Public intimacy

”You won’t be able to see Marlene Dumas for an interview,” Dumas’s publicist told me over the phone last week, ‘but you can come for coffee on Sunday afternoon.”

How an invitation to coffee with Dumas did not imply that I would interview her I wasn’t entirely sure, until I found myself at the Clico Guesthouse in Rosebank on Sunday, the mute addressee of an inexorable verbal torrent (punctuated occasionally by a patriotic ‘umm — ja”).

‘I prefer to write,” she warned me, gesticulated with a reckless hand clutching a wine glass. ‘When I talk, somehow the fact of the presence of people makes me not shut up.”

She showed me to an armchair opposite her, began talking at me, flanked by silver trays of petit fours and a bushel of gaudy chrysanthemums. With a swell of familiarity, I felt I was sitting on the stoep of a long-lost tannie.

With Intimate Relations, her first solo exhibition ‘on home soil”, a great to-do has been made about her reasons for leaving South Africa in 1976, ‘how it feels to be back home” and whether she intends to return. Unsurprisingly, all this is far less interesting than what Dumas has to say about art.

While the title of the show might suggest the sort of sexual daring in many of her works, for Dumas the matter of intimacy in art is very complex. ‘I chose the title because I wanted to put an emphasis on more intimate situations in [my works] than on groups, on portraits of individuals. There is also the sexual dimension — I wondered, is it possible to make the art work like a confessional?

‘I was struggling on all these levels — whether a painting is a private or public thing. When you are dealing with art you are dealing with a public. So, when you make an intimate confession, as soon as you become a confessional artist and show in public something that comes from the more private space of the studio, you run the risk of losing some of that intimacy.”

Occasionally the word ‘intimacy” seemed to weave its way into her discussion as a euphemism for sexuality or eroticism. Dumas is, amusingly, quite coy when asked directly about what she calls ‘the pornography thing”. I had the impression, after all the throat-clearing when I inquired about the significance of pornographic imagery in her work, that she would much rather I had said ‘the p-word”.

Trying to put the subject to rest, she said: ‘The type of pose that I don’t really do is people copulating, if I have to use that word. My works are of people alone, showing themselves, which is something I find so fascinating. I had never really seen naked people walking around [before Amsterdam]. Porn is the only area where you really see the very peculiar differences in the form of the human being.”

The human figure is central to Dumas’s approach to painting and she describes it as ‘the vehicle through which I can talk about or work with various fields — the visual history of sex and how it has changed.”

At this point, Dumas took to the centre of the room and gave a nimble demonstration of how she had once ‘arranged” an unwitting nude model in a life-drawing class at Royal Holloway College, whose Hellenic pose she had condemned as kitsch.

‘Kitsch — one takes on forms that are not living anymore,” she says. ‘You have to ask, what do you want to express with this kind of body? Nakedness can express different things.”

On the fairly overt likeness of her own figurative works to Rodin’s erotic drawings, Dumas said: ‘I didn’t know of them in the beginning, but when I saw them I found them much more beautiful than my drawings.

‘You might hold this against me, but I think those types of drawings are wonderful — I think it’s very good if you are attracted to your subject matter,” she said, chuckling.

Dumas reflects on the first time she saw Goya’s Disasters of War at the Prado Museum, which she cites as an important influence on a recent work, Blindfolded (2002): ‘When I saw those Goya paintings, I realised that painting can make you cry.”

At this she trailed off and became suddenly tearful. For the first time I could hear the birds, as we observed a moment of silence for Goya.

With both of us taken aback by this unexpectedly schmaltzy moment, I sensed it was time to grab a fondant and hit the road. As I left the next group of ‘guests” was being herded into the lounge and Dumas was already well on her way with monologue number two.

The details
Intimate Relations is on show at the Standard Bank Gallery until March 29. Tel: 011 631 1889

Inside Marlene Dumas
Anthea Buys

It is hard to come by locally published exhibition catalogues whose covers are not brazenly intruded on by the gallery’s or sponsor’s logo, or which don’t feature rambling, self-aggrandising essays by people who should probably stick to curating.

Thankfully, the catalogue for Marlene Dumas’s Intimate Relations bears no Standard Bank flag, although it is slightly blighted by an unnecessarily long pseudo-critical composition by the exhibition’s curator, Emma Bedford. This is balanced, though, by a number of absorbing and intelligent textual contributions by Dumas herself, Marlene van Niekerk, Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe.

The biographical material and early works included in the exhibition are as well represented in the book as Dumas’s later and better- known paintings, reproduced in generously sized colour illustrations. The section entitled ‘The Michaelis School of Fine Art (1970s)” includes a collection of university snapshots and reproductions of Dumas’s post-crit ‘notes to self”.

Nuttall and Mbembe, in their essay ‘The Human Face”, consider the notion of intimacy through Dumas’s representations of the face in her more recent Blindfolded and Man Kind series. In comparison with Bedford’s irresolute effort, this piece is theoretically pertinent, elegantly written and accessible.

Undoubtedly the most interesting (and, appropriately, the longest) chapter of the text is ‘Love Letters”, a mélange of Dumas’s poems, juxtaposed with images of her works, source material, reflective notes on her work and a number of astoundingly frank letters to her mother. In one such letter, she describes watching a pornographic film in which a man ‘did it with an old white goat”.

According to Dumas, the catalogue unveils the correspondence for the first time.

For any admirer, they provide invaluable insight into her reflection on artistic processes in her formative years.