Univeristy of Cape Town 2 Secular Séance Post-Victorian embodiment in contemporary South African art Alexandra Dodd Thesis presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language & Literature University of Cape Town February 2014 3 For my brave mother, Susan, who never had the opportunity to study at university. You knew. 4 Acknowledgments First, I give thanks to my supervisors, Carolyn Hamilton and Carrol Clarkson, for their wise counsel and fierce intellectual energy – and for accompanying me through the labyrinth. If a text is not an autonomous entity, but “a relation, an axis of innumerable relations”1, then these two relationships have been at the fulcrum. I am grateful also to Imraan Coovadia for his input at the early stages, and to Daniel Herwitz, Nick Shepherd, Anette Hoffmann, Hedley Twidle, Sandra Young, Coílín Parsons, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, Njabulo Ndebele, Kylie Thomas, Glen Ncube, Litheko Modisane, John Wright, David William Cohen, Carine Zaayman, Grant McNulty, Niklas Zimmer, Clare Butcher, Marlene Winberg, Joanne Bloch, Brenton Maart, and my other fellow researchers in the Archive & Public Culture research initiative for broadening my lexicon through many mind-opening dialogues. I hope that I have not shied away from the rigorous challenges they posed. Deep thanks to Jason Camlot at Concordia University in Montreal for catalyzing my initial interest in the Victorian postmodern, and to Mary Sibande, Nicholas Hlobo, Mwenya Kabwe, Kathryn Smith and Santu Mofokeng for triggering the imaginative impetus to take things further. The Research Commons at the UCT Library provided a much-needed space of quiet retreat in the final months of my PhD journey. It seems apt that the room faces onto the ascending slope of a mountain, while, on the other side of the glass, scholars sit in the still, silent interior, scaling immense peaks on the inside of themselves. I am deeply grateful for the existence of that room, and thank Amina Adam and the staff at the Research Commons for maintaining such a rare and valuable space of scholarly sanctum. I give thanks to the National Research Foundation and the Ford Foundation for funding this study. I was also the recipient of a K.W. Johnstone Research Scholarship and a UCT Doctoral Research Scholarship for 2013, and am grateful to those funds for helping to keep the wolves from my door in the final year of my PhD project. On a personal note, I feel blessed to have received such stalwart support from my dear friends Koulla Xinisteris, Anne Taylor, Laurianne Ulyate, Angela Craig, Sharon Peddie, Renate Meyer, Debra Pryor, Corina van der Spoel, Niklas Zimmer, Katya Watson, Verna Jooste, Jane Kennedy and Craig Carbutt – also from Megan Cawood, who accompanied me for the homerun. Thanks too to my father and stepmother, Ivan and Patricia Dodd, and my brother and sister-in-law James and Tanja Dodd for keeping the faith. My deepest thanks go to Wendel Fernandes for being such a patient futurist. C’est un voyage extraordinaire. 1 Borges, Jorge Luis. “Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw.” [“Nota sobra (hacia) Bernard Shaw.”] Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 5 6 For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives. To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything of oneself one must know all about others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive. Is this impossible? I think not. Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist: A Dialogue (1890)2 Colonial subjects were perhaps the furthest removed from the centres of Victorian culture, but they were heavily invested in Victorian values as much, if not more, than the Victorians themselves… In rehearsing Victorianism and its core values, the colonized were also transforming Victorian categories; they were using the dominant forms of colonialism to express their own experiences… In this sense, Victorian subjects were perhaps the first post-Victorians… The Victorian frame of reference was indispensable in the construction of what would later come to be known as postcolonial culture. Simon Gikandi, The Embarrassment of Victorianism: Colonial Subjects and the Lure of Englishness (2000)3 2 Wilde 979 3 Gikandi 159, 182 7 8 Contents List of figures 13 Abstract 15 Introduction: Aesthetic Embodiment as Public Séance 17 Séance redux 20 From the Victorian postmodern to post-Victorian embodiment 31 Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde: Victorian doubleness and colonial modernity 38 Theoretical entanglements: Postmodernism, the postcolony and beyond 46 Transnationalism: Navigating faded cartographies 50 Narrowing the field: From texts to ‘texts’ 53 Image as text 57 Emergent re-readings of the Victorian era as a time of radical experimentation 62 Bedlam waltz: First person hauntings and hankerings 65 Structure 76 Chapter One Dressed to Thrill: Counter-archival imaginings in the work of Mary Sibande 85 The pnenonic dress: Re-fashioning the past 88 Transcending submission 90 Counter-archival freedoms 93 Chapter Two Pump up the Parlour: Entanglement and desire in Nicholas Hlobo’s Umtshotsho 98 Entering the parlour 100 Alien nation 102 9 10 Chapter Three The Persistence of Empire: Unveiling Transnational Legacies of Race in ‘Funnyhouse of a Negro’ 106 Staging racial subjectivity 108 Patterns of movement, transformation, relocation 110 “Long live the dead queen” 114 The impossibility of purity 120 Catharsis 122 Chapter Four Victorian post-mortem: Forensic conjurings in Kathryn Smith’s Jack in Johannesburg 126 Forensic reconstructions 129 Joubert Park/Whitechapel: Spatio-temporal echoes 131 In with the old, in with the new: A pre-cursor to Time’s Arrow 139 Gender, “performativity”, and performance 143 Psycho-geography and ancestral impulses 146 Chapter Five “Live transmission”: Intimate ancestors in Santu Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album/Look At Me: 1890-1950 154 “Chasing Shadows” 155 The self-fashioning impulse 158 Diffusion/remixing: Remaking self and history 163 Photograph and ghost 167 Conclusion: Somatic utopias 173 The “live art” turn 176 Post-traumatic fantasy 180 “En mal d’archive” 183 Works Cited 188 11 12 List of figures Fig. 1. Mary Sibande, The Reign (2010). Mixed media installation, 330 x 200cm. Photo by John Hodgkiss. Courtesy of Gallery MOMO. Fig. 2. Mary Sibande, Long Live the Dead Queen (2010). Artworks presented on nineteen buildings in the Johannesburg CBD. Photo by Dean Hutton. Courtesy of Gallery MOMO. Fig. 3. Nicholas Hlobo, Kubomvu (2009). Found table, found lamp, rubber inner tube, ribbon, red light bulb. Installation view, Monument Gallery, Grahamstown. Photo by Carla Liesching. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Fig. 4. Nicholas Hlobo, Izithunzi (2009). Rubber inner tube, ribbon, organza lace, found objects, steel, couch. Installation view, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town. Photo by Mario Todeschini. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Fig. 5. Lesoko Seabe in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, directed by Mwenya Kabwe. December 2010. Arena Theatre, Cape Town. Photo by Ingrid Masondo. Courtesy of Ingrid Masondo. Fig. 6. Nadia Caldeira in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, directed by Mwenya Kabwe. December 2010. Arena Theatre, Cape Town. Photo by Ingrid Masondo. Courtesy of Ingrid Masondo. Fig. 7. Kathryn Smith, Jack in Johannesburg (and elsewhere) (2003). Johannesburg Art Gallery. Performance still. Photo by Andrew Meintjies. Courtesy Kathryn Smith. Fig. 8. Kathryn Smith, Jack in Johannesburg (and elsewhere) (2003–2004). DVD. Length: 14 min 24 secs. Courtesy Kathryn Smith. Fig. 9. Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo Album/Look At Me: 1890-1950. [Names of sitters unknown.] Slide 32/80, black and white slide projection (1997). [Photographer unknown.] © Santu Mofokeng. Courtesy Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg. Fig. 10. Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo Album/Look At Me: 1890-1950. [Names of sitters unknown.] Slide 8/80, black and white slide projection (1997). [Photographer unknown.] © Santu Mofokeng. Courtesy Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg. Fig. 11. Santu Mofokeng, Black Photo Album/Look At Me: 1890-1950. Moeti and Lazarus Fume. Slide 10/80, black and white slide projection (1997). [Photographer unknown.] © Santu Mofokeng. Courtesy Lunetta Bartz, MAKER, Johannesburg. 13 14 Abstract n this thesis I explore selected bodies of work by five contemporary South African artists that resuscitate nineteenth-century aesthetic tropes in ways that productively reimagine South Africa’s traumatic colonial inheritance. I investigate the aesthetic strategies and Ithematic concerns employed by Mary Sibande, Nicholas Hlobo, Mwenya Kabwe, Kathryn Smith and Santu Mofokeng, and argue that the common tactic of engagement is a focus on the body as the prime site of cognition and “the aesthetic as a form of embodiment, mode of being- in-the-world” (Merleau-Ponty 123). It is by means of the body that the divisive colonial fictions around race and gender were intimately inscribed and it is by means of the body, in all its performative and sensual capacities, that they are currently being symbolically undone and re- scripted. In my introduction, I develop a syncretic, interdisciplinary discourse to enable my close critical readings of these post-Victorian artworks. My question concerns the mode with which these artists have reached into the past to resurrect the nineteenth-century aesthetic trope or fragment, and what their acts of symbolic retrieval achieve in the public realm of the present. What is specific to these artists mode of “counter-archival” (Merewether 16) engagement with the colonial past? I argue that these works perform a similar function to the nineteenth-century séance and to African ancestral rites and dialogue, putting viewers in touch with the most haunting aspects of our shared and separate histories as South Africans and as humans.