Marlene Dumas: Returning Home

MARLENE DUMAS RETURNING HOME Virginia MacKenny M arlene Dumas grew up in Kuilsriver outside Ca pe Town, stud ied art at Michaelis, th e Universi ty of Ca pe Town's School of Fine Art, and left South Africa in 1976, aged twenty-three, to engage in fur ther study in Holland. I There she enco untered paint ing in the real, instead of th rough reproduction, and there she explored fur ther the topics that have rem ained a staple in her oeuvre-sex, politics, race, and death. Despite worldwide acclaim (in 2007 she was the recipient of the lucrative Dusseldo rf Art Prize and exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Co ntempo rary Art [MOT] in Tokyo and in 2008 exhibits at MoMA, New York), Dumas's Intimate Relations is her first solo exhibitio n in South Africa. Exhibited at the South African Natio nal Gallery in Cape Town and the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, the show is in many ways a homecoming for the artist. Structured in the manner of a retrospective, it shows a cross-section of her production over the last thirty-four years, including work from her stude nt days to work finished in 2007. This allows viewers to follow the development of her ideas th rough bo th major and minor works and to examine var ious influen ces on her production. Like many artists who leave the land of th eir birth, Dumas's artistic practice rem ain s strongly predicated on her experiences in and of it. "SA is my content," she asserts. Thus whether the work depicts prison ers from Palestine, the victi ms of American imperialism , or the wome n who populate the red-light district in Amsterdam, the im petus for Dumas's engageme nt is roo ted in the place from whence she came. Dumas grew up in traumati zed , Apartheid _ Journal of Contempora ry African Art governed South Africa, yet, as a young white girl, was largely protected from its harsh realiti es. Dumas's recollection s of her childhood are situated in the ru ral landscape of the family wine farm, a place fraught with its ow n conflicts:"Africa struggles with nature. Droughts and floods and ancesto rs and ghosts. 1understand that growing up on a farm. I played in the earth and climbed in the trees. Cities are something else." Interestingly, however, it is not to the landscape to which Dumas turns when engagin g her concerns, but almost exclusively to the image of the human figure. Cur ator Em ma Bedford initia tes the exhibitio n Intimate Relat ions with Miss Rosebud (1973 ).2 An early work produced by Dumas in her student days, it dep icts a blond doll in a red biki ni top with dislocated legs splayed open. A quietly violent, iconoclasti c gesture, this sim ple image upsets notion s of the innocence of childhood and enca psulates many of the themes that continue to preoccupy Dumas. Dominant among these is a conce rn with the representat ion of th e female form, of whic h Inti mate Relati ons has many. Several stand tall at three meters, notabl y th e totemic Magda lena images painted in 1995, whe reas others are more intimate. The \Vitl/ess (2002), a watercolor of the head of a young girl, is a soft and slightly battered form and seems cousin to three of the most telling, and disquieting, of the sma ller images in the exhibition: Give the People What They Wallt (1992), Liberty ( 1993), and Justice (1993). Versio ns of each other, the girls hold the same, so mewha t awkward pose, fro ntally viewed with bo th ar ms bent outward as if in supplication or display. Disturbingly revealed , each girl is presented nake d to the public eye. The girl in Give the People What Het Kwaad is Banaal (Evil is Bana~, 1984. Oil on canvas, 125 x 105 cm. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Courtesy Goodman Gallery Cape. Spring /Summer 2008 The Image as Burden, 1993. Oil o n canvas, 4 0 x 50 c m . Private collection, Belgium. They Want holds a cloth behind her...