The bearable lightness of Tracey Roses The Kiss

16 August, 2004 //

Ashraf Jamal
I
When, prompted by her elders and peers, a white schoolgirl squats over the beaten body of a black schoolgirl and
shits on her, the act is not only gross but also curiously intimate. That the act, which made national headlines,
occurs in a South African high school in 2003 is all the more chastening. Nothing, it seems, has changed. Of
course, one could say that such an act of defilement is eccentric. Who in their right mind would do such a thing?
Still, the deed was done, and, like many an act of grotesquerie, it has fascinated us as much as it has revolted us.
But then again one could say that the balance sought between fascination and revulsion is not only inexact but
also false; that one can never with any ease find the symmetry of conflicting emotions that I beguilingly aim to
persuade you of. Emotions are never tidy, acts never so easily calibrated. And yet it is astounding how,
unerringly, one holds onto such a balance when the event that sparks such conflicting emotions leaves one
dumbfounded.The matrix of fascination/revulsion can never be the harmonious abomination that we take it to be.
By way of attempting to survive the abomination, however, we persist in believing that that which fascinates and
that which revolts merely amount to different sides of the same coin. This common mistake has come to define
the way that South Africans respond to the perversity of their birth, a perversity which, for Kendell Geers, defines
the nature of our deeds. Perversion begets perversion. Then again, as alluring as this tautology may appear, it
fails to explain the conundrum of perversion itself. Similarly, when JM Coetzee declares that South Africa is as
irresistible as it is unlovable, one is lured back to the pathological. What Coetzee means here, and what he has
always meant, is that the fascination one has for this country is fundamentally a matter of loathing, whether it be
the loathing of the self or otherwise. That this loathing is borne, as Coetzee notes, from an unacknowledged and
repressed desire to embrace the body of Africa, in no way explains his account of the refusal to do so. Coetzee
invokes a promise but fails to realise it. In resisting the desperate need that he acknowledges, Coetzee brings us
back to the cesspit that he has tilled all too well. This cesspit is certainly borne out by the drastic incident of a
white schoolgirl shitting on a black schoolgirl. However, Coetzees proven view of a country that is compellingly
perverse, as irresistible as it is unlovable, is one, irrespective of its seductiveness, that remains dangerous.
II
In writing about South Africa one should be wary of falling back upon a tidy pathological matrix such as that which
emerges in the formulations of Geers and Coetzee. This is not merely because I dispute their truth, but because
formulations such as these leave little or no room in which to construct a more enabling vision of ones cultural
inheritance or possible future. More importantly, such formulations lack the dexterity, the difficulty that one needs
to embrace in order to understand what it means to live and think and create as a South African. This is because,
in my view, South Africa abhors wit as much as it abhors a finely turned yet profoundly false sentence. For South
Africa is a country that invariably destroys the claims of those who attempt to explain it, or worse, to explain it
away. This corrective one made as much to myself as to others is, I believe, a fitting one to uphold in relation
to the varnished tale one may choose to deliver concerning 10 years of putative democracy. To say this is the
case is as absurd as to say it is not. What is needed, then, is a philosophy that functions within and in spite of the
claims made by those who believe in change or those who believe that change, if and when it comes, is bound to
be for the worse. The three insidious logics that consume us like a poison, the one no less deadly than the other,
are fatalism, optimism and relativism. How to think in spite of these vengeful claimants upon our conscience? For
it is true that hope is as dangerous as fatality, and that neither is satisfactorily conquered by the newfangled
relativism nothing more than a cloak-and-dagger opportunism that has consumed the current South African
imaginary.
If South Africa today is a joke, it is for all the wrong reasons; if it is a tragedy then similarly so. What is profoundly
absent in South Africas creation of itself is modesty. As infatuated with its gore-fest as it is with its love-ins, South
Africa has failed to access the self-reflexive moment that could allow it to hover between the shadow and the act.
Its contemptuous disregard for mystery, its maniacal belief in closure, its festering recourse to pain, its hatred of
embarrassment, its toxic pride, has left it standing like the proverbial emperor enfolded in its naked pomp. A soap
opera, South Africa is a country that chooses to serialise itself into oblivion. How, then, to commemorate? Where
does one begin? The fact is one doesnt, for South Africa, irrespective of the history it has constructed for itself,
remains a society that lives with the terrible unease of never having begun. It may suppress this unease; indeed,
it would seem that South Africas finest talent is its ability to draw a rabbit out of a hat and call it history. Such is
the perversity of this nation that its pain has become a mockery, its hopes mere baubles.
What I am working towards in this polemic is the desire to imagine a country purged of its infatuation with a
belittling memory, a country healthily open towards the perversity that has shaped it. This health of which I speak
is neither a virtue nor a crucible; it is not something one fights for like an athlete transfixed by the fear of failure.
This fight is not controllable; it cannot be moderated, calibrated, made to fit a projected ideal. Rather, it is a fight
that is first and foremost an act of play. This notion of play is not an easy one for South Africans, a motley
grouping of peoples as illiterate, as stupefied by each other, as reticent and wary, as fake as a handshake and a
toothy smile.
Play as it is understood here is a kind of blindness, a whim, or an airy nonsensicality that seems virtually
impossible to achieve. Which is why art, the apogee of apparent redundancy, is the sphere that best achieves this
playfulness. When in that rarest instance art is stripped of accountability, left to its singular and impoverished
devices, when it is not roped into the tawdry and dull enterprise of nation building, art precisely allows for the
opening to a surprise. When art is not depressive or gauchely hopeful, it enables the lightness that frees South
Africa from the brute template that has disfigured it. When such art happens we are invited into a speculative and
wondrously improbable arena where fascination no longer revolts, where the perversity of ones birth is no longer
the birth of perversity per se, where givens groan under the weight of their absurdity, and one suddenly alights
upon a place that, at best, can be described as the place of the imagination. This place, open to the all too few, is
not a privileged timeshare, a holiday place away from home, but the place in which creation becomes possible.
This place, as suggested earlier, is a place that exists between the shadow and the act, a place that recoils before
intention and its fall-out. Suspended, it is a place that cannot be thumbtacked between dates. So how to
commemorate? Perhaps, at best, by accident. Or perhaps by enacting the act of commemoration as an accident.
The rest, I think, would be a posturing that cannot be foolproof.
III
South Africa is not irresistible and unlovable as Coetzee has claimed, a claim as efficacious as it is disingenuous;
rather, the view I would propose is that South Africa is resistible and lovable. By this I mean that one survives the
barbarism of ones history irrespective of the template that has normalised ones illness. Coetzee knows this, as
does any thinker who has delved into the pain that has been said to define what it means to be South African.
Artists, with a devastating ease, have tended towards an equivalent prognosis. Therefore, those who have
created in spite of this order this mock truth are rare to find. They exist, however. Their quality is that of a
fission flare. Bereft of power, stripped of the ruse of self-knowledge, they peer into the world with bafflement and a
lack of self-aggrandising posturing that leaves one breathless.
Tracey Rose is such a creature. Irrespective of her trickery, her mockery, her fraught eye, her terribly self-
reflexive carnage, she at no point allows herself to be beguiled by the pathological. Illness for her is not an
inheritance or a moral duty but a plague she routs out with a vengeance. The video work TKO reveals the artist
beating the shit out of a punching bag. In grainy black and white, the images quaver, nauseously revolve,
accompanied by the accelerated panting of the artist. The knockout, as I understand it, is not restricted to boxing;
rather, as a reflexive term, it reminds us of an obstacle that stands in ones way and must be removed. That
object may be a repressive self, an unquestioned history, a dirty habit, a way of doing, of thinking or creating that
must be changed. It is not solutions or tidy formulations which Rose offers in that work, but a kinetic, physically
engaged and contentious drama. By placing herself at the centre of her art she does not thereby fetishise or
memorialise herself, but, in an act of mimicry, of self-mockery, Rose introduces the importance of play, of the
performative, in the making of art and the ceaseless recreation of ones cultural and socio-historical identity. That
Rose, as a coloured, figures as a glitch, a quirk, a protean and degenerate anomaly in South Africas Manichean
racial register, has, no doubt, impacted on her take on identity. She can be everything and nothing. She can as
easily spoof the fetishistic integrity of race as turn it on its head. However, at the root of the mockery lies the
realisation that no identity is binding, but that each and every attempt to pin something or someone down
illuminates the shadow and the act of a radical human heterogeneity. The centre could never hold, the tidy
polarities we set us between black and white, man and woman, could never fix the flux. For Rose every faked
posture is more than the sum of its parts. Always there is something other than the obvious statement that
matters to her.
Of course Roses strategy is not particularly new or even innovative. Both Geers and Coetzee, in the spheres of
art and fiction, have shown precisely the importance of the performative, while Homi Bhabha, in the sphere of
theory, has drawn our attention to the radical subversiveness of mimicry. However if Rose has, in my view,
attained something special it is because of the lightness of her work. This is most evident in The Kiss, a
photograph of a naked black man and a naked white woman. The black man is Roses American art dealer, the
white woman, with the filigreed fulsomeness of a pre-Raphaelite figure, is Rose herself. The man is seated on a
plinth, back upright, head in contemplative profile, lithe legs dangling in mid-air. The woman lies across him, an
odalisque with legs and arms in a delicately tangled flutter. The work could not be more pronounced in its
location, across the room as you enter the Iziko: South African National Gallerys Decade of Democracy
exhibition. If there is lightness in the mans airborne feet, there is also a weightedness, and, in his profile, the worn
exhilaration of a black mans victory. The profile is strikingly marmoreal, though the self-awareness of the man
adds that quicksilver quintessence. The woman, meanwhile, has a gamine-like shyness; her fluttering is also a
kind of shudder. There is pleasure, there, in the making of that scene, pleasure and a fresh awakening.
Now it is this pleasure that I find particularly compelling. Irrespective of the self-consciousness of the image,
irrespective of the element of pastiche, what lifts the image above and beyond the influences and constraints that
shape it is that sense of pleasure, of laughter, that lightness. Thereby, through laughter, through what Roland
Barthes famously termed jouissance or bliss, the iconic or representational quality of the work dissolves, or, at
least, is strategically foregrounded yet kept in abeyance. If the work is about race, about gender, it is also about
something far greater: love. By this I mean that Rose has not only shown us the obvious, but through the obvious
racial conflict and sexual difference she has managed to point a way forward. This way is one that eschews
the pathological and perverse, which conceives of South Africa not as a place that is irresistible and unlovable,
but, all the more profoundly, as a place that is resistible and lovable. For Rose this resistance assumes a reflexive
turn: it shows the object of critique then approaches it at a glance. This glance, like the playful hooded eyes of the
woman in The Kiss, is loaded in its seeming frivolity. That the work possesses a populist appeal, and, at the same
time, is able to assist us in rethinking the pathology of our history, makes it all the more significant and durable.