Image by Lotte Klosters
I have worked really hard on Ukukhohlakala Komqondo (Corruption of the Mind) and although there were some hurdles, the work is on show at Galerie Bart on Bloemengracht 2 in Amsterdam.
I have been humbled, confused and rewarded while working on it and I have no idea what could be next. But there is no better birthday gift than seeing it on those walls. It made it … I made it. What more could I ask for?
Interview by Daniel B Bertina
Photo by Gita Jagessar
Today the sun shone bright and the heat was intense. On days like this not even a cold drink helps, not even the fan or a swim, but I heard this song blasting out of someone’s window in the neighborhood and it cooled me right down.
Hugh Masekela was born in Witbank on the 4th of April in 1939. Inspired by American movies and musicians like Louis Armstrong (who he would later meet), Miles Davis and Bessie Smith, he learned to play music as a youth with the help of apartheid activist Archbishop Trevor Huddleston.
In his early years he played with other South African greats like Zakes Nkosi and Kippie Moeketsi. He formed the iconic Jazz Epistles with Abdullah Ibrahim (then known as Dollar Brand) among others.
He left the country after the 1960 Sharpville Massacre and the increasing severity of the apartheid regime. With the help of Miriam Makeba and her New York cronies including Harry Belafonte, Hugh went to study and play music in New York. Makeba and Masekela worked together extensively and later married. They divorced in 1966 and Hugh moved to Los Angeles where his career thrived.
Today he is a household name and rightly so. He has made an impression on our music and politics and as the years go by, he remains the ultimate king of cool.
I found this to be a truly inspiring talk by a truly inspiring artist.
Image from: Gallery Momo
Wish you were here
Mary Sibande
Mixed media installation
2010
Since I’ve been back, I have heard some people express ambitions to move towards the West as there is more money to be earned there. Yes - the money is plenty, but it is all very carefully managed and allocated to the ‘chosen’ candidates.
Although it is not likely to be acknowledged, finding a suitable job in the Netherlands (for certain people) is quite delicate. It was often said that one isn’t eligible if one’s Dutch is not perfect, but that doesn’t often apply to candidates from other Western countries, or just candidates with some sort of Western ancestry.
Nobody likes a whistleblower, especially not in dainty little countries like the Netherlands where groupthink is ubiquitous. But the mirage is remorseless. The senseless sanctity of ‘being Dutch’ has prevalence even in service.
University researchers in sociology Evelien Loeters and Anne Backer have made a remarkable detection. After approaching 187 employment agencies, they found that 77% were knowingly discriminatory against ethnic applicants. The agencies confirmed “rather not have any Moroccans (or Turks or Surinamese) even if they speak fine Dutch”.
Through historically similar processes it remains a South African disaster that most lowly jobs, namely domestic/cleaning jobs etc are allocated to lower class black people. But with a good education in contemporary South Africa, you can go a long way in spite of your race and prior disadvantage.
And then black affirmative action also means an open preference for people of color. So I guess to some degree the tables are turned. Where it is an inconvenience in the West, it could even be an advantage in the south.
Maybe the playing field will never be even. Someone will always get the raw end of the deal. So I guess as many Dutch counterparts have elucidated, it is better to be wherever you are in the advantage. Be where you are recognized in the workforce, not as an undesirable but as a potential employee. That’s as good as it gets.
What do you see?
Installation, 100 Drawings, Mixed Media
2011
For this project I wanted to further interrogate personal and communal values. Frame of mind, in relation to groupthink was the primary predicament. Having been reading Why am I so Wise? By Friedrich Nietzsche, in which he deconstructs the very idea of values, I set out to scrutinize perceptive values.
When Elaine Vis and I began our discussions, our mutual awareness of circles, cycles and collectivity at the Wasserturm was overwhelming. Here I began exploring the cycles in my existence.
The racial argument is present by co-incidence and must not be ignored. In penetrating the idea of blackness, I was inclined to measure the whole history, magnifying the recurrent themes of authority, sadism and propaganda.
The first room, titled Holy Shit is a colorful expulsion carried out with the medium of painting. I confront the evolution of painting in both the Western and ethnic contexts with landscape, portraiture and installation. The tension between past and present; and high and low art is symbolically expressed.
In the second room, titled What do you see?, are drawings which have a metaphysical component. I obsessively collage coincidences and associations based on the notion of psychology. The result questions the issues of awareness, action and consequence.
The premise is infinitely indefinite. Whoever we are, principles are our detailed guidelines, but they are not self-determined. The behavior induced by our values is merely an extension of our culture. With these chance aesthetic objects, I propose that the dubious dynamic between our cultural conduct and natural chaos might be a lucky consolation.
Image from: andyhixon.com
by Andy Hixon
Date & Title Unknown
Mixed Media
I recently came across Manchester artist Andrew Hixon. One of his works made an impression on me because it was oddly similar to a series of sketches I was busy with. I had been trying to nail something – some creature caught between good and evil; decency and obscenity. I wasn’t really there yet, making small progress but always feeling as though I had not achieved anything.
When I saw this image I was at first quite taken aback. The image was sublime and as always when I experience what I think is good art, I feel instead of think. Then when the thinking process began, I was quite envious. There are always artist that make similar work, but it’s irritating when they do it better.
Andrew Hixon has a complicated process mixing photography illustration and sculpture. The dark outcomes are something from another world. The contradictions in his characters and narratives are what excite me the most. This sort of effortless representation of beautiful/ugly; dark/light is quite impressive.
Charlie Chaplin’s momentous final speech from the film ‘The Great Dictator’, 1940
It all started so well. Human civilization is one of the biggest miracles in the universe. It is one of the most vivid displays of the majestic beauty of chaos. And even today it seems anything could happen. Nothing is permanent and nothing is certain. That is the lesson we should have learnt, and yet we loiter and we wait as if pandemonium were beneath us. As if we were protected from natures most powerful force. Our majority forsakes chaos’ splendour for man-made fables.
I guess one of the reasons I’m so obdurate in my philosophy is that I have a fanciful imagination. I myself would sooner trust a man in a tie than a whimsical artist. But that impedes me not. It must be because I watch far too many films, read too much rubbish and perhaps listen to a precarious sum of music.
I have never experienced it and quite honestly believe I will never live to see it, but I do believe in Utopia. I believe people are capable. Human beings are made for joy. It’s true. But it is that predisposition to stick to what we know that prevents this exquisite prospect. Instead of choosing nature, we believe what we are told. Our whole lives are lived under prescribed methods and precautions are recommended in case there should be any detours.
I believe in democracy and it has been done, even though it does not always succeed. But I think we need not settle. This term could be taken as seriously as the word money. I even wish it were possible that its importance could exceed that of money or power, but well … I know that is in vain.
I guess it’s my speculation that there need not be exact practical peace. But perhaps it all starts with opening our minds. Maybe once we see that we can be the leaders instead of the followers, that we can decide instead of being decided for and that we have the right to speak out and demand our rights – maybe then there will be a less bleak reality. And our joys might be of a greater magnitude and our contribution to human history a bit less shameful.
It is only a dream, a mere fantasy, but I believe in it the same way some believe in men with bombs, frivolous myths and fancy things.
Then again, perhaps I am missing the point. Perhaps that is democracy’s great feat – that we can all believe in anything, no matter how worthless. How tragic it is that this is how we shall be remembered. With all our guns and our rules and our maps, all we have achieved is rent that we hate, politicians that pretend and rituals we don’t grasp. How very tragic …
My practice is based on taking what already exists and creating a new concoction. Everything I see and have seen is the raw material. In my mischief, my aim is to disturb or even depose the so-called ‘powers that be’. I want to cheapen what we have previously thought to be true and question the very notion of truth.
Being South African, I am shaped by contradictions. I cannot ever neglect the intrinsic evil within the human race, but find integrity in challenging this unmentionable. Among my targets are theology; groupthink; racial politics (post-colonial theory) and ethics.
I use a narrative to express my exasperation. While working with cultural identity in relation to sexuality and stereotypes, a new imagined romanticism is formed. Drawing influence from collective (vs. individual) memory, the work I make is confrontational and sometimes grotesque.
Essentially, I survey the mutability of cultures. I obsessively wonder/wander between good and bad. An age old anxiety within the arts. I think of the world as a machine that never rests, constantly churning out quirks, miracles and disasters. I then steal these, remix them and turn them into art.
Most people reckon there’s no longer a need for activism. In both politics and art, having a cause is no longer common. We see more often creatives that exist for the sake of creativity and politicians that exist for the sake of politics. Bureaucracy has seeped into these fields so much so that anyone can participate without the will or capacity to change anything. It seems that these streams which were previously separate from the mainstream are now in lockstep. Just like today’s popular movies, music and books, art and politics have been simplified and adjusted so as to ‘fit’ just about anybody. But in this process, I believe important issues are being whitewashed and slighted in a depthless attempt at representation.
Acceptance of the norms has always been a human tendency, but it seems to be becoming a requirement instead of a tendency. During a time that is so wrought with inequality and deceit, it seems to me like activism should be on the rise and not declining like it is. There are still a great number of brave artists and critics who dare to object, but their voice is small and divided. Really to me the specific cause is not so pivotal. But the nerve to stand up is what impresses me. Wether it is on war, inequality, poverty, animal cruelty, domestic violence or corruption, I think contemporary lobbyists can be united by the very frail remnant of activism today.
The trick is to remember that nowhere in history were people praised for attempting improve the world. From Jesus Christ (supposing he existed) to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther-King, John Lennon, Steve Biko and even Michael Jackson, it is only after the deed, when the hard work has been done that people jump onto the wagon. Change has never come easily, but it is always greater than the absurdity it seeks to repair.
So it is much better to stand (out) alone for something (anything) of significance than to disappear in a friendly mob egged on by oblivion. If anything it means that you have some serious balls.
In preparation for my upcoming solo exhibition Negerzoenen, I have been doing some research on racial slurs, particularly those used for black people. This has been a very enlightening practice and it was frighteningly fun.
There are so many words with so many connotations that when selecting the ones I feel will be relevant, I had to consider the origins as well as the current implications. Some of the words have less weight than others, and some are more descriptive than others. So the process became a bit like going through an unfamiliar closet in an attempt to find the perfect dress.
These are some of the results.
Image from KSB.org
By Megan Powers
Allegations of physical and psychological abuse, sinister mind control and ostracism at a Christian mission in KwaZulu-Natal have been made, sending shockwaves throughout the country’s religious circles.
On Saturday theologians and clerics from around the country held a closed crisis meeting in Durban to determine what action should be taken.
The Kwasizabantu mission near Greytown, which has ministered to thousands of people in KwaZulu-Natal since 1970, still educates hundreds of children and attracts scores of local and international visitors each year.
It now stands accused of running a draconian “cult-like” organisation under the guise of Christianity, a claim the mission “rejects with contempt”, saying it is non-sectarian and holds “mainline orthodox beliefs”.
The flood of allegations against the mission follows the publication in a local magazine of a woman’s account of the 13 years she spent at the KwaZulu-Natal mission, both as a pupil at the Domino Servite School and as a teacher. Within days of Erika Bornman making certain allegations, she had received dozens of calls from other ex-pupils and preachers who said they agreed with her.
“I, and many others, can sum up our experience at the mission in one single word: Fear. That is why people have remained silent about the place. I have decided to speak out, not because I have conquered the fear, but in spite of it,” said Bornman, now living in Sedgefield, near Knysna, and working in tourism.
The 28-year-old claimed there had been public beatings in an “upper room” at the mission, where mission staff allegedly beat children violently for misdemeanours, ranging from thinking a boy handsome, admiring themselves in the mirror or clapping during a school play.
Bornman claimed black pupils were forced to undergo virginity tests, contact between girls and boys was forbidden outside the classroom, chapters dealing with animal reproduction or human anatomy were ripped out of their biology textbooks, and certain songs in family films like The Sound of Music were censored before being screened. Her claims were supported by several reliable sources.
“There was an all-pervasive fear that surrounded the place. We were taught to be so afraid of God that I lived in constant dread of dying if my life wasn’t right with God,” said Bornman.
But it was only after a counsellor allegedly made sexual advances towards her, after which she was allegedly called a “whore” and a “slut”, that Bornman decided to flee to an aunt in Pietermaritzburg in 1993.
Her mother, sister and brother-in-law still live at the mission and have largely disowned her.
Ex-pupils who contacted the Tribune this week claimed there were cases of excessive violence, in which they were beaten by mission staff until they were bleeding.
An evangelical preacher, who spent almost 20 years at the mission, said he and his family left after witnessing the “most terrible attacks”.
“What I saw there shocked me into near hysterics. I once watched about 80 women in the upper room punch and beat a young man for allegedly peeping through their windows. Several leaders were present during the beating and one of them actually took part in the attack,” claimed the theologian, who asked not to be named.
“What really worries me is that so much of what they practice at the mission, including their attitude towards and control over normal relationships between male and female, has no scriptural basis whatsoever.
“There is no biblical foundation for their behaviour at all. Little of what happens there has any part in Christianity,” he said.
Sibongile Malinga, a 24-year-old liaison officer for a national company, who was expelled from the mission school when she was 15 because she was alleged to have “fallen in love”, believes that the beatings - allegedly sanctioned by leadership - may have led to the death of her young cousin in 1989.
“He was taken to hospital after a beating by his father and later died. But the mission made no mention of this,” said Malinga, who claimed her father had no choice but to beat her with a hosepipe and evict her from the mission, even though she had repeatedly protested her innocence. She claimed that a year before her expulsion a rule was passed that anyone expelled should leave the mission with only the clothes on their back.
When the Tribune requested an interview with the mission’s leader, Erlo Stegen, on Friday, he was said to be preparing for a “men’s seminar” and was unavailable. But a “committee” of Stegen’s nephew Arno Stegen, Kjell Olsen, Fano Sibisi and school principal Dorothy Newlands agreed to an interview.
They said pupils had been exposed to corporal punishment up until 1994, but this had only been the standard “six cuts with a cane”. They confirmed “hidings in the upper room” in which plastic pipes were used on pupils, but this had been carried out by parents, not staff.
They were “aware” that a boy had died after being beaten by his parents on their premises, but they had no specific details. They confirmed virginity testing was carried out at the mission, but only by Zulu parents who wished it.
They admitted excommunication was performed, but denied ever evicting anyone.
Olsen said he doubted Borman’s allegations that Stegan had cursed her and called her derogatory names, but added that he (Olsen) had no problem using the words “whoring” and “slut” when preaching.
Newlands admitted the school censored certain films which were “explicitly graphic” and that biology textbooks were still censored and “our own notes used”.
“We’ve had a 100 percent pass rate for 11 years and are listed as one of the country’s top schools,” said Olsen.
Pablo Picasso
The Source
1921
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
“Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936”
Guggenheim Museum
Notes:
• Individuality of the artist expresses itself: the artist’s identity determines what they express
• Expression is liberty: when one is able to achieve formal realization of their identity, then they are the liberated artist
• Liberty is a virtue: the realization and expression of one’s identity, which can never be actively controlled by the self, is an asset
• The occupancy of liberty means the destruction of order
• Chaos is the main component
Image from: KSB.org
I had a guest the other day. Someone I considered a close friend whom I hoped or assumed knew me well enough. But I was struck by their reaction to my work and immediately averted the gaze out of disgrace, I guess - that annoying human propensity to avoid seeming bizarre. I took my work down because for that moment I agreed, it was too out of the ordinary, too raw…
I am currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Gelders Balkon in the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem and one of the procedures involves deciphering an apposite statement about my work and background. The process is in its early phase, but I have already learned a great deal. One of the elementary exercises has been introspection. I think I have come to realise how dishonest I have been, hiding behind metaphors in my work to avoid the personal narrative (out of cowardice really). Yes, I’m quite repelled by the notion of retelling my own story. That seems stagnant and narcissistic. This is why I chose grander comparisons so that the notions would apply to a broader context. But upon having a sit down with Mirjam Westen the curator of contemporary art at the museum, I was confronted by the obviousness of the personal narrative and the need to clarify.
The thing about backgrounds is that they are only spectacular when they differ. That, I think, is what inspires me the most. It is not the individual story, nor the collective, but the dynamic between the two. Why are some things ‘normal’ and some things ‘strange’? There are so many layers of difference in the human perspective that to convey a reality can be the most complex undertaking. While I try to demonstrate how common the narrative in question is in my work, I’m also aware that a paradoxical narrative is just as common, causing the primary narrative to seem shocking or abnormal. But the same hypothesis applies the other way around. What happens here? Is it ignorance or indifference? And what does it take to tip that scale?
My work might seem a bit weird, but it is not intended to be. The attempt is to find an aesthetic for the things that concern my social context, but it does become personal. This identity is not specific – there are plenty of identical backgrounds, but it becomes eccentric when it is out of context. We simply have within our psyches different ways of seeing as a result of what we have (or have not) seen.
Mirjam Westen has offered me an insightful article confronting my (normal/strange) background:
A controversial Christian mission in KwaZulu-Natal, accused this week of abuse and cult-like behaviour, allegedly doubled as an anti-liberation agency for military intelligence and the security branch in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Well-placed sources told the Tribune this week that a sophisticated system of information gathering within the Kwasizabantu mission near Greytown is claimed to have led to the kidnapping and arrest of United Democratic Front and ANC activists in northern KwaZulu-Natal. This has been denied by the mission.
One former member of the mission, whose identity is being withheld by the Tribune, revealed how he had been recruited by intelligence agents, undergone military training, been supplied with intelligence equipment, including a briefcase with a hidden microphone, two secret bank accounts into which the military paid his expenses and told to report back on anything that was a threat to the “status quo” and “law and order”.
“We were deeply involved with the security forces. We were used to propagate the apartheid message around the country and we were used as informants. I know of cases where special forces took people out as a direct result of information I gave them,” said the source, who claims he was discouraged by other mission “agents” from going to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but still believes it should be investigated and exposed.
“Someone would repent and the next minute the whole of the security branch knew about it. Many co-workers were informants and some of the mission’s leadership, which remains the same to this day, knew all about it. At one stage we received VIP Protection training because it was believed our leader Erlo Stegen had become an ANC target,” he said.
Information was secretly gathered during “confessions” - a cornerstone of the mission’s religious practice - and allegedly passed on via daily calls on “scramble phones” to Colonel Tobie Vermaak - who worked in military intelligence - and a security branch captain in Greytown, whose identity is known to the Tribune.
Colonel Vermaak - who was “put on pension” in 1992, the same year De Klerk purged the SADF of military intelligence officers suspected of alleged “dirty tricks” - allegedly requested, paid for and accompanied (in civilian clothes) preachers and the mission choir on “outreach campaigns” and preaching tours in volatile troublespots around the country in the ‘80s.
It is also alleged Vermaak used a military plane to fly himself and certain mission preachers to Namibia in 1989 where they used the scriptures to preach an anti-Swapo message. Vermaak allegedly operated in Namibia under an alias, which is known to the Tribune. Following Swapo’s election victory that same year, a mission preacher was allegedly sent to Namibia at the military’s expense.
Regular visitors to the mission included deputy minister of defence and later minister of law and order Adriaan Vlok, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, King Goodwill Zwelithini, and senior government and military officials from the homelands.
When contacted at his Pretoria home this week, Vermaak said he’d “met the Lord” at the mission 15 years ago and that his two children currently attended school there. But he described the claims of the mission’s involvement with state intelligence as “laughable”.
“The mission was a well-known anti-apartheid organisation.
“Nothing of that nature happened there. I went there and attended meetings while I was in the military because the country was in chaos and it was uplifting to see hardworking black people who weren’t negative,” he said.
He denied ever going on any preaching trips with the mission, either inside or outside the country and said he “doubted” the military ever funded the mission’s activities. When asked why Vlok, Buthelezi and other members of the state’s security structures had visited the mission so often, he said he “could not talk for them”.
Kjell Olsen, one of Kwasizabantu’s spokesmen who has been at the mission since 1976, denied the mission had ever been used as an agency of the state and claimed they had in fact been harassed in the ‘70s because they were considered “communists”.
He said that Vermaak was, and remained, “our friend” and had helped raise money for the mission.
“We gave assistance to people in the community who came to us and wanted to repent. But we never revealed information to anyone without their full permission. Maybe people who have since left the mission were involved in such things. It’s possible they know things that we don’t,” said Olsen.
He said he was “unaware” of military funding of any preaching tours although he believed the mission choir had been “sponsored” at some stage. A later request for clarity and details on the funding issue was not forthcoming.
He said Vlok, Buthelezi and others from state security structures had come to the mission for “our advice on how to move towards a non-racial society”.
Image from Google Images
Each day I’m tormented by the wretched reflection that I am not yet learned enough to produce something worthwhile on the topic of love and beauty. These things, fleeting and intangible as they may be are the skeletal dictators of my existence. And to face failure in depicting them with each poem, each painting and each lyric is like gambling and losing time and time again. Luckily I am preceeded by great masters who will teach me and comfort me until I am able to summon something good.
The Requiem, by Freud is an essay which stretches 200 pages. Although the book seldom offers new insight on the subject, I was comfortable with the ease with which I could read it as an amateur. This is my favorite style in which to read philosophical writings - narrative, personal and well … easy.
In the summer of 1913, Sigmund Freud took a stroll in “a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous poet.” That August he was vacationing in the Dolomites, an epic mountain region at the border of Austria and Italy, amid cinematic, archaic promontories whose profiles resembled dragon’s teeth. It was a place Freud knew well from his student days in Trieste and from many subsequent holiday rambles. An avid naturalist, who delighted in hunting flowers and mushrooms, he would have reveled in the the hardy mountain flora, in the parnassia and primrose, milkwort and rampion, and the fragile hellebore that poke their way each spring through the rocky soil and receding snows.
As Freud and his companions lingered in the soft light of that afternoon, admiring the surrounding nature, their conversation took a melancholy turn. The young poet was troubled by ghosts. Everywhere he turned he saw beauty, but in this radiance the poet foresaw the coming of sorrow. All these things were transient, fated to extinction; mocked by its own frailty, beauty was eclipsed by its negation, and had no value and no meaning.
The older man was sympathetic to the poet’s melancholy (which their silent friend shared), but he could not accept his anguished conclusion. The poet was correct, of course, that all earthly things must pass away, including those in whose qualities we take special pleasure. But rather than subtract from their beauty, Freud protested, this evanescence only added to beauty’s increase. Winter replaces summer, but spring comes again in winter’s wake. The scientist— taken aback, perhaps, by the poet’s remonstrance—suggested that it was beauty’s “scarcity value in time” that gave what is precious its worth. Since beauty was known—could only ever be known—only by the heart and eye and mind of its witness, so long as we live, beauty is with us, passing into nothingness only when we, too, cease to exist.
Freud’s protests found no favor with the poet, or with their companion, the “taciturn friend.” His own conviction, however, remained unshakeable, that the fleeting quality of existence increased, not diminished, its value.
Later, Freud wondered at the source of his companions’ attitude that afternoon. Looking back on their conversation, he recognized in them what he called “a revolt in their minds against mourning.” They recognized in the transience of these beautiful things the essential mortality of life, and of their own lives; this knowledge so disturbed them that they could no longer appreciate beauty except as something already lost. In the process, life lost for them its luster and meaning.
Freud himself was puzzled by mourning, which he considered love’s rebellion against loss. When we love, he said, our love goes out from us to the object of our affection, where it dwells in the beloved as if in ourselves—much like an embassy which, though in a foreign land, is said to stand upon the soil of the native country. When we lose a loved one, our love is drawn back again into us. But this process of recall is arduous and painful. Our love strives to inhabit the dwelling it has built in the heart of our lover, even when that heart no longer beats or is no longer near. And so, losing love, we suffer, and in that suffering we experience our love once more, in parting.
After their conversation, one assumes, the wanderers went their separate ways, each of them confirmed in their own opinion of life’s fleeting blessings. We can do no more than assume, though, since here our knowledge of that afternoon ends, and the companions disappear from view with the last mountain light.
http://www.freuds-requiem.com
Because i have to find a way to exist in this society in a serviceable way, I have to convince myself of blatant lies on a regular basis. Everything in this country which is out dated or politically incorrect hides under the pretentious banner of cultural confusion. The admittance to the actual facts of history is rare, instead one is met frequently with a blank stare and a claim that it is other countries which have faltered, not the Netherlands. Also, there is the popular practice of offering the testimonies of Surinam and Dutch Antilles people to claim that nothing in the Dutch culture is offensive to black people.
I fool myself into tranquillity by feigning acceptance. After all, I don’t want to exert that same feeling which is exerted upon me to other people. I daren’t say to someone: “I command you to change “even if I do believe it to be the best course of action. In any case, any foreigner living in the Netherlands will know artist or not, this is not the place for immigrant grievances to be voiced. But there is only so much one can take!
With the festive season, I am faced every day with the excruciating figure of Zwarte Piet. The blackface character is plastered everywhere from supermarkets to adverts and even the cinema. The horrendous icon of which I have spoken in a previous entry is relentlessly used to perpetuate an apparently harmless tradition with deep roots in slavery for the enjoyment of Dutch children. This affront has often turned me into a snivelling absentee, often being teased during this ‘festive’ time for my resemblance to the thing.
I find my tolerance to this icon to be highly commendable. I have had the pluck to discuss it many times over, never managing to convince people of my distress, but in my opinion emerging victorious for my assertion. But the surreptitiously bigoted ambience continues to compress my enduring will. There is little I can do to ignore that this common force will probably never change. It is in the nature of this place and I will never see the contrition. The general response is that of nonchalance. Why must you complain? You’re an African in the West. You should be satisfied. You almost feel the reactions implying ‘a neger must be seen, not heard’.
Contrary to the advice of many well meaning Netherlanders, I must continue to take offence because one of the things I have learned in my stay here is that what I think I know is nonsense. The only thing I can really depend on is my instinct – my gut. And the terrible feeling that stirs in me when I see people unashamedly make fun of a history they refuse to acknowledge is more dependable than their word that they really have done nothing wrong.
I recently had this chat with a friend of mine who’s also a South African living abroad and he mentioned that it’s so hard to find music like he knew back home. Of course this is largely influenced by the fact that he is not home. I personally seem to remember staking many complaints about the quality of South African music.
But he made the point that there is basically something lost in music whose ethos you don’t fully grasp. A lot of the music we see in mainstream American culture is made to avoid that issue, I guess. It’s simple, universal and really about nothing, but then everybody gets it.
The alternative for this is finding a finely customized style or genre, or by returning to your roots. What delights me is how much things change in the music scene while I’m away. New artists emerge; new genres and models, and I remain, mostly uninvolved and unaware. But this has changed my perspective on SA music. It changes rapidly and includes all sorts. From traditional music, to classical, folk, rap, pop, you name it. And specialized developments are also common. Kwaito and khwela music are examples of new forms arising from such rapid change and diverse influence.
One of the treasures I’ve recently discovered s a hip-hop/kwaito group called Teargas. They’ve been around for a while already, but they have developed into something I could have never foreseen. Their music is a wonderful cocktail of urban swagger and traditional realism. Their lyrics are unfeigned and though I’m not there to survey their contribution, I can still relate perfectly to what they’re spitting. I guess you can take the Zulu out of Africa, but you can’t take the Africa out of the Zulu …
My concept revolves around the ‘made thing’ and what sorts of environments lead to what sorts of artifacts. If you look back in time, there are certain objects and images linked to certain eras, positions or cultures. I’m concerned with the simple question: Which people own which object?
Circumnavigate Africa, documenting and collecting the colloquial objects made by the different communities. Now this practice is not new, but I see opportunities for a fresh perspective being that I myself have grown up in various ‘African’ communities acquiring knowledge for some of these skillfully made objects that I’ve only seen the rarity of after receiving a Western education. From stylistic machetes to animal traps and weaving tools, the third world is bursting with their own visual language powered by adversity and the struggle for survival.
The thought is that through taking ‘ordinary’ objects that were not made to be displayed as art, and presenting them as such, a comparison can be made between the two contexts. The project would stimulate awareness about the handling of the objects on both sides of the coin, which is also a valid as a bridging tool, creating connections where there were previously none or few to speak of.
For this project, I would append myself in the role of ‘explorer’ and return my findings with a claim on the objects. Here I will fundamentally be challenging the perception of these cultural artifacts, the cultural standards in terms of what art is in these dissimilar social climates and the distinctive systems of ‘valuing’ art. Asking questions about performativity, authenticity and appropriation, I hope to open a vault of artistic discourse with the project. And the physical objects, which would then be displayed in the Western artistic context, would challenge the viewer about their notions of trade and ownership. Overall I think this would be fertile foundation for important discourse in this field of research.
Here are some examples I found on the web of ‘everyday’ objects around the African continent:
So I have all this work from my student days and it’s sometimes nice to look back and see how far I’ve come. It’s exciting to realize that my whole struggle has actually been a journey where I can see the milestones and the kinds of things that I used to be obsessed about in relation to the work I’m making now. Now what do I do with all this ‘debris’ which used to be so close to my heart but now makes me squirm in shame with the thought: “What the #$*% was I thinking???”
If you’ve suffered from writer’s block, you’ll find this particularly amusing.
S.Fenty. Why Old School is ‘Cool’: A Brief Analysis of Classic Video Game Nostalgia
• The author recounts the first time he played a video game, Pong in 1981. He remembers how unexcited he was by the simple game once he started playing it and how he got bored by it
• However, Gordon Moore’s prediction that computing capacity would double every 18 months. Video games have become more developed and a formidable form of entertainment
• These developments in games have been partly driven by our desire to play more sophisticated games. So games have moved form the simple two dimensional graphics and synthetic blips to richly rendered, photo realistic, interactive, three dimensional environments
• Even though all media are changed by advancing technologies like the written word was changed by the invention of the printing press, new media are changed even more by the rapidly changing technologies.
• Film for example has moved from black and white low frame-rate roots to vivid colours of computer rendered animations and surround sound explosions and reverberate in our bodies in only a hundred years.
• Even television in only fifty years has changed dramatically in both form and content
• But in video games the change is tremendous. Not only do games in homes and arcades undergo change but also in video game industries - home and portable gaming devices. The technology of production and consumption undergo radical changes every 5 years where new gaming models render old models useless.
• Tomorrow always seems to be better in this respect – better graphics, better interactivity, etc, but often the old classics remain the favourites of gamers.
• Older gamers list these classic games as their favourites but when players who seek to experience these games do not have access to the original consoles and have to play them on their pc’s, they say that it is not the same.
• The colours, sounds, the feel of the controller and even the smells are different because perhaps they spent many hours playing Donkey Kong (1981), Ms Pac-Man (1982) in a Laundromat near their home which smelt of dirty clothes and strong detergent
• These games have come to occupy an important space of memory for many gamers. They become nostalgic, not only for another time and space, but another state of being for themselves.
• Nostalgia is the emotional by-product of change. It is the desire to return to some past period or irrecoverable condition, because the current condition is somehow different
• Then it’s not surprising that in its most pathological cases nostalgia is most suffered by those who have suffered the radical and extreme changes brought on by war. It’s easy to see how someone who has been through a war would long fro a time before the conflict
• Marshall McLuhan states that every new technology causes pain and misery, torn into two groups, those totally of the old technology and those stuck between the old and the new.
• Those completely of the old technology long to return to a time where the new technology doesn’t exist. They reject the new technology and their pain comes from a longing of a time that can never be regained.
• Those stuck in the middle experience a different pain, a pain of transition, they struggle with the pain of being caught between two worlds.
• Those born totally within the new technology do not undergo this pain because for them it is not new technology, it is the state of things.
• McLuhan speaks of the radical changes that happened when New Media changed from a print to an electronic culture
• Interactivity has come to characterize so much of what has seduced us about computer technology. Most of the discussions about the past, present and future of computer based technology. They are grappling with computer enabled interactivity. It is interactivity (i.e. the participation within virtual spaces) that makes video games such a revolutionary medium and a powerful source on nostalgia
• Videogames are places, they are states of being and because they are stored unchanging data, they tease people with a hope of possibility of return if only we can regain access to them
• Though created in a medium that is constantly changing, we cannot help but think of these virtual playgrounds as perfect and immutable constants that we can return to for comfort as our world changes around us.
• Video games may be for some artefacts of a past they want to return to, but video games also offer the seduction of a perfect past that can be replayed.
• Lev Manovich mentions in his book The Language of New Media that although video games require us to move within them and change within them, they are themselves never changing; they are always there waiting for us to return and enter in the activities and patterns and repetitions that learned like rhythms of a dance we practiced time and time again. Since nostalgia is a return to an irrecoverable condition, it would not be nostalgia if a return were possible. Though we may desire to go back, we never really can. Not because the games are different but because we as players are different due to the games themselves
• Marc Prensky in his book Digital Games-Based Learning suggests that we are now part of what he calls the “games-generation”
• Prensky notes that the change in the way player experience the world is based on video games, noting how video games can be used as learning tools. Our experiences in video games like with all media change us as a culture and as individuals
• The nostalgia felt by those of the ‘games-generation’ and who first ventured into the arcades and first played home consoles and computer games in the late 70s and early 80s can only be felt by that generation. A nostalgia that underwent a profound cultural shift into computer mediated play and representation
• But at the same time, the nostalgia felt foe video games isn’t necessarily a longing for the past before the trauma of experiencing the game, but a longing for that experience of playing a game for the first time – a yearning for the moment of transition
• It is a desire for the liminality of the transition of being in the real world and being in the games world. The enjoyment of beginning to know another world and the contrast between that world and the one in which we normally reside.
• So the question is whether this process is really revolutionary. After all the worlds of the video games that we immerse ourselves in by learning the rhythm of the games are very similar to those offered by other entertainment media
• Similar to novels video games require significant effort to enter an imaginary space
• Umberto Eco who wrote The Name of the Rose insisted that a novel is in itself a world and to enter this world would require effort, so he purposefully made the first hundred pages of his novel difficult and demanding because he said the reader must accept it pace. In short, there is a learning curve involved and if readers cannot get past it, they will never gain entry to the novel
• Similarly if the player do not learn the rhythm of the game, they will never fall into the flow of the game, they will never be fully in its world. So the experience of entering these worlds are active ones
• With a book, the reader must interpret the words on the page and read on for the events to unfold. They must read thoughtfully in order to understand the events and if the text is well written, then the reader has to continue. Without effort everything stops. So it is with video games. Players must play on. And if the game is a good one and to play on, players must learn to play it well, learning the patterns of a game in order to continue it.
• This process alters the players making a return impossible, although television and film are not entirely passive, it is video games and novels which require the most effort, often requiring rereading or replaying
• The similarity between television, film, books and video games is that they all require participants to suspend disbelief. Sometimes that is not enough an when it is it is a remarkable feat of self deception. All words written and electronic are incomplete and limited. The viewers must ignore this and try and connect the dots.
One of the avenues in which I prefer to work is a crowded and complex field. Most of my mentors have warned me against it citing the fact that these sort of images are seen everywhere as a reason for me to stay away from them. I see this as an asset. What could be more exciting than taking the most common images and making work. Perhaps because of their frequency, they can never be new, but I couldn’t think of a more inviting challenge.
Using imagery from popular magazines and adverts, the semniotics become something rather familiar. Attempting my own ‘Twiggy’ or using the text ‘Maybe she’s born with it’, I explore the extent to which these public forms are appropriated and personalized. These icons are available to almost anyone and as much as they are presented from the creative world, they become a new set of raw materials for the viewer/artist and a new set of manifestations is possible. Nicolas Bourriaud best theorizes this phenomenon as post-production in his book of the same name where he analyzes the recent development in the art world where artists have moved towards a more diverse array of subject matter which includes existing works by other artists, existing objects and so forth.
Here are some examples of how I appropriated today’s imagery and incorporated it into my own private practice.
• Post-modern: a set of developments in philosophy, architecture and the arts towards the end of the 20th century, propelled primarily by new currencies in French thought
• Modern: from the eighteenth century ‘age of enlightenment’ with its emphasis upon rationality, technological progress and the explanatory power of empirical sciences.
• Post-modernism challenges these notions
• Post-modernism was characterised by:
o Political and cultural malaise
o Playfulness in the arts
o Post-structuralist critique of structuralism in linguistics and communication
o Post-colonial challenges to the hegemony of Western culture and philosophy
• Structuralism sees the truth as being behind or within a text but post-structuralism stresses the interaction between the reader and text as productivity, therefore reading has lost its status as a passive consumption of a product to become performance
• Post-structuralism critiques the unity of the stable sign – there is a shift from the signified to the signifier, so truth loses its status or finality
• Language was questioned in terms of play of references and systems of differences within which meaning is flexible
• Jacques Derrida, French linguistic philosopher, in order to deconstruct language systems, the ways in which words carried the erasure of alternative referential possibilities and operate within a chain of signification where each word contributed to the developing line of interpretation needed to be investigated
• So the focus is on meaning and its lack of fixity
• When this is visually translated, for example a picture of a traditional rural landscape, it is derivative not only form that which is represented, but from its opposite, say an industrial or urban area
• Jean Baudrillard said that post-modernism dislocated any direct relation between the signifier and the real
• Images were seen as central to consume culture, but involved, discursive relation rather than representation. Focus was on surface style rather than form and function, opening the avenues of parody, irony and pastiche which were influenced by previous movements in art and popular culture
• Effectively, notions of originality and genius were questioned which were previously in place in the arts and in literature
• It was shown that the signifier is actually empty and that the photograph is a communicative artefact
• Post-modern philosophy challenged legitimising myths and narratives of the modern era
• Michel Focault and Frederic Jameson were a few to culturally investigate circumstances, specific contexts and power relations in their critical writings
• Post-modernism was reactive rather than pro-active because it critiqued old views, but didn’t really support new ones
• There is a link between feminism and post-modernism because feminism challenged patriarchal views within liberalism and Marxism
• Yet as feminists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, post-modernism was still a predominantly masculine movement
• In photography, post-modernism destabilised the links between representation and reality
• The fluid notions of identity and the influence of representation were taken into account, there was a critique of traditional aesthetics
M.de Certeau. Walking in the City [Editor’s Introduction]
• Certeau represents a theory or rather an ideal for the city, against the theories and ideals of urban planners and managers. To do so, he does not look down at the city as if from a high rise building, but he walks in it.
• Walking in the city seems to have it’s own logic, or as Certeau puts it, it’s own “rhetoric”
• The walker individuates and makes uncertain the legible order given to the city by planners, a little like the way real life is displaced and confused by dreaming.
• The everyday is different from the official in the same way that poetry is different from a planning manual
• The author opens my saying how he wonders what the significance of looking at the city from above is. How can it be beneficial to totalise all the human texts? He says to go up to the top floor of the highest building is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer in the grasp of the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law. Nor is the body possessed by the rumble of so many differences within the city.
• When one goes up there, s/he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. This elevation changes him/her into a voyeur – puts him/her at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was possessed into a text that lies before one’s eyes
• Must one finally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back an forth, crowds that though visible from high are not themselves able to see down below?
• The desire to see the city came before the method of seeing the city. Medieval or renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. That can be seen as an achievement.
• Is the immense texturology spread out before one’s eyes from the top anything more than a representation? The panorama-city is a picture whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.
• The ordinary people of the city live beyond where visibility begins. Walking is an elementary form of experiencing the city. Walkers’ bodies follow the thicks and thins of the urban text. Walkers write without being able to read it. The city dwellers are unaware of the spaces as lovers in each others arms, but they constantly use their bodies to sign the text that has been signed by many others. It is as though the practises organizing a bustling city were characterised by their blindness.
• The networks of these moving intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither a spectator nor an author
• The everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface
• Recently space has provided a backdrop for many feminist, post-modernist and post-colonial enquiries. Space has also been the focus of public art and geo art and has provided a grammar in cultural discourse.
• The language of cultural and social investigation is increasingly submerged in spatial concepts in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a few decades ago. This spatial reconfiguration accompanied the artistic and literary rise of modernism, during which time the priority of time over space was not so explicitly questioned.
• Henry Lefebvre and David Harvey were the social theorists who first brought about the appeals for an explicitly ‘spatial politics’
• Frederic Jameson claims that contemporary culture is increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic. A model of political culture appropriate for our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organizing concern. Jameson conceived this spatial politics as guided by the process he called ‘cognitive mapping’, a label which he later declared was a ‘metaphor for class struggle’
• The extent of interest in space is equal to the spatial concepts in focus. In social theory and literary criticism, space has become a predominant means by which social life is understood. ‘Theoretical spaces’ have been ‘explored’, ‘mapped’ and ‘charted’.
• But there has been little attempt to examine the implications of material and metaphorical space.
• Metaphorical concepts and uses of ‘space’ have evolved quite independently from material uses of space. Much of the material use of space indicates an ignorance to the metaphorical concepts of space. So if a new spatialized politics is to be coherent and effective, it will be necessary to understand the connection between material and metaphorical space.
• Current spatial metaphors such as position, locality, territory, nomadism and displacement require urgent critical scrutiny
• Location, mapping and colonization are the concepts which are much in use in contemporary social and cultural discourse
• In geographical terms, location fixes a point in space usually by reference to some abstract co ordinate system such as latitude or longitude. Location may be no more than zero dimensional space, a point on a map.
• Position, by contrast implies a sense of perspective on other places and is therefore at least one dimensional
• Locality suggests a two- (or more) dimensional place, an area within which a multiple and diverse social and natural events and processes take place
• In December 1922 an exhibition headed by Rabindranath Tagore in Calcutta which included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky sparked a new modernist movement in India although it was not immediately apparent
• The dominant theme in Indian art since then was the problematic relationship between global modernity and national identity
• While Industrialisation was an important aspect of Modernism, India was essentially a non-industrial country in the 1920s and social cohesion had not yet broken down unlike European Modernism
• Where Modernism in Europe resulted in the alienation of the artist, Indian artists were engulfed by the real or imagined unity of all Indians as a result of post colonial nationalism
• Influential artists like Rabindrinath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil and Jamini Roy all responded to Modernism in their own individual ways
• But the first Indian response to modernism was a fascination with cubism which had become the most widely emulated style in the world
• The pioneering figure in this context was Rabindrinath Tagore’s brother Gaganendranath (1867-1938) who became famous in 1917 with a series of cartoon lithographs.
• Since the 1870s in Bengal, cartoons had been a prime device in art and literature for exposing pretension and mocking contemporary manners. This satirical tradition continued into the 20th century but few matched Gaganendranath’s style
• In the 1920s, he discovered cubism which used illusionism created by directional lighting. This was done by creating conflicting relationships of light and shadow within a picture frame thereby dissolving the solidity of an object
• The second development in Indian Modernism was primitivism.
• Indian society was predominantly rural
• During nationalism, nation was equated with the soil
• Bengali consciousness invented the ideal ‘noble savage’ or Santhals (hunter-gatherers) of eastern India
• This stereotypical image of ‘primitive’ groups in India already existed in colonial anthropology
• Tribal art came to be admired by the elite who saw similarities here with European modernist works
• The quest for rural/tribal art as resistance to colonialism became focal in India
• Rabindranath Tagore
o First major modern painter in India
o He made primitivism his vehicle for artistic expression
o He was a poet before he took up painting at 67
o His paintings were compared to Surrealist works and called ‘automatic paintings’ and had radical imagination, unmistakeably personal style
o His affinity to the European avant-garde was from the parallel approach to primitivism
o Fascinated with combinations of text and image
o He used pen and ink with limited colour
o His shapes began to emulate human and animal-like figures
o There was evidence of North American influence, but little influence from India, but then tribal art was not widely known then
o His primitivism, like that of European artists sprang from an inner psychological need
• Amrita Sher-Gil
o The second major figure in Indian modernism
o The first professional female artist in India who died young
o Born in Budapest in 1913 to a Sikh nobleman and a Hungarian-Jewish musician
o Amrita returned to India after training in Paris, she had primitivist longings for India upon her return
o She declared her goal to interpret the lives of the poor, mute, unsung
o She was openly influenced by Gauguin and had a textural style which was used by many Hungarian artists
• Jamini Roy
o The third leading modernist before 1947
o His primitivism made a consistent ideological statement
o Trained in Calcutta Art School
o He searched for ‘authentic’ national expression in art
o He had various influences ranging from east to west with Orientalism, Impressionism and even Chinese wash painting
o At some point he was so influenced by spiritualism that he questioned the need for painting
o Eventually he turned to rural India, to the Santhals who were already being romanticised by the Bengali nationalists
o He became convinced that genuine indigenous artworks could not be produced with western pigments and so he gave up oil painting and began using earth colours and organic pigments
W.Chadwick,1998.The Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism; Self Representation. MIT Press: Massachusetts.
• Claude Cahun had shocking views in Autoportraits, 1980s which critics classified as harbingers of Cindy Sherman.
• Then two women happened to create a series of photos where they were both the staged subject and the object, posing, using lighting, costume and backdrop convincingly
• Cindy Sherman’s black and white stills in the 70s showed multiple selves and masquerade even narcsissism and her later work focussed on historical feminine identities as self portraits
• Scale was important – Cahun’s black and wite productions were the size of pages from personal diaries where Sherman’s work was on an oversized scale
• The essay focuses on Cahun’s incomprehensie work, discussing the highlights and comparing it to Sherman’s later work
• Close evaluation allows us to appreciate their differences and their influence on Surrealism
• During the 1920s, Cahun produced a large number of self portraits in various guises where the figure mostly occupies most of the frame and background and props are minimal which gave the figure more psychological significance
• She presents herself as many personas with influences from theatrical productions which she has reworked, changing things like size, focus and point of view
• The aim is never to seduce, even writing “Do not kiss me, I am in training” on her chest – her characters are unalluring and unapologetic and masculine
• These early figures do not conform in terms of the relation between viewer and subject – she confronts the viewer
• The mask is viewed as a tool for evasion or concealment, but they reflect rather than deflect – both the artist and the individual re present and each one represents a complex self
• Let’s look at Cahun’s Autoportrait, 1928 which is a three quarter portrait showing the artist in a male tailored jacket in front of a mirror starlted and slightly uneasy, clutching her geometrically patterned costume closely around her neck as if in a sudden draft. Her location is unclear, the space is abstract and flattened and almost symmetrical. The mirror is unexplained and unattached to a bedroom or bathroom and almost reads as a window. The real figure acknowledges the presence of a viewer and gives eye contact where her reflection is averted, so she seems to have been interrupted
• Compare that to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #2 in which the towelled artist is seen in a narrow three quarter view reflected on a steamy bathroom mirror. although her nubile body occupies most of the foreground the attention is directed to her pointing finger and eyes which only look at herself and the viewer is closed out
• Cahun established multiple personalities early in life. Lucie Schwob was born in 1894 into a Jewish family in Nantes. After receiving a secondary education in England she became gender neutral Claude Cahun. A year later she worte an article in an London bold paper about homophobia.
• From the 1920s Claude lived openly with her companion Suzanne Malherbe whose pseudonym was Marcel Moore. They were an influential lesbian Parisian couple
• Canhun was one of the few women who were close to the original Surrealist movement. She was also politically active, anti-Fascist and in 1929, she translated Havelock Ellis’ work whose theories suggested a third sex which involved both sexes but existed as neither one
• The self portraits described above are straight forward with surrealist discourses disregarding normality, theatrically exaggerated
• But photography has an invitation to disrupt the integrity of the body which surrealists enjoyed. Cahun’s adoption of this method is rare – she doubles he figures usually, but they are often not quite mirror images
• This hybrid image in particular interrogates the viewer and the subject. The interruption is showed by the broken eye contact
• Her deepest works are the anamorphic works in a dark void where she sports a severely shaved head which is stretched to that she is seen from two points of view – the feminine décolletage below and the unwomanly bald skull above construct an uneasy combination
• In 1930, Cahun published book Aveux non Avenus about love and self knowledge, just like the Autoportraits which inquired on the nature of her identity and proposed a series of unstable selves. Her texts emphasize the absence of fixity. She questions self definition early in the book but says that she is only capable of narcissism and individualism in the smallest degree.
• She illustrated the book with photomontages which were a medium of choice for Surrealists and which were seen to have disrupted the book which is consistent with the aims of Surrealism – denaturalising vision, anti-realist bias and access to subconscious process
• In her Autoportait no 96, the recumbent artist is clothed, apparently sleeping. a gloomy sign however is transmitted by stems and flowers engulfing the body which lies on an oddly animal like fabric and the viewers head forms a dark shadow upon the figures vulnerable neck
• In no. 95 the fetid and erotic undertones are even louder. There are no more fleshy white blossoms and the artist is now nude on the exotic skin and is in an alternate world and her expression shows that she is deeper than in sleep
• Her later work is quite different from her earlier work and she acknowledged that she can no longer fathom her earlier figures. David Bate and Laurie Monahan agree that there is no original or single Claude, but there are alternative aspects of the original Claude in each one of her manifestations.
• This concurs with Joan Riviers’ 1929 thesis that the woman and the masquerade are inseparable
• Cahun broke the boundaries of gender definition and brought to light a new third sex which was ‘virgin, androgyny and soldier’ all at once, very consistent with Havelock Ellis’ and postmodernism gained a female identifier
• So how can we relate her to Cindy Sherman?
• They both rely on mediated images.
• Cahun parodied theatre bill, postcards, circulars and circus posters
• Though Cindy Sherman does not acknowledge any stock for post modern theory, she does source art and fashion photography, advertising, movies, pornography and medical illustration
• The coincidental similarities between the two women cannot be denied yet the differences are also very apparent particularly in the instance of the mirror. Sherman avoids directly referencing the way in which she works with self representation unlike Cahun. But there are other formal similarities
• In Sherman’s recent sex pictures which consist of medical-like prosthesis instead of the artist, the boundaries of surrealist grotesque and radical reformulation are explicitly pushed where as Claude Cahun’s similar works of androgyny are her own, hard-won, personal and performed
• The difference is that Sherman posits multiple roles where Cahun posits multiple selves
• Cahun’s work demonstrates the development of queer theory, postulating the postmodern – possibility of a plurality of gendered identities and identifications, showing that identity is never fixed, it is unstable
• Sherman however is not in her work, she only represents – she plays to the audience. She sets up the situations so that they may be seen not to reveal herself like Cahun. The camera is directly implied by means of color, pose, scale and surface. Like commercial photographs, Sherman’s works have a glossy, high quality finish. There is also evidence of fetishism with the high heeled flamboyant exhibitionism of some of her personas.
