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6.3 Love Me/Fuck Me : Tracey Rose
markings of race and gender are mimed back across the body. By re-viewing the spectacle of the body of colour that had been institutionalised as an anthropological curiosity, Rose and Searle make use of their bodies as a critical medium. I will look at their work as examples of how the performance of bodily identity can disrupt the historical inheritance of racialised thinking and hegemonic constructions of racial and gender identity.
Fig. 31 A typical French caricature of Baartman ca 1810
resisting the conditions that a society which, despite democratisation , remains bound by racialised and sexist discourse and, accordingly, a preference for contained art. That is, South Aricans remain rather conservative about 'the body' in performance and the female body removed from its normative commercial or medical framework.
Rose disrupts the representational margins that have been handed down to her in racial, gender and religious forms. The disruption of these margins is forged through a strategy of laughter or jouissance. Jamal recognises this strategy in Rose's photographic work, The Kiss (2002). In the large-scale photograph (125 x 125cm) a nude, pale-skinned woman lies across the lap of a black-skinned male. Jamal (2004: unpaginated) describes the composition of the image: "The man is seated on a plinth, back upright, head in contemplative profile, lithe legs dangling in the air. The woman lies across him, an odalisque with legs and arms in a delicately tangled flutter". The photograph upends Rodin's classical precedent by at once mocking classicism's perverse obesance to race and gender homogeneity whilst mimicking the canonical work's composition. The duality of the work- both mocking and celebratory- is proper to the idiom of laughter. Laughter in the sense that I use it to discuss Rose's work refers to a libidinal impulse or energy that is released by the friction of contradiction. Laughter, in this sense is: "what lifts inhibitions by breaking through prohibition (symbolised by the Creator) to introduce the aggressive, violent, liberating drive" (Kristeva 1984:225). What is happening in Rose's The Kiss is a subtle and multiple undermining of canonical conventions and prohibitions. Firstly, the use of flesh-and-blood bodies in a mock-up of Rodin's sculpture treats the body as a sculptable material in much the same way as Orlan assumes the flesh to be a plastic medium.
Furthermore, the intimate embrace between a white woman and a black male plays upon the taboo subject of miscegenation and the dualistic construction of the black male as dangerous/desirable and the white female as virtuous/excitable (Keegan 2001). Both parties in the image look virtually soporific in embrace, it is hardly a vision of pathological relations. The representation of gender difference in The Kiss is not only tied to the issue of racial difference but to issues of gendered power dynamics. In the photograph, the soft- looking body of the female figure is supported by the muscular Hellenically proportioned male, which may reiterate a typical feminine object-passivity and active male dominance over the possessed object. However, Rose anticipates such readings, for as it turns out, she is the pale-skinned female in the photograph and the man is her American art dealer, Christian Haye. Perhaps then we can take the image as a comment upon the ubiquity of art
with sexual exchange, as Orlan and Sprinkle highlight. A canonical master (Rodin) in order only to debase the power centres that have established his, and other canonical work, in the first place. Rose also subverts racialised aesthetic imperatives by passing her body off as 'white' in the photograph. This both undermines the genealogical convention of the artistic genius as a white male and shows up the way in which racial classification is based upon arbitrary physical markers.
If women in general have been marginalized as artists, then non-white women especially have been excluded from making significant contributions to representational economies by proxy of their association with abject corporeality and the relegation of 'African' art to museum shelf as 'craft', curiosity and artifact. Sobopha (2005:127) states that, at the high point of colonial rule in Southern Africa, to be an aesthetic subject "[was]
to be a gentleman, an owner of property and a controller of space. To be an aesthetic object, on the other hand, was: "...to be a member of the working class, a woman, or a racial Other who controls neither space nor access to property... the one who can see and appreciate beauty is the one who can exercise the right to rule over all those who are merely aesthetic objects" (ibid). As image-maker and aesthetic object in her works, Rose mimes back the privilege of the image-maker through her own body, thus dismantling these antagonistic categories. Her classification as 'coloured' itself destabilises static identity categories, for she is neither one thing nor the other but both at the same time.
Contradictory subject positions are reiterated in The Kiss as the artist traces her own body into the work so that, as artist, her gaze constructs the scene and the object who will be viewed by the male counterpart in the picture, the 'eye' of the camera and a viewing public. This mobility, I think, allows the artist to negotiate between the positions of embodied subject, artist-who-looks and visual object. These contradictory positions open up a space for ambivalence and contradiction- the space that is opened up by the idiom of laughter- wherein antagonistic dualisms no longer hold.
i Fig. 32 The Kiss (2002, lamda print 125x125cm) (www.google.co.za)
Rose moves to live performance in some of her works, most notably Span I and Span II, which were performed at the South African National Gallery (SANG) as part of the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. In Span I, Rose employed a paroled ex- prisoner to incise text onto a wall of the SANG. The text comprised memories from Rose's childhood, most of which dealt with the problematic role that curly hair, or kroeshare, played in being categorised as 'coloured'. In Span II, Rose exibited herself in a plexiglass display cabinet at the SANG. She sat naked, perched on a television turned sideways, knotting the hair that she had shaven off in a previous performance." Whilst Span I and Span II are complementary peformances I am most interested in the contents of Span II because the artist has used her own body. Thus, my analysis will focus upon the latter performance.
Figs 33 and 34 Span II (1997) (www.google.co.za)
The display of Rose's naked body in a museum case in Span II references directly the ethnographic theatres responsible for the display of the bodies of people 'of colour' in museum tableaux, public shows, or dissection and preservation of body parts, as discussed previously in light of the story of Saartjie Baartman. However, the artist has chosen to display herself, which raises the same question as it does for other female performance artists who use their bodies as an explicit medium in performance : does the act of placing one's body on display merely reinscribe the female body as a theatrical product of the scopic imagination or can this viewing framework be transgressed effectively? Indeed, de
" In Ongetiteld, a video performance produced in 1997, Rose is presented naked and alone being videoed as if by a surveillance camera. In the video, she is shown shaving off all of her body hair. She said about the performance: "(It) is about both de-masculating and de-feminising my body, shaving off the masculine and feminine hair. This kind of de-sexualisation carries with it a certain kind of violence. The piece is about making myself unattractive and unappealing. But what was disconcerting was that I suddenly became attractive to a whole different group of people" (in Mackenny 2001).
Lauretis (in Mackenny 2001 : 15) contends that 'woman' is unrepresentable "...except as a representation". It is clear that Rose is not attempting to uncover an essential feminine symbolic that is hidden beneath representations of gender-and race, but is rather deconstructing and critiquing the conditions whereby gender and race come to be intelligible, that is, the frameworks in which and through which gendered and racialised bodies are constructed and viewed. As Mackenny (ibid) states : "Peformance art is one of the prime 'stages' to re-imagine gender [and race] identity as it allows a rescripting of conventions and a 'playing out' of such rescripting". Although the choice to re-display the body risks reiterating the convention of eliding 'woman' with 'body', this anxiety perhaps esteems verbal communication (the ability to speak) above the flesh.
Rose's inclusion of the video image of herself as a reclining nude on the horizontal television set in Span II is a reflexive gesture against the assumed passivity of the female nude. Rose (in Sobopha 2005 :128) states: "With my naked body on the TV I wanted to negate the passivity of the reclining nude. In doing the piece, I had to confront what I wasn't supposed to do with my body".What is it that she is 'not supposed to do' with her body ? It has been established that it is taboo for a woman to display her body of her own volition (she will be marked as 'whore'). Furthermore, to position herself as artist and art- object contradicts western canonical standards whereby the aesthetic object should bear no traces to its maker. The act of knotting her shaved hair draws attention to another level of contradiction in Rose's identity-performance : her hair especially marks her as coloured and thus neither 'white' nor 'black'. The coloured body sits on the ethnographic borderline between the imagined pollution and danger of the black body and the purity and civilisation of the white body. During apartheid, the coloured body was identified primarily by reference to kroes or tightly curled hair which could be subjected to the notorious 'pencil test'(N. McCloy, 1999, pers. comm*).60 On the one hand, having straight hair as opposed to kroes (curly or crinkled) hair is a privilege whilst on the other hand "...having straight hair [if you were coloured] meant you were often insulted for thinking you were white, or pretending to be white"(Sobopha 2005 :129).
For the purposes of racial classification, it could be ascertained whether a person was coloured enough (that is, had enough 'black' blood) to be placed in that group or not by means of a 'pencil test'. This crude test involved a pencil being placed in the individual's curls- if the pencil held, the person swayed on the side of coloured rather than white (*N. McCloy, 'coloured' activist and personal acquaintance, Lesotho).
The act of having shaved off and then working with her hair as if it were a string of rosary beads is a refusal by Rose to identify with the pejorative connotations of being classed as 'coloured'. It is also, as Rose explains, a refusal of a fixed gender identity and a meditation upon the ambiguity of race and gender. Rose explains that she is 'intrigued by the fact that body hair on a woman's stomach and nipples border on masculinity' and that '[confronting this hair is, to an extent, about confronting sexual ambiguity' (ibid). The image of hair also raises issues around socially appropriate and historically specific styles of bodily grooming and presentation. Female body hair is subject to various taboos and prohibitions across a range of cultures that insist that hair be depilated or screened. In terms of racial difference, hair is a loaded bodily feature, its length, texture and styling being marked with status or denigration : long, straight, fair hair tends to be idealised in terms of a dominant Aids beauty standard. Black and coloured women regularly subject their hair to chemical treatments and straightening procedures. This in itself is not problematic, but an attachment to a Aids standard is insofar as it reinforces a homogenous, and highly marketable, version of femininity. Rose's body is a dubious spectacle in that it cannot be read as a sexualised image nor medical specimen. The abject, shaven form repulses sexual connotation whilst the lucidity of the artist, and the framing of the act as a performance, removes the body from the scrutiny of the medical scenario.
By re-framing her body inside the display case and again within the television screen and then working with bodily materials (that is, her hair), Rose mimes the epistemic violence of the scrutinising, scopic imperial [white, male] gaze that has historically established viewing frameworks for bodies on display. Via the performance of a critical mimesis, Rose mimes the body that has been defined by discourses of scientific racism and misogyny, that is : "By the displaying and staging of her body, Rose focuses on the body, not as a biological entity, but as socially and physically constructed" (Sobopha 2005 : 129).
Rose thus points to the ideologically invested yet arbitary fixing of singular identities upon the body's surface by reference to physical featuresjn this instance hair. So then, what she is not 'supposed to do with [her] body' is, because of her race and gender, to upset the borderlines that construct her race and gender. She is able to upset the circularity of this precedent by using her racially marked and gendered body to talk back, as it were, against stereotypical and dominant myths that figure the body as 'coloured' and 'female'.