Penny Siopis

Edited by Kathryn Smith Johannesburg 2005 Johannesburg 2005 Published by Goodman Gallery Editions Image credits pp 168 – 172 © The Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg First edition published January 2005 The Goodman Gallery Available in 100 Deluxe copies, casebound in SUEDEL®luxe Tomate with original 163 Jan Smuts Avenue painting and 900 casebound standard copies. Parkwood Johannesburg ISBN: 0-620-33546-7 2193 South Africa Typeset in Electra, Helvetica Neue Printed on 150gsm MagnoMatt PO Box 411137 Craighall Layout by Studio 5 Reproduction, printing and binding by Ultralitho 2024 South Africa The publisher wishes to thank writers, museums, galleries, collectors and photographers for their kind permission to reproduce material, and for their help in the production of www.goodman-gallery.com this publication. The artist wishes to give special thanks to Colin Richards for his continued support. Tel: +27 11 788 1113 Fax: +27 11 788 9887 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by Email: goodman@iafrica.com any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from Penny Siopis, Edited by Kathryn Smith the authors or Goodman Gallery Editions. Research assistant: Emily Stainer Introduction © Kathryn Smith 2005 Prima Facie © Colin Richards 2005 Painting, Difference and Desire © Griselda Pollock 1994/revised 2005 The Ocean in a Bottle © Brenda Atkinson 2000/revised 2005 My Lovely Day © Penny Siopis 1998/revised 2005 The Gift © Jennifer Law 2005 The Place of Imagination © Achille Mbembe 2005 The Shock of Beauty © Sarah Nuttall 2005 Cover and end pages: Detail from the Shame series, 2002 – , mixed media on paper, 18.5 x 24.5cm each Column Cake, 1982, oil paint and found objects on wood base, 63.5 x 22.5 x 22.5cm This page and facing: Details from the Shame series, date, medium, size, collection The Archive, 2002, installation of found objects loaned from Dutch institutions with South African archive holdings, Tropen Museum, Amsterdam “Looking, with a specific consciousness, is a way of thinking for me. It is as if thoughts unfold from my eyes and attach to things.” - Penny Siopis Contents Introduction / Kathryn Smith 02 Prima Facie: Surface as Depth in the Work of Penny Siopis / Colin Richards 06 Painting, Difference and Desire in History: The Work of Penny Siopis 1985-1994 / Griselda Pollock 46 The Ocean in a Bottle: Penny Siopis and the Slippage of History / Brenda Atkinson 68 My Lovely Day / Penny Siopis 92 The Gift / Jennifer Law 102 The Place of Imagination: A Conversation with Penny Siopis / Achille Mbembe 118 The Shock of Beauty: Penny Siopis’ Pinky Pinky and Shame Series / Sarah Nuttall 134 Chronology 160 Contributors’ Biographies 164 Penny Siopis: Selected Publications 166 List of Illustrated Works 168 Introduction Kathryn Smith Introduction In a country where artistic innovation and challenging creative sensibilities seem to far outweigh the buying capacity of the market, getting a substantial artist’s monograph published is a small miracle in itself. As such, this book is long overdue. Perhaps of all artists working in South Africa post-1970, Penny Siopis has exerted the most influence over aspiring students and scholars. Her stunningly prolific output, intellectual agility and natural interdisciplinary sensibility has captured the imaginations not only of fellow artists, curators and art lovers, but also of anthropologists, sociologists, historians and philosophers. It is difficult to resist being drawn into her capacity to reflect the alwayschanging zeitgeist, on both locally-specific and globally-relevant levels. Penny Siopis and I enjoy a relationship that has grown and developed over the last ten years, starting with my very green beginnings as an undergraduate student at the University of the Witwatersrand. Secondary art education seemed to revolve around her iconic work Melancholia (1986), a bold, rude, kaleidoscopic painting that was literally too ‘full’ of itself. This ‘woman artist’ who wore her political and feminist heart on her sleeve (or, as much as it was possible to at the time) embodied creative ambition, desire and integrity, taking pleasure in flying in the face of the old guard and imbuing painting with such emotive and critical possibilities that it had people wondering whether she was celebrating or undermining the very act of painting itself. Being invited to edit and collate this book has brought our mentor-student relationship dauntingly and demandingly full-circle. At times, the responsibility seemed insurmountable but, like Siopis’ compositions and installations, beneath the apparent density and dis-order lies a rare kind of sensuous fulfilment and intellectual composure. There were times when Siopis, our research assistant Emily and I were gathered around Siopis’ overburdened dining room table, trying to sift through a considerable archive of images, and our collective hysteria (the humorous rather than Freudian kind) would have us in fits over ‘the full catastrophe’ of what this project actually entailed. It was during one of these sessions that I came across a discoloured photograph of a curious assemblage, mixed up with other archival misfits in a shoebox. The old jumbo print gave no hint as to the actual scale of the object depicted. Wire coat hangers hang from a rod inside a perspex box, attached to the wall by two small nails. Bits of fur and other objects hang from the coat hangers. I was completely taken by this strange thing and stared at it for some time before turning to Penny to ask her what it was. She shrieked with laughter, dismissing it as a work she’d made as a student and had shown once or twice on relatively insignificant group exhibitions, but the ‘thing’ as she put it, no longer exists. Untitled was in fact not life-size, only measuring about 30 x 40cm. She’d hand-fashioned the coat hangers, and the other objects were part of the contents of her studio. Looking at it again, we were mutually struck by what it seemed to foretell of her increasing interest in the complex relationships between ‘things’ and ‘signs’, and the potential for the ‘stuff’ of one’s life to act as powerful visual synecdoche. The imbrication of Siopis’ practice and references makes it difficult to speak of individual bodies of work as mutually exclusive from those that precede and progress from them. In terms of South Africa’s recent political transition, it seems appropriate now to ‘take stock’ of Siopis’ oeuvre which spans some 30 years of production. There is a cliché in South Africa that many so-called ‘struggle artists’ have found themselves in a state of ‘post-democracy crisis’. The artist photographed in her studio by Hannelie Coetzee, Johannesburg 2004 02 / 03 While Siopis fell somewhat outside of this rather parochial categorisation, her early ‘cake’ paintings and iconographically rich ‘still life’ compositions were widely interpreted as a powerfully gendered take on the spoils and excesses of colonialism. Her ironical ‘history’ paintings – often labelled ‘Resistance Art’ – were met with some consternation at first, coming as they did at a time of radical social and political upheaval. Now, the initial uncertainty 1 Interestingly, it is the ‘history’ works, as well as works produced around the mid-1990s that problematised notions of gender and race, that in part gave rise to the now-infamous ‘representational politics’ debate, where a number of mostly female, South African artists (Siopis included) inspired the wrath of several internationallybased, mostly male, postcolonial critics for allegedly ‘taking advantage’ of the imaging of ‘others’. This influential debate, however skewed in its origins, cast a critical eye on the culture and bias of representation at a time when South Africa was enjoying a rather uncritical celebration of its contemporary art on the international exhibitions circuit. See Atkinson, B and Breitz, C (eds) (1999), Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art (Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press) 2 Penny Siopis Interviewed by Sipho Mdanda (2004), www.goodmangallery.com 3 Cheales, Richard. Staggering, Original Paintings. The Citizen Newspaper, April 9, 1986 with which these works were received is being revised.1 As Siopis commented in a recent interview: Although not unhappy with political readings [of my earlier works] I sometimes feel frustrated that an emphasis on the political often results in reductive responses to complex and ambiguous situations. If one thinks of ‘relevance’ as using one’s imaginative capacities as fully as possible to present a social scene, then I am as I always was: an artist engaged in a social world imaginatively re-worked […] History creates ways of looking as well as making, and sometimes what becomes visible later was invisible, but present, earlier.2 In a rather pug-nosed review of her first Goodman Gallery solo exhibition (which featured the work Melancholia), critic Richard Cheales commented on Siopis’ “bravado in shoving so much into one picture”. At the risk of giving Cheales more credit than is his (retrospective) due, his observation of “[Siopis’] incredible devotion to clutter” found genuine embodiment as a critical strategy in both her paintings and later installations.3 Most particularly, Sympathetic Magic’s gravity-defying whirlwind of furniture and objects elicits powerful affect, vertigo and claustrophobia notwithstanding. Interestingly, these two psychosomatic conditions hark back to earlier descriptions of the affect of her paintings, with the picture plane threatened and challenged by unusual perspectives, impossibly thick impasto and simply too much ‘stuff’, like the criticism of Mozart that he used ‘too many notes’. It could be argued that in fact, Siopis has never been ‘correctly tasteful’. In a country like South Africa where history shadows and commands every action in the present, aesthetic sensibilities do not, and should not, necessarily ‘obey’ western canons of beauty. An artist of Greek descent, Siopis has commented that her imaginative investment in objects has been influenced by her Catholic upbringing; not in a dogmatic sense but in the broad sense of being concerned with all people and things. As the essays in this volume infer, the most compelling aspect of Siopis’ work is precisely this: the ability to refer both ‘universally’ and specifically as well as to that which is profoundly intimate. Theoretically engaged and technically dextrous, Siopis’ oeuvre has exhibited a remarkable capacity to encompass and embody a range of complex ideas, including women’s studies, psychoanalytic theory, postcolonial discourse, western and indigenous art histories and so on. The intellectual content and design of this book intends to mirror something of Siopis’ simultaneously synoptic and specific approach. The first essay, Colin Richards’ Prima Facie, is a penetrating and critical survey of Siopis’ production that takes surface (the converse but also corollary of depth) as its premise. Griselda Pollock’s Painting, Difference and Desire locates works produced between 1985 and 1994 – a crisis-driven period in South Africa’s history – in terms of gender and subjectivity, informed by postcolonial and psychoanalytic discourse, but more specifically, extends Richards’ discussion of the performative act of painting. Pollock’s discussion echoes Siopis’ own comments in relation to her history paintings of the 1980s as an act to turn (painting) “against its own values – not only [as] the representation of politics, but the politics of representation as well”.4 In The Ocean in a Bottle, Brenda Atkinson’s entrée into Siopis’ imaginary is by way of one of her first major objectUntitled, c.1975, mixed media assemblage, 30 x 40cm, no based installations, Reconnaissance: 1900-1997. Encountering Charmed Lives and Zombie, Atkinson poetically and insightfully explores the sensuous and political possibilities of these spatially-situated works. Autobiography figures strongly in Siopis’ recent output – particularly post-1994 – and is ushered in by her film My Lovely Day, which featured on the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale and has enjoyed international critical acclaim, most recently screened as part of the conference Art, Identity and the Unconscious in the Age of Transnationalism at the Tate Modern. The artist herself offers some commentary here on the making of this work, which by way of her self-reflexive authorial ‘voice’, reveals much about the constructed nature of memory. In The Gift, Jennifer Law confronts the ongoing work Will (1997-) through an interrogation of the social and cultural significance of the notion of the gift, something not nearly as innocent as an object-based show of affection wrapped in bright paper and a ribbon. Will is a growing collection of personal objects and fragments reconfigured from past installations that Siopis has ‘bequeathed’ to various people. On the occasion of Siopis’ death, these will be distributed across the globe. In The Place of Imagination Achille Mbembe extends the discussion of the nature of the relationship between the personal and social significance of objects in a stimulating conversation with Siopis focusing on her collecting and creative processes. Finally, in The Shock of Beauty, Sarah Nuttall comes face to face with fear, uncertainty, xenophobia and shame in a powerfully subjective account of her experiences with Siopis’ visceral and emotive Pinky Pinky and Shame series, contextualised within the broader social framework of contemporary South Africa. As evocations of psychological exposure, these works manifest what the artist refers to as a “poetics of vulnerability”. It is interesting to note that the first showing of these works was met in some instances with the rather misguided perception that at last Siopis had finally ‘returned’ to painting. But paint has always been somehow ‘involved’, as a 4 5 Williamson, Sue (1989), Resistance Art in South Africa (Cape Town, Johannesburg and London: David Philip and the Catholic Institute for International Relations); p.22 Siopis and Mdanda (2004), op. cit., www.goodmangallery.com device to engender physicality in and of things; to embody the imagination. That paint and object have always been incontrovertibly allied in Siopis’ work, is compelling at a time when so much contemporary art seems deeply ambivalent about the ‘position’ or ‘relevance’ of painting. As Siopis so simply but powerfully states: Painting gives us something like an elemental state or process of imaging. It can bring into the world something new, a ‘presence’ which is not ‘prefigured’, not representational in the obvious way. I am not talking here about the conventional romance of painting to which many artists and viewers subscribe. Painting is for me a form of imagining itself, and that imagining leaves physical tracks of its forming.5 04 / 05