“The economies of repetition”: The market, the artistic, and the genocidal in Ivan Vladislavić’s “Curiouser”

Abstract

As a fictional response to a series of artworks by the Johannesburg artist, Joachim Schönfeldt, Ivan Vladislavić’s The Exploded View had unconventional origins. Though Vladislavić maintains that the links between Schönfeldt’s images and his own text are understated, certain motifs are obviously common to both. Moreover, if authenticity is one of Schönfeldt’s central themes, this is no less true of The Exploded View — and particularly of the story “Curiouser”, which features another (fictional) Johannesburg artist, Simeon Majara. The latter’s multi-media pieces not only raise uncomfortable questions about artistic originality and integrity, but also self-reflexively interrogate artistic representations of atrocity and the public’s consumption of such images. Intriguingly, however, while the fictional Majara’s installation on the Rwandan genocide, the “Nyanza Shrouds”, bears little relation to Schönfeldt’s work, it does implicitly set up a “conversation” with the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project (indeed, the similarity between Jaar and Majara’s names suggests a deliberately teasing cross-reference). In this article, I discuss the ways in which “Curiouser” engages with “the anxiety of influence” and the art world’s implicatedness in commodity capitalism. I also explore what Majara terms “the economies of repetition” in his own praxis, and his musings on the uncanny nexus between surplus and iteration in both genocidal and artistic contexts.