Twelve-year gorefest: William Scarbrough at Bell-Roberts
by Tavish McIntosh
I remember being fascinated by my mother's medical journals as a child. Looking at these flabby bodies strangely bloated, with weird protuberances and odd discolourations was endlessly intriguing. These people passively displayed their anomalies, giving up their bodies to the medical gaze. The only privacy was granted by a black stripe hiding their eyes. Strangely enough, this editorial prudence perhaps fascinated me more than their freakish bodies. Without eyes these figures lost their ability to look back on the viewer, to reciprocate and thus contest the dispassionate medical gaze. The black stripe seemed to vindicate the viewing process. But they also frustrated any attempt to fully see these people. They were forever lost in visual limbo.
It was of these figures that I thought when struggling to digest William Scarbrough's 'Stitches' exhibition. He has spent 12 years collecting images from different media sources in order to stitch together a portrait of contemporary society. In their resolved aesthetic, their cohesion as a body of work, Scarbrough seems to propose this as a definitive collage of modern life, but it is the violence embedded in this vision that is particularly jarring.
The show's kaleidoscopic pictures of scarred bodies, butchered limbs and lambs are an unabated visual assault. The blinkers the editors at South African Medical Journal had placed on their figures were missing and one longs for their protection. The reassuring homilies embedded into You magazine's morbid tales are absent in this barrage of gore.
Scarbrough's collages collect together a comprehensive show of the morbidly fascinating underbelly of contemporary society. Utilising all the edit, cut and paste techniques associated with post-modern approaches, Scarborough juxtaposes images of children with images of the ill, the deranged and misguided, and the brutalised. His images bring home the sickness of a world that allowed Hitler to exterminate millions of Jews; that dropped the atom bomb in Japan and more generally thrives on brutality. He is pointing to all that has been repressed by the sanitised modern world, all that doesn't belong in the rainbow nation, all that doesn't fit the white picket fence ideals.
Technically Scarbrough's show is held together by an almost uniform format, a strong eye for compositional harmony and balance, and the labour-intensive working of each image. The layers are carefully arranged to echo a Rorschach-esque symmetry and then neatly sewn together with thread. In Healing Hands this laboursome process is at odds with the distaste engendered by the collages and their impersonal content. Scarbrough leaves out of the frame traumas that are closer to home, images from his own world. Instead these are the traumas imaged in the mass media.
Freudian psychoanalysis would have us believe that we are called to endlessly repeat oedipal traumas, revisiting and recreating the sites of our personal anguish and discomfort. In contrast, Lacanian psychoanalysis posits trauma as outside the frame of representation and the symbolic, and therefore impossible to repeat - one is only able to edge towards and hint at the unspeakable traumas, but never able to represent them. Scarbrough's exhibition implicitly refutes both the Freudian and Lacanian models of trauma. He brings us to the node of societal trauma, without revisiting the personal oedipal trauma, or positing trauma as outside the representational frame. In his comprehensive treatise on how to visualise, historicize and mythologize trauma, it is the juxtapositions, the coming together of disparate elements that bring about the trauma embedded in the collage. Thus in Bad Dog Went the image of the young and studious girl points to the violence of the skeletal dog's body suspended by a meat hook. The childish quality of the title is evocative of primary transgressions, demonstrating a link between early psychological traumas and later violations visited upon innocent victims. Importantly the image doesn't so much represent trauma as enact it in its implicit narrative structure.
The show exposes viewers to juxtapositions that ask us to read trauma into the image by implicitly echoing Scarbrough's stitching mechanism. His work is in itself a traumatic event. Is this a successful strategy? Does recreating trauma in imagery have value? In so far as Scarbrough wishes to expose his audience to thoughts and images we often try to avoid, he succeeds. Perhaps it is the visual limbo of an untold story that is fascinating, rather than its resolution.
Opens: April 2
Closes: April 26
Bell-Roberts Contemporary
89 Bree Street, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 422 1100
Fax: (021) 423 3135
Email: suzette@bell-roberts.com
www.bell-roberts.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 8.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 10am - 2pm
