BRENDA ATKINSON suggests that beastly is in the eye of the beholder
FRENCH librarian and pornographer Georges Batailles, whose literary works were littered with corpses, sperm, eyeballs and the odd boiled egg, sought repeatedly to prove his own dictum that there is no prohibition that cannot be transgressed.
Purity and Danger, curated by Penny Siopis, takes on the murky territory of transgression at a peculiarly knotted moment in South African political history. Prohibition – the prescribed decorum that would keep purity and danger apart – is not always taboo.
In South Africa, which has recently acquired one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, “taboo” proper is easily confused with the merely diversionary, or negated by the expanding territory of permitted behaviour (witness the declining South African sales of skinmags after their brief, post-1994 boom).
Constructed within this problem, Purity and Danger both illustrates its dilemmas and offers, in impressive moments, some eloquent commentary on the limits of the proper. Siopis has invited nine artists and five “public personalities” to respond to the complex and always historically delineated discourse of taboo.
Terry Kurgan’s photographs of her naked six-year-old son are exemplary of the forms of power at stake in the preservation of purity. Against the current levels of anxiety about child abuse and paedophilia in South Africa, Kurgan’s colour-processed black-and-white photos – uncannily reminiscent of late-Victorian postcards – are provoking, poignant, beautiful, a little scary. Titled I’m the King of the Castle, the work plays on the innocence of the children’s rhyme, and implies numerous “dirty rascals”.
Its public reception has in part been marked by the language of physical distress: some viewers found it “chilling”, even “nauseating”. While Kurgan sees such responses as inappropriate to a work that is for her a reclamation of mother-child intimacy, she will inevitably be seen as the “dirty rascal”. The evident sensuality of her son – naked, dressing up, posing, playing with the camera and with his own props – is always potentially the sign of the abused child.
Clive van den Berg’s slanting representation of adult male sexuality functions spatially as a prelude – and possible consequence – to Kurgan’s loaded images. He embeds a screen in a carefully constructed battlefield, its golden Broederstroom grass scarred by pebble graves. On screen, historical Boer War and contemporary footage exploit the slippage between violence and sex; between our memorialisation of space and the desire to move on; between bodies at war and at play. A darkly humming soundtrack implies the trauma, the sex, the pleasure we do not see.
Siopis herself participates in the exhibition as a “public personality”. She offers a powerful work on the abject body – three custom-made wheelchairs which document 68 years in the life of the congenitally crippled woman who occupied them. The chairs embody with awful clarity the absent body whose needs they served and continue to express. The woman, her father, her husband, are all creepily alive in the intimate and evolving technologies of each medical machine.
Minette Vari’s Decoy uses smell to explore the territory of taboo. The perfume, made of ingredients from muti shops, is Vari’s ironic take on the beguiling politics of capitalism’s packaging.
Not all the works have the spikiness their theme demands. Mark Gevisser’s image/text composition, One Weekend, Three Drags, begins, however, to push the envelope of the unseemly. Gevisser writes brief, beautiful texts to accompany Henner Frankenfeld’s photographs of different transvestite events, each with its own dangerous history.
Scars and all, Purity and Danger is a carefully conceived and curated exhibition. While not all the works resist a too-easy indulgence, their mitigation of the unspeakable into the interesting is itself politically telling.
Purity and Danger is at the Gertrude Posel Art Gallery in Johannesburg until June 17