Iziko South African National Gallery
12.12 - 30.06.2026

This article, originally published on ArtThrob in 2012, is being republished following the current retrospective “Steven Cohen: Long Life” at the Iziko South African National Gallery. The republication follows the censorship of some works in the exhibition and public outcry over several pieces, including works related to Nomsa Dhlamini.

The body and nudity have always been central in art making and thought. But as various feminists have argued, the discourse of art has endlessly examined these themes, largely at the expense of women. Similarly, Prof. V.Y. Mudimbe draws conclusions on how contemporary art re-enacts the imperialist schema through a rendition of blacks as fungible objects – that is to say they are represented without a specific identity. And it is fifteen years since Okwui Enwezor critically adumbrated this point in his essay ‘Reframing the Black Subject’ with specific reference to South African art. Though with its own limitations, Enwezor’s critical labouring debunked the residual racist assumptions of the general imaginary of white South Africa.

Of course today the pervading problem of racism remains safely insulated and ineffable, and Enwezor’s concerns, despite Grey Areas (Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz’s critical rejoinder to Enwezor’s assertions), still linger. To be sure, the presiding understanding of the problem still seems to be predicated, almost wholeheartedly, on the understanding of racism as something contingent rather than inherently structural.

Steven Cohen’s collaboration with his family’s maid, Nomsa Dhlamini (a woman staggering through her 90s) entitled ‘Magog’, at Stevenson Gallery Cape Town, is a show of various media; from prints, to photographs, to videos. However although Cohen’s media are disparate, his thematic interests seem to gravitate towards a singular place: the works on ‘Magog’ coalesce towards either the life experience of Nomsa, or Cohen’s own relations with her. First the eponymous ‘magog’ is seemingly derivative of  ‘gogo’ – referring to an old age woman. And Nomsa Dhlamini here unambiguously is the aim and the object of this exposition. Dhlamini, according to Cohen’s story, and typical of the domestic worker narrative, ‘helped raise’ the artist as his second mother.

Cohen offers in his artist statement: ‘I am interested in the politics of nudity, not in sex as commerce’. This is nothing new for us considering Cohen’s oeuvre. However, ‘Magog’, in which again Cohen is largely naked, both with and without firecrackers lighting up his lower colonic area, presents us with what I would refer to as the ‘racial impasse’ of white South Africa. It is a pattern that has been recapitulated, and it is precisely this kind of presentation that Jared Sexton and Huey Copeland once called ‘an entrenched visual schema predicated on the fungibility of the black body’.

Cradle of Humankind, a photographic triptych, shows the evolutionary process of Nomsa. In the first panel, Nomsa, in a softly bent pose almost too typical of the pre-human, holds a measuring stick whilst affecting a peculiar expression. In the second panel she foregrounds the top part of her red Swati hat, which covers her upper body, while exposing her legs and arms. In the third panel, Nomsa is sitting down, wearing spectacles and reading a book, which almost covers her upper body. Though there might be some intended message, as obscurely definable as it is, one can’t shake off the fact that the triptych was unimaginable without Nomsa being the model – the subject and object. The typicality of this triadic trajectory from animality, to tribality and to civilization; no matter the assumptive irony that could be at play; this, to me, is Cohen displaying racist overtones. And it is here where Cohen’s tropes come into being through a violence which kills. This is in stark contrast to a trope that merely exploits the object, so that the concept might ‘live’.

Cohen has stated that ‘[t]his work is more about the slave trade than the flesh trade… a personal film and a portrait of apartheid, a naive striptease and a personal confession…. We see Nomsa’s life, without glamour, spending her time cleaning the uncleanable, and her dignity in the face of exploitation.’ To be sure, Cohen aims at exposing the exploitative nature of domestic work. But he’s asleep at the wheel to think he can separate the black slave trade from the ‘flesh’. Nomsa’s slave life needs her flesh, or, to repeat Hortense Spillers, acts of slavery are ‘crimes against the flesh.’ For her, flesh both racial and sexual are inextractibly sutured.

In the video Maid in South Africa this is even more evident. In this work a naked Nomsa moves from her tribal identity to being a stripper whilst laboring as a maid. Wouldn’t it have a better effect if Cohen had just ‘dressed’ Nomsa in normal domestic workers’ apparel? Did he have to strip her? Did he have to relegate her to a pornographic prop to drive his point home?  For surely Spillers is right when she argues that ‘before the body there is flesh’?

It is through this linearity or repetition that we see Cohen becoming ‘baas’. Here we are driven not to distinguish between direct exploitation and empathy, as Nomsa’s subjugated body and its suffering is occluded and obliterated. It is in these moments of ‘being for the other’ that the very violence of niggerization is reiterated. Though the intention is to highlight the precariousness of Nomsa, Cohen’s casual use of her body, ‘stripping’ in Saartjie Baartman’s fashion, evaporates his intended metaphors. His white tears become proxies of the enslaved Nomsa  – and the idea that we ponder Nomsa’s suffering through him is an awkward and morally confusing conceit.

Although Cohen’s show might be a ‘shock’ to many whites (which is precisely what Cohen seems to be seeking), to me at least, his attempt remains indexical of the prevailing status quo. Though we have seen, after Enwezor’s exegesis, a kind of ‘caution’, Jo Anna Isaak’s plea is perhaps where the argument should lie in that such problems, such as faced by white South Afircan artists, won’t be remedied by the careful changing of pronouns and tropes. Or, to pillage from Bertolt Brecht, white people have ‘merely freed themselves from grammar’ but not from racism. As I have stated above such presumption is predicated on the fact that racism is contingent rather than structural. The race problem is systemic and it is only through a process of correcting historical injustices and upending systemic relations that the black majority’s dignity, like Nomsa’s, will escape exploitation. So Cohen’s intervention bespeaks white ethical dilemmas, that zone of white parasitism – the silent betrothal of empathy and violence.