Minnette Vari scratches beneath the skin of identity, representation and reality in her multi-media artworks. She spoke to HAZEL FRIEDMAN
THERE’S an ancient myth concerning the origins of the looking glass, that when Eve saw her reflection in the water, like Narcissus, she fell in love with it. Since then, woman’s identity has been predicated on image, her sense of identity derived from surface reflection and represented as something other than herself — as an object of differentiation and desire.
Minnette Vari is clearly intent on shattering this hall of mirrors. Although she would probably be the last to attach to herself a feminist tag, she admits to being preoccupied with skin-sensitive issues. But she is also caught up in the problems of making art in the late 20th century — when art can no longer claim to represent reality and the boundaries between the two seem irretrievably to have broken down.
”I try to examine issues that exist in all of us,” she says, ”whether we acknowledge them or not — intimacy, the fragility of reality and identity.”
The words ”scratch”, ”skin” and ”thread” punctuate her sentences. But they are more than descriptive metaphors. They serve as a recurring refrain, a roadmap forging linkages within what appears, on the surface, to be a disparate and sometimes unfocused oeuvre.
A masters student at Pretoria University, Vari is the offspring of a heritage beset with contradictions. Raised in a bastion of conservatism, she has adopted the mantle of the ”artsider”, forming part of a very insular cultural ethos. Like her sister in skin, Belinda Blignaut, Vari made her debut via Johannesburg’s brave new gallery scene before joining the post-apartheid cultural nomads hanging out on the international art scene. And although her work differs vastly from that of Blignaut, she, too, has embarked on a risky and sometimes uneven journey of self-discovery in her efforts to scratch beneath the skin of art, identity, representation and reality.
In general, her works produced during 1995 reveal a remarkable conceptual coherence. In Uncommon Threads (exhibited during the Johannesburg Biennale), she mounted 25 tiles, each with a tokoloshe statuette and a Grecian classical muse cast in glycerine soap, on the inside of a wooden enclosure. Based on an earlier work in which the same statuettes are coated with flesh-coloured rubber, Uncommon Threads raises twin issues of fetishism and faith, evoking analogies and differences between Western and African belief systems as well as exploring fertility, sexuality and, of course, skin.
Her most successful work is arguably her traffic-stopping billboard outside the Pretoria Art Museum. It is a composite of advertising and anthropological images, deprived of history and context and transformed into an artificially constructed reality featuring Vari’s seductively splayed torso with the features of an African woman superimposed on to the artist’s face.
”Of central importance for me is the issue of simulated reality,” she explains, ”and the ways in which one can intrude on the surface of a supposedly intact reality, to reconstruct it subtly yet completely.”
But Vari’s most recent work takes this quest to a less than successful conclusion. Her efforts to alter the representation of reality have become so subtle as to be undetectable. In a work on the recent Unplugged exhibition, Vari attempts to subvert the myth of documentary truth as propagated through newpaper photographs by digitally altering a familar image. But the fact that her features have replaced those of an eyewitness escapes attention. And at The Young and the Restless Without Permission, this critic saw elements in Vari’s work which literally were not there.
And there lies the rub. In dealing with issues of identity, Vari has slipped into the very ”sin” she attempts to expiate: narcissism, or the obsession with surface reflection. Because she emphasises the subtlety of the process, one tends to scratch away too earnestly at the surface of her work, in the hope of uncovering more visceral content. Little more is to be found, except perhaps a long hall of unbroken mirrors.
Vari exhibits with Anton Karstel at the Newtown Galleries from April 14 to May 11