohen in
CueTV 2012) and “I think we’re near the end of what we can do, together, she’s 92 and
I’m fifty. It’s, it’s delicate and it’s unsustainable and I think that has value” (Cohen in
CueTV 2012). It is in this celebration that he finds the opportunity for the expression of fear and pre-empted mourning. As Dhlamini is in only two of Cradle’s four staged parts,
Cohen holds this rhythm of slow, minimal and limited movements even in her absence. It is not arguably a misinterpretation to suggest that Cohen pre-emptively mourns her death.
The aim of the trauma narrative, that of reconciliation with oneself, would seem to echo what Cohen understands his feelings about this work to be: that in it, he takes the risk of being himself and that it’s the only time he has ever really been happy on stage (CueTV
2012). This would seem to be in accord with his response to a question about his performance persona, that “I’m not the kind of person who behaves like I do” (Cohen in
Jolly 2012).
The apparent unfamiliarity of this approach for Cohen, perhaps, accounts for, what I consider to be, the two conflicting languages on stage and in the work’s subsequent under-developed potential. Rather than writing the colonial and apartheid projects’ brutalities over and with their bodies, the narrative could have been more personally and intimately documented from both participants, opening another direction in which the narrative might have been written, deepening the representation of the vulnerability and subjective presence that the performers bring from their lives into their on-stage relationship to each other. This might have made for a greater sense of the integration,
223 rather than the re-enactment, of traumatic material. As the work unfolded, however, many viewers felt, like Sizemore-Barber (2013: 263), that “it was Dhlamini’s body that became the stage onto which audience members were invited to project their pre-existing notions about the black, female, elderly, primitive South African body”. As Siopis says of her own series that deal with shame: “Perhaps few would see anything positive in shame, as it involves extreme humiliation, psychological nakedness, traumatic loss of face, of voice” (Siopis 2008: 240). The discursive projections possible may account for the reasons why viewers and reviewers floated between responding with discomfort with the display practices and representations in the narrative, and with emotion and respect for the tender, somatic, relational dance that the two performers shared as they ambled around the stage, murmuring inaudibly, seemingly emotionally detached from both the audience and the narrative’s tableaux, absorbed in each other.
In Cradle, Cohen constructs the work around (some would say, over) Dhlamini, such that her image becomes its “ultimate spectacle”, in ways analogous to how Mulvey (2006: 7) identified the Hollywood female star to be constructed as “the emblem and guarantee of its fascination and power”. Like Mulvey’s film star, Dhlamini cannot step completely into a role on stage because her ‘real’ identity and her relationship with Cohen are an intrinsic component to the work. Cohen’s demonstrable devotion to Dhlamini leads him both to ‘worship’ and to ‘degrade’ her in the work’s narrative. She is venerated as an
‘original mother’ but her ‘son’ ritualistically humiliates her as well. It is arguably thus the minimal choreography that provides the opportunity for the audience’s gaze to soften from the appraising voyeurism of the darkened theatre/film house auditorium, which
224 Mulvey identified in her seminal 1970s essay, and that Cohen bombastically challenges the viewer to adopt, in addition to paying for the opportunity to see Dhlamini ‘exhibited’.
Feeling into these relational moments, one may potentially allow the fetishised
“spectacle” to dissolve momentarily – not into narrative halt, which Mulvey (2006: 7) seeks in celluloid film, since a performer is always, even slightly, moving and breathing in his/her body – but into what may be called a present awareness. This awareness, developed conceivably through Cohen and Dhlamini’s long and rich relationship, unself- consciously enacts the affecting tenderness in their relationship that initiated and sustains this work and its critically challenging elements.
Conclusion
This work could potentially have been an opportunity for a woman to express her individual body – aged, black, female – in ways that did not perpetuate imposed histories, and to do so in collaboration with the white man who considers her his surrogate mother.
Cohen’s story of ‘evolution’ may not have now ‘evolved’ a visual, performance or dance language with which to enter and recount more personal experience. The most significant contributing factor to this critical discomfort has been the distinction, as Gers (2012: 51) makes, between Cohen’s “dramatizing” and “acknowledging” ethical dilemmas and his
“redressing” them (although she queries what forms ‘redress’ may take). I have drawn parallels here with Herman’s distinction between the integration and re-enactment of trauma narratives. In his characteristic idiom, Cohen seeks to make visible dilemmas that he feels are hidden or unacknowledged by privileged and normative society and
225 discourse, by marking himself, or his personas, as the abjected element in his performances where his ‘self’ is a confirmation and celebration of many prejudices about homosexual, white, Jewish men. In works such as Cradle of Humankind, in Family and
Maid in South Africa, Cohen extends his self-othered representational strategies to accentuating the fetishism of the figure of a black domestic worker and ‘nanny’. He acts out the traumatic history of this fetish through Dhlamini’s performances, believing that, as Mulvey (2006: 12) describes, a fetish is
a massive screen on which collective fantasy, anxiety, fear and their effects can be projected[,] speaks the blind-spots of a culture and finds forms that make manifest socially traumatic material, through distortion, defence and disguise (Mulvey 2006: 12).
Cradle of Humankind is complex in this regard because it is through the enactment of
Cohen’s relationship with Nomsa Dhlamini and through her performances that the ambivalence, and the ambivalent agency, in this traumatic fetishism emerges. It is for this reason that I introduced the metaphorical figure of Baubo, as a suggestion of how race, gender and experience may be specularised whilst also acknowledging the subtlety of the communication between the performers. While I contend that the performers’ vulnerable, nearly nude, human bodies communicate a depth of trust and tenderness in relationship that is perhaps uniquely expressed, I propose that because this somatic communication is not successfully visualised into a work of performance or discourse, is indeed at times overwhelmed by Cohen’s narrative arc and accompanying symbolic language, that the viewer might be served by drawing his/her attention to the consciously slow rhythms of
226 the piece. From that conceptual place, the viewer may try, while not ignoring the work’s problematics, to feel out expression for Cohen’s claim on RMR radio (2012) that “it’s about Nomsa giving something to me, to the audience, and to life”. Stielau considers that the work is disarming in its “representation of the profound mutual affection between
Cohen and Dhlamini that transcends generational, cultural and racial difference” (Stielau
2012).
The disarming candour of their mutual affection is the initiating factor for this second,
‘somatic’ language that I have identified, which holds, lulls or ‘cradles’ the ‘performers’ in their minimal performance. At the same time, the specific nuances of their communication are largely lost on the audience before them. This solicitation and rejection of the viewing audience, which is nonetheless crucial in holding the space for the work, could be said to extend beyond the frame of the stage or the celluloid and photographic still, and, in so doing, seems to seek to universalise a species’ originary story of love and rejection. I argue that this relationship with the audience holds the potential, at least, “to dissolve voyeurism and reconfigure the power relation between spectator, camera and screen, as well as male and female” (Mulvey 2008: 167). This dissolution and reconfiguration is how Mulvey (2008: 167) identifies the way in which the “fetishistic spectator” controls the image. By deploying these fetishised symbols, something that clearly shapes the performance is Cohen’s fetishising symbolism. This symbolism, I contend, is a symptom of psychic pain that follows in the wake of social trauma. Abrahams reflects: “To write the history of pain, hatred and anger, without replicating and passing on the heavy burden of those unresolved emotions, would be a
227 truly humane history of Africa” (Abrahams 2007: 450). While I would not propose that
Cradle of Humankind unambiguously achieves this, I consider that the discussion arising from Cohen’s Cradle of Humankind gives the work significance in South Africa today.
Like Cohen, Mary Sibande transgresses but arguably does not disturb existing heteronormative as well as consumerist ideals. She however has a different approach to exploring her personal relationships with domestic workers, one that centres on iterations of her ‘double’, ‘Sophie’, a fantasising domestic worker. I explore these in the final chapter.
228 CHAPTER FIVE
UNCANNY DOUBLES
IN ITERATIONS OF MARY SIBANDE’S ‘SOPHIE’ (2007 – 2013)
Introduction
When Mary Sibande says, “Sophie is me. She is my alter ego” and “I wanted to put myself among these women, these maids. I am making a work out of their work”
(Sibande in Corrigall 2010b), she speaks from a generation of South African art practitioners who came of age after the end of apartheid. Overviewing the first generation of post-apartheid art-makers, Farber (2010: 314) notes how they deploy masquerade, mimicry and performance in order to soften, collapse and play lightly yet critically with the stereotypes and binaries of self and other. ‘Sophie’ (Fig. 5.1) is the better known and one of only two artistic creations by Sibande. Her figure is cast in fiberglass from
Sibande’s body, and she is deployed in about two dozen iterations and variations. She is dressed in an elaborately staged, ersatz-Victorian costume that uses the distinctive fabric of a South African domestic worker’s overall or uniform. Sophie’s costumes are the external manifestations of her internal fantasies that see her everyday existence as a domestic worker transformed into aspirational icons of cultural privilege, such as a queen, a stallion-riding warrior lady, or a hairdresser. As Sibande says: “She wants to
229 flaunt what she has, but the problem is that she doesn’t have anything. This is just a dream. It’s me dressing up as Sophie and then dressing down” (Sibande in Corrigall
2010b). These fantasies are variously staged through installations and digital prints.
I examine eight iterations of the ‘Sophie’ figure, including the four sculptures Sibande produced in 2009 in her first exhibition Long Live the Dead Queen that represent four generations of women in her family, the fourth being herself, Ntombikayise. I also engage with four figures from Sibande’s 2013 exhibition The Purple Shall Govern, which marks a departure from the recognisable ‘Sophie’ figure by introducing a new character, dubbed the ‘Purple Figure’.
Sibande has received to date substantially more popular than critical attention. Details of acquisitions such as Carol Brown (2011) for African Arts have been published, and exhibition reviews and interviews, most substantially by Artthrob editors (2013), Lisa
Meekison (2014) for the on-line magazine Scope51 and Chris Thurman (2014) for
Business Day Live. Corrigall has conducted several interviews with Sibande, which she has drawn on to publish several in-depth blog posts and newspaper articles (such as
Corrigall 2009, 2010a, 2010b). Sibande herself has published an artist’s vision statement in 2013 entitled ‘Africa and its diaspora’ in n.paradoxa. The three journal articles that to date contribute to a critical framework with which to interpret Sibande’s work are
Alexandra Dodd (2010), Sarah Nuttall (2013) and Corrigall (2015). Dodd (2010) in
Critical Arts suggests that the overly theatrical and hybridised qualities of “the Victorian
51 http://www.scope-mag.com is an online magazine begun in 2011 that publishes journalistic articles on contemporary thought, art, design and music.
230 postmodern” function as “counter-archival imaginings” that confront stereotypical images of black African women. Corrigall’s excellent article in Critical Arts (2015) examines the sartorial challenges and critical limitations posed by Sibande’s deployment of excess in Sophie’s costumes. Corrigall positions her definition of ‘excess’ as a symptom of Bhabha’s concept of mimicry and difference which is the same but not quite and discusses Sibande’s work as an inheritor of dandyism in the history of sartorial fashion. Nuttall (2013) makes an important contribution to discourse on Sibande’s production in her article in Cultural Studies where she focuses on Sibande’s fiberglass figures as exploring a new language for destabilising the racialisation of skin, one that sees skin as protective cladding, not as the site of wounding.
In this chapter, I outline the development of Sibande’s ‘Sophie’ character and the popular and critical response to her in order to locate the character’s motivation for identity metamorphosis as symptomatic of the role that fashion and commodity culture play in
South Africa’s burgeoning, aspirationally materialist society. The significance attached to clothing in Sibande’s work is rooted in her appropriation and transformation of the three- piece ‘domestic worker’s overall’ and I take the opportunity here to expand in greater detail than previous authors have been able on how artists have approached this burdened tradition, complicated by the politics of race and representation, by focusing on the possibilities that uniforms afford in subverting, rather than affirming, the regulation of the body evident in conventional portraits of women employed in domestic work. I also give space to how domestic workers themselves have transformed a uniform into a symbol of female empowerment and community through the Women’s Manyano movement.
231
Because much historical and contemporary ideological work has gone and goes into naturalising the role of the ‘servant’, ‘maid’ or domestic worker, the implicit acknowledgement is always that a person cannot be ‘contained’ within a uniform, or a role. This tension is played out in the symbolism of the uniform, but to examine other ways in which Sibande’s figures query their own representation, I focus on her 2014 sculpture, Introspection, which has not yet received critical attention. This sculpture allows my reading that, while indebted to Nuttall’s theorising of skin surfaces, concentrates more on how struggles with a doubling of identities, begun in the ‘Sophie’ sculptures but there expressed primarily through her costumes, is here directed into an assessment of how body casts, particularly face casts, are imprints of life and individuality and must therefore shadow death, and the questioning of selfhood and identity.
Development of ‘Sophie’
‘Sophie’ is a figure in multiple iterations with which to reclaim and retell narratives belonging to generations of black women disempowered by history, specifically domestic workers, in a way that is not a documentary approach (Brown 2011: 77 – 78). As Sibande poignantly and simply says: “I wanted to celebrate them [domestic workers]. I think that they are heroes. It was so hard to put food on the table” (Sibande in Corrigall 2010b). In her own self-fashioning, ‘Sophie’ manipulates aspirational ideals that are themselves drawn from hierarchical and essentialised social, racial and gendered codes. Her
232 pastiching of cultural heroes expresses this complex relationship. Like the other art makers I have discussed, Sibande deals in the after-life of experience in which she herself is implicated. The four ‘Sophie’ sculptures represent three generations of women in her family who had been domestic workers: Elsie (Fig. 5.1), Merica (Fig. 5.2), Velucia (Fig.
5.3) and then the artist herself, Ntombikayise (Fig. 5.4). Sibande’s maternal great- grandmother was called ‘Elsie’ by her white employers because they couldn’t pronounce her African name, a perpetuation such that, as Sibande recalls, “the name even appeared on her gravestone” (in Corrigall 2015: 155). ‘Sophie’ as a generic and Anglicised
‘servant’ name is therefore chosen by Sibande because it “is such a common name with maids”. Elsie is dressed as ‘The Dead Queen’ (after which Sibande’s first solo exhibition in 2009 was named, Long Live the Dead Queen). While she is a ‘queen’ in that her costume hybridises a domestic worker’s three-piece overall with the embellishments of aristocratic, royal and/or Victorian dress, Elsie is also a ‘queen’ in Sibande’s acknowledging of her position as respected maternal progenitor of her family.
Merica was Sibande’s maternal grandmother. Velucia, Sibande’s mother and Merica’s daughter, did domestic work in the afternoons after school as a teenager until she began working as a hair stylist. Sophie-Velucia’s aspirational daydreams therefore reference her mother’s experience in the salon by centring on self-styled Madam C. J. Walker (Fig.
5.5), who became the first self-made African American female millionaire by developing and selling hair and beauty products for African American women. Born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana in 1867, as the first child in her family to be born after the Emancipation
Proclamation (her parents and elder siblings were enslaved on a plantation), she was a
233 formidable personality, activist and philanthropist. Her ambivalent legacy was the invention of the hair straightener and the founder of today’s commercial empire that tends to ideals of beauty for black women.
As Ntombikayise, the artist positions herself in relation to her female ancestors. Herself as
Sophie is an uncanny double: a conflated eruption of the real and the imagined. Yet at the same time, she gives herself her Swazi name because “Sophie is more self-aware now.
Sophie can be herself now [and not a maid because] I’ve got my education and I’ve achieved my family dream” (in Mabandu 2009). There is ironic therefore Sibande is known as Mary not as Ntombikayise. From 2002 to 2007, Sibande studied for a Fine Arts
B-Tech degree at the University of Johannesburg. Her initial intention to study a diploma course in fashion design was thwarted when she arrived in Johannesburg too late to submit her application (Stileau 2014). Her first artworks showed at the Gordart Gallery in
Melville in 2007: these were shoes made from luxury fabrics that were decorated and distorted beyond any functional use, seemingly speaking to the imprisonment of aspirational fashions and therefore, as Corrigall (2010b) points out, they “indirectly marked the birth of Sibande’s alter ego”. As Sibande remembers: “I first made the objects that Sophie aspired to owning: beautiful shoes […] They couldn’t be worn, they were completely impractical” (Sibande in Corrigall 2010b). Corrigall (2010b) points out that, when it came to developing a character who desired (like the artist herself) markers of privilege and luxury, and given her interest in fashion, Sibande would find it fitting that she would model the character on herself, and off her own body, using fiberglass casts of
234 herself to shape a mannequin figure on which to create her costumes. As Sibande recalls:
I had to make Sophie real. I wanted to feel her presence. The best person to use as a subject was me. I realised that Sophie was me. I aspire to having all these beautiful things. When I was growing up I didn’t have lots of beautiful things that other kids had. It’s not that I grew up poor but other kids always seemed to be 10 steps ahead of me (Sibande in Corrigall 2010b).
As Nuttall emphasises:
[Sibande’s] referencing of consumer culture is not particularly ironic, or not in the mode of critique cultural theorists might tend to look for, but closer to a certain unfixing and reconstructing of self through the capacities of things (Nuttall 2013: 427).
As Sibande explored ‘Sophie’ in different situations and settings, in exhibits and photographic prints, the costumes and storylines became increasingly elaborate and confident. Thurman describes Sophie’s development:
Even though she ostensibly lacks freedom, she has been presented to us over the years as a shape-shifting adventurer. She could be a queen, an orchestra conductor, a horse-rider, a superwoman. Perhaps these are simply guises in which Sophie imagines herself (Thurman 2014).
For Sibande, the multiplicity of Sophie’s guises has been in part a demonstration of her own creative and professional freedom and agency: “I have the choice to play around with the figure of Sophie” (Sibande in Corrigall 2010b). And yet, as in Caught in a rapture (2009; Fig. 5.6), a consequence of Sophie’s “mov[ing] further into her
235 dreamscape”, as Meekison (2014) puts it, is to become ensnared in a web of her own dream-making. Reprising the use of synthetic hair, as in Sophie-Velucia, Sibande this time weaves a spider web-like structure in which Sophie is trapped – or cradled – by her aspirational fantasies. These fantasies may be seen to play out in the explosive development of Sibande’s own career, centred on her alter-ego; as Karen Brusch, a gallerist at Gallery MOMO that represents Sibande, comments: “Sibande’s career has been driven more by galleries and the media’s hunger for her work, alongside her intense work ethic, than it has been by any specific ambition on Sibande’s part” (Brusch in
Meekison 2014).
In her fantasising, ‘Sophie’ acts out iconic images from art and history, inserting a black female protagonist into these narratives, thereby contesting the gendered, racial and social roles usually assigned within them. In The Reign (Fig. 5.7), Sibande presents ‘Sophie’ as a virile female equestrian. The horse was made by a foundry in White River in
Mpumalanga. Sibande asserts that, for Sophie, “this stallion is a symbol of power and strength” and that “Sophie has a relationship with the horse” (Sibande in Zvomuya 2010).
This “relationship” is an enactment of, as Dodd says, “the fantasy of a fully self-directed, autonomous individual” (Dodd 2010: 473). She is someone who is holding the ‘reins’ of her life. It references assertions of power and normative masculinity, such as Jacques
Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800; Fig. 5.8), which itself draws on the celebrated and mythologised account of Hannibal, who, in 218 B.C., led his Carthaginian army from Gaul over the Alps directly into the Roman Republic. This reference then may be seen as implying ‘Sophie’ herself leading an assault on the bastions of history and art
236 history. Like Napoleon, Sophie’s reins are so loosely held as to make her control over the horse purely nominal – and thus ideological. Sibande’s reference was a similar portrayal of masculine and colonial power: the equestrian statue of Louis Botha, unveiled in 1946, occupied a central position outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria (Fig. 5.9). Coert
Steynberg’s sculpture of the Boer war commander and then first Prime Minister of the
Union of South Africa heralded a concretising of white rule, and black subjugation, in
South African history.
Having established ‘Sophie’ as a subject, Sibande then sends her out into different environments, to expose discrepancies in other narratives. Pasted around central
Johannesburg as part of the Johannesburg Art City Project during South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 F.I.F.A. World Cup, a series of nineteen monumental prints and building wraps reads both pride and ambivalence into the urban environment. In the placement of
Wish you were here (Fig. 5.10), for instance, Sophie’s print is accidentally juxtaposed with a First National Bank advertistment, which has the words ‘Today this is the greatest country in the world” emblazoned across a monumental South African flag. Sophie’s spinning of a superhero – her dreaming, tale-telling and overt manufacture of a saviour – renders more ambivalent the advertisement’s assertion of patriotism. The urban project was reiterated in 2013, when seven large-scale prints were installed across the French suburban cities of Ivry-sur-Seine, Vitry-sur-Seine and Choisy-le-Roi (Fig. 5.11). These outlying Parisian suburbs (banlieux) are known for, amongst other things, social unrest, revolutionary political support and diverse cultural and immigrant populations marginalised by mainstream and privileged Parisian society. They are therefore
237 communities that, in some ways like inner-city Johannesburg, demonstrate the lived realities of social divisions and inequalities and to inhabitants for whom ‘Sophie’ potentially might have some resonance. Sophie’s appearance around Johannesburg and the fact that, as Corrigall (2013) remarks, “[s]ince her first solo exhibition, Long Live the
Dead Queen, at Momo Gallery [sic] in Joburg [in 2009], no large-scale exhibition has been complete without a sculpture of Sophie” has brought significant attention from the mainstream public and arts media. Sibande credits this attention with recognition for the domestic worker leitmotif: “If people are not raised by a domestic worker then their mother or auntie has worked as one. This is why Sophie always hits home, she always evokes the familiar” (Sibande in Meekison 2014). This limited reading is equally dissatisfying to the artist however: “A lot of people think they understand what Sophie is about because she is a maid and then they stop […] I wanted to create another dialogue around Sophie” (Sibande in Mabandu 2013).
Such an attempt would be Lovers in Tango (2011; Fig. 5.12) which, while featuring
‘Sophie’, expands the familial focus to create a tableau to explore her mother’s relationship with her estranged father. ‘Sophie’ (in her characteristic blue gown, white apron and headscarf) and a soldier figure (dressed in a soldier uniform’s pith helmet, tunic and trousers) face each other and extend their arms in gestures that promise to begin yet always preclude an embrace. The soldier’s green tunic suggests that of the Zionist
Church, whose adherents follow a hybridised form of Christianity and ancestor-worship and who call themselves the ‘soldiers of God’. This ‘tango’ is always arrested, not only in the static immobility of the mannequin figures, but in the implied tensions between
238 mother and father. Behind the father-officer, 26 figures are regimented with their arms locked around invisible rifles, aimed above the heads of the never-embracing couple.
They could represent literal people, living, dead or ancestral, or personified influences cohering around these lovers. As all figures are modelled on Sibande’s figure, they materialise Sibande’s stepping into these roles and exploring her perceptions and memories of the non-normative family.
‘Sophie’ disappears, in that her distinctive costumes are relinquished, in Sibande’s 2013 exhibition The Purple shall Govern. The title refers to the ‘Purple Rain’ protest in Cape
Town on 12 September 1989, when anti-apartheid Mass Democratic movement supporters, intending to march to the Parliament buildings in protest of the apartheid elections to be held on 16 September, gathered in Greenmarket Square (the place where
Muholi photographed Kekeletso Khena, discussed in Chapter 3). Police used a water cannon to spray protesters with purple dye, for later identification and arrest, as the parade moved down the streets towards Parliament (Fig. 5.13). In the square, protesters wrested control of the cannon from police and turned it away from protesters, subsequently spraying surrounding buildings, such as the Old Town House, as high as four stories up with the dye. These events and the banner that protesters marched under proclaiming ‘The People Shall Govern’ inspired anti-apartheid graffiti such as “Forward to Purple People's Power” and ‘The Purple Shall Govern”; the latter was scrawled over
Cape Town’s first colonial public and civic building from 1755, the Old Town House.52
Sibande explores colour as a determiner of South African social relations as well as
52 Information sourced from Wikipedia, which was sourced from the Weekend Argus (2 September 1989) and the Cape Argus and the Cape Times (both from 5 September 1989).
239 returning to her first and only incarnation of ‘Sophie’ that specifically depicted herself –
Ntombikayise – who wore a purple costume (‘Purple Shall Govern Mary Sibande at
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Museum’, 2013). The colour purple therefore has led the art-maker into exploring a figure who, while still cast in fiberglass from the her body, has no name nor recognisable domestic-worker signifiers. These installations and digitally manipulated photographs present what Sibande describes as “the next generation” or “the next chapter, in which I speak of my own aspirations, desires, fears, and anxieties of being a woman” (Sibande in Meekison 2014).
As Thurman (2014) comments, Sophie’s ‘death’ allows Sibande “to relinquish her concern for the narratives of others … to attend more closely to her own story, to privilege her own desires, experiences and preoccupations.” Of The Reign, Sibande says:
“It’s not about Sophie working for the madam any more. The horse is really a preparation for the death of Sophie” (Sibande in Zyomuya 2010). It is appropriate therefore that
Sophie’s horse rears up on its back hooves, given the unfounded myth about the hoof position of equestrian statues, which circulates that if a rider died in battle, the horse is depicted with two hooves off the ground. If the function of the ‘Sophie’ iterations is to work with and through self-limiting and historicised (self-)conceptions of black femininity, the works portraying the ‘Purple Figure’ would appear to signal alternate concerns on the part of the art-maker.
240 The ‘Purple Figure’, as it has been dubbed, is presented wreathed in and extruding viscerally intestinal, worm-like creatures, as though ‘Sophie’ had been flayed or turned inside out, her internal organs and bacterial colonies magnified and exposed. In A
Terrible Beauty is Born (Fig. 5.14), a headscarf and apron are draped over, not tied in place on, the figure who stands like Medea, holding court before, or lost in a forest of, digitally enhanced Mirò-evoking amorphous creatures. The figure’s ambiguous relationship with these invertebrate forms and her own possible or potential monstrousness can be interpreted as Sibande’s developing ambivalence in regard to her understanding of personal and creative freedom. As Meekison (2014) recounts: “At first,
[Sibande] described it [freedom] in blunt terms as “the ability to do what I want, when I want.” Later in the interview though, she mused that freedom can be a monster, “an octopus with many legs and hands”. This ambivalence can express a metaphor for contemporary South Africa, at the curator-driven demand for more iterations of ‘Sophie’ and for Sibande’s disapprobation at being viewed as a brand, not a storyteller (Meekison
2014). In Cry Havoc (Fig 5.15), the square of cloth that was the headscarf has transformed into a laced handkerchief which, rather than a signifier of service and servitude, has the royal power to unleash the Shakespearean “dogs of war” (Some literary associations of dogs with military belligerence were discussed in Chapter 2, and these are pertinent here too).
Deploying excess as bloated sartorial fantasy
241 To represent a person who is visually identifiable as a domestic worker is to represent someone in a role. To avoid naturalising the role, the artist somehow signals, in subject matter, medium and process of making, that he or she does not intend to represent a transparent cohesion between external appearance and implied identity. In this, artists also re-examine the traditional aspirations of portraiture. Much South African art has been socially engaged but the impetus to examine representation in this way may be understood in the broader post-apartheid context, where artists draw on and examine personal and quotidian experience and memories, as well as the domestic spaces and relationships in which they themselves are involved. In doing so, they explore how ideologies about gender, ‘race’ and class produce, what become naturalised as, the signs of difference.
‘Sophie’ adheres to the central tenet of conventional portraiture in that her ‘insides’ mirror her ‘outsides’: her personal fantasies of being a ‘lady’ are outwardly visible in the elaborate transformation of her domestic worker’s uniform. As I discussed in Chapter 3, art-makers both portray and produce the ‘essence’ of their subjects: they actively consolidate the subject’s self by portraying an ostensible unity between the subject’s outer form and inner self, and in so doing, affirm the uniqueness of the subject as well as proving their own abilities (Van Alphen 1997: 240). In conventional portraiture, an art- maker therefore handles another’s image, in whose representation an overt economic and ideological negotiation takes place. In the ‘Sophie’ installations, a naturalised transition from inner self to external appearance proposes a labour of imagination; it is this imaginative labour that she performs with which Sibande challenges conventional
242 representations. As suggested in the Introduction and Chapter 2, such works serve, either intentionally or inadvertently, to uphold the icon of the devoted servant and to produce, maintain and legitimise the existing social order as the “faithful friend and helper”
(Reynolds 1988: 318). In Kay’s Cookie: Annie Mavata (Fig. 2.6), I drew attention to the difference between Kay’s oil portrait and her source photograph: the absence of Mavata’s labour, the beans which she is cutting up in the photograph. In the painting, her hands are awkwardly positioned around her ‘tools of trade’, which are in themselves as much signifiers of her position within Kay’s household as her blue coverall dress and white pinafore. I argued that it is Kay who performs the artist’s creative labour as Mavata’s labour is dispersed into the creative effort of the image itself. Sophie’s creative labour, in contrast, is writ large, not written out. Playfully performative, visually ebullient, eminently marketable, at the same time the ‘Sophie’ installations are ambivalent expressions of ideals of privilege and femininity.
In The Purple Shall Govern: A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1 (2013; Fig. 5.16) ‘Sophie’ and the ‘Purple Figure’ – Sophie’s double or progeny – confront each other; they are not, as Corrigall (2015: 160) quotes Thembinkosi Goniwe (2013: 32), “simply dancing together in celebration of their split or connection. They are in contestation for space”. As
Corrigall observes:
[T]heir postures and configuration and physical features, which are identical, also imply that this confrontation is one with the self, as they are the mirror image of each other. It is as if her dreams for the future have ‘turned on her’ and are gradually subsuming her, as they replicate and expand past the confines of her imagination (Corrigall 2015: 161).
243 This fascination with the double – the self that is reflected back to the self, mirrored yet alien – began in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the Victorian era and the age of colonial empire, where encounters with other belief systems and exposure to and domination of other cultures led to more complex engagements and self-assessments on the part of the colonisers (Warner 2002: 188). The excess and tension of the encounter for both coloniser and colonised peoples gives rise to differentiation and the doubling of self.
Corrigall proposes that Sophie’s desire to become, or at least to possess the accoutrements of privilege belonging to, the European colonial authority, even while she always remains a servant of that authority (the ‘madam’) presents a doubling of identity
(Corrigall 2015: 157) in as much as, to quote Bhabha, she presents herself with “a disassembling image of being at two places at once” (Bhabha 1994: 64 in Corrigall 2015:
157). Sophie has internalised that dissembling, doubling image. The increasing physical excess and conceptual scale of Sibande’s creations demonstrated in Sophie’s costumes, accessories, settings and activities, suggest an aspirational fantasy that far outstrips the original four ‘Sophies’. This ‘excess’ as a form of differentiation that gives rise to
Sophie’s internalised doubling, Corrigall (2015: 154) proposes, may be seen as reflective of South Africa’s contemporary socio-political landscapes that has witnessed an increasingly social mobility and cultural hybridisation that disorders the racially- segregated status quo cultivated under apartheid, yet simultaneously it is increasing class- based conflicts and a wider gap between the elites and the poor, between ‘servants’ and
‘mistresses’ (Corrigall 2015: 154). Corrigall outlines how she perceives sartorial excess to be an expression of the movement Bhabha’s mimicry makes on its way to difference, taking her cue from Bhabha’s assertion that “[i]n order to be effective, mimicry must
244 continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” as Corrigall (2015: 154) quotes
Homi Bhabha (1994: 122). Mimicking authority expresses difference from that authority and yet arguably serves ultimately to sustain it, through an affirmation of the established authority’s position of power (Corrigall 2015: 156).
Sophie’s mimicry of colonial authorities has many South African antecedents. Wearing riding breeches was common amongst rural black African men of high social standing in the early twentieth century, as seen in portraits of the Zulu royal family in the 1920s and
1930s, up until the 1950s. Klopper (2011: 131) explains that while the appropriation of these garments challenged codes of conduct and dress established to differentiate colonial masters from African peoples, their use, particularly by the rural elite, also borrowed the privilege adhering to these garments to affirm existing social hierarchies within their own communities. In another example, up until the 1970s, the ‘Kitchen Boy suit’ ubiquitously worn as a uniform by male domestic workers, according to Sithabile Ntombela’s father as she recounts it, was a source of shame for black African men because it advertised that they had to work in this ‘feminised’ sector (Ntombela 2012: 133). But by the mid-1980s, this outfit was being worn by fashion-forward, politically active young men, as a defiant statement about their individual and collective identities (Ntombela 2012: 133). As another instance of sartorial mimicry in South Africa, the Ibandla IamaNazareta
Independent Church, known colloquially as the Shembe church, wear kilts and pith helmets as part of their ceremonial attire.
245 Appropriating the costume of the colonial authorities is central to Sophie’s creative labour, and her interpretation of it both betrays and honours her situation as a servant.
The ever-growing degree and grandiosity of excess in Sophie’s fantasies of self-invention is expressed in her costumes, until she is swallowed by the ‘Purple Figure’ and the intestinal abstractions of the digitally-rendered creatures in photographic works such as A
Terrible Beauty is Born. Corrigall (2010) notes that this increasing excess “was designed to mirror the conspicuous display of wealth in the postapartheid era”. She quotes
Sibande’s observation from their interview:
You see a lot of rich people in the township wearing a lot of bling. They have 10 rings on their fingers, wear the latest wigs. It’s excessive. It’s as if they don’t know how to stop making themselves more beautiful. You think the more you have the more you are getting there (Sibande in Corrigall 2010b).
Corrigall proposes therefore that in ‘Sophie’, Sibande uses dandyism as a sartorial tool to expose “the syntax the wearer assumes to rally against” (Corrigall 2015: 157). As she concludes:
The quotation of elitism apparent in Sophie’s garments – the allusions to aristocratic ceremonial dress – is not only driven by a desire to deride or challenge it, but has been eclipsed by such an insatiable hunger to attain it, that it ironically impedes her liberation (Corrigall 2015: 157).
As such, ‘Sophie’ as a hyper-version of privileged status comments “how an emerging elite existing at the cusp of a society in transition, may be following in the footsteps of the colonial authority” (Corrigall 2015: 157).
246 Marina Warner (2002: 18) discusses how, like tales of doubling, tales of metamorphosis
“often arose in spaces (temporal, geographical, and mental) that were crossroads, cross- cultural zones, points of interchange on the intricate connective tissue of communications between cultures”. In these stories that draw overtly on material that predates them
the physical conditions of ordinary existence simply do not obtain: characters are free to fly, to shape shift, to see far into the beyond, and these breaches in the order of reality enhance the psychological intensity of the depiction of human states of being, they press into new forms ways of telling the self – recasting literature’s familiar materials, anguish, passion, lust, pity (Warner 2002: 211).
In “paying homage to the muted voices of past histories” (Warner 2002: 208), these tales of metamorphoses “express the conflicts and uncertainties, and in doing so, they embody the transformational power of story-telling itself, revealing stories as activators of change” (Warner 2002: 210). ‘Sophie’ is more ambivalent a figure than a triumphalist herald of social change, as she loses herself in increasingly baroque dreamscapes thereby reaffirming her limited physical reality. Yet her avaricious imagination that indulges in these flights of fantasy and spectacles of metamorphosis may justifiably be interpreted as an expression of aspirational, creative labour that speaks to the contemporary moment in
South Africa.
Sophie’s dreams of becoming and usurping the privileged position held by her ‘madam’ are aptly storyboarded in a Madam & Eve cartoon from 1993 (Fig 5.17). Madam & Eve is a South African cartoon strip that runs in several national newspapers and has, to date, released several collections of the long-running strip. Arguably reaching its peak of
247 popularity in the first decade of South Africa’s democracy, this strip by Steven Francis,
Harry Dugmore and Rico Schacherl allows the reader to venture into the mutually dependent world of one ‘madam’ and ‘maid’ whose appeal lies especially in the recognition of (and the perpetuation of stereotypes of) the personalities and antics of the tight-fisted, paranoid yet helpless ‘Madam’ Gwen and the wily, lazy ‘maid’ Eve. In this cartoon, Eve fantasises about attaining wealth and social status that both eclipse those of her ‘madam’ and that render her ‘madam’ a subordinate supplicant to her. Eve’s fantasy also unfolds such that it affirms her existing role as a domestic worker: Madam demonstrably falls apart and cannot do without her, becoming an unkempt alcoholic in a ramshackle and dirty house. In every way the roles are reversed: Eve’s fantasy new position gives her the ability to enter or leave Madam’s house on her own whim (given
Madam’s surprise at seeing her), the ability to preen her ostentatiously expensive clothes before Madam, the ease to bestow largesse and charity on Madam, and the power to deride, laugh openly at and humiliate Madam, who accepts it. When the final two panels reveal the situation as Eve’s daydream, Eve’s fantasy persona is comical in her desperation, and her real-life character is resigned and put-upon.
The fantasy role-reversal53 underlines Eve’s quotidian ‘drudgery’ even as it demonstrates an imaginative licence and “new ways of telling the self” (Warner 2002: 211). As
Sibande pragmatically states: “I didn’t want to move Sophie away from being a maid. As much as she is moving forward she is also going back” and “Whatever she does she will
53 When Madam has a dream that when she is on holiday, Eve will try on and pass judgement on her clothes and hold raucous parties in her house, she also expresses this inversion of roles; in her case, what Bhaba describes as, in Corrigall’s phrasing, “the colonial authority’s paranoia that the servant wishes to take her place” (Corrigall 2015: 158).
248 always be a maid” (Sibande in Corrigall 2010b). As such, Sibande acts as the critical witness to Sophie’s excesses and to entrenched histories and present realities of privilege, inviting the viewer to do the same. The character Eve, like that of Sophie, as Corrigall
(2015: 157) points out, leaves unquestioned the fundamentals of a hierarchical system of paternalised labour. Corrigall (2015: 162) quotes Jean Baudrillard’s assertion that the illusion of social mobility expressed through fashion is the illusion of change offered by democratic rhetoric. As such, Corrigall elucidates: “Baudrillard concludes that as objects support the idea of success at the very most they function as ‘frustrated social aspirations’, as the constant renewal of objects implies a disappointed ‘aspiration to cultural and social progress’” (Corrigall 2015: 162). Despite this opportunity to critique and contextualise ‘Sophie’, Sibande’s viewers are invited to empathise, even collude, with Sophie’s fantasies, and to respect this display of her internal subjectivity. Because while speaking to an aspirational post-apartheid moment that seeks, often unsustainably and futilely, to transcend the traumas of the past, Sophie’s network of fantasies and self- definitions also denote more broadly the characteristics of how Bhabha presents the postcolonial subject.
As he and Jean Comaroff propose:
[T]he subject is always in excess of itself, supplementary to its subjecthood and it is this ‘excess’ or liminality that becomes the basis of the intersubjective relation […] Where does, say, the Senegalese subject situate itself? In Dakar? In the Senegalese countryside? In Paris or New York? In the world music section of Tower Records? On the Net? Clearly, in all of these places and virtual spaces (Bhabha and Comaroff 2002: 32).
249 The nation-state is thus at risk from nebulous sources, that may be, and may be perceived as being, both malevolent and benign. Bhabha and John Comaroff discuss how, through their invisible presence and actions, the immigrant, the international terrorist and cyber- space cross boundaries, exposing how porous they are (Bhabha and Comaroff 2002: 28).
In addition, enacting this porousness, structures break down from within. An individual may no longer look to official structures to provide judicial, moral and social outlines; all metanarratives, both societal and literary, appear to be erased. When attempting to articulate ‘identity’, Bhabha speaks of a “circulatory network of signs” in a “metonymic and iterative process” that informs the process of identification as a kind of “being-in- time” (Bhabha and Comaroff 2002: 32). Postcolonial identity in particular as a contingent, evolving process, as “being-in-time”, may be expressed in a liminal or in- between space – “the transcultural space in which strategies for personal or communal self-hood may be elaborated, a region in which there is a continual process of movement and interchange between different states” (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 1998: 130).
Bhabha (1994: 219) suggests that, in these contexts, identity is constructed through experiences lived where marginalised or minority identities achieve a mode of performative agency by enacting a form of historical intermediacy. He suggests that
Freud’s nachntruglichkeit (deferred action) can, in these circumstances, feel an appropriate response (Bhabha 1994: 219). Nachntruglichkeit allows the past to dissolve in the present rather than the present being determined by the past; in this way, the future becomes “once again open” (Bhabha 1994: 219).
250 It is in this sense that Sophie’s fantasies represent more than an unsustainable and futile reaffirmation of existing power structures. In dreaming of alternate possibilities for both herself as an individual and collectively for domestic workers and those in other employment given little social status in the past or in the present, she both asserts their existing presence and subjectivity and also offers new inscriptions and possibilities for their subjectivities, even in the mode of the address (the staged presentation of the hybrid fantasies). The numerous iterations of Sophie’s adventures and personas are in themselves a needful enactment of alternate possibilities for this worker (or, at least, for the consumers of her work to consider as a needful enactment).
My final word, however, on Sophie’s aspirational yearnings for an alternate subjectivity, return to Corrigall’s analysis of her costumes as a form of sartorial mimicry and metamorphosis that cannot transcend (or resolve) its own symptomatic tensions. In I decline, I refuse to recline (2010; Fig 5.18), Sibande’s musings that “I want to see how far I can take her – not just conceptually but in terms of the size and scale of the dress”
(Sibande in Corrigall 2010b) would seem to be actualised. Here the extreme proportions of a dress that spills metres in every directions morphs into, or is weighed down by, a psychoanalyst’s couch. Sophie’s arms reaching outwards and upwards could suggest that she is now struggling to take flight into her fantasies. As Corrigall points out, the title suggests Sophie’s refusal to lie down on the couch and explain her behaviour or to be analysed for her now pathological condition, that is her propensity to seek fulfilment in the excessive accumulation of garments, material objects, experiences and the ecstasy that she derives from this (Corrigall 2015: 160). The psychoanalyst couch is also a
251 confirmation that Sophie’s desires are delusional (Corrigall 2015: 160). Sophie’s refusal to expose her inner thoughts and motivations could be in some circumstances a form of resistance, such as Freud’s case of the patient ‘Dora’ who terminated her sessions with him after being manipulated by paternal and patriarchal figures in her life, including potentially her analyst Freud himself. Her actions have been (re)read by several feminist scholars as protest (such as Gallop 1984). However, Sophie’s refusal and her accumulative actions are implied by Sibande to be symptoms of a more complex societal trauma.
The very materiality of Sophie’s increasingly excessive fantasies suggests that, as
Corrigall (2015: 162) puts it, “the form of liberation she seeks is a psychic one”. As
Siopis discusses in conversation with Nuttall, one consequence of contemporary art- makers’ investment in performance and multiple roles is that “all this dressing up” stunts reflections about the nuances of everyday experiences (Siopis in Nuttall 2010: 458).
Pollock (2004: 22) points out that it is in phantasy that trauma insistently repeats itself and yet it cannot become its own representation. In this way, fantasies as reveries that consciously imagine future possibilities to fulfill needs and desires act out phantasies, which are infantile feelings and drives that initially establish object relations and which may express themselves through symbols to the individualised mind. I position fantasies in Sibande’s work (and in Muholi’s) as responding to historical and structural traumas in
South African psyches. Sophie’s materialist fantasies, so insistently repeated, arguably demonstrate the close connections between mimicry and fetishism.
252 Development of the domestic-worker uniform
Sibande works with the widely available ‘standard’ outfits associated with domestic workers’ protective wear. Figure 5.19 is an example of such a uniform, described as a
“three-piece overall” consisting of overall or housecoat, a headscarf or doek, and an apron, made variously from 100% polyester or a poly-cotton blend. In South Africa, these outfits are commonly worn by domestic workers and as such form a part of material culture and are a widely recognised gendered, racialised and social signifier. That domestic workers may choose to wear their own clothes at work, or that employers (with degrees of negotiation with their employees) may purchase garments such as T-shirts and trousers for employees as protective wear (Ntombela 2012: 141), makes little impact on the perceptions that may be accorded a woman dressed in a ‘domestic-worker overall’.
The legacies of colonial and apartheid rule point to domestic workers as, in Ntombela’s words, women who “have had subordinate legal status with limited access to productive resources like education, training, credit and formal employment” (Ntombela 2012: 141).
As ‘Brinj’, a domestic worker, tells Ntombela: “When people realise you are a maid [see you in a maid’s uniform], they tend to look down upon you because they know you work in someone’s house” (‘Brinj’ in Ntombela 2012: 143). Domestic workers themselves may feel they lack the skills and education training needed for work in other sectors. As
‘Mimmie’, a domestic worker, explains to Ntombela (2012: 142): “They look down upon you if you wear the maid’s uniform. Even employers look down on you. I think the reason is that it is a job for uneducated people.” It does not necessarily follow, however, as Ntombela (2000: 142) demonstrates, that the self-perception of women employed as
253 domestic workers is negatively affected by these beliefs, as many feel pride and self- respect, or at least sanguinity, in working honestly and conscientiously, being financially independent, and being able to provide for their dependents. Most domestic workers feel strongly, however, according to Ntombela’s research, that while protective clothing is desired, the ‘maid’s uniform’ is disliked because of its associations and history
(Ntombela 2012: 140). As ‘Mimmie’ says: “Remove uniforms, let domestics wear ordinary clothing; they can serve the same purpose” (‘Mimmie’ in Ntombela 2012: 141).
In this section, I outline some of the origins and iterations of the ‘maid’s uniform’ but I give my attention principally to some ways in which selected South African art practitioners have critically explored the signifiers adhering to these items of dress. I also examine some of the meanings in the attire and activities that the Women’s Manyano movement (or, loosely translated, ‘Mothers’ Prayer Union’) offers its members, who are predominantly domestic workers.
There are two main brands supplying domestic worker overalls in South Africa:
‘Duchess’ and ‘Ethnix’. These names portray their origins as rooted in historical class- based privilege as well as the attempt to rebrand, at the expense potentially of reforming, the inherited structural hierarchies. The ‘Duchess’ overalls come in pale pastel and powdered colours such as pink, yellow, blue and green, arguably echoing the morning dress of Edwardian housemaids (Fig. 5.20). The black overall with white collar and sleeve trim (Fig. 5.21) recalls the Edwardian servant’s afternoon uniform (Fig. 5.22). The dark blue uniform in Figure 5.18 is described as “royal” in colour (according to the online
254 site, Azulwear). The “Cindy” coverall or pinafore (Fig. 5.23) comes with a ‘Duchess’ tag and “engraved DUCHESS buttons [sic]”, with an insignia of a stylised crown (according to the online site, Azulwear). A domestic worker clothing line called ‘Duchess’ subsumes the domestic worker’s identity with that of her employer in an eternal power differential, positing her as an accessory of her employer. Sophie’s response, to usurp or interpret the privileged role, is one that is invited by this presentation of apparently a priori social divisions inflected with a stylistic, rhetorical colonialism. ‘Ethnix’ runs a line of domestic worker outfits that feature generic Ndebele geometrical prints and isishweshwe designs
(Fig. 5.24). Here the ‘Africanness’ of the print is an ideological mollifier, potentially
‘redressing’ rather than addressing the causes of the inequalities that are expressed in the more demonstrably colonial and apartheid-era ‘maid’.
Sibande’s pastiche of aspirational cultural icons centres on Sophie’s uniform, which lead back to nineteenth-century Britain and colonial South Africa, when class-based, racialised and gender distinctions in the middle-class household crystallised, with consequences for servants that are still played out in South Africa today. From the second half of the nineteenth century, uniforms for workers and servants began to proliferate; until then, there had not been any kind of standardised and socially agreed form of dress for servants (Crane 2000: 87). Liveried servants had served the upper-classes and aristocracy. With the rise of industrialised work forces and the burgeoning middle class, uniforms served to suppress individuality, to identify members of the working class and thereby to differentiate them from other social classes (Crane 2000: 87). By 1860 in
British middle- and upper-class households, servants were wearing cotton-print dresses
255 with starched caps for mornings (Fig. 5.20) and black dress, white apron, and cap in the afternoons and evenings (Fig. 5.22) (Crane 2000: 92). The focus for the “maid of all work” or “general servant” was, according to an 1899 guide to household management, to
“be personally clean” (Jewry 1899: 582). This servant should
ask her mistress for housemaid’s gloves, and endeavour, as much as possible, to keep her hands clean, so as never to leave smutty marks of fingers on anything she touches. Her hair should be banded carefully back, and be kept smooth, and her face clean; and as she has to answer the door, she should wear her coarse apron as much as possible, and at a knock or a ring exchange it for a clean white one, kept within reach (Jewry 1899: 581).
This indicates a fear of dirt and contagious disease that had the potential also to be a fetishised fear of class (and, in the colonies, racial) contagion.54 Such practices continued during apartheid and commonly today as well, with separate dishes, cutlery and ablution facilities for domestic workers and gardeners. They also managed and encouraged
‘moral’ rectitude and ambiguous erotic impulses. Fears of ‘contagion’ express a horror of miscegenation. As McClintock observes, washing is a ritual of purification that
“prepare[s] the body as a terrain of meaning, organizing flows of value across the self and the community and demarcating boundaries between one community and another”
(McClintock 1995: 226). In such a ritual cleansing, it is understandable that soap became a quintessentially Victorian fetishised signifier of racial hygiene and imperial progress
(McClintock 1995: 208).
54 As an undergraduate student at Rhodes University, I took a book out of the Grahamstown Public Library that dated from the 1940s. This book had a notice fixed onto the title page that read, I paraphrase, “Black servants must wear gloves when collecting or returning employers’ library books”.
256 In an 1860 cartoon by J. Leech in Punch (Fig. 5.25), the prospective servant arrives for her interview mimicking middle-class fashions. She is a source of amusement to the mistress (the master’s face is more impassive) because her interpretation of middle-class fashions betrays her limited financial means – her crinoline is short and artificial, made with distended wire – and her vulgarity – her bonnet is loud and her expression smug. But the bemusement may also be a symptomatic fear that, with the right activities and accessories, class is a matter of performing. Clothing was the first widely accessible consumer good (Crane 2000: 95) and the consequent possibility of diminishing obvious differences between employer and employee, and thus enabling class mobility, seems to have resulted in imperatives to reassert visible status boundaries. Uniforms helped to maintain social boundaries and emphasise social distinctions (Crane 2000: 95).
In addition, from the mid nineteenth century, middle- and upper-class housewives were expected to participate only minimally in household activities, creating the need for visible status boundaries for the maintenance of authority between themselves and their servants (Crane 2000: 91). As a 1858 sketch (Fig. 5.26) lampoons, decreasing involvement of middle- and upper-class women in household activities made leisure and dependency in the domestic sphere an increasing sign of class and femininity (Crane
2000: 91). The middle-class woman, imprisoned by her flounced crinoline skirt, clutching a bunch of hothouse blooms, resembles both a powder puff and a spider squatting in her web. This paradoxical relationship with ostentatious excessive fashions that enforce inactivity (thereby signalling that the wearer possesses the financial means to depend on service) is the situation that Sibande explored in Sophie’s Caught in a Rapture (Fig. 5.6).
257 These domestic and feminine ideals were such that many middle-class women had to perform domestic labour of necessity in a concealed and secretive manner and could ultimately, paradoxically, work very hard at maintaining the appearance of leisure
(McClintock 1995: 36).
As Cock (1980a) notes, the institution of domestic service was a potent and visual vehicle by which class-bound attitudes assumed a racial form. The roles of servants integrated black women and men into the lower echelons of a social hierarchy, deemed appropriate to both their race and gender. A Victorian sketch (Fig. 5.26) titled “Who would be a page?”, and the depicted emasculating indignity that the footman suffers, has been noted in a South African context as well by Ntombela (2012: 133) when she retells anecdotal comments that her father made. He would describe how black men disliked the ‘Kitchen
Boy suit’ that advertised their work in the service sector. As Sol Rachillo writes in his poem ‘The Annonymous Houseboy’, that dislike extended to the uniform itself:
Inside my incredible kitchen boy suit that never fits too well (I like mine white it makes me look like a circus clown.) (Rachillo in Malan 1988: 45, sic).
Henri Hubert van Kol’s 1904 photograph (Fig 5.27) of a “dienstmeid” (serving girl) in
Willemstad, the capital city of the island of Curaçao in the southern Caribbean Sea, then a
Dutch colony, shows a black woman in a striped, long-sleeved dress, full ruffled apron and frilled cap that was the standardised servant’s uniform. This style of dress clearly was
258 in widespread use in European colonies other than British ones. That the woman is hitching up her skirt to display her petticoat implies an intention to titillate the viewer, given the eroticism of undergarments, and demonstrates the sexualising of racial and class-based differences.
Ntombela (2000: 132) points out succinctly: “It is not the uniform itself that degrades domestic workers, but it publicises their position, which has been constructed as low in the social order.” Before I discuss some instances of art practitioners who have interrogated signifiers accumulating to the domestic worker’s uniform, I look at the attire and activities of the Women’s Manyano movement. In doing so, I give space to how women employed as domestic workers use uniforms in a different context to assert themselves within communities of support and sisterhood.
Uniforms in the Women’s Manyano
The Methodist Women's Prayer and Service Union is colloquially known as Manyano, or the Women's Manyano (there is also a much smaller Young Women’s Manyano). It may also be referred to as the Mothers’ Union or Prayer Union. Women who are full members of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa are eligible to join the organization, which has over 62 000 members in South Africa (Methodist Church of Southern Africa 2015).
Manyano is an isiXhosa word (and the isiSotho Kopano) that is related to the concept of union and may be translated as “let's pull together” (Holness 1998: 25).
259 The Manyano uniform was allegedly modelled originally on the uniform of the British
‘redcoats’ (Gaitskell 1990: 261). From 1873, the majority of British infantry regiments wore vivid scarlet coats. Like Sibande’s sartorial use of the colonial Victorian middle- class mistress’ dress and ceremonial attire of British royalty, the Manyano movement has similarly appropriated and reinterpreted a colonial uniform to signal involvement in an organization whose raison d’être is about recouping autonomy for black women
(Corrigall 2015: 154). Today, the Manyano uniform is a scarlet tunic or blouse and cape, with a wide, square white collar, white cap and black skirt (Fig 5.28). The Manyano member’s “sense of identity, of being somebody in her own right” is symbolised above anything by the uniform (Holness 1997: 27). Holness describes how she has “seen a person become somebody different the moment she puts on her Manyano uniform”
(Holness 1997: 27). She observes that domestic workers “move from being individuals with a sense of either no, or at best second-rate, personal identity (a negative selfimage) or only derivative identity (Mrs so-and-so's maid), to people with a positive identity of their own” (Holness 1997: 27). This sense of empowered personal identity that Manyano supports is expressed by Margaret ‘Maggie’ Manamela, a domestic worker whose employer had initially refused her an afternoon off, by evoking the infantalising name by which her employer knew her: “Manyano time is not their time… Not time for ‘Maggie’ but for Margaret Manamela” (Manamela in Ally 2010: 175).
Manyano meeting days correspond with many domestic workers’ days off, often a
Thursday afternoon (Ally 2010: 165). At those times, domestic workers in their distinctive uniforms are a common sight in white suburbia (Phillips & James 2014: 422).
260 Every member dressed alike promotes solidarity and community while levelling out different socio-economic situations (Holness 1998: 26). Describing her year-long membership of a Manyano group, Holness details the structure of the meetings: “Each week there was the business section, a time of sharing, a devotional time which always included preaching, singing and praying, followed very often by preparations for a visit to some member in need” (Holness 1998: 26). Sharing, healing, song and lamentation in the form of isililo (‘wailing’) and giving and soliciting advice provide an opportunity for oral expression and serve as prompts for social action by the group (Holness 1998: 28).
The women's Manyano movement of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, as with similar movements in other churches, is rooted in the late nineteenth-century revivalism of the Anglican and Methodist mission churches (Holness 1998: 25). Holness explains the movement’s development:
By holding their own meetings (with the blessing of the missionaries), and in time insisting on a high degree of autonomy from the local and institutional church – options that traditional religion and culture did not offer – women in effect, and perhaps even unwittingly, assumed an unprecedented degree of spiritual leadership (Holness 1998: 25).
Still closely connected to the active practice of traditional Christian values, Manyano groups typically promote a “Victorian-style femininity”, often defined in terms of respectability and sobriety and often contrasted to a perceived masculinity and its opposed values (Phillips & James 2014: 422 – 23). The emphasis on motherhood and family provides a framework for women, especially migrants, from rural areas, to affirm themselves through conservative cultural values and also to position themselves, as Ally
261 (2010: 182) puts it, “as compromised mothers and dehumanised workers”. The pain that absentee mothering causes, as well as the fragility of sustaining stable families, are issues many domestic workers face and which the Manyano group identify and support (Ally
2010: 182). Ally concludes that
this sense of empowerment issued precisely from the manyanos’ stabilization of the meanings of motherhood and its validation for their understandings of care. Even if separated from their children for all but one or two weeks a year, many still felt powerfully connected to their identities as mothers because of their role in taking care of their children through their waged work. The manyanos therefore were, and remain, particularly resonant for this class of mother-workers (Ally 2010: 182).
The importance of their uniforms within the Women’s Manyano provides a noteworthy example of how domestic-worker members have been involved in repositioning uniforms, such that they serve a democratising, unifying and self-affirming end. Sibande has in her own way done something not dissimilar. By creating a small contingent of dozens of ‘Sophie’ figures, all recognisably similar to each other and all indebted to the domestic-worker uniform even as they appear to transcend its limitations through their own creative labour, Sibande is also creating a uniform for Sophie that empowers her identity (however ambivalent that expression may be).
Re-working domestic worker uniforms
Art practitioners have also spoken to, with, against, and even without domestic-worker uniforms to examine their connotations in a South African context. In Chapter 1, I
262 discussed Penny Siopis’ folded ‘maids’ overalls’ that support the central image by creating the ‘frame’ in her mixed media work Maids (Fig 1.18). I mention now works by
Thembeka Qangule (who also uses uniforms indexically) and Marlene Dumas (who arguably in not representing a uniform at all, leaves an open signifier in the place of pre- conceived perceptions about the woman wearing it). I briefly discuss these works to demonstrate that Sibande may be positioned amongst other art-makers who reappropriate domestic-worker uniforms.
Thembeka Qangule uses domestic worker overalls indexically to represent black women employed as domestic workers (Fig 5.29). Qangule currently teaches and lectures at the
College of Cape Town; she was born in 1969 in Grahamstown, and undertook a Bachelor in Fine Arts degree at the University of Fort Hare before completing teaching certification and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town. As she explains, each work or ‘page’ in her series Pages uses materials – fabrics, clothing, sorghum, rusted corrugated iron, isiXhosa text and mats – to signify the artist’s personal struggles as a woman and an artist that are collectively shared by black women (AVA
Gallery 2004). Each ‘page’ is a memorial, as she says, but also in its slab-like presence, each is a kind of Rosetta Stone or tablet from Mount Sinai, asking to be read and invoking an experience to be shared. The assertive monumentality of Domestic Work provides a substantial base to display the crumpled overalls that appear as discarded skins, or personas. This mode of display asserts the right for the experiences of these overalls’ wearers to be heard and acknowledged. These fabrics were all once worn, some by personal family members, and therefore are “linked to social passages within the
263 communities where they come from” (AVA Gallery 2004). Although they speak of transitioning through spaces and roles, these ‘pages’ all also “spell the erection of barriers” (AVA Gallery 2004). In this, each solid ‘page’ is a tombstone, as well as a memorial.
From this position, the inclusion of women employed as domestic workers is an apt part of the tapestry of black South African women’s experiences. The preserved pink overall, although clearly body-less, appears to call a body into it in its positioning: the sleeve seems to hold open the bottom, unbuttoned part of the overall, inviting the viewer in under the skirts, into the experiences of its now absent wearer. Qangule’s will to transcend oppressive norms motivates her identification of unresolved social issues relating to urbanised black women (AVA Gallery 2004). At the same time, she asserts: “I employ this gesture as a way of highlighting the strengths of women and to mark their initiative ability in not succumbing to abusive male domination” (Qangule in AVA
Gallery 2004). Although she appropriates domestic-worker uniforms in a different way,
Sibande also has a desire to affirm black women’s experiences and identities.
Like Siopis, Alexander, Cohen, Muholi and Sibande, Marlene Dumas explores the role of three women in her personal life, and while unrelated to each other, their conjunction in the art work allow the viewer the opportunity to muse about the connections that may be forged between the women, and equally, those that may not. In 1984, Dumas produced three portraits of three Marthas Martha – die bediende (‘the servant’; Fig. 5.30), Martha
– Ouma, (‘Grandmother’; Fig. 5.31) and Martha – Sigmund’s Wife (Fig. 5.32). Although
264 a painting in three parts, it is a triptych that is not comprehensibly joined together; each woman is figured and titled in a slightly different fashion. The paintings are also now scattered since they are owned by different collectors. The three women are related only through Dumas’ association with them. As she says: “I paint the women of my men” (in
Martin et al 2007: 59). The artist (born 1953, in Cape Town) graduated from the
Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1975, with an interest in psychoanalysis, which she has explored consistently through her career (hence the inclusion of Sigmund’s Wife).55 She was close to her grandmother – Ouma – who also is part of the world in South Africa where she grew up until she left the country in 1976.56
55 Martha who is ‘Sigmund’s wife’ has her appellation clearly underscored with lines and picked out in white against a dark background. The faux familiarity and informality of referring to Sigmund Freud as ‘Sigmund’, foregrounding that the ‘father’ of psychoanalysis, known through his works and theories, was equally a man who had a family, a wife, a home and quotidian bodily existence makes the point that the woman in his life is equally consigned by history and interpretation to a marginalised position. Dumas recollects that instead of doing her master’s degree, or becoming an art therapist, she “painted the wife of Sigmund Freud instead/[she] painted the woman ‘behind’ the man” (Dumas in Martin et al 2007: 59). 56 Martha – Ouma does not have her title painted onto the canvas, assisting the interpretation of this square-jawed, austere, milky-eyed, matriarchal presence as God. The painting has also been hung high on exhibition walls such that the painting ‘looks’ down on from above the viewer. Dumas herself makes the comparison in a poem she wrote
God cannot be painted And he isn’t a man But if he were a woman He would have looked like this sometimes (Dumas in Martin et al 2007: 56).
Pomeroy (2014: 67) points out that the transparent, bruised quality of the subject’s skin, achieved with blue under-painting revealed through thinly applied washes of creamy beige paint, is a painterly expression of the fact that Dumas painted this ghostly, intangible image from a photograph after her grandmother’s death. Pomeroy sees the colour and brushwork as interpreting the artist’s memories of her ‘Ouma Tottie’; as Dumas recalls in her poem
How soft my grandmother felt to touch. How blue she bruished [sic]. How the sun shone through Her almost transparent pink ears (Dumas in Martin et al 2007: 56).
265 Similarly, Martha, die bediende, as a figure in her childhood, is part of the complexity of growing up in South Africa. That they share a Christian name is a linking strategy that confers a partial and conditional solidarity. Martha is a biblical character, in the Gospel of
Luke, who, upon Jesus’ visit to her and her siblings’ house, “was cumbered about much serving” (Luke 10: 40) and is contrasted with the attitude of her sister Mary, who “sat at
Jesus’ feet, and heard his word” (Luke 10: 39). When she appeals to Jesus for her sister’s assistance, Jesus maintains that “one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10: 42). As the patron saint of servants and cooks (according to the online site, Catholic), Martha is the one who performs domestic labour and serves guests, but she is also the woman whose labour does not receive value and recognition, as she is chided for her adherence to codes of femininity and hospitality (codes which would nonetheless be required to be observed).
This supportive female role would appear to be similar to the roles of the three women that Dumas examines.
Martha, ‘the servant’, is the third subject of this trio. This work is infrequently exhibited and mentioned only cursorily in the literature on Dumas. The exhibition catalogue for the
1992 Miss Interpreted, for instance, states simply, as if fact, that this subject “has a passive, subservient nature” (Dumas, Evenhuis & Verhey 1992: 17). Although Dumas has not, to my knowledge, made any comments on record that speak specifically to this work, she has had the experience of growing up during apartheid and was socialised in an
These three head-and-shoulders portraits are amongst the first portraits that Dumas painted, having begun the practice in 1984, although she did not call them ‘portraits’ but rather “situations”, as her Amsterdam gallerist Paul Andriesse recalls (Andriesse in Solomon 2008). They were exhibited together with another six portraits at her first all-painting show, which was held in 1985, at the Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam (Solomon 2008).
266 environment founded upon policies of racial segregation. In an interview with the New
York Times, Dumas recalls “We had a lady working in the house, and I would sit with her and read to her […] We were very warm with one another, but we could not sit at the same table” (Dumas in Solomon 2008).
Martha – Die bediende is called only ‘Martha’ on the canvas. Dumas paints ‘Martha’ twice; one darkly and confidently rising vertically in small controlled script, one dissipating into a faint smudge, apparently painted over (Fig. 5.33). On the one hand,
Dumas would have appeared to change her mind about the positioning of the title, perhaps consulting her sense of pictorial balance. On the other hand, this double naming may be read as a split reflection of identity. Dumas has not signed this portrait (nor the other two Marthas) so without an artist’s signature, asserting, as Garb (2007: 129) describes it, “the female capacity to grasp the world in her own name”, the title is the
(doubled) text that speaks to the image. Doubling a female image, usually in a mirror, has a tradition in western art history (and also ethnography) of presenting women from several angles as eroticised spectacles (Garb 2007: 129). In Martha – die bediende
(detail; Fig. 5.34), I propose that the doubled title that is not painted as a reflection of itself may be interpreted as expressing the shadow doubling of experiences involved in the reproduction of domestic labour (of employing a domestic worker and of being employed as one), and of being a domestic worker who plays two roles – as expressed by
Manyano member Margaret ‘Maggie’ Manamela, who distinguishes between ‘Maggie’ and ‘Margaret Manamela’ (Ally 2010: 175). However, since ‘Martha’ is repeated twice,
Dumas may be interpreted as reflecting on how little employers may know of their
267 employees, artists may know of their subjects, and on the reconstruction and invention that characterises our relationships with our memories. The leached sketchiness of the hesitant marks outlining Martha’s clothing draws all the viewer’s attention to the defined and painted-up head; it contrasts, too, to the clothing of the other two Marthas. It is rather as if, in choosing not to represent the subject in a domestic worker’s outfit, Dumas vacillates and finally leaves the space, and the canvas, blank, unsure in the end how to attire this ‘servant’. If Dumas does indeed represent the absence of a domestic worker uniform, she may be viewed as affirming the potency and complexity of the institutionalised regulation of ‘race’, gender and individuality to which the signifier attests. Consequently, the threshold status and liminality of the servant’s position is emphasised.
If Dumas is interpreted as refraining from depicting ‘Martha’ in the role in which she knew her (even as she names her role – ‘die bediende’), then arguably she both acknowledges and does not engage with the potent signifier of service and racialised and gendered servitude that the uniform carries. Sibande, on the other hand, takes on this challenge. As I have discussed, much of the power of the ‘Sophie’ figures is that they bring in, not leave out, the figures’ histories as domestic workers, specifically honouring them in a way that simultaneously honours Sophie’s creative agency. Sibande’s generational, ethnic and social background affords her the opportunity to speak from a discursive and experiential place that Dumas cannot, and does not attempt to, speak.
268 Circulating ‘Blackness’ on the surface of the skin
Sibande’s interest in pursuing a career in fashion design may account for her decision to structure her work as costumes worn by fashion mannequin-like figures holding different poses. As Corrigall (2013) comments, Sibande’s costumes are the most expressive element of her work. Unsurprisingly, therefore, analysis of Sophie’s costumes has dominated popular and critical discussion of Sibande’s work. There has been less focus, however, on the fiberglass sculptural figures that wear the costumes, the life casts of Sibande’s body, some significances of which I discuss in the next two sections.
Corrigall points out how Sibande’s use of casts can be seen as both enacting and reinventing the fantasy tableau that fashion ideals present. Fashion entices consumers to buy products by encouraging them to imagine the fashion mannequin as an avatar of themselves; consumers are already ‘wearing’ these clothes and appearing as sophisticated, slim and so on as the mannequin. The reality (the mannequin modelling the clothes) encourages fantasies of self-actualisation in consumers (the illusion of access to a privileged world of fulfilled dreams that these more ‘attractive’ versions of the consumers can make possible) (Corrigall 2015: 158). ‘Sophie’ has equally aspirational motivations, but her transformation is self-generated, indebted as much to the women in her matrilineal line as to contemporary indexes of wealth and privilege. As Dodd (2008:
469) suggests, the large, imposing and insistent qualities of the sculptures signal that the generations of women whom Sophie acknowledges are not invisible but presences in a room, and in society. Casting from her own body also embodies Sibande’s personal investment in an inescapable family legacy (Corrigall 2015: 158). Casting the figures
269 from her own body becomes an externalisation of memory as well as a conscious re- construction and invention of experience. Like the clothing’s invocation of privileged feminine ideals, the casts evoke the exploitation of ethnographic representation, and the seeking after a stable identity, framing the artist’s appropriation and interpretation of experiences as a bodily consequence for herself. Yet at the same time, for Sibande, they also perpetuate iterations of uncanny doubles.
The sculptures are painted a shiny, porcelain-like black to represent, as Sibande (2008) explains, “the shadow that follows me throughout life – neither a positive nor negative force, but simply a fact of my life and evidence of the now impossible life that I may have led”. She thus proposes herself as the inheritor as well as the producer of an imaginative and creative labour. Dodd (2008: 469) suggests this flat monochromatic colour becomes a self-reflexive protective layer for stereotypes and fantasies about black women to be played out on, but not to penetrate and poison, the surface of the skin.
‘Blackness’ becomes “something not really nameable but also excessive” (Dodd 2008:
468). Nuttall continues this line of thinking, proposing that Sibande’s skin surfaces display a way of being that evokes ‘cladding’ or ‘sealedness’ using the skin as “a prop, a costume and surrogate” rather than using “the language of wounds and flesh” which works to reveal or re-enact the traumas written into the skin during South Africa’s past
(Nuttall 2013: 428). Nuttall draws on Cheng’s argument of how the American-born
French dancer, singer, and actress Josephine Baker (1906 – 75) used her skin as part of her costume in performance. Baker’s skin “always greased and polished to a shiny, laminated gloss” seems to blur the organic and synthetic, appearing impervious to racial
270 marking and stigmas despite, or because of, her almost nude performances (Nuttall 2013:
427). Nuttall (2013: 427) points out that she as an author is not trying to speak for or over
Baker’s personal experiences, but rather to suggest that Sibande’s fiberglass figures, like
Baker’s skin, seems to move beyond ‘raced skin’ and a racialised signifier of ‘blackness’ by emphasising its ‘plastic’ qualities. Nuttall quotes Ann Anlin Cheng’s elaboration of the “cladding” of Baker’s skin as a way to conceive such a manner of healing, which
would not draw from some essentialized notion of pre-discursive flesh but from the vocabulary of cladding, of the plastic sense lent to her figuration that turns her from a body suffering from or disguising the ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh’ into a figure that stands resistant to them (Cheng 2011 in Nuttall 2013: 429).
In the ‘hyper-black’ of the sculptures’ skin therefore, Sibande hyperbolically performs its own rejection of an excess of meaning, which may be interpreted from Sibande’s statement that I quoted earlier, that Sophie’s black skin represents “neither a positive nor negative force, but simply a fact”. Nuttall concludes by proposing, as Corrigall does, that
Sibande’s ‘sealed’ mannequin-like figures propose “other languages of the black skin, and new ways, too, of intersecting artistic projects and the heightened language of commodity culture which pervades contemporary Johannesburg” (Nuttall 2013: 427).
This concept of the fiberglass ‘skin’ as protective cladding is here invoked as a syntax for
‘black skin’ that moves ‘beyond’ the languages of the past, specifically those associated with wounding (and implicitly, victimisation and trauma, even, perhaps, excessive interiority). It is a different hermeneutics than that employed by artists in the 1990s such as Siopis, where the interpretative emphasis was in the drawing out of and tending to the
271 racial and gender-inflected wounds of the past. In Chapter 1, for instance, I discussed how, in Tula Tula, Siopis saw the building up of affect-laden layers of paint over the face of the domestic worker as a means of ‘soothing’ the traumas inflicted on an individual through the meanings attached to the pigmentation of her skin. As I discussed in Chapter
1, in the early 1990s, Siopis sought to examine the skin surface as a construct, in response to a past where
our lives stressed the exteriority of experience, when we lived on the surface of our skins, when institutionalised racism made it extremely difficult for skin colour to signify anything more or less than the possession or lack of power (Siopis 1997: 60).
During apartheid, Siopis considers, the skin could not be penetrated because the surface was all-determining. Interiority was negated. Therefore when Nuttall sees a return to a circulation of meaning on the surface, there is a distinction that may at times, due to its very subtlety, slip from a rejection of inherited signifiers adhering to skin into a return to the negation of interiority, through a habituated unease about going deeper into the psyche (like ‘Sophie’ refusing to recline on the psycho-therapist’s couch), whether that unease be due to apartheid ideology or through an externalised focus on consumerist markers of social status. The movement described is thus from saying that racialised colour ‘means’ only two things (possession of or lack of power), to an exploration of multivariate meanings, to a rejection of all meanings (“just a fact” ‘meaning’ that all
‘meanings’ merely bounce off the impermeability of the plastic skin).
272 The potential paradox is that this syntax of ‘cladding’ reaches into language of containment that ironically repeats, for instance, Nead’s analysis of the regulation of the
“wanton matter” of the female body and female sexuality in acculturating her as an image that is acceptable to a patriarchal gaze (Nead 1990: 11). In examining the female nude in western art history, Nead explains:
One of the principal goals of the female nude has been the containment and regulation of the female sexual body. The forms, conventions and poses of art have worked metaphorically to shore up the female body – to seal orifices and to prevent marginal matter from transgressing the boundary dividing the inside of the body and the outside, the self from the space of the other (Nead 1990: 6).
Nuttall therefore proposes Sibande’s “shoring up” (Nead) or “sealing” (Nuttall) of the female body as an act of reclaiming agency and self-definition, rather than as internalised patriarchal self-containment. Nuttall’s emphasis on the hyperbolically asserted, even performed, polished, monochromatic qualities of the ‘blackness’ of the ‘skin’ of
Sibande’s figures allows for a reading of the figures’ surfaces as, in miming their own excess, creating the slippage between mimicry and difference that exposes the workings of racial and social power (as Bhabha theorises). Sibande’s creation therefore of a figure in Introspection (2014; Fig 5.34) where the figure’s ‘face’ detaches from her ‘face’ underneath, is significant firstly, in its creation of stylised fluids seeping from the rupture, and secondly, in its enactment of a doubling of identity that began with ‘Sophie’ but now moves into a rupturing of the ‘Purple Figure’.
273 The consequence of this regulation of the female body, according to Nead, is a heightened awareness of, and fetishisation of, the boundaries and distinctions between the inside and outside of the human form (Nead 1990: 8). The ‘frame’ or framing, rather than the art form itself, is therefore the site of meaning (Nead 1990: 8). With a heightened awareness of boundaries comes a concern with all substances that transgress those boundaries. As Nead says:
Hygiene and dirt imply two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a transgression of that order. All transitional states therefore pose a threat; anything that resists classification or refuses to belong to one category or another emanates danger. And once again it is the margins, the very edges of categories that are most critical in the construction of symbolic meaning (Nead 1990: 8).
I have touched on how this concern about hygiene has been instrumental in the development of the uniform and the rhetoric surrounding it for servants in different ages and for contemporary domestic workers today. The irony that repeats on itself in a vicious circle is that, as Nead (1990: 8) explains, “[i]f nothing is allowed in or out, then the female body remains a disturbing container for both the ideal and the polluted” (Nead
1990: 8). The uniform for a domestic worker therefore functions in some way in place of the inability of the employer to control the ‘otherness’ and potential ‘waywardness’ of the body and psyche of this interloper (who is often of a different ‘race’, class, language and geographical origin) into the closed family circle. The emphasis on containment, invisibility, hygiene and neatness for a servant are arguably only surface symptoms of a greater unease for the ability of this person to step outside of her prescribed role and to disturb “identity, system [and] order” (Kristeva 1982: 4). The presence of a servant in a
274 household therefore has always the potential to precipitate an abject rupture of symbolic meaning, if abjection is defined as Julia Kristeva theorised it; it is “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules, [what draws attention to] the fragility of the law”
(Kristeva 1982: 4).
In Introspection (detail; Fig. 5.35), the dried black rivulets cannot be blood, as they are too darkly coloured, even though they symbolise the blood that would flow from a living human body if the skin were to be flayed from the flesh. In keeping with what I have called Sibande’s representation of a ‘hyper-black’ body as resisting or side-stepping the marks and markers of ‘race’ by assuming a mannequin-like impermeability, the figure
‘bleeds’ ‘hyper-black’ blood, performing wounding, rather than experiencing it in any realistic or mimetic manner. Since the ‘blood’ is the same paint that coats the fiberglass figures, it literally emanates from the surface of the body and from the ‘skin’ that has been painted on the fiberglass figure. It does not come from inside the body. Just by issuing forth, blood and other bodily secretions demonstrate the leaky porousness of the human body (Douglas 1966 in Nead 1990: 5). In contemporary South Africa, however, where blood is one of the bodily fluids that carries the HIV virus and as such is often regarded with extreme caution and fear, the boundaries between the inside and outside of the body take on a heightened significance. Sibande’s figure is frozen and revealed in a transitional moment, in the shedding of part of her skin. This somatic shedding signifies an internal process of self-reflection, as evidenced in the work’s title, confusing in another way the (false) inside/outside and mind/body dichotomy. At the same time,
275 however, the artificiality that is sartorially signalled through what one can term the ‘stage blood’ may be analysed as a wry commentary on the behavioural boundaries that are put in place through habit and repetition to circumvent the transgression of social norms in the ‘master’/‘servant’ as well as the apparently more democratic employer/employee relationship.
Uncanny doubling in life casts and death masks
In Sibande’s ‘Sophie’ sculptures, ‘Sophie’, through her costume or transformed ‘maid’s uniform’, is ebulliently sartorial in her excess and mimicry in as much as she overflows the boundaries of the ‘decorum’ and ‘invisibility’ that a successful servant traditionally and conventionally is supposed to assume. In this she may be read as offering a place of celebration for the self-expression of individual women employed as domestic workers in
South Africa, while acknowledging the colonial and apartheid origins of the practice in a manner that is, arguably, in the end unthreatening to the maintenance of South Africa’s new institutionalised privilege (unless this new elite has any sense of irony or self- reflection to see themselves sartorially mirrored back in Sophie’s aspirations). This makes Introspection arguably one of Sibande’s more interesting works because it is the life cast, specifically the cast of the face, Mary Sibande’s face, that performs the fissures in this doubling of identity.
276 Even by the 1960s, life or body casting and plaster, the medium and material that the process57 used, was not fully accepted as a legitimate method of art-making within a fine arts context (Schmahmann 1998: 27). This was because of the fields in which the method’s historical use had been most prevalent, namely biology, natural history, and anthropology, during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, where likeness to living subjects were prized (Schmahmann 1998: 13). Consequently, perceptions formed of life casts being objective, “impartial records” rather than representations of their subjects, and such, mechanical rather than aesthetic or creative and interpretative processes
(Schmahmann 1998: 13). As Honoré de Balzac's Frenhofer says to Porbus in Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu (1831 – 37):
You are not a servile copyist, but a poet […T]ry to make a cast of your mistress' hand, and set up the thing before you. You will see a monstrosity, a dead mass, bearing no resemblance to the living hand; you would be compelled to have recourse to the chisel of a sculptor who, without making an exact copy, would represent for you its movement and its life (Balzac, in Pointon 2014: 29).
Because life-casting was so strongly identified with an ‘objective’ and mechanical copying, they were often used in ‘scientific’ and museum settings to display body casts of peoples perceived to be ‘lower races’ such as the Khoekhoe, the native pastoralist people of southwestern Africa. Being able to satisfy a colonial fascination with racial typography
57 Life casts, or body casts, are created by applying first grease and then wet plaster bandages to the body of a chosen model. The front and back halves are often done separately. When the cast is released from the model, which is a dangerous and delicate process, the inside of the hardened plaster body cast, which was in touch with the contours of the model’s body, becomes the outside of the fiberglass cast because the wetted fiberglass cloth and fiberglass resin is placed inside the plaster cast. The fiberglass is then separated from the plaster and the two halves are connected. This is called a double-casting process.
277 has therefore linked life-casting to ethnographic display practices. Another consequence of the ‘life-like’ qualities of body-casts was that they could be confused with taxidermy, especially when body-casts of people were displayed in the same context as embalmed animals; this occurred, for instance, for visitors to the South African Museum in the early twentieth century, who viewed dioramas depicting ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentots’
(Schmahmann 1998: 13).
Therefore when Sibande, as a black African woman, uses body casts in her art practice, she positions herself as re-examining these ethnographic associations. Her distancing of her subjects from attempts at mimetic naturalism, with the chosen paint colour of her subjects’ skin for instance, therefore becomes a sartorial device that serves to undo exploitative viewing and making practices from the past. In this way, ‘Sophie’ functions symbolically not unlike the Black Madonna whom in Chapter 2 I discussed in
Alexander’s photomontage Fragmented Group (Fig. 2.22). Here, the pregnant Madonna is montaged through pasted photocopies into an ethnographic exhibit displaying life-cast moulds of people at the Natural History Museum in Cape Town. I argued that the
Madonna’s pregnant belly acted as a place of generative fermentation for re-imagining the human subjects of ethnographic display practices. Sibande’s body casts in their creative labour arguably do something similar.
Since Sibande makes a feature of the face of the ‘Purple Figure’ in Introspection, I focus here on the practice of casting life and death masks. In doing so, I propose how Sibande’s life masks, as imprints of the artist’s own body, relate particularly to her self-exploration
278 after the more overt hybridisation of ‘Sophie’ has been replaced by another language of, potentially confrontational, doubling. As Marcia Pointon explains:
Both life masks and death masks record the immobilized features of someone who is either already dead or who will die. The connection between portraiture and mortality is here at its most vivid (portraits are made in the expectation they will outlast their subjects) (Pointon 2014: 25).
The life mask, which is obviously what Sibande has made from her own face, is an imprinted portrait that, as Pointon (2014: 27) observes, “seems to freeze the sitter for perpetuity in defiance of biological dissolution”. The death mask is an imprint taken of a recently deceased person, the making of which reached its peak during the nineteenth century, which Pointon (2014: 31) notes as the age of the mechanisation of the object; it also saw the flowering of the cult of mourning. When preserved or displayed, a death mask is aestheticised so as “to distance the cast face from the actual face, to rinse it clean of the touch of the corpse and therefore of its association with decaying matter” (Pointon
2014: 33). The need for such rinsing and dissociation is psychically necessary for the tending of bodily boundaries because as Kristeva (1982: 4) notes “[t]he corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.
Abject.” However, that it is difficult to distinguish between life and death casts is, as
Pointon (2014: 33) says, “axiomatic: both in the drama of their production and in their material characteristics, these masks epitomize the conundrum of the relation between life and death.” The “drama of their production” is real: a person must breathe through, usually, straws inserted into the nostrils, enacting being buried alive. In their “material characteristics”, both life and death casts are dependent on a body imprint, which as
279 Pointon (2014: 33) describes “is in itself deathly, regardless of the condition of the subject from which it is taken. The artefact invokes in the viewer the melancholy of an absence that is most definitively that of death”.
The figure in Introspection displays her internal musings as her ‘face’ detaches from her skull, revealing a ‘face’ beneath that. In a straightforward reading, contemplation allows the ‘mask’ that the figure assumes, and perhaps the role she performs while wearing that mask, to be discarded. Yet unavoidably, because Sibande is playing on and with both life and death masks, the ambivalence of the figure’s identity to herself, and to generations of ancestral women, is affirmed.
Whether in a life or a death cast, “the look, so significant in portraiture, is veiled”
(Pointon 2014: 27). The closed, unseeing eyes in all of Sibande’s figures draw the figure’s attention inward as she actively absents herself into her fantasy dream-world, in, as Dodd (2010: 468) suggests, “a fit of hysterical conjuring or sublime prayer”. By withdrawing her sight, she perhaps refuses to acknowledge, collude with and validate the viewer (as Muholi does with her averted eyes). However, she also rehearses her own death. ‘Sophie’ is a figure that died before she was born; as Sibande points out, her first exhibition was titled Long Live the Dead Queen (Sibande in Meekison, 2014). The closed eyes of Sibande’s figures are among the most persuasive elements of her works if one were to consider her output as expressing, as Dodd (2010: 474) puts it, “a shift from melancholic understandings of a post-traumatic culture” towards a “favoring of generative fictions over the verisimilitude of documentary forms” (Dodd 2010: 474).
280 Sibande’s figures do not look outward to be witnessed, as is characteristic of documentary genres, where workers such as in Zubeida Vallie’s series meet the eye of the camera/photographer/viewer (Figs. 3.11 – 3.14), but nor do Sibande’s figures turn inward to reflect upon their own psychological landscapes. They close their eyes or ‘blind’ themselves to disappear from their realities as domestic workers and reinvent themselves in ever more excessive daydreams, thereby expressing the commodification of self- fulfilment and happiness in symbols of (and of symbolic, rather than actual) status and wealth – the ‘bling’ of which Sibande speaks.
In this way, a commemoration of Sibande’s matrilineal heritage of domestic workers also functions as a turn away from their realities. This has the potential to allow the
‘Sophie’ figure to function as a fetish marking a place of unresolved trauma.
Commemoration as the ambiguity central to Freud’s later theory of fetishism attempts, as
Pollock (2004: 10) describes, “to disavow unbearable knowledge while simultaneously placing at its traumatic site a memorial marker, the fetish”. The ever-increasing demand for ‘Sophie’ installations by curators of group exhibitions on national and international art circuits may be read as acknowledging the unresolved traumas of South Africa’s contemporary social and economic crises even as these ‘Sophies’ step back from engaging with them in more nuanced and varied specificity because of their validation of
Sophie’s own disavowal of her realities. When Sibande describes Sophie’s closed eyes, she narrates it as an act of agency: ‘Sophie’ closes her own eyes. Life casts and death masks also usually depict eyes as blank orbs. But it is also possible to interpret Sibande as enacting this blinding upon the figures that bear her own image.
281
In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny”, Freud elaborates how the phenomenon of the double
(doppelganger), together with “a compulsion to repeat” and “omnipotence of thoughts”, is the paradigm of the Freudian uncanny (unheimlich). For a subject, an experience of the uncanny is frightening because it is secretly and long familiar in that it has gone through repression and returned from it (Freud 1919: 245). Freud claims that the double emerged originally as an insurance against and denial of the inevitability of death (of the ego) and therefore the ‘immortal soul’ was initially figured as a double of the material body (Freud
1919: 235). Yet, Freud continues, “[f]rom having been an assurance of immortality, it
[the double] became an uncanny harbinger of death” (Freud 1919: 235). Freud postulates that a developing self-consciousness, ‘conscience’ and ability to criticise and critique the ego-self can be shaped into the idea of a body-double of a person (Freud 1919: 235 – 36).
In addition to the double as an autonomously-embodied critic of the self, the double may also express “all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse circumstances have crushed” (Freud
1919: 236).
By these definitions, both ‘Sophie’ and the ‘Purple Figure’ are not only body casts of
Sibande, but uncanny doubles as well, expressing the ambivalences in her own ideas of selfhood as well as the personas that she takes on on behalf of her own female ancestors and other women contemporary to her now in South Africa, who have been denied opportunities to explore multiple facets of their personalities. The disquiet Sibande voices may be interpreted then not only as a fear of being seen in art circles either as a ‘one-trick
282 pony’ or as the producer of endlessly profitable iterations of ‘Sophie’ but also as a realisation that she has in a sense birthed a character that may cannibalise its creator. In
Introspection, the body cast, by tearing off its face, is performing a form of autogenesis that removes its representation from that of Sibande even as it uses her own face to do so.
In portraiture, as I have discussed, the face is of primary significance to the portrayal of
‘self’. Here Sibande creates a situation where she symbolically gives her ‘face’ over to her double to manipulate. Her figures’ closed eyes may in this light be seen as enacting a fear of going blind, which expresses a fear of self-annihilation (or, in Freudian terminology, castration) (Freud 1919: 231). Although the ‘Purple Figure’ is promoted as
Sibande’s exploration into meanings of her own self-assertion and womanhood, I cannot but conceive of them as ambivalent harbingers. Given the way in which ‘Sophie’ has been allegorised as a comment on the nation’s materialist aspirations and the perceived failure of the idealist national project symbolised by the ‘Rainbow Nation’, the trajectory of Sibande’s body-cast creations may be seen as in line with Freud’s contextualising of the double, where the double “has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned to demons” (Freud 1919: 236).
I contend therefore that some of these readings are appropriate in considering the implications of Nuttall’s opinion that Sibande’s creations portray “a certain unfixing and reconstructing of self through the capacities of things” (Nuttall 2013: 427). Whatever interpretative path Sibande’s figures may take the viewer down, the domestic-worker leitmotif remains as a foundational feature of an analysis of Sibande’s output. This is significant because, as with the majority of the art-makers whose work I have examined,
283 it demonstrates how tropes of domestic labour and workers form an inter-woven thread in the tapestry of South African experiences.
Conclusion
In Sophie’s imaginative transgression of the boundaries between the inside and outside of her own body, in her conflation of the ‘uniforms’ of aristocratic, middle-class and working-class colonial women, in her pastiche of recognisable cultural icons, Sibande explores the multi-layered, value-laden regulation of African women’s bodies and its sensitive relation to what she calls domestic workers’ “lingering self-doubts”. Neither a victim nor a heroine, Sibande’s Sophie is creatively ambivalent. Liberating and self- regulatory, her internal fantasies transform her external appearance, even as ideals of femininity and aspirations of consumerist accumulation inspire them. The regulation of black female bodies and the already entrenched function of and interaction with a domestic worker’s conventionally determined role and appearance is both acknowledged and contested through her installations of ‘Sophie’ and the ‘Purple Figure’. Rather than seeking to portray her subjects’ ‘essences’, or indeed to delve too far down into a wounded collective past, I have examined how Sibande has sartorially challenged the uniform signifier of the ‘maid’s overall’ as well as putting forward a psychoanalytically- inflected interpretation of the implications of the life casts in her practice. In doing this,
Sibande seeks to position herself, personally and creatively, in relation to the generations of black African women who work or have worked as ‘maids’, representing them as what
Nelson (2010: 12) terms the “subjects of representation”.
284 CONCLUSION
In this study, I have explored several historical and contemporary tropes that constitute the visual and ideological making of a ‘servant’ and a servant’s work as an incomplete and ever-regulated process of ‘othering’. I have also detailed how this ‘othering’ has been contested by art-makers of multivariate racial, gender, sexual, class and generational backgrounds who have sought to facilitate visual rapprochements across these lines of socialised difference. The liminality of the domestic worker within her employer’s home and family circle, and the reproduction of labour that she facilitates, stirs up layers of memories and emotions in South Africa. Art practitioners have often been drawn to excavate the vulnerability and ambivalence of these layers.
Freud’s Oedipal theory, McClintock (1995: 88) argues, elides the structuring of the middle- and upper-middle-class household around the presence of working-class maidservants, nurses and governesses, and as such overrides the child’s historically variant experience within that household. The story of Oedipus as the privileged and paradigmatic example of the maturing of a (male) individual within a family in relation to male and female origins is clearly limited and yet its influence has continued. This is arguably because variants of such a narrative are paradigmatic of patriarchal and heteronormative narratives that extend beyond those of classic Freudian theories of subjectivity. I have dwelt at some length on these theories because of how McClintock develops the argument for the servant to be read as the figure who opens up the generative triad in the archetypal familial narrative. I have discussed Penny Siopis’s Tula
285 Tula as exploring some consequences of this subjectivising process on the ‘nanny’ and male child. The figure of the servant becomes the site for the interpellation of self and other, comfort and contamination, public and private as well as family and nation, serving both material and ideological ends. The figure of the servant is therefore potentially a complex subject around which to coalesce a hermeneutics that is, as McClintock puts it,
“a culturally contextualised psychoanalysis that is simultaneously a psychoanalytically informed history” (McClintock 1995: 72). A comprehensive hermeneutics of this type is beyond the scope of this study, where my intention has been specifically to analyse representations of South African domestic workers. I hope to have been able to draw in selected interpretive tools and frameworks in order to explore not only the socio- historical context of why institutionalised, paid domestic labour is such a potent issue in
South Africa, but also why the figure of the servant recurs as an archetype or mytheme in cultural narratives.
Many researchers and commentators avow that the institution of domestic work provides a microcosm of the socio-political practices put in place by colonial and apartheid ideology and legislation. As Du Plessis, whom I quoted in the Introduction, puts it:
“[T]he institution of domestic work seems to have a special quality that allows it to carry and encapsulate something of the apartheid moral order that goes beyond the actual practice” (Du Plessis 2011: 48). Because there was much that defined the practice as exploitative and inhuman, and because there remains much that is unresolved about institutionalised domestic labour today, when art-makers (or indeed, many cultural commentators and creative practitioners) explore the relationships and subjectivities
286 produced through this practice, the dynamics revealed are often uncanny (unheimlich).
The uncanny marks the partial return of the repressed, of what is made known when it is knowledge that is collectively agreed to be kept concealed, yet it is inadvertently revealed. It is knowledge that is kept hidden not only from others, but also from the self.
Bhabha augments the Freudian uncanny in light of postcolonial experiences, terming it the ‘unhomely’. As Corrigall suggests in her discussion of Mary Sibande’s work, Bhabha positions this ‘unhomeliness’ as within the abilities of artists to mark and make recognizable in the aesthetic realm. The unhomely
has less to do with forced eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social accommodation or historical migrations and cultural relocations. The home does not remain the domain of domestic life, nor does the world simply become its social or historical counterpart (Bhabha 1997: 445).
In Southern Suburbs, Alice Mann’s doubled portraits of the inhabitants in affluent
Capetonian homes – black domestic worker and young white employer – produce this unhomely/uncanny effect.
In analysing Jane Alexander’s Pastoral Scene, I have attempted to demonstrate some ways in which the liminal presence of the domestic-worker character exposes the unhomeliness or uncanniness of South Africa’s socio-political landscape. She does this by drawing some experiences of black women employed as domestic workers and servants into both the employer’s home and into conventions of the pastoral genre.
Sibande may also be seen as evoking the uncanny with her body-double ‘Sophie’ characters. Alexander also makes use of body casts in her sculpture installations – as I
287 have noted ‘Beauty’, the domestic-worker character is modelled on a living woman – but as I have discussed, in Sibande’s work, the compulsive repetition and iteration of the figures is a central feature of her oeuvre. Unlike Alexander, Sibande may be interpreted as specifically referencing the uncanny qualities of body casting because she draws overt attention to the ‘hyper-black’ plasticity of her painted fiberglass casts, which are deployed in – as well as lost in – internal dream/nightmare landscapes. Sibande asserts that these dreamscapes express the aspirational motivations and fetishistic materialism of contemporary black South Africans, which speaks to the expression of the societal trauma that South Africa has experienced.
At the site of the uncanny, or unhomely, fetishes are placed as boundary markers and commemorations. They attempt to disawow unbearable knowledge even as they mark it
(Pollock 2006: 10). Fetishism is more than a reductionist explanation of male subjectivity formation as responding to the fear of castration. Fetishes, according to McClintock, have multivariate origins and mark “a crisis in social meaning as the embodiment of an impossible irresolution” (McClintock 1995: 184). In the face of these irresolutions, “[t]he contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur with compulsive repetition” (McClintock 1995: 184). In Steven Cohen’s performances with his former ‘nanny’ Nomsa Dhlamini, his deliberate fetishisation of her hyperbolically repeats her oppression as symbolic of that experienced by black women in
South Africa. I have argued, however, that his process does not release these fetishes, despite the potential for this kind of diffusion in the empathic relationship that exists
288 between Cohen and Dhlamini. I have outlined this close ‘mother-surrogate’ relationship as both enabling and also preventing alternative narrating modes.
Releasing fetishes may be done by diffusing traumas without wholly absorbing them.
Delivering trauma into narrative and representation is necessary for healing (Pollock
2009: 40). In this study, I have proposed that issues arising from both historical trauma
(overwhelming events and experiences specific to an individual life within a cultural and time period) and structural trauma (the losses which form discrete subjectivity) are stimuli to creative production in representations of domestic workers. I have, however, attempted to highlight some instances of the inter-relation of historical and structural trauma in a South African context. This speaks to South African culture post-apartheid as it continues to seek language to express the consequences of migration, urbanisation, the
HIV/AIDS crisis, racialised and class-based separations and inequalities, community fragmentation and new supportive networks, lost and new opportunities, petty power manipulations, and affects such as anger, resentment, anxiety and fear. These are some of the things that structured everyday life during colonial and apartheid rule. The relationship to these experiences informs many aspects of contemporary South African culture, often expressed in a combination of selective remembering and deliberate forgetting. Art-makers such as Maureen de Jager have worked with childhood memories during apartheid, exploring in her medium the various filters placed over experience.
To explore how some of these consequences pertain to domestic workers as subjects, I have discussed key issues of representation that have arisen in portraiture and
289 performance. Domestic workers are subjects who may carry, as Pollock (2005: 54) phrases it, “the burden of representation which is not self-representation”. All the contemporary art-makers whom I have examined have expressed their awareness of this and have sought in their individual ways to be alternately respectful, playful and empathic in response. Finding a visual language to represent domestic workers in the years following the democratic transition has been symptomatic of a wider desire to reassess deeply ingrained ideological and material ways of relating to one another. Some art-makers such as Siopis and Angela Buckland manipulate polarities of presence/absence in their deployment of erasure and the presence of absence as a conceptual tool. Siopis, Buckland, Sibande and Thembeka Qangule also interrogate indexes that refer to the ideological framing of domestic workers, such as the domestic- worker uniform and Anglicised naming. To depict women employed as domestic workers, some art-makers have adopted a historicising imperative, such as Zubeida
Vallie’s portrait series of women, where solidarity in community is often an affirming position. Zanele Muholi, whose LGBTI* archival project in Faces and Phases has a strongly historicising approach, turns however to a different register – photographed tableaux of parodic staged performances – for working with her own familial memories as she explores the relationship dynamics in the employer’s home.
Muholi seeks a more inclusive register with which to image the nuanced and diverse experiences of black and queer women that simultaneously contextualises women performing domestic labour within the art historical canon of representations of black and queer women. Stepping interpretatively into this space of new relations, where diverse
290 narratives may be told, interpretation may also be guided by Ettinger’s re-theorisation of castrative subjectivity, which intends to work beyond polarising binaries. Ettinger, according to Pollock, invites the reader-viewer “to consider aspects of subjectivity as encounter occurring at shared borderspaces between several partial-subjects, never entirely fused nor totally lost, but sharing and processing, within difference, elements of each unknown other” (Pollock 2004: 7). I have introduced some of Ettinger’s concepts where they might elucidate Siopis’ work that focuses on the relationship between the male child and his ‘nanny’. This relationship would appear to exist precariously in these shared “borderspaces”, visualising Ettinger’s theorising of archaic infant/carer relations as a field of richly “intersubjective relations, events and passions” (Pollock 2004: 8).
It has been my intention in this series of case studies to draw together some issues surrounding the representation of black female domestic workers in South Africa. It does not purport to be a complete survey of the subject and as such, many questions may arise from this study that propose additional directions for future research. The inter- disciplinary nature of the subject weaves together multiple threads of enquiry. Visual analyses of advertisements featuring domestic workers in the popular press over the last century would be valuable to consider as reflecting evolving perceptions of domestic workers. Advertisements that today target black women, promoting conservative gender roles, emphasising mothering and nurturing as acts of agency and self-expression, could be examined in relation to images and text that encouraged the reproduction of their labour outside their own homes, of being ‘good servants’. More in-depth archival research into depictions and perceptions of servants in the nineteenth and early twentieth
291 centuries would doubtless yield a fascinating account of the development of race relations within the intimacy of European and African homes. The feminising of the domestic labour sector from the 1920s would also be worthwhile to chart in visual and textual sources. I have attempted to situate representations of domestic workers within art- makers’ thematic concerns rather than to decontextualise them. It would be fruitful to continue this effort and incorporate representations of domestic workers into other thematic groupings, such as part of investigating art-makers’ explorations into issues of family, home, child-care, security and national identity and affiliation. Claudette
Schreuders, whom I have not discussed in my study but whose Mother with Child (1995) and Abba (2010) portray ‘nannies’, is someone who could be considered in relation to these framing themes. Extending the focus to the wider African continent would give the opportunity to compare how different colonised peoples responded to roles imposed upon them, given that a common thread proves to be sartorial mimicry of hierarchical power, whether that power be colonial, post- or neo-colonial.
Paid domestic labour as a global phenomenon has produced research that spans the fields of sociology, anthropology, history, geography, politics, the architecture of space, psychology and psychoanalysis, literary and post-colonial studies and the visual arts. In focusing on how five contemporary South African art-makers have represented women employed as domestic workers, I have begun, and concluded, with a simple premise: that the socio-political status of domestic workers reflects the successes and the failures of the national project toward an integrated society. How art practitioners perceive, respond to,
292 subvert, and hope to change these allegories of family and nation, whilst writing in narratives of individual women, has been the subject of my study.
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