Archive: Issue No. 43, March 2001
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Tracey Rose
Tracey Rose
Tracey Rose
Tracey Rose
Tracey Rose
Tracey Rose
Tracey Rose
Tracey Rose
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A feature on an artist in the public eye.
Tracey Rose
Modus operandi: A young artist who is making an impact on the international scene, Tracey Rose is not a practitioner who jumps at every curatorial opportunity offered her, and has been known to withdraw from more than one exhibition if the circumstances have not seemed right. A cool consideration marks her approach. "I find it quite insulting when people don't understand the gravity of what they're working with," says Rose, adding that her preferred period for working a concept through to its resolution is two years. With a Catholic upbringing and a rich ancestry which includes German and Khoisan forbears, Rose's themes are the dissection of her own social history as a coloured person in South Africa, and issues of the body, identity and gender. Early works, like The Thinker,1996, dealt with specific incidents: a small reproduction of the Rodin piece is used as a weapon in a family argument. Recently, Rose's work has become more abstract. The piece Rose refers to as "my masterpiece" is TKO (2000), which had its roots when Rose took up boxing and trained at a downtown Johannesburg gym for an extended period "because I wanted to beat up a curator who I thought put up an extremely crap show - I decided not to participate �" Invited in 2000 to take up a residency at the prestigious ArtPace Institute in San Antonio, Texas, Rose proposed the piece which became TKO, in which the artist, unclothed, boxes a punching bag in an ever increasing crescendo of blows and cries, under the surveillance of four spy cameras, including one in the punching bag itself . "Monet's waterlilies struck me - that commitment to the surface - my understanding of boxing was that it was an art, a passion, like dancing, and the intention was that each punch would be a mark, a gesture, building up to something". The images are pale and shifting, the sounds urgent and guttural, and the artist/protagonist is both victim and aggressor, implicating the viewer in this complex visceral exchange. Artist's statement: "Making work is a documentation of a journey - each stage, each process, each dilemma has to be worked through. At one time I felt pressured to do a lot of things at the same time, but now I want to take one step at a time. When you make an artwork you're not just doing something at that moment, you're contributing to an entire history of artmaking." Currently: Rose is artist-in-residence at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town for February/March. Here, she will undertake the serious task of preparing a work for the central show at this year's Venice Biennale, director Harold Szeeman's 'A Plateau of Humankind'. This will be a video installation. Before that: Since her mid nineties graduation from the University of Witwatersrand, Rose has had an extremely busy few years internationally, as her CV shows. In much of her work in this time, Rose has investigated questions of gender and colour, often through the visual motifs of her own body and body hair. In Ongetiteld (Untitled), shown on 'Democracys Images' at the Bildmuseet in Umeå� , Sweden in 1998, Rose again used surveillance cameras to film herself shaving off all of her bodily hair. In the catalogue, Rose describes this act as being "about both demasculating and de-feminising my body, shaving off the masculine and feminine hair. This kind of de-sexualisation carries with it a certain kind of violence. The piece is about making myself unattractive and unappealing. But what was disconcerting was � that I suddenly became attractive to a whole different group of people. Perhaps there was not enough of a sense of penance and flagellation in the work." And before that: For 'Graft', the Colin Richards curated show at the SANG on the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Rose presented Span I and Span II. In this, Rose sat with shaved head on a sideways TV displaying a closeup image of a reclining nude, a classic art history image. Head bent, Rose busied herself with knotting strands of her own shaven hair. The bravura performance took place inside a glass cabinet. Rose says, "With my naked body on the TV I wanted to negate the passivity of the action of the reclining nude. In doing the piece, I had to confront what I wasn't supposed to do with my body. The work is a cleansing act, a coming out. The knotting not only invokes the rosary beads of my childhood, but also the working with one's hands, and the meaning of this handiwork as a form of empowerment". In Span I, the complementary part of the piece, a red-overalled prisoner incised text on to the opposite wall of the gallery, memories from Rose's childhood, often dealing with the role that hair, how straight it was, how curly, and thus how it defined race, had played in her childhood. "The wall's a purge � and a perversion of the idea of a lack of penance, where I become vindicated through the act of employing an ex-prisoner to 'perform' my confession." Next up: In April 2001, Rose will show at De Appel in Amsterdam and "something possibly in New York in July." Asked what direction her work might take next, Rose replied she would like "to take a step back to look at what could probably be nurtured. I'm hoping there'll be a lot of humanity in it - not just self lacerating but something more. And there must be an allowance in any artwork for you to be charmed, something that's tender, frivolous." Selected Curriculum vitae:
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