Archive: Issue No. 88, December 2004

Last month, the Goodman Gallery hosted an exhibition by performance artist, Tracey Rose. Entitled 'The Thieving Fuck and the Intergalactic Lay', it was beguiling, particularly for the Jewish community, constantly alert and sensitive as it is about reflecting identity in real time. Rose's socially critical yet critically astute focus gives her the edge. It might be frightening and offensive for some, but perhaps this can be viewed as healthy.

Rose flippantly dismissed the relevance of audience response when she spoke to ArtThrob shortly after the opening. But dealing directly with the fabric of this potential audience's culture, can she afford to?

In a silent video, The Wailers, the artist has captured five boys dressed as Hasidic Jews playing basketball underwater. The knee-jerk reaction would be to cry 'anti-Semitism', 'misappropriation of cultural references' or to lump Constitutional injunctions at her: 'Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which... does not extend to... advocacy of hatred... based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm' (Constitution 1996: 9).

A critical look at the piece, however, paints a different picture. Does it advocate hate? Aesthetics maybe and questions, certainly. But hate? Many non-Jewish local artists, including Willem Boshoff, have used Jewish references in their work. Could it reflect on the point that our world has reached where cultural references no longer bear the untouchable stigma they used to? Is globalisation infiltrating the intimacy of our individual cultural definitions?

The problem then lies not in the appropriation of the references, but in the appropriateness of their use, and this is where The Wailers hits a wall, and it's not the Wailing Wall. The elements are evocative, but some of the interpretative clues she offers in her press release, like five players evoking the five books of the Old Testament, or the swimming pool tiling being reminiscent of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, are not only forced, but trite. More homework is necessary on Rose's part for a critical exercise of this nature to hold water.

Armed with a Wits Fine Arts degree in 1996, Rose quickly became internationally prominent for her performances, in which she teased apart issues of cultural-specificity. Her work deals with sexuality and race, challenging the hegemony of biblical tales.

From the time of her contribution to the 2001 Venice Biennale, entitled Ciao Bella, she began developing a range of identities and personae, which she created and performed.

On show on 'The Thieving Fuck...' were lithographs, lambda prints and two video works. The first video, Lucie's Fur: The Prelude, finds Rose dressed as a Mexican death-festival character. It's a disturbingly comic work, evoking European histories and narratives, including Cervantes's Don Quixote. The title references 'Lucy', an Australopithecus afarensis dubbed the 'African Eve', whose remains were discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. 'Lucy' is controversial in human evolution: geopolitically, racially and scientifically.

We've seen Rose trotting through long grass posing as Sara Baartman. We have seen her in a museum display cabinet messing about with her bodily hair and its political and historical connotations. We've seen her as a whimsical Marie Antoinette and a coy but over-the-top Lolita, a self-denigrating pugilist and a machine gun-toting Bunny. Now we see her, a little more subtly, but just as confrontational, dealing with colonialist theory and its overspill onto mysticism and evolution in a particularly guttural fashion.

Lucie's fur is a component of a multifaceted work that takes on litanies of colonialist material offering sexist, racist and territorialist attitudes. Some of the nuances Rose explores are interesting and quirky and there is clearly a fine sense of humour at play here. Others, however, are a little obvious and art-historically tired, such as the 'genius/penis' analogy.

The Wailers, was earlier shown in New York. In using the complex image of religious Jews dressed formally playing a sport not normally played underwater, Rose provides an interpretation of contemporary Jewish socio-politics. Her maternal great grandfather was the illegitimate result of a liaison between a Griqua maid and her Jewish boss.

Admittedly, this doesn't give Rose authority to image this community in a particular way, but the aesthetic result achieved by the surreal combination of elements, renders the work a nebulous comment on identity. Basketball is 'one of the fastest changing sports in the world, in terms of rules', she discovered in her research.

For a non-Jewish artist to reflecting on the Hasidic community - or an easily recognisable sect of the Jewish community, which arguably represents a right wing political bias - raises pertinent issues about the Jewish community's identity and status, not only in South Africa. Rose is fascinated with how history has repeatedly been rewritten.

Her lambda prints complement the videos; here she has created more fictional characters in a cosmology. Not all of them are played by her, as in previous pieces. Rose is not a simple storyteller, making up odd characters and she should take care to maintain this status. Deeply aware of issues like racial hatred and fundamentalism, she is disillusioned about the nexus we have reached in this world. 'It is becoming increasingly beige', she said, 'Everyone's constructing who came first, who did what, who's better ... to suit their own agendas.'

Closed November 13