Becoming animal: liminal rhetorical strategies in contemporary South African art (original) (raw)
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2015
This thesis examines how the language of species pressures the construction of ‘the human’ in post-apartheid democracy in selected recent works by South African artists Nandipha Mntambo, Jane Alexander, Elizabeth Gunter and Steven Cohen. It responds to Achille Mbembe’s call for a “self-writing” that not only answers the historical and contemporary violence of animalisation, but opens onto an “ethics of mutuality.” However, while Mbembe’s “self-writing” criticises the Western model of the subject, it does not disturb what Jacques Derrida describes as its “sacrificial” or “carno-phallogocentric” structure. My argument explores the ways in which these artworks trouble this structure through the ambiguous return of its constitutive sites of exclusion. The theoretical framework is informed by Derrida’s “metonymy of ‘eating well,’” Mbembe’s critique of necropolitical violence, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Donna Haraway’s readings of inappropriate/d, interspecies relationality....
LIMINALITY IN THE INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BODILY IN CONTEMPORARY ART - PhD Thesis - SUMMARY
LIMINALITY IN THE INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BODILY IN CONTEMPORARY ART , 2021
The dissertation at hand is approached with a profound understanding and reverence for the vast scope and intricacy of the subject that is the focus of this research. The multidimensional nature of the interpretations of the body in contemporary art, as a subject of analysis, gives rise to a complex and dynamic structure that can be defined as a zone of registration, parameterization, and systematisation - the very edge. It begs the question, is there a clear boundary to the corporeal, or can we only consider liminality as a recognizable drive or a need for articulation and interpretation? The spectrum of interpretations encompasses somatic and even visceral experiences beyond our awareness, through objectification, and culminates in levels of abstraction such as schema, symbol, sign, number, and the many nuanced iterations in between. The theses espoused in this dissertation are formulated from the presumption that the perceived complexity of the relationship to the corporeal in art cannot be subjected to definitive generalisations or categorizations. Rather, it endeavours to mark the boundary which oscillates between uncertainty and ambiguity, the zone that resists unambiguous definition or signification, and where the use and presence of the body and the corporeal in contemporary art are defined. A thorough analysis of the subject necessitates the excavation of the historical context and arriving at an understanding of the fragmented nature of the body in art. This approach also enables us to identify potential directions for the development of the subject. An in-depth study of the interpretations of the corporeal in contemporary art cannot be separated from the philosophical discourse of the body, the understanding of social phenomena, and identity formation, and the scientific domain of physics. It demands that we examine the physicality of bodies and the physiology thereof, as they are sensually perceived. When considering the "body" as an abstraction, its schematic representation becomes a defining characteristic of its status quo within the existing social structure and values. This tendency to view the body as a generalised quantity is critical in the disregard of its properties and specificities. The variety of states and aspects of the corporeal and the uncertainty of the body are often marginalised within a social context, making the unconventionality of corporeality inapplicable to the general socio-cultural and aesthetic status of the body. The discourse related to the question of the body inevitably leads to ambivalent concepts, resulting in a transgressive entropic structure of the paradigm. The artistic approach to the corporeal serves as a means of marking the field of research, which is closely linked to the research process itself as an indirectly determined, latent experience. My work on the subject of inquiry aims to explore the potential overflow of essences from object to subject, the capacity to distinguish and allocate moral categories to subjective sensations. In this sense, the body can be perceived as a correlation; it is accessible only outside of itself—a state of indeterminacy and unconventionality. These aspects of the "body," which do not conform to "convention," enable it to be viewed as a mental resource that is consumable in a transgressive form of "ekphrasis"—a record of an indeterminate material in an intermediate state. An essential element of my dissertation work involves my artistic exploration of the subject, which interprets, through a series of works, the body's reflection in relation to ethical categories and social prejudices. The image of the body, through its dialectical categorization, is inherently limited to a linguistic convention, considered at the limit where the transformation from one state of matter to another occurs- an allegory that is disconnected from its original form, akin to a reflection of a reflection. In order to ensure the representativeness of the present study, it is imperative to examine instances of artistic interpretations concerning the body and corporeality, specifically within the spectrum in which the body transitions from being a means to an object of art. The mechanism of synergistic interaction, known as logos-iconos, is crucial to the focus of the present study, as it possesses a distinct and inherent connection with bodily qualities. In the field of visual arts, this mechanism is observable when art is created by, through, with, and at times, within the body. The array of paradigms, or theoretical tools, available to comprehend knowledge about the body within contemporary art is endless, contingent upon the way in which the body is perceived in its independent state, prior to its classification within thought categories. Thus, assertions of a universal paradigm related to the body are implausible, as approximations of the artistic experience to specific contexts are instead more applicable. Within contemporary art, interpretations of the corporeal and its boundaries or parameters, i.e., whether they exist or not, represent further questions. Singular or plural, whole or composite, the varied applications of corporeality within art form a primary concern of the dissertation in terms of predicting the future directions of the relationship between contemporary art and the corporeal.
When Moshekwa Langa’s eponymous solo exhibition opened in Johannesburg in 1995, it was hailed as turning point in South African art as it appeared to mark the entry of the first black South African artist working within a neo-conceptualist rubric. Untrained and hailing from a rural locale, years earlier Langa’s art would most likely have been deemed unprogressive or “traditional”. Borrowing from Arnold van Gennep’s (cited by Turner 1969) notion of ‘reaggregation’ – the final phase of a rite of passage, where the subject transcends the liminal phase, in this article I explore the shifts that facilitated Langa’s provisional inclusion, while unpacking the manner in which his identity paradoxically served to ensure his liminal status. Olu Oguibe (2004) suggests that African artists can resist this position through acts of self-definition. Langa avoided this route; he was complicit in constructing his liminal identity. He challenged reaggregation via an ironic reenaction of reintegration as a universalist subject in a photographic body of work that responded to the skewed reception of his 1995 exhibition. Meditating on this landmark moment in South African art history, I demonstrate how terms and labels used to “elevate” or culturally position Langa’s art, such as the neo-conceptualist tag, were fundamental to his art being reaggregated by the predominately white artworld, although it was to some degree an uneasy fit. Other theoretical frameworks used to usher his work into the canon of the contemporary, such as a notion of African conceptualism, as proposed by Salah Hassan and Oguibe (2001) are explored. So, too, are the intricacies and flaws involved in “inclusionary” or corrective processes instigated by the same authorities that played a role in determining exclusionary paradigms. Van Gennep and Victor Turner’s theory of liminality proves useful in mapping the mechanics of aggregation and the position of the liminal subject, but, as I demonstrate in this article, it cannot sufficiently contextualise imposed notions of liminality as ascribed to African artists by Eurocentric writers who privilege inclusion into occidental canons above others.
The Artistic Traditions of Non-European Cultures, Vol. 5, 2018
The interest in African art is continual for Europeans, although its face is changing – the forms and practices it entails, and from which it surges. The constant moment of this interest is the call to identify oneself in front of the Other. This Other has been differently defined in colonial and postcolonial times, being strongly discriminated and subjugated to the European subject, abused and exploited, much later beginning the process of emancipation. Africa, along with America and Asia, was presented as savage, primitive, sometimes as beautiful (in Western categories), or as spiritual. These forms of identification were constructed in the texts of anthropologists, geographers, explorers, photographers, and others, and in images – mainly in photographs and in drawings. The discussions held around African art show the problematic status of representation: Who is representing whom? How? For what reasons? Is the person/group represented active in the creation of their representation, or are they a passive object represented from the outside, by someone else possessing the power and means of representation? What I am mostly interested in are specific strategies used the redefine the African subject in postcolonial situation. Strategies that I note are: de-construction of oppressive racial categories, which is the subject of Berni Searle’s work; re-inscription and transformation of colonial images and memories which haunt contemporary living bodies, found in Kitso Lynn Lelliott’s and Mary Sibande’s artistic realizations; and representations of the hybrid, mixed, non-normative South African subjects, as presented in photographs by Lauren Mulligan.
The shamanic seam: transnatured humanities and sutured animal bodies in contemporary visual practice
This paper was featured in the Pointure supplement (edited by Leora Farber and I), published in December 2012 in Art South Africa. This publication following the Pointure exhibition and colloquium hosted by the University of Johannesburg in 2013. This pdf contains this and other articles that emerged from these events: In pointing to a lace structure in the human experience, the Irish poet and scholar John O’ Donohue chooses an apt model for the frailty of the human interface with the eternal. He also gestures to an unexpected notion: that it is the ruptures in our lives, the openings, punctured, trimmed and mended, and at times raw, that are the most sublime. The recent Pointure exhibition and colloquium ‘laced’ together a poignant range of artworks and theoretical papers that relate to artistic acts of stitching and notional derivations of this material phenomenon. In these written theses and artworks, the acts of stitching, pricking, suturing, tearing, rupturing, cutting, embroidering, appliquéing, grafting, spinning and weaving, and a myriad of other incarnations of this practice of the ruptured mark, demonstrate and invoke the incisive, deconstructive, cathartic and prophetic energy of the ‘stitch’. Derrida’s rhetorical formulation – pointure – is employed as a probing theoretical frame for this ‘weave’ of medium and metaphor. Pointure is a metaphoric device in Derrida’s 1978 essay ‘Restitutions of the truth in pointing [Pointure]’, ‘poking holes through’ and ‘lacing together’ Heidegger and Shapiro’s exploration of themes of presence in Vincent van Gogh’s painting, Oude Schòenen (Old Shoes). This mimetic word relates to printing in terms of the “small iron blade with a point, used to fix the page to be printed on to the tympan” as well as the “the hole which it makes in the paper”; and serves the figurative purpose of opening the text for critique. Pointure also references the practice of cobbling (in an intertextual gesture to van Gogh’s shoes) in relation to the ‘sewing together’ of the shoe, and the ‘drawing together’ action of the lacing-eyelets. In the context of the Pointure exhibition and colloquium, pointure is employed as a trope through which complexes of visual culture involving ‘pointured’ mediums and ‘pointured’ literary approaches may be critically framed. In this sense, pointure serves as a textu[r]al ‘loom’ for weaving together theory and practice, with the ease that one might lace a shoe. This extended conception of pointure is here entwined (by unisex design) with Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s intrauterine inspired matrixial theory – a “maternal-feminine” model for human discourse. In a leaning towards aesthetic application and revisionist thinking, matrixial theory and Derridian pointure share a common zeitgeist. Further to this Ettinger has also linked matrixial theory figuratively to the notion of weaving. In terms of the articulation of ‘pointure-type’ visual and textual practices, matrixial theory represents significant possibilities, as it allows for a complex ‘weave’ of subjectivities within visual representation and the ‘warp and weft’ of practice and being. Ann-Marie Tully is an artist, writer, and Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg.
The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education, 2018
This chapter critically analyzes South African art criticism texts by White writers, highlighting racialized tropes in speaking about black artists and their creative production. These texts present black artists as lacking and mimetic, maintaining the naturalization of European colonial “fine arts” values and geo-specific histories. We posit that bodily epidermalized speech acts are operationalized as White property and cultural capital. By framing visual arts discourse in its bodily materiality, the chapter aims to point out the interconnectedness between theory, materiality, and practice when it comes to understanding and evaluating creative works. It also argues that the reproduction of Whiteness validates a naturalized (White) system of “looking at art” and the discoursing about and teaching of visual arts/art history.
Invisible motion: Paratactical curation of bio art and performative political imaginaries
Yetiskin, E. (2017). "Invisible motion: Paratactical curation of bio art and performative political imaginaries", Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 15 (2), p. 203-213. , 2017
Bio artworks tend towards social reflection, conveying political and societal criticism through the combination of artistic and scientific processes. Some bio artworks also challenge to subvert hegemonic political imaginaries. In this article, focusing on the curation of a bio artwork and making an ethnographic research based on my participatory observation, I suggest a new conception of contemporary curatorial practice, 'paratactical curation', which aims to create performative political imagi-naries and alternative futures. The article focuses on The Invisible Life, a series of a bio artwork of Joseph A. DeGiorgis and Ayse Gul Suter. This series was exhibited in Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair-Plugin New Media Section that I have curated in 2015. The main discussion is developed by paying attention to the giant squid axon work, in which the article responds to the emergence of a new political realm that reflects the communication problems of post-control societies: connection failures, memory loss and noise.
Aesthetic Negotiations of Identity ‒ Between Embodied and Disembodied Performance
Ekphrasis , 1/2015, 2015
The study focuses on the aesthetic and ethical relevance of the hybrid nature of a few multimedia artworks, taking Klaus Obermaier’s performances as significant self-reflexive and also trans-artistic processes. The visual, musical, choreographic, and simultaneously digital and corporeal “stories” displayed by these artworks contain an ongoing deconstruction and reconstruction of performer’s own artistic identity in-between fictional worlds, media, bodies. At the same time, by equally exposing a radical ‒ sometimes trans-human ‒ alterity, the performances call for a critical rethinking of a few aesthetic categories and of rigid theoretical dichotomies. Plus, the embodied and alternatively disembodied performances could be analyzed as an enactment of a “chaosmic” production of subjectivity (to use a formula of Guattari’s) and thus they reveal a live matrix of artistic creativity. Finally, such hybrid artworks are revealing for the ontological condition of non-captive spectators, namely those challenged to have an agency when confronted with the artistic process. The ethical value of the intermedia performance sometimes resides in the spectator’s possibility to opt, to express choices regarding the different layers of meaning, as these are embodied on stage. This is not a matter of effectively performing an option through some actual physical intervention in the stage area. It is instead an aesthetic and critical option and one pertaining to the ontology of art and to the spectator’s own paradoxical, “hypermediated” status.