Penny Siopis’s new show enacts a dialogue between beauty and cruelty, between private and public, writes Tracy Murinik
Quietly, to Chopin, two breasts bathed in blood-red paint dip and resurface as if by lunar pull. Beautiful, and slightly comical, this video seems to engage in ambivalent dialogue with Queen Cakes, a pair of “cup-cake” breasts cast in bronze, which wait, beckoning from across the room.
At the show’s opening, the artist described how she still had a slight rash from lying in the paint to be filmed. Occupational hazards! The double-play of simultaneous vulnerability and titillation, of submission and resilience which emerges in these works is a notable feature of Penny Siopis’s new exhibition at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery.
Charmed Lives! takes further many of the themes and questions that Siopis has grappled with over the years. The exhibition comprises paintings, installations, videos, photographs and tableaux. Largely autobiographical, the show seems to look back over the artist’s career and personal history. But the references to some of her earlier works are not simply repeated here – Siopis reassesses and revisions these records of her art and her life in a type of densely layered personal archive.
The archive becomes, for Siopis, the obsessive domain of collecting and storing; of revisiting, ordering and processing lived experience into a system of remembrances narrated through things. As an exercise that has allowed her to pack, repack and unpack found and made items, in a type of play that is both contingent and deliberate, she talks about a need to revaluate objects and the associations they hold.
Invoking Vladimir Nabokov’s description of “dead things shamming life”, Siopis explores the ways in which objects come to record and stand in for human experience. She deliberately emphasises artifice in the face of not being able to describe and present oneself in complete, finite terms. She describes the ambiguity around a “self” which is both public and private. She finds herself lost in objects, “souvenirs” of her self.
For those who missed its tender showing at the Johannesburg biennale, Siopis has mercifully included My Lovely Day, a video based on footage shot by the artist’s grandmother. It tells the story of how her family settled in South Africa, of the cinema that her grandfather established in Umtata, and of the “charmed life” that her grandmother says she led as a child. It is a document beautiful and tragic, lamenting severe loss. To show the video, Siopis recreates a piece of the Metro Cinema in the gallery.
Then there is the tableau. Like a museum display or an elaborate diorama, it offers up empty casts of its absent entities. Dead animals lurk in poised defiance of their deadness, remembrances of themselves. They appear tragicomic and absurd: impotent in their ability to act, offering, instead, melodrama and a vacant threat.
It is within this “absurd theatre” that Siopis looks back upon and revisions herself. The references to her own history, of her art and of her personal experience, appear in abundance. As theatrical set, each object is overdetermined with significance in the play of things, each piece deliberately placed and considered.
But saturated colour acts as an equaliser for all the things that Siopis sets on display. Colour simultaneously alters the sensual quality of the space and of its “players”: it creates an environment swathed in desire and sensuality. The play is between what is real and what is constructed, the ambivalence around beauty and cruelty; between public and private, in the contiguous relationships that exist between objects.
Four serenely quiet works hang at the back of the gallery. Siopis describes them in terms that imply healing and an attempt to consecrate. Entitled Somnambulist I-IV, she has performed a type of exorcism on four military “souvenirs”, old pieces of army equipment issued to a conscript. Attaching new worth to these items, Siopis nurturingly places delicate white leaves on a sleeping bag; embroiders netting with cowrie shells, sheathes a small bag with doved rings, and beads a small pillow, laying a small porcelain arm to rest.
Revisioned, they co-exist as momentary records of memory in what is exorcism, healing and fantasy.