Tracey Rose 'Plantation Lullabies' at the Goodman Gallery
by Anthea Buys
Tracey Rose's remarkable advantage over several of her contemporaries exhibiting at the Johannesburg Goodman Gallery in the last year is that many of her would-be detractors are too terrified of her to voice their criticisms in public. These are reserved for the privacy of the post-exhibition car-ride confessional, or are nervously grunted between scenesters over a skinny cappuccino somewhere far, far away from the Jan Smuts 'gallery strip'.
Not so long ago a colleague warned me not to write anything bad about Tracey Rose because 'she doesn't take criticism lightly'. Another artist confided, 'I thought the show was shit. But I would never admit that to anyone else'. Although more than anything else this attests to the smallness of the Johannesburg art scene (Rose herself called it 'a tiny poep-hole') and the strategic censorship that often seems to regulate it. It also positions Rose as precisely the figure, or the institution, she sets out to condemn in her most recent exhibition, 'Plantation Lullabies': Rose has become The Man, the mainstream, the incontrovertible System.
In 'Plantation Lullabies', as in 'Ciao Bella' shown here in 2002, we find Rose in costume, grafting her own body into the guise of a politically charged historical figure. This time it is Mammy, who appeared in 'Ciao Bella', but is also commonly associated with the historical 'minstrel show' convention, or its more derogatory alias, the 'coon show'. This allusion is sustained in both the title of the exhibition and that of the video installation around which it centres. Here called The Cunt Show, this work collapses two dirty c-words to the end of criticising the institution of Western feminist art, which Rose maintains is reductively vaginocentric and marginalises women artists of colour.
The Cunt Show is derived from a performance called, The Cant Show that Rose gave during a series of artists' talks at the 2007 'Global Feminisms' exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In 2005 the Brooklyn Museum unveiled its trophy adjunct, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art - a sort of cathedral to Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. Upon Rose's arrival in Brooklyn for the exhibition, it became apparent to her that 'Global Feminisms' was framed as a homage to the white feminism of the Anglo-American academy, that it ostracised and made a spectacle of so-called 'coloured', feminist artists. Her response to this was a performance in which she ventriloquised through two sock puppets a satirical dialogue between two artists participating in the exhibition. At one juncture the pink sock asks, 'Where are all the coloured American artists?' The cornflower blue sock answers, 'They're dead. Linda Nochlin killed them.' Nochlin curated 'Global Feminisms' and was in the audience at Rose's performance.
Sadly, all this contextualising detail is lost in 'Plantation Lullabies', which many visitors read either as pointlessly pugnacious or sloppy and unresolved. However, Rose is adamant that if her South African viewers were not so lazy - if we had bothered to pre-read on 'Global Feminisms' - her video of the performance would resonate with significance, and we would reel from the incisiveness of her critique. Local audiences could be more proactive in our viewing of art - this is not a bad suggestion, but does it exonerate Rose from the charge that parts of 'Plantation Lullabies' are fairly ad hoc and lacklustre?
Rose's performance at 'Global Feminisms' is translated for the Goodman Gallery as a video diptych. The dominant projection shows Rose dressed as Mammy with her sock puppets, reciting the same dialogue contemptuously simplistically. In the background, an arbitrary animation of kitsch, psychedelic swirls pulsates, dwarfing Rose behind her podium. Opposite this is a black and white projection of multiple figures in an array of strange dress, moving repetitively against a cave-like background. This is an allusion to Plato's 'Allegory of the Cave' in The Republic, in which a community of prisoners trapped inside a cave tries to decipher an entourage of strange shadow figures projected on the cave wall by a troupe of puppeteers. The ignorant prisoners are enthralled with what Plato calls 'mere images'.
In Rose's setup, she is clearly one of the puppeteers, or the master puppeteer, and the costumed characters in the opposite video projection are presumably the shadows on the cave wall. That leaves the viewer to take up the title of ignorant prisoner, duped into fascination with the strange figures. However, the viewer's relationship to the duping puppeteer is ambivalent: on one hand, we see the puppeteer and are no longer deceived: the mechanisms of the system are exposed, and this constitutes an educating, ethical revelation. On the other hand, this unveiling doesn't alter the fact that we have been gullible. Our confrontation with the puppeteer is humiliating - it bares our insipidness, and shows us, before a privileged being, to be stupid and powerless.
The socks take pops at 'Africa Remix', white women artists, white men and institutions, like the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center, which Rose considers to have been established with a view to hegemonising the history of art. This dialogue, titled Tits & Ass, is displayed on the walls of the Goodman Gallery, scribbled on mock foolscap paper against similar backgrounds to those that appear in the primary video. This display puzzlingly dominates the gallery space, while the video diptych is shoved in a gloomy corner, giving the vague impression that not much thought had gone into the curation of this exhibition.
Certainly Rose's acerbic critical voice is an invaluable force in the local art scene, and her intelligent and brave engagement with globally dominant discourses encourages a widening of critical perspectives for local artists and critics. However, this does not mitigate or excuse the awkward execution of 'Plantation Lullabies' in a context so completely different from that for which it was first intended. The title's allusion to slavery and the 'coon show' motif introduced in the video diptych are glossed over somewhat opportunistically, and the delivery of the exhibition, for all its intrepid subtlety, seems careless.
Anthea Buys is a Johannesburg-based writer who works for the Mail and Guardian as an art journalist
Opens: 29 March
Closes: 19 April
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