An unrecoverable strangeness: some reflections on selfhood and otherness in South African art

Abstract

In conversation with Penny Siopis SN: Penny, I think you will agree that we have had a long struggle in this country over the ethics of representing, speaking for and speaking to 'the Other'. One consequence of such debates seemed to be that, at least by the 1980s and 1990s, South African artists came increasingly to feel only comfortable imagining and speaking for themselves, and with turning to their own bodies as their subject. I wanted to ask you what you think the impact of this has been. PS: The phenomenon of artists turning to their own bodies as a way of speaking for themselves in the context we are discussing was more a feature of the 1990s. In the 1980s progressive artists, both black and white, made work that went beyond 'the self' as part of the collective struggle against apartheid. This political position became synonymous with art as a critical practice. With liberation came both crises and opportunities for renewal of selfhood. For many white artists this prompted an inward turn. And many black artists went public. The body figured in both tendencies and was generally manifest through photography. The opening up of the country to the larger 'global' world complicated matters further for artists around questions of representation. It was at this juncture that many turned to their bodies as subject. But, I am not sure that this was because they felt uncomfortable representing 'others'. That would have been very defensive and would have made us somewhat exceptional. Of course, a strong consciousness existed about power, given the horror of our history. This made ethics an issue, but I don't think this was the determining factor in shaping the turn to self-representation I sense we are talking about here. Frankly, I think that the violence of the times, deception and the utopian yearning for release from a very malignant experience of history, all factored in, as did the feminist and postcolonial discourses of the day and wider art-world trends. Also, the different uses of the body presented different inscriptions, making the framing of certain practices in fixed binary self/other terms problematic. I mean, when an artist like Berni Searle uses her own 'black' body as subject in the mid-1990s, is she speaking only for herself?. Is she retreating from otherness? SN: Was one of the most powerful influences here the increasing dominance of 'body politics' in the international art world?' PS: Yes, I think so. There were two strands of critical art practice that addressed selfhood. On the one hand there was the scripto-visual tradition that Mary Kelly typified. This brand of conceptualism was predicated on avoiding mimetic imaging of the body in order to critique the power relations (colonial, gender, class) inscribed in such representation. On the other hand there was the practice of Cindy Sherman, in which mimetic imaging was asserted as a critique of fixed self-hood. Sherman performs multiple subjectivities 'dressed up' as different identities through high artifice colour photography. And it was this mode, and the identity politics discourse attendant on it--such as masquerade, fetishism and so on--rather than Kelly's, which many South African artists adopted. Of course, one might ask what made this type of self-representation so attractive to South African artists and why it took root in the way it did. I have a hunch, but the complexity of the situation needs more intricate exploration. SN: What is your hunch? PS: Complicated. A few fragments of thoughts, rather than anything coherent. The body, in all its contesting inscriptions, signified modernity--an acute consciousness of individual sovereignty, selfhood, subjectivity, but also a crisis of uncertainty about who we were. So the appeal of high artifice lens-based work a la Cindy Sherman was powerful and functioned as model. It was perfect in that it was so clearly constructed. It was the absolute opposite to the authenticity accorded the black-and-white documentary photographic tradition that evidenced 'the struggle', for instance. …