Assembly (2017)

Co-directed with Thalia Laric

Performed by: Julia de Rosenwerth, Kopano Maroga, Cilna Katzke, Vathiswa Nodlayiya, Ciara Baron

13 July, Cape Town: Confluences 9, University of Cape Town

27-28 July, Cape Town: Youngblood Art Gallery

Videography by Riley Thompson

Notes on abstraction and figuration

I have been reading an essay by Ashraf Jamal (2017) on Esther Mahlangu’s work. In the essay, Jamal talks about abstraction and figuration and what these two approaches mean within South African art, (and if it is even possible to talk about any kind of nation-based art).

What about abstraction and figuration?

Mahlangu refuses figuration in her work. Jamal argues that her freedom comes through her use of abstraction or her avoidance of figuration (even though the human is not absent in her work). He argues that her work goes against “the grand narrative of South African art – especially since the 1970s”, which is defined by “a culture of resistance, with the embattled black body central to this culture” (Jamal, 2017:376) and “a pathological fixation upon its history of pain” (Jamal, 2017:377). “At the vortex of South African art”, writes Jamal, is the body, “a locus of abjection and transfiguration” (Jamal, 2017:376). Art must foster change. Abstraction is insufficient and the prerogative of the wealthy and the privileged. Out of touch with reality. An elitist indulgence. Jamal argues that this aesthetic of resistance through figuration nonetheless represents an aesthetic closure aligning itself with a fixed reality principle (Jamal, 2017:380). He explains that

  • Abstraction as an aesthetic and an ethos remained in abeyance for what was strikingly apparent in South African art in the 1990s is that, as an art of play and experimentation remained bonded to-and-by the human figure at the core of the resistance movement (Jamal, 2017:380).

Yet through Mahlangu’s work, he sees a possibility for abstraction as resistance and a way to exercise aesthetic freedom and agency. She does not allow her work to be reduced to her history as an artist. How does he say it? “She cannot be explained away in-and-through a focus upon her gender, ethnicity, or even her age. [She is] unmoved by a reductive identity politics, resistant to the grand narrative of resistance” (Jamal, 2017:382).

What is the connection with your own questions about dance?

I was interested in Jamal’s case for abstraction, his critique of the reductive risks of identity politics and the emphasis on figuration. I have been interested for some time in ways in which dancing bodies are made to line up with particular narratives. How can bodies dance when they do not line up, when they do not adhere to particular orientation devices (Ahmed, 2006)? I am wary of the politics of identity, but worry that reaching towards abstraction risks making the work irrelevant. No story, no meaning, elitist indulgence.

Is it possible to remove figuration from the dance? You are dealing with the body.

Okay, so you cannot help that the body is a measure, a means to measure silences. That is Spivak I think. Figuring the body in dance is a way to resist, to transform meaning and to measure the silence (Spivak, 1988:82), but also a way to play the politics of identity within a particular reality, a specific narrative of South Africa. Maybe abstraction is not about the erasure of the body, but a re-figuring of the body. Dealing with and through the body so that its image, its representation, are not central to the work. Is it possible to bring the workings of the dance to the foreground and move the figure of the dancer to the background? Are there other or greater possibilities for agency when the workings of the dance are foregrounded rather than the figure of the dancer?

 

You need to explain this more. 

Jamal not only juxtaposes abstraction with figuration, but also with realism. I find his questions powerful. He asks: “Why is it that the figurative, when framed by the socio-political, continues to dominate South Africa’s image repertoire? What hold does the figure have on the South African imagination (Jamal, 2017:380)? He adds that in addition to the dominance of the figurative, there is a sense that realism is “automatically deemed more committed to the needs of the underprivileged and the suffering” (Jamal, 2017:380). This, however, he writes, is a false opposition. He writes that the role of South African art “remains largely tied to a painful truth” (Jamal, 2017:381). But, he is not saying that art should untie itself from this truth. Dealing with this painful truth and freeing the body is necessary work. He reminds us of Fanon, who explains that, and I need to read this again: “Colonisation not only suppressed and emptied the black body of agency, it emptied the mind, it emptied the soul, replacing substance with a void – in effect turning the absented, the abstracted, the nullified, into a theatre of horror” (in Jamal, 2017:381). Freeing the body is working to restore agency, purpose, narrative and being. But, and this is the really important point, he writes that one could argue that “it is the very obsessive-compulsive fixation upon the body which has diminished the understanding of its relationality within a more complex and uncertain socio-political and cultural matrix” (Jamal, 2017:381). In other words, he seems to be suggesting that it is the obsession with figuration and realism -the compulsive fixation on the body- that limits the role of South African art to speaking to its most immediate and painful past. It makes me think: does the fixation on the body as a figure restore agency? What else is at work?