Goodman Gallery
28.09 - 13.11.2024
There is a painting of three women. Are they The Fates? The Norns? The Weird Sisters? Matronae? Tridevi? The longer I look at it, the more it seems to reimagine William Blake’s engraving Europe supported by Africa and America (1796). But these are faceless allegories, cropped just below the chest, and backdropped by a Giverny-green. They are pissing. Or perhaps it is a ray of light that shines from their urethrae. The colour is piss-yellow either way. Vulgar, you might say. I like to think of it a purification rite, after a Barbara McCullough film I saw recently at the AVA, in which Yolanda Vidato pisses ritually on the rubble of Watts. A crude baptism. The artist who made this work, Pélagie Gbaguidi, calls it an “archaeology of freedom.” The painting is called Le jour se lève, which in French means “the day awakens.” It is also called The Mutants.
These are the two aspects on which, I think, Gbaguidi’s project hinges. She wants to wake up the world: in her words, to eschew “last century’s blindness” and initiate a “chapter of sensible souls.” To do this, she wants to turn our attention to all that is mutant and monstrous, Other and otherworldly. The Colours are the Bark is the name of the exhibition up now at Goodman Gallery, Gbaguidi’s first showcase in South Africa. I take this to signify a paradox: the beauty of life is in the growl of the wolf.
The Dakar-born, Brussels-based, Beninese artist describes herself as a “contemporary griot,” that is, a storyteller, a praise-poet, an intermediary between past and present, material and eternal. In West Africa, the griot is traditionally a cross between an epic poet, a singer-musician and a folk historian. Gbaguidi’s tools are not instruments but charcoal, coloured pencil, pastel and paint. Nevertheless, her work operates at the intersection of history and proverb. The cruelty of colonialism is her subject, but it is constellated in the cosmic realm of folktale and fate. Take A qui ai-je vendu mon scalpe (Who did I sell my scalp to) as an example. From a distance, this painting is near-unintelligible. Looking closer, however, pieces of a narrative begin to emerge. A woman’s heel. A grimace. A tongue the colour of a plum. Reels of film. Puzzle pieces. Neckties without faces. The work was inspired by a trip to the Musée d’Arts Africains, Océaniens, Amérindiens in Marseille, France, which boasts a major collection of shrunken heads. From this gruesome encounter with human remains trapped as oddities in a European institution, Gbaguidi extrapolated an epic, atmospheric tale about bodies violated, bodies dispersed, bodies cut and cropped like images, exchanged and discarded like objects.
If this extrapolation sounds far-fetched, it is because Gbaguidi’s works are dense. Perhaps a little too dense. Pourquoi je ne bande plus dit le vieil homme à son médecin is an enormous, two by six metre work. It comprises mainly brown and red marks that look like they have been punched into the composition. Some of the punches look phallic. Others look like hands dragged through blood. Faint images––scissors, tongues, eyes, faces––can barely be made out in the chaos, and a sheath of white paint suggests a botched attempt to wipe this cruelty out. It is difficult to look at. I might even call it ugly. Why am I no longer hard, said the old man to his doctor is the English translation of this work’s title. It is about a man’s impotence and the existential confusion it unleashes into his life. It is also about the violence that permeates a patriarchal world in the throes of castration anxiety. Gbaguidi paints an ugly picture because the world she observes is ugly. The wolf barks and the colours jostle for attention.
But ugliness is not all bad. I have said before that there is something about the mutant that is radical, that can foresee a new world. This became clear to me when I looked at two series on paper titled Care and De-Fossilization Of The Look, Dialogue With Madonna Del Parto respectively. These drawings are frenetic, full of distorted faces and shrieking mouths, freakish bodies and monstrous forms. How might these bizarre images represent care, dialogue, or de-fossilization?
As I looked at them, I was reminded of two texts: Hélène Cixous’ “Laugh of the Medusa” and Zander Blom’s “Garage-ism Manifesto.” An unlikely pairing, perhaps. But hear me out. “There was something off or freakish about each piece,” Blom writes about his own paintings, though the description could easily apply to Gbaguidi. “They were mystifying creatures that were unfit for the world, unfit for daylight… Possessed by a curious energy, these works revealed a truth that was hard to look at, yet harder to look away from.” Cixous echoes: “Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives… hasn’t accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dance, to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn’t thought she was sick?”
Freakishness. Possession. Monstrousness. Sickness. It would seem that these qualities charge the creative process with their sense of the new and unusual. That is, the new is always unusual and, at times, a little horrifying. Gbaguidi seems to suggest that it is the adeptness with which we face the unusual that prepares us to break from the status quo, “to sketch a civilization” free from the “impasse” of the present. Unfit is another name for unfixed. To mutate is to change.
These gestures towards “an otherwise future” have become incredibly popular in the art world, and I confess that, the more I encounter them, the more I tend to roll my eyes, perhaps because, as they’re compulsively repeated, they to me more rhetorical than political, more disassociated than imaginative. But what I appreciate about Gbaguidi’s contribution to this canon is the same thing that draws me to Blom and Cixous in times of creative crisis. It’s a whisper of permission to venture towards that other, nether, never place and see what wacky ideas come out on the other side.
On that note, my favorite work is a mural that Gbaguidi created specifically for The Colours are the Bark. It depicts three women. They mirror The Mutants who stand on the opposite wall. The first has red hair and a faded face in her belly. You can see through her hand to the blood inside of it. The second has five mouths. She cries ink and her body spirals. The third and final figure is a mother flanked by children birds. She has a sun for a heart and a gaze that is fabric. They are gentle beasts whose home is close to the unconscious. They are characters from a story as yet untold. Their meaning is elusive but their vitality is immense.