Wound, Surface, Skin

Bibliographic Data

ID19002740
AuthorsSarah Nuttall (corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume27
Issue3
Pages418-437
Publication date2013-04-29
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09502386.2013.780228
OpenAlexW2153383249
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited9

The essay draws on four recent artworks which have been highly controversial or visible in South Africa since 2010, in order to explore concepts of wounding and political autopsy on the one hand, and of skin surface on the other. The discussion aims to elaborate on and render increasingly complex both the wounds that won't heal, and which erupt into public life through responses to artworks, and the healing over of a wound along a skin surface which artists are exploring in its multiple senses of a cover, a form of cladding, and as a membrane of feeling. Each of the artworks imply a complex relationship between the domains of public and private, and invoke the intimate, or sites of vulnerability, including the dead body, as a means of reimagining the social. They draw on histories of violence to re-compose the aesthetic project: histories of violence, that is, are resisted, forced open, surrendered to, and generative of unforeseen subjectivities. Keywords: autopsyartificeskin surfaceplasticitywoundingdepthlessness Notes 1. This analysis of Yuill Damaso's painting is an extract from a piece by this author called ‘Mandela's Mortality’ forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela, Cambridge University Press, edited by Rita Barnard. 2. The artist had produced controversy before in relation to depictions of Mandela. In 2000 he ran into trouble with the Mandela Foundation when he produced a series of paintings of the former president, including one of a dreadlocked Mandela, and one of an elderly Mandela wearing boxing gloves and a title belt. ‘They told me that his image was copyrighted. But how can you copyright and image of a public figure?’, Damaso said. 3. A politics, that is, of racial reconciliation, national unity, African modernity, and regeneration. See Elleke Boehmer (Citation2008). 4. Nkosi Johnson, performing the autopsy on Mandela in Damaso's painting, was the longest surviving South African child born with HIV. In July 2000, at the age of 11, he delivered a self-written address to 10,000 delegates at the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban. ‘My name is Nkosi Johnson’, he began, ‘I am 11 years old and I have full blown AIDS’. Thabo Mbeki, who was in the audience, left before Johnson finished his short speech. The young boy died the following year. In contrast in Mbeki's AIDS ‘denialism’, Edwin Cameron writes that when Mandela donned one of the Treatment Action Campaign's ‘HIV Positive’ T-shirts, he ‘may have marked a turning point in our national struggle about the meaning of AIDS’. Cameron believes that Mandela's ‘intervening moral voice’ played a significant role in shifting the government away from its resistance to anti-retrovirals. It also gave members of Mbeki's cabinet the courage to take the president on. 5. In May 2011, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, Helen Zille, told voters, in a speech mixing English, Xhosa, Afrikaans and Sotho phrases, that her party was the only one that could make Nelson Mandela's vision of a better life for all South Africans happen: ‘The DA vision is the same vision that Nelson Mandela spoke about in the Rivonia Trial’. COSATU, the country's largest trade union federation, responded by describing Zille as a ‘political vulture...a political vampire’, adding that ‘Zille carelessly speaks about Mandela as if he is no longer on this earth with us to defend his own legacy ... Mandela is still alive and perfectly capable of speaking for himself’. 6. A key difference between the two men, according to Mbeki, was their different approaches to racial reconciliation: for Mbeki racial reconciliation was ‘unrealisable’ unless it was ‘accompanied by the fundamental transformation of the entire social-economic fabric of South African society. Therefore you can't have reconciliation without transformation’. Mandela, meanwhile, was taking tea with Betsie Verwoerd and donning Springbok rugby jerseys. So they had different understandings of history, as Gevisser notes, of healing, and of transformation as a social and psychic process. It was Mbeki's view that Mandela's status precluded good government, and that his executive style privileged personality over process. Yet ultimately, most commentators agree that Mandela's political style won out, most pointedly as a critique of Mbeki's defensive, wounded form of doing politics, and his destructive blind spots. 7. Later, the signatures were found to be genuine and sales went ahead at London's Belgravia Gallery in 2008. The Gallery released a statement saying: In 2005, a legal dispute arose – still unsettled at the time of writing – which claims that funds did not reach the nominated charities. Belgravia Gallery has therefore used part of its proceeds of sale to make donations to two children's charities in Africa and India. Prints sell for between 3000 and 14,000 pounds each. 8. ‘A white man first approached the painting and used a brush to paint a large X over both Zuma's face and genital area. A black man then used his hands to smear black paint all the way down the front of the figure’ (Cape Argus, 22 May). 9. On 21 May 2010, the Mail & Guardian published a strip from Zapiro depicting the prophet Muhammad as part of Everyone Draw Mohammad Day. On 20 May 2010, the M&G had won an eleventh-hour court bid by the Council of Muslim theologians to bar the publication of the cartoon. A week later, Zapiro released another cartoon in response to the various reactions to the original cartoon. In it he says that he will have to accept that exceptions will have to be made in regard to ‘religious censorship’. This was seen by some as a statement that he felt that his freedom of speech would have to have been limited because of those that were insulted by his cartoon which had graphically depicted the prophet Mohammad. 10. Sibande uses her body as a reference to model likeness, or casts parts and models parts and puts these together. 11. In one 2009 work, this conjuring, of getting out of oneself, as Dodd again points out, has everything to do with commodity culture itself: in ‘I Put a Spell on Me’, Sophie reaches out to a Church of Zion staff archly adorned with multiple replications of the emblem of Louis Vuitton, a much favoured bling brand of South Africa's black middle class. 12. In viewing her enormous sculptures, or more precisely the huge digital photographs of her sculptures, Dodd suggests we could think of Alison Light's descriptions of the hidden history of domestic service in her book Mrs Woolf and the Servants (Citation2009), which she describes as the ‘messy, painful, intimate, damaging feelings of inferiority, envy, deference and belligerence’ involved in domestic labour. She remarks, too, of the perpetuation of exploitation in what is officially an era of democracy and new attention to human rights and how uncomfortable a topic it renders itself in the formally convened public sphere. 13. Parts of this section are extracted from Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Postapartheid (Citation2009). 14. Since the 1970s, critics like Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus (Citation2009) have been arguing, we have relied on a method of reading and seeing that has deeply invested in the symptom. The critical meta-languages that were central to that project were psychoanalysis and Marxism. In the logic of the ‘political unconscious’ that we have relied on in one way or another in much of our theorizing for 35 years, they argue, the most interesting aspect of a text is what it represses, and so interpretation should seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one. The interpreter, Jameson wrote, ‘rewrites the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretative code, and reveals truths that remain unrealized in the surface of the text’. By disclosing the absent cause that structures the text's inclusions and exclusions, the critic restores to the surface of the text the deep history that the text represses

Art · Law in Society and Culture · Public Spaces through Art · South African History and Culture

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