Bathed in sickly blue-yellow light, Marlene Dumas’s baby is almost repellent. Instead of an instant love affair, Dumas paints an alien encounter, the unnerving presence of an ‘other’, the realisation of an individual with a will and determination of his own. Marlene Dumas confronts the reality of motherhood, with all its natural and terrifying implications.
Dumas:
Marlene Dumas is a South African born artist and painter who produces paintings, collages, drawings, prints and installations. She now works mainly with oil on canvas and ink on paper.
In 1984, Dumas started painting heads and figures.
A series of paintings she executed in the mid-1980s, titled “The Eyes of the Night Creatures”, explores recurring themes in the artist’s oeuvre, including racial and ethical intolerance. The White Disease (1985) is a painting of an ageing South African woman with pale blue eyes taken from a medical photograph.
Self Portrait with Physalis, 1912
‘Interrogation III’, 1981; acrylic on linen
Observations point out that her paintings recall the influence of predecessors such as Egon Schiele and Leon Golub (above).
Many of her paintings are large (many times greater than life-size) and each is composed vertically. She does not idealize her images.
Between 1998 through 2000, in collaboration with the photographer Anton Corbijn, which saw Dumas took Polaroids which she then used as sources for her pictures.
(Dutch photographer, music video director, and film director)
Since she first began painting portraits in the 1980s, famous figures ranging from Osama Bin Laden to Naomi Campbell, various family members, friends and even unknown persons have been the subjects of her work. The haunting and distorted faces and bodies of her figures are a product of her use of thinned down paint, wiping the pigment away from the canvas to create the washed out, smudged figures that are characteristic of her work. At times dark and disturbing, always weighted in poignancy, and drawn on topical and contentious material, she repeatedly mixes the personal with the political. She has said that her works are better appreciated as originals, to mirror the at times shocking, discomforting intimacy she captures with her works.
- Common use of photographic sources
- “Re-inscription of emotion”
- Photography as a mediator
- (Original) meanings and intentions of a photograph
- Dumas does not copy a photograph, but demonstrates the differences between photography and paining (as both an addition and a subtraction)
- A representation of a representations
***Correspondences; Bernice Eisenstein and Anne Michaels (2013) Correspondences: A Poem and Portraits
- Awareness of the artifact and the specificity of the art of reading
- Deviations from the usual habits of reading i.e. layout and visual presentation of information housed inside the book
***Griselda Pollock – The Virtual Feminist Museum
Continuing her feminist reconceptualisation of the ways we can experience and study the visual arts, world renowned art historian and cultural analyst, Griselda Pollock proposes a series of new encounters through virtual exhibitions with art made by women over the twentieth century. Challenging the dominant museum models of art and history that have been so exclusive of women’s artistic contributions to the twentieth century, the virtual feminist museum stages some of the complex relations between femininity, modernity and representation.
Griselda Pollock draws on the models of both Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and Freud’s private museum of antiquities as well as Ettinger’s concept of subjectivity as encounter to propose a differencing journey through time, space and archive. Featuring studies of Canova ‘s Three Graces and women artist’s modernist reclamations of the female body, the book traverses the rupture of fascism and the Holocaust and ponders the significance of painting and drawing in their aftermath.
Artists featured include: Georgia O’Keeffe, Josephine Baker, Gluck, Charlotte Salomon, Bracha Ettinger and Christine Taylor Patten.
***The Three Grace’s; Antonio Canova Rome, 1814-1817, Carved Marble.
- Extended museum space, spurred by photographic reproduction
- Virus – Impossibility (cannot be realised as an actual museum a under the current social-economic-political institutions and constraints)
- Challenge to pre-existing exhibition settings
Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-1924/9?)
- Relating to memory
- Historical montage with meanings through collection
- Resinent affinities
- Phantasmal science that refutes any kind of order
Phantasmal – pertaining to or of the nature of a phantasm; unreal; illusory; spectral:
- Archive no as a resource, but as a perpetual holding/haunting- its accumulative effect
- Countering dominant narratives
- Trauma as a psychological piercings of the psyche
“Trauma has no connection to time…unknown and unremembered”
“The eventless event”
“Art thats deals with drama indistinct from representation”
(Pollock, 2013, 2)
Painting as a material operation…an event
Slides:
Bibliography:
Bernice Eisenstein and Anne Michaels (2013) Correspondences: A Poem and Portraits, London: Bloomsbury.
Dan Smith, Reading Correspondences through the Virtual Feminist Museum, Comics Forum August 2015