Marlene Dumas – the image as challenge

Great Britain

If ‘better late than never’ was the case with my recent visit to the Goya exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, then it was ever more true with a Friday evening trip to see an exhibition at the Tate Modern.

Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, has been on since February and finishes tomorrow.

I had half thought of visiting, but the first few months of the year have been manic, for various reasons. And I admit that, against that background, a combination of not being familiar with the artist and feeling slightly put off by the publicity image used, I hadn’t got past that half thought.

Rejects

Fortunately, when visiting the Tate Modern last week to see the Sonia Delaunay retrospective, I’d picked up enough visual information to decide that I needed to see the exhibition.

And so it was that, after work on Friday, The Other Half and I headed back to the South Bank, for what was probably my first major exhibition by a living artist.

Dumas was born in born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, leaving the country for Amsterdam in 1976, the year of the Soweto uprising.

Amy Blue

Here, the Tate has gathered together a body of work that encompasses her career to date – a career that clearly illustrates the influence of that background.

Dumas doesn’t paint from life, but from photographs: some she takes herself, others that she sources from various media.

These are far from being copies, however, but merely a starting point. And where the images remain figurative and, in cases of famous people, entirely recognisable, Dumas imbues them with a power and haunting quality that raises many questions – not least, how we look at our fellow human beings.

We begin with Rejects, a series of ink and graphite ‘portrait heads’, which includes the image used for the exhibition publicity material and which, within this wider context, makes sense.

These are not ‘rejected’ people, but primarily created from works that were initially rejected or incomplete, and the set was inspired by her home country’s ‘reject stores’ where you can by clothes with faults.

The Teacher

Once you know that, you start to understand what she’s exploring. Because exploration is what it is – there is nothing polemical about Dumas’s work: it is a starting point for contemplation or discussion.

One of the most perfect examples of this is in the two canvases that form Great Britain (1995-97). One is taken from a fashion shoot with Naomi Campbell and the second, from a royal portrait of Princess Diana.

Seen as a single piece – not initially the artist’s intention – they create a serious dialogue about ideas and representations of femininity and female sexuality. And because neither of them shows a representation of women that is highly sexualised, it makes that dialogue all the more interesting.

The Widow

In The Painter (1994) we are presented with a picture of the artist’s young daughter, hands covered in bright paint, a petulant stare challenging the viewer.

Part of what struck me about this was the simplicity of the grey sweep of paint that creates the child’s lower face, giving it that petulant expression. Indeed, it brought to mind the simplicity of Goya’s washes in the pictures I’d seen just a few short weeks ago.

Early this century, Dumas turned to more obviously political subjects. Two versions of a painting, The Woman of Algiers (2001) and The Trophy (2013) show a young woman being held, naked, for cameras.

Against the Wall

The Widow (2013) shows Pauline Lumumba walking bare-breasted through Kinshasa in 1961, in an act of mourning after the murder of her husband, Patrice, the first democractically-elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Against the Wall (2010) shows Jewish men waiting to go to prayer, standing alongside the Israeli security barrier – a visual reminder of the Wailing Wall.

The same room houses another large painting, The Mother (2009) – this time showing an anonymous woman in black, kneeling before an empty grave, with a framed picture of a young man near her. She is surrounded by more empty graves.

The Mother

She takes a classical theme of art in Forsaken, with a crucifixion, which has the Christ on the cross utterly alone, and is hung here in the same room as Great Men, a series of delicate portraits of notable gat men from both 19^th and 20^th centuries, which was created in response to attitudes towards homosexuality in Russia, and was first exhibited there in 2014.

One room contains a number of works that explored the dynamic of the naked figure (male and female) in art, pin-ups and pornography.

Again, this challenges the viewer to consider precisely how they view.

For me, The Teacher (Sub A) (1987) strikes a note of great familiarity, showing as it does a conventional school photograph (how I remember them!), while her portrait of Amy Winehouse, Amy – Blue (2011) is another striking work.

Her palette is muted, her sense of scale vast. But Dumas illustrates the power of the figurative in a world that sometimes seems to have forgotten it.

She paints terrorists and suspect, victims and more, constantly challenging us to consider our relationships with those pictures. Her work is full of questions about life, death, sexuality and power.

And one of Dumas’s greatest strengths is that she so carefully avoids the polemical; she doesn’t patronise the viewer, but instead invites you to consider.

Better late than never, as I said. This was a challenging exhibition that has left me with much to mull over. I’m very glad I made it.

Farewell Ratzi and thanks for all the bigotry

Thomas Mann – damned by the Pope.

Isn’t identity a funny thing? Okay, let me try to be clearer: isn’t how we choose to identify ourselves a funny thing – what labels we decide fit us; what tribes we decide we belong to?

To be honest, I’m not personally a big fan of identity politics – or, indeed, of labels in general. So often it seems simply to point up what divides us rather than what unites us.

So it was not uppermost in my mind to consider penning something around February being LGBT History Month.

But then something happened that made me change my mind.

The Pope decided to retire.

That’s right: because Joseph Ratzinger has called it a day, I decided to pick up the LGBT baton for a post.

Many of us might prefer that no religious leader have any meaningful power in the 21^st century world, but whether we like it or not, that is not the case, and the office of pope still commands a great deal of clout and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Before his own elevation, Ratzinger had previously been grand inquisitor for John Paul II: when Karol Wojtyła was getting a tad past it, it was undoubtedly Ratzi who was really pulling the strings, so he’s had power for rather longer than simply his ascension to the top job in 2005.

Now, number one point to make: beating Ratzinger up because he was a member of the Hitler Youth is just plain daft. You don’t have a to be a fascist sympathiser to comprehend that children, at that time, would have had little safe choice in the matter.

So that isn’t going to be this blog’s complaint.

The problem with Ratzinger is that he has used his office to push lines that are sexist and homophobic.

Clare Balding – damned by the Pope.

His rhetoric about how those dodgy gays will essentially kill off civilisation cannot simply be taken as the rantings of an elderly person – not least because he/the office has the authority mentioned earlier.

And whether the Pope realised or intended it or not, his pronouncements have lent a veneer of legitimacy to those who would discriminate against LGBT people – and even do violence toward them.

His stand against contraception in general – and, in particular, the use of condoms as a method of safe sex – has been detrimental to the fights against poverty and against HIV/Aids.

He would rather a married couple produce far more brats than they can care for than that they use contraception. He wants every act of sexual intimacy to be heterosexual, monogamous, married and with getting the bird up the duff in mind.

He would rather that people died of Aids-related conditions than that they use condoms.

This is also an individual who has played a role in the protection of child abusers by his organisation.

Jodie Foster – damned by the Pope.

But then again, this he has also headed an organisation that believes that the victim of rape, even if a nine-year-old child, should not be allowed an abortion if made pregnant by her abuser.

It is an organisation that does not value women, but would rather a woman die than have the abortion that could save her life. The realised human being is worth less, in Catholic orthodoxy, than the potential of her producing a (male) child.

These are the attitudes that Herr Ratzinger has chosen to uphold in the name of a belief in something for which there is not a solitary shred of evidence.

Thus his faith cannot be viewed as somehow ‘cute’ or ‘quirky’, but for what it is: a stick with which to beat many, many other human beings whose lives and whose intrinsic being is different to what he wants it to be.

Let's also be quite clear: there really is not much difference between the likes of Ratzinger and the likes of the Taliban: and yet we (rightly) condemn one, but allow the other great respect and clout.

There’s something very wrong with that; very wrong indeed.

Oscar Wilde – damned by the Pope.

And it is worth noting that it is far from certain that the cardinals will elect a new pontiff with more 'liberal' credentials. Ratzinger is not the first 'traditionalist' to occupy the role of pope, and he is highly unlikely to be the last. In other words, his reactionary attitudes are far from unique.

I hope that Ratzinger has a peaceful retirement. There would be something rather pointless and sad about wishing him, as an individual, ill. But he is most certainly NOT some sort of saint. And the organisation that he has spent a lifetime promoting and defending is, frankly, immoral and corrupt and well past its sell-by date.

Now, since I have mentioned LGBT History Month, let's be a little more positive. Here are a few of my own household gods – who just happen to be or have been part of the community of which I myself am also a member. They're not my only "household gods", and they are not "household gods" because of their sexuality, although it is not hindered by the sense of connection that flows from that.

And perhaps, in that, I have just countered my own arguments against identity politics.

Remember: every one of these extraordinary people would be damned by the man who is just about to retire, and by his organisation. And yet he and it would almost certainly applaud Tony Blair.

Alan Turning – damned by the Pope.

Alan Turing – massively instrumental in the defeat of fascism and in the development of modern computer science, but effectively driven to his death afterwards simply because he was gay.

Thomas Mann – one of the greatest authors ever; a principled and humane giant.

Virginia Woolf – wonderful, wonderful writer, and hugely innovative. If you haven't done so already, do read Mrs Dalloway.

Quentin Crisp – England’s real queen.

Oscar Wilde – greatest wit ever? And yet one of my favourite quotes of all time is more poignant than Wilde’s reputation would lead one to expect: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”.

Stephen Sondheim – what a god of the musical theatre. Forget Andrew Lloyd Whatever He's Called.

The Pope.

Clare Balding – breaks down barriers all over the place, not least by being a ‘posh bird’ introducing Rugby League for the BBC. In line for national treasure status – and it will be utterly deserved.

Alan Bennett – just a wonderful writer; such a great ability to understand human beings and the smallnesses of their lives.

Nigel Slater – quite simply the best food writer that this country has produced since Elizabeth David. Nobody else, currently writing, has anything close to his sense of food and time and place and memory.

Jodie Foster – a wonderful screen actor, and has managed an amazing career without getting caught into all the crass celeb gossip etc.

Gore Vidal – oh how we miss him; an intellectual giant and iconoclast.