Africaine: Candice Breitz Wangechi Mutu Tracey Rose Fatimah Tuggar

iiilliiiiiiii CANDICE BREITZ . i WANGECHIMUTU TRACEY ROSE FATIMAH Journal of Contemporary African Art Candice Breitz, Ghost Series #5,1996, C-print, 27 x 40" In these works, the very problematics of historicization, colonialism and tourism are enacted on the literal surface of the African female form. Anthropological portraits such as these, while apparently documenting a fading way of life, in fact trap and isolate the subject symbolically from their intended context and environment. Decontextualized, the native is readily exploited and exoticized as a commodity on the basis of her image or physical shell. It is upon this remaining husk or sheath which Western desire for the other may be projected. With these works, Breitz appears to challenge ideologies of race on the grounds of a binary essentialism, while paradoxically locating her visual discourse in the very same milieu. Included in the exhibition were several postcards bearing surface alterations made with "Tippex", as well a series of poster-sized C-prints. While the larger images commanded attention due to the sheer space needed to present them, the smaller works clearly carried the greater impact by virtue of their understated poignancy. The effect of this protective erasure, while emotive in the markings on the smaller works, dissipated in the large-scale works that functioned visually as enlarged reproductions and lacked the vitality or spontaneity of their originals. Easily overlooked, these diminutive works bore both intensity of sentiment and intimacy of experience. Tracey Rose presents four photographic works that act as sexualized archetypes of black femininity. Cicciolina (2001) features Rose as a dominatrix porn star caricature, sprawling on a sport scar. Her heavy, cornstarch make-up and leather gear conjure images of drag queens and the trashy video quality of pornographic movies. The scene occurs in an urban setting, with the spotty patches of grass looking as used up as the woman herself. The title makes allusion to Italian porn queen and politician Cicciolina, famous in the art world for her marriage to Jeff Koons and, more importantly, the graphic works Koons used her body to create. In Lolita (2001) the oversized grill of a shiny, red fire truck, frames the figure of a nightmarish rag-doll woman with candy-apple red hair, frilly dress and crimson mary-janes. Her eyes are painted on, open and staring. The frilly underskirt she wears billows slightly in the breeze revealing white, cotton panties, while she rams an absurdly large candy cane into her mouth. Tracey Rose's Mami (2001) depicts a middle-aged woman, clearly a governess or housekeeper, as she eagerly greets the homecoming of an off-camera character. Her face is bare except for plain spectacles, and in contrast to the aforementioned works, we see a woman effectively desexualized and normalized into the mainstream expectation of someone in her position. Lastly, Venus Baartman (2001) poses Rose as Eve archetype, nude in a grassy knoll, poised as if startled to attention by a predator. Caught in the moment of pre-capture, her body is robust and she seems unaffected by her own nudity in the exposed setting. The name of this work references Saartjie Baartman, the domestic slave who in the nineteenth century was paraded by her owner as an oddity, for profit. The women of her people called the Khoisan or "Hottentots," were considered anomalous in the West for their distinctive, pronounced buttocks. South African Baartman became known as the infamous "Hottentot Venus", and was highly sought after as human curiosity, a freak. In her life her body was displayed and studied; in her death she was dissected and her bones ultimately acquired by the Musee de l'Homme in Paris.1 Of the four works, Rose's Mami bears the most potential for multilayered meaning and ambiguity. Were it not for its didactic name, there would be a poignant slippage between the presumption that the woman pictured is the housekeeper of the sprawling mansion, and the possibility that she is in fact the houseowner. Shot in various significant locations in the vicinity of Johannesburg, the pieces vacillate between narrative photography and performance documentation. The scale of the works, the role-playing and the performative aspects inherent in the construction of such photographs...