THE IMAGE AS BURDEN

ART SOUTH AFRICA, Issue 13 Vol 4 / 2015

A wall of 'Rejects' greets you on entrance to the Marlene Dumas retrospective at the Tate Modern. Initially composed of ink portraits rejected from another work, Dumas chose to combine these 'rejects' to form the starting point of a new multi-part series highlighting her process of selection and exclusion, as well as her interest in politics of representation.

The bold choice to begin the retrospective with a series of rejected works is typical of Dumas, who never shies away from interrogating her own practice. From then on her work appears in rough chronological order, in a series of rooms each loosely associated with the central concerns of her work. These thematic groupings, each accompanied by an introductory text and quote by the artist, frame her work and make their conceptual underpinnings accessible.

it's easy to see why Dumas has garnered the critical acclaim she has; her work is intriguing, unsettling, complex and unapologetic.

After making your way through all fourteen of these rooms, it's easy to see why Dumas has garnered the critical acclaim she has; her work is intriguing, unsettling, complex and unapologetic. Predominantly successful in its structure, the curation does occasionally fall short. In some instances the links between grouped works are tenuous, as in the room themed around her politically focused pieces. Grouped together by content rather than style or chronology, the relationships between the works seemed disingenuous in the otherwise chronological context of the rest of the exhibition. 

The room with Dumas' sexually explicit paintings had a similarly disjointed feel removed from the timeline of the rest of the exhibition, it's hard to place within the context of her wider body of work. However, the reason for this was clearly practical rather than curatorial, as sensitive visitors had the option to avoid the explicit works. Apart from these occasionally disparate groupings, the chronology and curation of the exhibition flowed successfully from one room to the next; a journey through Dumas' varied conceptual explorations.

The progression of Dumas' portrait painting, early on in her practice, shows her continued fascination with images of the human face. Well known for her large, close-cropped portraits that foreground the abstract nature of facial features, Dumas' early student works are examples of her first explorations in this directions.

We are privy to her experimentation in depicting and distorting faces sometimes of friends and fellow students, and other times of unknown people. From The Jewish Girl to Out of Africa: portrait of Moshekwa Langa, Dumas focuses closely on the face, doing away with background and context. More than simply a portrait of the person, the physical nature of her painterly surfaces draws attention to the abstractness of the image. Dumas is conscious of her interpretation of both the individual and their image, reflecting on both while creating something entirely new.

Dumas' strong connection to South Africa, the country that she left in 1976, is a defining feature of the exhibition. In the multifaceted Black Drawings (1991 - 1992), Dumas illustrates the political and conceptual depth of her work. As a politically conscious South African artist living in the Netherlands, she was acutely aware of the issues of representation, particularly of black people, taking place both under apartheid and internationally. Using early twentieth-century postcards as her initial subject matter, Black Drawings consists of a series of black ink portraits, made with layers of ink and water.

By choosing to focus on the faces of the people, Dumas gives them an importance and agency denied by the ethnographic framing of the original imagery. She then used black models in magazines as source imagery, as well as individual found portraits. In her own words, she wanted to create a series that was a "tribute to black" as a colour.

a subtle but powerful interrogation of the fundamental principles of discrimination

Created a few years before the first democratic elections in South Africa, the timing of this series allows for an interesting reading of its layered meaning. In the catalogue text, the work is described as exploring "what happens to our conception of an individual when they are seen as part of a group." This is a subtle but powerful interrogation of the fundamental principles of discrimination, judging individuals based on preconceived notions of the group they are seen to belong to.

Just as Dumas boldly interrogates complex political issues in her work, she doesn't shy away from the complexities and politics involved with being an artist. She constantly interrogates her subject matter and medium; both the reference images she uses and the painted images she creates from them. Highly conscious of the associations and connotations created in every aspect of her work, she manages to maintain her free style free both in the choice of subject matter and content, and in the expressive mark.

The core concept explored in all her works is her relationship with imagery; the title of her retrospective is a fitting reference to this. Referring to both a small painting included in the exhibition and Dumas' own relationship with images, The Image as Burden captures the many layers inherent in the images that so intrigue the artist the history, associations, representations and interpretations that she works with on a daily basis.

By Siobhan Keam for Art South Africa.