Abstract
As a fictional response to a series of artworks by the Johannesburg artist, Joachim Schönfeldt, Ivan Vladislavić’s The Exploded View had unconventional origins. Though Vladislavić maintains that the links between Schönfeldt’s images and his own text are understated, certain motifs are obviously common to both. Moreover, if authenticity is one of Schönfeldt’s central themes, this is no less true of The Exploded View — and particularly of the story “Curiouser”, which features another (fictional) Johannesburg artist, Simeon Majara. The latter’s multi-media pieces not only raise uncomfortable questions about artistic originality and integrity, but also self-reflexively interrogate artistic representations of atrocity and the public’s consumption of such images. Intriguingly, however, while the fictional Majara’s installation on the Rwandan genocide, the “Nyanza Shrouds”, bears little relation to Schönfeldt’s work, it does implicitly set up a “conversation” with the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project (indeed, the similarity between Jaar and Majara’s names suggests a deliberately teasing cross-reference). In this article, I discuss the ways in which “Curiouser” engages with “the anxiety of influence” and the art world’s implicatedness in commodity capitalism. I also explore what Majara terms “the economies of repetition” in his own praxis, and his musings on the uncanny nexus between surplus and iteration in both genocidal and artistic contexts.
All my works are failures … because they always come too late. Is art a subcategory of mass-market consumer culture or something different from it?
Described in the publisher’s blurb on the cover as “a quartet of interlinked fiction”, and elsewhere as a “four-part novel” (Gaylard, 2006: 67), Ivan Vladislavić’s The Exploded View proved surprisingly controversial, due to its generic ambiguity, when it first appeared in 2004. However, the text was not only unconventional in terms of its generic status, but also in its very conception, since it arose as a solicited, but otherwise entirely autonomous response to a series of embossed artworks by the Johannesburg artist and sculptor, Joachim Schönfeldt. Schönfeldt had approached Vladislavić in 2000, presenting him with photographs of 26 of his pieces which he described as “illustrations for an unwritten text” (qtd. in Miller, 2006: 120), and which were divided into two sets entitled Silence! and Roar, respectively. The former comprised an “organogram of portraits” (Schönfeldt, 2004: 9) of men’s faces, arranged in a sequence from a single face to a cluster of five, each of which was accompanied by an additional illustration or “double”: a minibus taxi; a typical township “match box” house; a hierarchical arrangement of five ovoidal spheres; four symmetrically arranged circles; and a disarticulated pentagonal design reminiscent of the seventeenth-century Dutch castle in Cape Town. Described by the artist as an imaginary “iconography of a pan-African religion”, the second series consisted of four uncanny images of three-headed female animals: a lioness, cow, eagle, and peahen. These were also accompanied by “doubles” in the form of “social pyramid diagrams in various colours”, which resembled children’s plastic stacking rings (Schönfeldt, 2004: 10). The “twinned” images for both series thus suggestively represented various aspects of social life, such as transport, housing, structural designs, and social strata or classes.
Significantly, though Schönfeldt dubbed his illustrations “narrative accelerators”, in his view they evinced “no notion of a continuous narrative” (Vladislavić, 2004b: 14). Similarly, Vladislavić originally anticipated that his written response to the images would be a series of discrete “epigrams” or captions (2004b: 14) — “a few short, lyrical lines that would lend themselves to display […] in a gallery or catalogue” (qtd. in Miller, 2006: 120). Nevertheless, as he explains, “When I started working […] I was drawn into a sustained piece of fiction” (2004b: 14). The role of appending captions to Schönfeldt’s illustrations thus later fell to the academic, writer, and cultural critic Andries Oliphant (2004), who was invited to match each of the images with a short extract from Vladislavić’s completed text. The Model Men, an exhibition comprising both the original artworks and these excerpts, was staged at the Wits Art Galleries from 24 August to 10 September 2004, the accompanying catalogue identifying Schönfeldt as the “illustrator”, Vladislavić as the “writer”, and Oliphant as the “reader”. However, as Muff Anderson remarked in a review at the time:
The extraordinary thing about The Model Men is that none of the men collaborated. At no point did any one corner of the triangle try to impose a point of view or a system through, or by, which to analyse their work. (2004: 3)
Indeed, Stefan Helgesson observes that, “[w]ith nothing but the dedication [of The Exploded View] referring to Joachim Schönfeldt, it is as though Vladislavić wanted to reinscribe the process of writing the book in its simultaneous concern for separation and connectedness” (2006: 30) — a concern manifested in the title itself. 1
Nevertheless, it is evident that the The Exploded View (2004a) contains both explicit and understated motifs drawn from Schönfeldt’s original artworks, including the following interrelated assemblages: TRANSPORT (taxis and motor vehicles, motorways, traffic flows and reports, intersections, robots, billboards); HOUSING (township houses, informal settlements, simulacral or faux cluster-housing complexes, gated communities, suburban/urban sprawl); STRUCTURAL DESIGNS (exploded view diagrams, engineering and architectural plans, sanitary schemes); and SOCIAL STRATA (statistical data, hierarchical relationships, work/professional interactions, formal and informal social gatherings). Moreover, Vladislavić refers to Schönfeldt’s constellations of faces in Silence! as “a cast of characters” on which he was able to elaborate, explaining that “[s]ometimes the text refers directly to the illustrations, and it would be possible to identify the central character in each of the four parts with one particular male image (they do have an odd sort of individuality)” (2004b: 14–15). However, he adds the qualification that “generally the connections [seem] indirect, a question of analogies or patterns. Most of the images conspired in this obliqueness. They emerge from a peculiarly stripped and varnished world, one that resists overlays and attachments, and easily makes an associative link seem tenuous or contrived” (2004b: 14–15).
Despite the fact that Vladislavić maintains that he found the “visionary, quasi-religious” creatures in Schönfeldt’s Roar series the “most resistant to being re-imagined” since they were “already so laden with a private mythology that it was difficult to subsume them into another narrative without becoming a textual narrator” (2004b: 15), variations of these esoteric animals do appear in The Exploded View, though as kitsch curiosities of a more mundane order. For example, in “Villa Toscana”, Budlender notices that the security guard at the entrance to Iris Du Plooy’s complex has a pen capped by “a little graven image […] A three-headed animal with a shock of orange hair on the crown of its head, six floppy ears and three pink noses” (Vladislavić, 2004a: 7). 2 And later, on his fifth visit to the complex, he registers that the guard has acquired “a stick with a carved handle: a creature with many heads, an enormous version of the idol on the end of his pen, glowering in every direction” (45). However, it is in “Curiouser”, the most self-reflexive of the four narratives, that Vladislavić presents his sustained engagement with Schönfeldt’s chimerical images in Roar. The story features a mixed-media installation artist named Simeon Majara, a “Young Lion of the Art Scene” (114), and focuses on his most recent exhibition, Curiouser or Curio-user (Majara has a penchant for punning). This work emanated from Majara’s cut-price purchase of several crates of (possibly contraband) African curios from a Malawian dealer under suspicious circumstances. Having discovered that one of the crates contained “an African menagerie carved in wood” (135), he had set about deconstructing the animals by dismembering, dissecting, and slicing them in ever finer, multiple cross-sections. He had then reconstructed and reassembled them as “many-headed monsters for a contemporary bestiary” (137), presenting them in vitrines “with mock scientific seriousness, as if they were taxidermic specimens” (137). As Majara himself reflects, “The effects were uncanny — ‘spooky’ was the description he came to — the studio turned into a museum of unnatural history” (137–8). Registering the success of the exhibition, he notes that “[e]ven people who were habitually sarcastic about his work thought he had achieved something remarkable, liberating the curio from its stifling form, that sort of thing” (103). As the art critic Jackie Wetzler had earlier observed, his speciality was “‘Recharging the drained object with meaning’” (107).
Arguably, however, Majara has not only opportunistically exploited the art world’s avid pursuit of novelty, but also the original producers of these craftworks — in the process exposing the contrivance and pretentiousness underlying “the serious business of making art” (101, emphasis added) and the art market’s implicatedness in a globalized capitalist economy of exchange value. The latter is underlined when, at the informal braai that Majara and his partner, Ruth, arrange at their home to celebrate the closing of the exhibition, he is accosted by his adversarial artist friend Leon’s new girlfriend, Amy, who interrogates him about how the original craftsmen might respond to “[s]eeing their things sawn into pieces and reassembled as monsters” (145). When she points out the obvious — “You carve up a cheap curio and put it in a gallery, and suddenly it’s worth a packet” — he obdurately (or perhaps defensively) motivates his appropriation of these curios and their “transmutation” from objets trouvés to objets d’art: “The curio is in one system and the art work in another. If you move an object from one system into another, by the sweat of your brow, you change its purpose and therefore its value” (146, emphasis added). His implicit equation of manual labour and artistic exertion here hides a disingenuous defence of capitalist exploitation, despite his recognition that “work” is differentially rewarded and “profits” selectively apportioned. Nevertheless, as later becomes apparent when Majara recalls a conversation with a leftist student from his university days, he is ironically aware of the “invisible and unacknowledged” (148) contributions of “the proletariat” (148–9) to the bourgeois (art) world that both he and Amy inhabit. Moreover, the distinction Majara invokes above between curios and artwork — or between the popular and the exclusive/elitist, kitsch and the avant-garde — is obviously undermined by the fact that, as Miriam Bratu Hansen observes, “‘High’ and ‘low’ are inextricably part of the same culture, part of the same public sphere, part of the ongoing negotiation of how forms of social difference are both represented and produced in late capitalism” (1996: 306).
Vladislavić’s story’s explicit engagement in a reflexive exploration of the role of art in a globalized culture of mass production and consumerism is further reflected in the fact that Majara’s works in Curiouser also resonate with the legend above the image of a single face in Silence! — “AUTHENTIC WORKS OF ART AND CURIOS” — and the ambiguously phrased rubric below – “PIONEER OF THE MATERIALIST VIEW OF ART JOACHIM SCHÖNFELDT” (emphasis added). As Vladislavić himself explains, “The notion of authenticity is central to Schönfeldt’s images, which have a perplexingly ambiguous status as highly crafted mass-produced objects” (emphasis added), and he acknowledges that authenticity is equally “a concern in The Exploded View” (2004b: 15). In “Curiouser”, ironically, then, he has responded to an existing visual artist’s actual work by crafting a story about a fictional artist who produces eccentric pieces that not only exert an imaginative power on the reader, despite their “unreality”, but that also interrogate artistic representation as a form of appropriation, if not exploitation. By reflexive implication, verbal representation is similarly interrogated.
The uncomfortable questions that Curiouser raises regarding the distinction between artistic originality or “authenticity” and mercenary opportunism gain a particularly charged dimension, however, when Majara’s previous series of exhibitions on the theme of genocide is considered. As he observes, of Curiouser, “The Genocide series had led [viewers] to expect another video installation. Instead he had given them sculpture, witty pieces quite unlike his stock-in-trade” (103). The question arises, then, as to why or how Majara has “graduated” from an artistic engagement with the representation of mass bloodshed to fanciful, reassembled curios. Moreover, if the inspiration for these artworks appears to be derived from fortuitous discoveries, his unearthing of the contents of the crate of animal curios pales into insignificance in comparison with the hauntingly ineffectual bandages he had chanced upon in an empty, quite literally depopulated, clinic in Nyanza — bandages which served as a poignant yet empty signifier of the ferocity and scale of the Rwandan genocide, and which he “appropriated” as the material for the “winding sheets” (104) displayed in the third in his Genocide series, the “Nyanza Shrouds”. 3
Significantly, in the present of the story, Majara’s recollections of the latter installation alternate with his more immediate reflections on the genesis and artistic execution of Curiouser — a praxis grounded in contingency, excess, and repetition which draws a provocative and unsettling analogy between art and mass violence. Among his more astonishing and counter-intuitive meditations on the nexus of unpredictability, surplus, and (re-)iteration in both a genocidal and an artistic context, for example, is his claim, in respect of his discovery of “the meat of Curiouser” (101, emphasis added), that “[i]t was startling how one lucky find had changed his artistic course — although the gap between corpses and curios was narrower than people thought” (106, emphasis added). He subsequently elaborates upon this assertion when he contemplates “The economies of repetition”, observing that “[a]ny task got faster and easier as you went along. One of the pleasures of working with your hands lay in finding rhythms and refining sequences, discovering how a given process could best be done” (105–6, emphasis added). Given the grim analogy which surfaces here, Majara’s claim that “[e]xcess was always interesting” (107) seems perverse. However, subsequently recalling his “elemental excitement” as the idea for Curiouser took shape — “The apparent endlessness of the supply was amusing and compelling. A shadow of the potential art work was already forming under the influence of this excess” (134) — Majara muses on the current modishness of excess in the art world generally:
He splashed the concept around in his mind. Wasn’t it one of the keys to understanding contemporary style? If you had one of anything, it was simply an object; if you had three, it was a design; if you had three hundred, it was a work of art. (134)
He then arrives at the chilling conclusion that, “[o]n a large enough scale, with sufficient repetition, everything became conceptual, whether you were talking about art or murder” (134), a conflation of the activity of producing artworks en masse and killing on an unimaginable scale which suggests that excess is not only “interesting”, but also abstract — or abstracted from the realm of comprehensible reality.
Since that which exceeds conventional notions of scale challenges assimilation is underscored by Majara’s response to the profusion of masks he had initially uncovered in the crates of curios:
He’d unpacked the second and third crates in a fever, piling the masks on the floor of his studio, amassing them. He wanted to see them heaped together. […] He needed to feel this excess, this accumulation, to measure it with his own body. (134–5, emphasis added)
His immediate impulse was to use machine tools to transform — or, alternatively, disfigure or mutilate — the masks, a process he describes in brutally visceral terms: “The chosen ones were arranged in little families and teams. Then he set about them with saws and drills, roughing them up, scarifying them, shearing off the tips of noses and ears, lopping and gouging” (135). That the products of his violent “craftsmanship” raise the spectre of a bloodbath is pointed out by his friend, Gemma: “It was […] like something you would see on Special Assignment when Jacques Pauw, a television newsman with the manners of an undertaker, made one of his ghoulish safaris north of the border looking for witnesses to an atrocity or survivors of a massacre” (135).
Once Majara has unearthed the wooden animals from the fourth crate, however, the equation between his “artistic” endeavours and mass slaughter becomes even more explicit:
when he turned his attention to them properly, he found himself cutting them into pieces. Perhaps it was the smell of sawdust in the air from the savaged masks that set him off, and the proximity of saws. […] Sawing, sawn. Already his arm was itching to do it again, to cut down through solid substance, and keep cutting down through it until his muscles ached. So a single gesture had grown into the primary dynamic of his work, replicated a thousand times […] at the time it felt to him like nothing but a mechanical compulsion, a tirelessly repeated dismemberment. (136–7, emphasis added)
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In effect, then, Majara has discovered a terrifying, if morbidly pleasurable, propensity for “working with [his] hands” — for a manic or mechanical repetition which, paradoxically, is both destructive and creative, and which, as he recognizes, resembles both the repetitive, standardized operations of mass production and, more eerily, the reiterative perpetration of intimate violence in genocidal contexts. From this process of compulsive vivisection and anatomization, he thus not only produces art, but also what he himself describes, in sinister terms, as “butcher’s carcasses” and “exquisite corpses” (137). As Ruth “half-serious[ly]” observes, he evinces an unnerving “talent for frightening people, for giving them goosebumps by doing violence to their ordinary clutter” (120).
However, in his artworks Majara not only teases out the darker implications of what arguably could be called wanton curio “abuse”, but also confronts the much more problematic ethical and aesthetic issue of how, and whether, violence on the unimaginable scale of genocide in reality can be represented. Indeed, the fact that the “Nyanza Shrouds” occupies almost as much prominence in Vladislavić’s story as Curiouser — the more obvious focal point — suggests an equivalent artistic (and narrative) preoccupation. And, like Curiouser, the “Nyanza Shrouds” has a powerful and profoundly ambivalent impact on the reader (or surrogate “viewer”), despite the fact that which is at stake, ultimately, is an imaginary or non-existent artwork. By implication, too, both the latter “installation” and the narrative account thereof self-reflexively interrogate documentary, artistic, and fictional representations of atrocity, together with the art world’s and reading public’s consumption of such images. Thus the identity between violence as art and art as violence that Majara establishes in his self-reflexive deliberations on the artistic generation of Curiouser implicitly includes narrative fiction, and hence reflects — ironically — on the actual writing process in which Vladislavić himself is engaged. As Zoë Wicomb trenchantly remarks, “violence is generative. In that sense, it’s like narration where the act of telling produces more story. Violence, too, reproduces itself” (Mengel, 2010: 22). This is a proposition that Vladislavić, and Majara, might take seriously. 5 Nevertheless, these considerations seem far removed from Schönfeldt’s work, which does not overtly appear to engage in the aestheticization of violence or the violence of aestheticization.
Intriguingly, however, though the “Nyanza Shrouds” seems to have little bearing on Schönfeldt’s images, it does set up an uncanny “conversation” with the Chilean-born architect, artist, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar’s The Rwanda Project, 1994–2000, part of which — The Eyes of Gutete Emerita — was exhibited at the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. Indeed, the similarity between Jaar’s and Majara’s names hints at a deliberately teasing cross-reference. 6 There are further correlations between (the fictional) Majara and (the real) Jaar, however. Both are installation artists who, in their respective responses to the enormity of the Rwandan tragedy, work with notions of scale, excess, repetition, and metonymy, and use theatrical effects, such as lighting and the element of surprise, to explore the limits of representing the unrepresentable. In addition, both interrogate the efficacy of visual media, such as photography or film, when confronted with atrocity, and are concerned with the desensitization and indifference of the (viewing) public when exposed to visual images of genocide. Thus, in an effort to challenge the apathy which characterizes both the museum/gallery space and the larger public space, they encourage viewer engagement by employing delaying or withholding tactics. And, finally, both artists actually visit(ed) Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. Jaar’s extended Rwanda Project emanated from the several thousand photographs he took after he arrived in Kigali in August 1994, and included approximately 25 different installations displayed in various cities around the world. We similarly learn that Majara’s “Nyanza Shrouds” is a direct response to his visit to Nyanza, the site where approximately 2,000 people were butchered on 11 April 1994 after a group of United Nations peacekeepers from Belgium had withdrawn. Majara’s engagement with the theme of genocide predates his trip to Rwanda, however, since the “Nyanza Shrouds” is one in a tripartite sequence, the two earlier works dealing, respectively, with the Holocaust and with the Ahmići massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina in April 1993. 7
Jaar’s decision to go to Rwanda was a response to his outrage at what he terms the “barbaric indifference” (ART21, n.d.: n.p.) of the international community to the enormity of the tragedy and, once there, he spent nearly a month interviewing and photographing survivors and refugees. On returning to New York, he found that he was unable to process the sheer magnitude of what he had witnessed:
I came back with thousands of images of horror. And also with the realization that it was not possible to show the material. I felt that it wouldn’t make any difference to show these images because I feel people here have lost the capacity to see, they have lost their capacity to be affected. This is due to the relentless bombardment of images we suffer every day and how it completely de-contextualises everything. (Lane, 2008: n.p.)
As a result, his earliest Rwandan-themed installation, Rwanda, Rwanda (1994), was not based on photographic images at all, but consisted of 40 light-boxes posted in various locations in the city of Malmö in Sweden (Stamey, 2011: n.p.). Each of the light-boxes contained the word “RWANDA” in large print, reproduced eight times in a vertical column.
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In Jaar’s own words,
These posters, scattered around the streets and squares of Malmo, reduced the rhetoric of advertising to a cry of grief. […] The posters were a raw gesture, produced out of frustration and anger. If all of the images of slaughter and piled corpses, and all of the reportage did so little, perhaps a simple sign, in the form of an insistent cry, would get their attention. (2006: n.p.)
Subsequently, however, Jaar did begin to use his photographs, though in ways which “preclude[d] the possibility of a spectatorial or voyeuristic consumption of his work […] and require[d] instead that his audience engage[d] — actively and critically — with the issues he raised” (Lane, 2008: n.p.). His ironically titled Real Pictures (1995), for example, consisted of several hundred photographs, each encased or “buried” in a black photographic box so as to produce a “cemetery of images” (Jaar, qtd. in Mirzoeff, 2005: 87). Though the images themselves were concealed, the lid of each box contained a description of its contents: a brief narrative detailing the circumstances in which Jaar had encountered and photographed a particular survivor, and the latter’s experience of the genocide. The verbal was thus privileged over the visual, requiring the reader/viewer’s empathetic engagement with — or “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra, 2001: 41) by — innumerable stories of individual and collective trauma. In certain stagings of the installation the boxes were arranged in a rectangle on a gallery floor and spotlighted to contrast with the dark surrounding space, but in others they were stacked in such a way that many of the stories were obscured or withheld. Viewers were therefore not only denied access to a visual but also a verbal record of the suffering the boxes both singly and jointly referenced; a strategy of refusal which “confirmed [Jaar’s] stance regarding the unrepresentable, literally obscene, nature of what had happened; and at the same time […] addressed his concerns about the distribution and consumption of such imagery” (Lane, 2008: n.p.). In other words, the visual (and verbal) archive represented by Real Pictures sought to respect and “preserve” the integrity of the survivors whose distress Jaar had witnessed firsthand.
Jaar’s signature work, The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996) — the piece that travelled to the second Johannesburg Biennale — was based on one of the narratives from Real Pictures, a stark account of how Gutete Emerita had witnessed the murders of her husband and both her sons:
Gutete Emerita, now 30 years old, is standing in front of the church. Dressed in modest, worn clothing, her hair is hidden in a faded pink cotton kerchief. She was attending mass in the church when the massacre began. Killed with machetes, in front of her eyes, were her husband Tito Kahinamura (40) and her two sons Muhoza (10) and Matirigari (7). Somehow, she managed to escape with her daughter Marie-Louise Unamararunga (12), and hid in the swamp for three weeks, only coming out at night for food. When she speaks about her lost family, she gestures to corpses on the ground, rotting in the African sun […] her eyes look lost and incredulous. (Jaar, qtd. in Mirzoeff, 2005: 88)
In one staging of this installation, the above account was projected in a sequence of black and white light-boxes on a gallery wall, the final pair containing the words “I remember her eyes. The eyes of Gutete Emerita”, followed by two backlit images displaying, for a brief instant, Emerita’s haunted, hugely magnified eyes. In a separate and dimly lit room, roughly one million copies of the same slide were randomly piled on an immense light-table — an agglomeration representing the approximate number of deaths which occurred in Rwanda over the four months from April to July 1994. Nevertheless, it was only by inspecting the photographs individually through a slide-viewer that gallery visitors discovered that they were all identical, though they collectively spoke to the trauma of all of those who suffered incalculable loss. As Alan Moore remarks, in this installation a “grave political event of incomprehensible dimensions has been humanized by Jaar, whose work insists upon it as one million instances of the kind of personal grief he encountered. He does this by combining quantity and sameness in a single miniaturized image” (1998: n.p.), a metonymic strategy adopted to avoid the numbing effect of what Jaar terms “generic suffering” (ART21, n.d.: n.p.) or the visual saturation and emotional fatigue produced by scores of images of anguish.
Many theorists have argued that trauma — and especially on the scale that Jaar witnessed it — cannot be adequately represented, and it is perhaps for this reason that, for Jaar, The Rwanda Project was, almost by definition, an exercise in mis-representation:
If I spent six years working on this project, it was trying different strategies of representation. Each project was a new exercise, a new strategy, and a new failure. I would learn and move on to the next exercise that also would fail and so on. Basically, this serial structure of exercises was forced by the Rwandan tragedy and my incapacity to represent it in a way that made sense. (Phillips, 2005: 16–18)
His overall sense of The Rwanda Project, then, is of the inadequacy of both visual and verbal codes of representation, whether documentary or artistic, to encompass the enormity of genocide. By contrast, however, Vladislavić’s Majara seems more sanguine about the success of his tripartite Genocide sequence, and particularly of the “Nyanza Shrouds” (115). Significantly, in creating a tension, in the latter installation, between the media’s desire for brute spectacle (represented by news footage of the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, and projected onto a giant screen) and his own more allusive or elliptical works (a video of the Nyanza clinic, a quilt of Polaroid photographs of the Rwandan landscape, and the 20 shrouds he moulded from the Nyanza bandages, each representing 200 deaths), Majara had staged contestatory representations and interrogated the limits of representation in a somewhat similar fashion to Jaar. Nevertheless, in aestheticizing his subject, he translated his materials into the realm of high art and of monetary value — as is evident in his reference to “the price list” (117) accompanying the exhibition, a reference which raises the ethically vexed issue of the consumption of and “target market” for genocide art, and whether its function is ultimately commemorative or commercial. 9
Indeed, Majara’s recollections of the opening of the exhibition reveal the disjunction between art dealing with matters of enormous gravity and the pretentiousness and callousness of art cognoscenti and/or prospective buyers:
The opening of the show had been the usual ironic spectacle. One was always aware of the uncomfortable contrasts, the hacked limbs and bleached skulls, the guests with their glasses of wine, the price tags, the little green and red stickers. By the end of the evening several people had spilled their wine stepping through the gap in the screen and left their palm-prints on the fabric. (117)
However, it is the presence of no less a person than the Minister of Arts and Culture that transforms the occasion from the incongruous to the farcical:
The highlight was undoubtedly the performance of the Minister of Culture. She had come to the opening address — there was some political mileage to be made, South Africa was involved in the peace talks in Rwanda […] — and she arrived in a wheelchair. Officially, she had sprained her ankle playing tennis, but everyone knew she’d been hitting the bottle. There she was, slumped in the chair and looking smaller than usual, rolled out to the microphone against a backdrop of military convoys as if she herself were a war veteran. Her foot in its plaster cast stuck out stiffly like the cannon of a tank. (118)
That there is both a satirical and a grimly serious edge to Majara’s dark “humour” here should be apparent to South African readers, who would find it difficult not to recognize a thinly-veiled allusion, in the passage above, to Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the Minister of Health from 1999 to 2008. 10 Tshabalala-Msimang was not only rumoured to suffer from bouts of excessive drinking, but also, and more troublingly, was widely ridiculed for her denialist policies on HIV/AIDS and advocacy of garlic, beetroot, olive oil, and the African potato as remedies during the early 2000s — some going so far as to claim she was “an accomplice to genocide” (McGreal, 2007: n.p.) as a result of the annual toll of hundreds of thousands of deaths. 11 Arguably, then, if Majara has recognized the ineffectuality of medical dressings in the face of genocide (he was reminded of “the old wisecrack about applying a Band aid to a cancer” [112]), if not their similar inadequacy in artistic renderings of atrocity, then Vladislavić (rather than Majara) is indirectly alluding to the dire impact of ineffectual interventions in the political and medical, as opposed to the artistic, arenas in South Africa, not Rwanda. In other words, if Majara’s “Nyanza Shrouds” has a bearing on the representation of the Rwandan genocide and converses with other similar efforts to represent that tragedy, such as Jaar’s, Vladislavić’s rendering of Majara’s exhibition suggests that South African “exceptionalism” post-1994 is misplaced.
The rationale for the Minister’s presence at the opening of Majara’s exhibition is one of political expedience: South Africa’s involvement in “peace talks in Rwanda” (118). Since, in reality, these talks resulted in an agreement being reached between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Pretoria in July 2002, the temporal setting of Vladislavić’s story is roughly the height of the AIDS pandemic, and almost a decade after 1994, the year which witnessed both the Rwandan genocide and South Africa’s first democratic elections and the official end of apartheid. Not surprisingly, a number of commentators have highlighted the striking contrast between the two scenarios in 1994, and have attributed at least part of the world’s and the press’s indifference to the atrocities occurring in Rwanda to the fact that the “miracle” unfolding in South Africa grabbed the limelight. Mahmood Mamdani, for example, observes that,
If Rwanda was the genocide that happened, then South Africa was the genocide that didn’t. […] [I]f some seer had told us in the late 1980s that there would be a genocide in one of these two places, I wonder how many among us would have managed to identify correctly its location. (2001: 185)
Indeed, attention was drawn to this disturbing correlation by the self-styled “cross-cultural adventurer”, Henk from Groningen, whom Majara encountered in Nyanza. Having listed the other “obligatory sites” he had visited — Auschwitz (“still the must-see” [105]), the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the Trail of Tears commemorating the ethnocide of Native Americans in North America — Henk casually remarked to Majara that “South Africa was next on the list” (105). Majara then felt somewhat reluctant to confess that he was an artist: “It suggested an intolerable common purpose with his fellow traveller” (105). Instead, he claimed he was a journalist, patting the camera bag in which, ironically, he was later to cram the bandages he removed from the Nyanza clinic. Thus, while inwardly he distances himself from the crassly voyeuristic and consumerist implications of “genocide tourism”, he too is guilty of forms of “appropriation” under the supposedly more elevated guise of “art”.
Nevertheless, the question of what, ultimately, to make of Majara’s artistic engagement with representations of genocide — and of Vladislavić’s story’s foray into a realm seemingly far removed from Schönfeldt’s original images — remains essentially unresolved. In typically mischievous fashion, Vladislavić stages this indeterminacy through offhand references, in “Curiouser”, to two other artists, both luminaries of modern art: Edvard Munch, Expressionist high priest of existential angst and solipsism in the fin de siècle and Modernist periods of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and Damien Hirst, enfant terrible of the “Young British Artists” scene of the 1990s. The reference to Munch occurs towards the end of the evening of the braai (and of the story), when Majara pictures his firearm lying on his bedside table among assorted items, including “a rubber keyring shaped like the figure in Munch’s The Scream which had been given to him by [the curator] Joanna Dahlberg” (152–3). This absurdly incongruous and irreverent reduction of Munch’s most iconic image to a novelty or trinket gestures, pace Walter Benjamin, towards the ways in which mass-reproducibility and circulation compromise the aura of the art object and its authenticity, integrity, and value. Majara’s keyring version thus takes the notion that “[i]n principle a work of art has always been reproducible” (Benjamin, 1992: 212) to ludicrous extremes. As an outrageous caricature, it draws attention to the fact that no artwork, however serious its intention or harrowing its subject, can escape the banality of commodification and mass reproduction.
Hirst is mentioned in the context of the guests’ discussion of Curiouser at Majara’s braai. When Philippa describes one of the pieces — a “skinny” (125) or “rickety” (126) rhinoceros — as “beautiful”, her husband, John, responds, “In a sly way, I suppose. […] You don’t have to be an art historian to see it’s poking fun at Hirst’s pickles. Those lab specimens are designed for the squeamish, aren’t they?” (126). His reference here to Hirst’s notorious Natural History series of artworks in which dead animals (most notably a tiger shark, in a work entitled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” [1991]), were preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in large vitrines, suggests that Hirst has been an influence on Majara, whether consciously or not. Pointedly, Majara himself not only describes the Curiouser installation as resembling “a museum of unnatural history” (138, emphasis added), but also inwardly muses that “[i]t was always easy afterwards to find the motives and themes, to sniff out the references to this art work and that style” (137). Though he does not elaborate, the fact that some of Hirst’s animals were also dissected or sliced into subsections suggests more than a casual resemblance. Moreover, like Majara, Hirst has been accused of exploitation, exhibitionism, and of creating “banal, mass-produced, decorative” (9) pieces; in his own words, of “mak[ing] really bad art and get[ting] away with it” (Hirst, qtd. in Spalding, 2003: n.p.). His reputation as “the world’s richest artist” and as a producer “not just [of] art that exists in the market or is ‘about’ the market […] [but] is the market” (Kunzru, 2012: 8, emphasis added), recalls Majara’s ambiguous designation of art as “serious business” (101). Majara also subsequently reflects that, following the success of Curiouser, “[h]e was turning into a little business”, and then disparagingly compares his achievements to Leon’s relative obscurity: “It irritated the hell out of Leon. He wanted to be a little business too, he wanted a manager and a personal assistant — stuff that, he wanted to be an industry — but he was just another muddler” (125). If Majara is a “little business”, Hirst, indisputably, is “an industry”. The reference to Hirst thus not only raises the issue of “the anxiety of influence”, but also acts as a prosaic reminder that, as Hari Kunzru puts it, “Long-term value in the art world depends in a certain raw way on scarcity, but is largely produced through a delicate process through which aesthetic value […] intersects with market value” (2012: 8).
Ultimately, then, the casual references to Munch and Hirst in “Curiouser” — figures who in some sense embody the notions of high seriousness and showmanship, respectively, in the art world — foreground the fact that the oscillation between gravitas and levitas, profundity and extemporization, reticence and caprice in Majara’s work and in Vladislavić’s story cannot be foreclosed upon: both artist and writer are consummately reflexive self-ironists. Moreover, in drawing attention, once again, to the art world’s ineluctable implicatedness in capitalist culture, these references extemporize on the pun underlying Schönfeldt’s legend “PIONEER OF THE MATERIALIST VIEW OF ART”. More darkly, however, they gesture towards the reality that, as Majara intuits in his reflections on Curiouser, the “history of modernity […] encompasses both mass production and mass extermination” (Hansen, 1996: 302, emphasis added). Between Munch and Hirst lies a century of modern art, of commodification (including the “mechanical reproduction” of artworks), and — most distressingly — of repeated genocidal eruptions that defy representation. The final irony, then, is that Majara is on the cusp of international recognition as a result of Curiouser (“a great success, a new beginning for him, everyone said so” [103]), and he has been invited to participate in a “group show”, curated by Dahlberg, at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm (150). By contrast, his Genocide series did not glean this kind of recognition, despite its global “reach”. The sobering conclusion can only be that both the South African and the global art world are implicated in mass-market consumer culture in ways that defy the imperative to recognize that, as Cathy Caruth puts it, “history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (1991: 192).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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