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Historical Events, Trauma and Memory in South African Video Art (J0 Ractliffe, Penny Siopis, Berni Searle, Minnette Vári)

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Historical Events, Trauma and Memory in South African Video Art (J0 Ractliffe, Penny Siopis, Berni Searle, Minnette Vári) 1 PRECARIOUS VIDEO: HISTORICAL EVENTS, TRAUMA AND MEMORY IN SOUTH AFRICAN VIDEO ART (J0 RACTLIFFE, PENNY SIOPIS, BERNI SEARLE, MINNETTE VÁRI) PhD DISSERTATION – HISTORY OF ART VOLUME 1 Yvette Mariette Greslé History of Art University College London January 2015 2 Declaration I, Yvette Mariette Greslé, confirm that the work presented in this dissertation is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the dissertation. 3 Abstract This dissertation explores four recent examples of video art by four South African women artists. It focuses on Jo Ractliffe’s Vlakplaas: 2 June 1999 (drive-by shooting) [1999/2000], Berni Searle’s Mute (2008), Penny Siopis’ Obscure White Messenger (2010) and Minnette Vári’s Chimera (the white edition, 2001 and the black edition 2001-2002). I consider the visual, sonic, temporal, durational, spatial, sensory and affective capacities of these works, and their encounter with historical events/episodes and figures the significance and affective charge of which move across the eras differentiated as apartheid and post-apartheid. I seek to contribute to critiques of the post-apartheid democracy, and the impetus to move forward from the past, to forgive and reconcile its violence, while not actively and critically engaging historical trauma, and its relation to memory. Each of the videos engaged enter into a dialogue with historical narratives embedded within the experience and memory of violence and racial oppression in South Africa. The study is concerned with the critical significance and temporality of memory in relation to trauma as a historical and psychoanalytical concept applicable to ongoing conditions of historical and political violence and its continuous, apparently irresolvable repetition in political-historical life. This inquiry is underpinned by art historical approaches to the relationship between art and trauma, and, in particular, the work of Jill Bennett (2005) and Griselda Pollock (2013). It is concerned primarily with Bennett and Pollock’s privileging, from their particular theoretical perspectives, of the affects and internal logics/worlds of art objects, which prompt critical thought, and theoretical and historical inquiry. The particular temporality of video is engaged through historical and psychoanalytical concepts of trauma. The videos selected for this dissertation suggest ideas of temporal and spatial disorientation, displacement, collapse, and irresolvable repetitive return. The opacity that characterises the works is a major point of emphasis, and is related to the dissertation’s concern with trauma, racial oppression and historical/epistemic violence. 4 A major concern is how artists and scholars enter into dialogues with history, from the perspectives of their own subjectivities, without reinscribing historical and epistemic violence, and the objectification of marginalised subjects. Situated within the parameters of feminist ethics the study foregrounds women artists. I argue for an ethics that takes into account self-reflexivity, and the artist’s, and the scholar’s, situated relationship to history, in the aftermath of sustained historical racial oppression and authoritarianism. It considers the possibilities of art objects as sites that facilitate empathetic, critical and intellectually engaged encounters with historical trauma and violence in South Africa. The videos explored counter spectacle and didactic, and authoritarian, modes of representation. In the absence of a sustained and visible art historical narrative of the history of video art in South Africa, the study focuses on work representative of the earliest, documented examples of video art by women artists, which emerge out of the transition from apartheid. The tension between history’s relationship to objectivity, detachment and empirical knowledge, and its participation in subjective, imaginary, and performative processes underpins the study. 5 Volume 1 Title Page 1 Declaration 2 Abstract 3 Introduction 8 Apartheid/Post-Apartheid 8 Against Spectacle 16 Women Artists 20 Trauma and Art 28 South African Video Art 40 Chapter One 47 Signposts 47 Obscured Vision/Aesthetic Construction 49 Circulation 59 Contested Histories 66 Vlakplaas 73 Haunted Landscapes 89 Chapter Two 101 Tracing 101 Fire and Smoke 104 Burning Bodies 115 Pulling at Threads 122 Mourning/Silence 126 6 Chapter Three 138 Disorientation 138 Telling Tales 149 Obscure White Messenger 160 Colour 170 Transparency/Opacity 181 Chapter Four 187 Mutability 187 Chimera 193 Familiar Discomfort 199 Unreliable Presence 207 Cyborg 216 Conclusion 220 Bibliography 228 Acknowledgements 249 7 Volume 2: Illustrative Material Videos Enclosed (attached to front and back cover) Title Page 1 Table of Contents 2 List of Videos 3 List of Illustrations 4 Chapter One 15 Chapter Two 36 Chapter Three 53 Chapter Four 96 8 Introduction Apartheid/Post-Apartheid In a 2009 Mail & Guardian article, Njabulo Ndebele draws attention to the political- affective charge of apartheid in South Africa today: ‘the existence of [...] a collective space of anguish may have to be recognised and acknowledged as the one feature in our public and private lives that has the potential to bind us. Beyond that it is vital to recognise that, being in that space, South Africans may not hold the same quantum of responsibility and accountability.’1 Pumla Gqola brings into view the question of accountability and responsibility in the aftermath of sustained historical racial violence, critiquing the glib promise of the Rainbow Nation: ‘rainbowism is evoked at specific points where a certain kind of non-racialism, though not necessarily anti-racism, needs to be stressed. We are not always rainbow people, only some of the time when the need arises’.2 Apartheid – imagined in this dissertation in relation to the art object’s dialogue with historical events, memory and trauma in South Africa - is a profoundly affecting phenomenon, the psychic, emotional, bodily, political, social, cultural, economic and spatial, implications of which reverberate in the present. It continues to inhabit and circumscribe South Africa’s historical imagination, cultural forms, social and political life and the seemingly innocuous encounters of everyday experience. Public life is imbued with narratives of anger, guilt, shame, denial, blame, and complicity: Psychic trauma related to apartheid’s discourse of white supremacy is apparent, overtly and opaquely, in South African public discourse.3 To speak of a post-apartheid era - as if there is a definitive before and after - is to silence the continuums of memory’s relationship to historical trauma, which complicates the boundaries of past and 1 Njabulo Ndebele, ‘Of pretence and protest’, September 23 2009, http://mg.co.za/article/2009-09-23- of-pretence-and-protest (accessed 5 August 2014). 2 Pumla Gqola, ‘Defining people: Analysing power, language and representation in metaphors of the New South Africa’, Transformation 47, (2001), 94-106, 100. 3 Many of the debates that take place in South African public life are engaged on the blog ‘Africa is a Country’, http://africasacountry.com/ (accessed 15 December 2014). 9 present. It is to negate the deeply ensconced psychic and power-laden disconnections present in South African social, political, cultural and economic life. And yet, the term post-apartheid has gained currency and is widely used. Writing about apartheid and remembrance, Mark Sanders articulates questions that are fundamental, and yet infrequently asked: What was apartheid? How is it being remembered? What is apartheid?4 Sanders explores the historical contingencies of remembrance in post-apartheid South Africa with an emphasis on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).5 He brings a Freudian perspective to national mourning and also highlights the limitations embedded, discursively, epistemologically and ethically, in concepts of forgiveness and reparation: ‘To remember apartheid is to remember that what made for its conditions of possibility can be repeated in the very acts of remembrance that, by linking epistemic and mournful practice, undertake to give an account of, and make reparation for, apartheid’.6 Sanders troubles temporal distinctions between past and present in South Africa; historical conditions of past and present are enmeshed and suggest future conditions of possibility. Historically sedimented violence, whether related to race, gender or epistemic and discursive structures more broadly, can be repeated.7 This notion of historical repetition and enmeshment is also foregrounded in the work of Mahmood Mamdani who draws attention to how the legal and administrative apparatus of apartheid underpinned the constitution of the TRC itself: ‘It had eyes only for the apparatus of civil law that governed white civil society and excluded black society, and that was at the heart of the claim that apartheid was indeed a rule of law’.8 4 Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007), p.34. 5 Ibid., p.34. 6 Ibid.,p.58. 7 Ibid., p.58. 8 Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)’, Diacritics, Volume 32, Number 3-4 (Fall-Winter, 2002), 33-59, 58. 10 In seeking to disrupt the distinctions implied by the apartheid/post-apartheid binary I set out to contribute to critiques of the post-apartheid democracy, which
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