Sisipho Ngodwana
A VAST number of artists are creating artworks from the basis of their lived experiences, establishing self-identity for various psychological and sociological reasons.
They are expressing an interrogation of the self, a process argued to derive among minority groups and those who have been denied the freedom of expression of their identity and those who share experiences of injustice in certain societal and cultural groups.
In contemporary society, “identity” is associated with political science that includes national, ethnic, gender and state identities. Writers in the field argue that the usage of the term and its contemporary definition is merely a social construct.
For Nomusa Makhubu and Mary Sibande “identity” explores its dispersive relation to contemporary arts. It interrogates the significance of “visuality” of race, gender, class and sexuality in artworks.
Makhubu’s artwork, Lover, and her mode of address of self-identity involve projecting colonial photographs on to her body. She explores society’s socio-political, religious, and cultural histories through her own body and the bodies of black subjects from the past.
Makhubu intends on seeking the connection between the colonial past and the black self-representation and forms of social identity in a post-apartheid society. She explores historic archives and the history of photography as an act of questioning or investigation.
“Sophie” is a representation of Sibande’s ego. Sibande’s body of work bears an insatiable love of fashion, marrying couture, sculpture and performance in a contemplation on the politics of identity imbued with an increasingly personal visual iconography. Sophie is an archetypal figure: a domestic worker, whom her history has cast into a subservient character. As her eyes are closed, she is dreaming, escaping from her reality of being a maid into that, of becoming a queen, hence the Victorian dress.
Sibande voices her disinterests in portraying vividly violent and “depressing” images as she claims that the reality in South African streets and its history is depressing enough. However, the apron and headscarf is a re-evaluation and confrontation of that image.
As I viewed the works I was confronted with issues surrounding assimilation. “Assimilation” refers to immigrant diasporas or “native” residents who are culturally dominated by another cultural group.
Eddie Chambers, a well-known American heavyweight boxer, claims he finds himself to be no less of an immigrant than the generations before him. As a result of having assimilated American identities and being an African, he is constantly alienated because “he belongs to neither”.
Sibande confronts this idea of assimilation further by portraying herself as the maid. She simultaneously draws on the parallels of assimilation and her identity as it has become a combination of what she is and that which she is not.
Before the 20th century, women were not allowed formal art training. Art galleries perpetuated gender inequalities by not exhibiting works produced by female artists. When they were finally allowed to make art they were meant to subsume it to women and motherhood.
By this time the art world had already constructed, for women, a knowledge that was particular and diminutive and this knowledge rested on womanly empathy. It was emotional but highly petty because its emotions were “merely those of feminine sympathy and intuitive rather than the ostentatious passion of the romantics”.
While Sibande covers her body with Western attire that signifies opulence and elitism as a way of inserting herself in a “better life”, a “dream”, she covers the reality of a black female maid in an oppressive society. On the other hand, Makhubu inserts herself in the harshness of colonial life revealing that the contemporary societal life of the black female remains within the structures of colonialism. From slavery to post-colonial theory, the black body remains a subject understood within the context of First World intellectual practises.
Class-consciousness is a concern with gender, race and sexuality, which destabilises ideas of a unified identity. Because she is not, and will never be, a maid, that makes her different from her family. The Western attire and the apron highlight this.
The apron signifies black qualities whereas the Victorian dress signifies Western assimilations. Black class-consciousness is distinguished by economic and cultural dynamics, which form the sub-communities of educated, business and middle-class black people.
A 1926 article by poet Langston Hughes claims that black people feel liberated when not being referred to as black because in their subconscious minds they are “white”. Longing to be “white” is not a longing for a biological whiteness, but rather an ideological one. This aspiration towards “whiteness” derives from historic power dynamics between white and non-white as a result of colonial social structures and hierarchy.
“Whiteness” meant privilege whereas “blackness” meant disfranchisement, hence longing for “whiteness”. These racial terms don’t necessarily refer to skin pigment but overtly to the socially constructed ideas and associations of those terms. Success and liberation are terms dismissed as having to do with Western ideologies. This misconception reinstates the occupation of the West as superior.
These dynamics become those that construct the black underclass identities. State policies contribute to the public image of black underclass living in townships.
Often these images are a portrayal of violence, which has become a socially constructed signifier of underclass black areas as well as identities. Visual interpretations of violence in townships perpetuated by the media reinstate the idea of the black body in the ideological fantasy of the West and that of “whiteness”.
These artists bring up these images to relate to the audience, issues that the black female has had to deal with and in coming to terms with her family heritage and transposition from it. Their imagery interrogates the frames in which the black female has been looked through as a result of colonial and apartheid structures.
They’ve experimented with aesthetics and the medium itself to forefront questions of identity, sexuality, subjectivity and persona, allowing the audience to understand how these frames have shaped and constructed a lens within which she views and understands herself and her location in a post-colonial, post-apartheid society.