Marlene Dumas

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 20 Number 3, 2001

Transcript

Marlene Dumas responds to a series of questions about interpretation and meaning in her works including ‘The First People (1991), a series of four paintings of babies which, given their enlarged scale, take on a menacing or threatening presence. She speaks about tension in her art arising out of a sense of ambiguity which invites multiple readings. In ‘Black Drawings (1991-92), comprising a series of 111 drawings and 1 slate, she rejects the suggestion that, in coming from the South Africa, the black portraits were motivated by the desire to make a political statement, to memorialise individuals, or to ‘speak for someone else’. She goes on to discuss the themes in her paintings such as love, eroticism, sexuality and pornography, where there is an implicit element of attraction and engagement with the total human condition. In describing her work as arising out of being felt, rather than starting from formal issues she goes on to add that, ‘the meaning of the work sits more in what happens to it when it’s finished and goes out into the world than where the starting point is’.

William Furlong: I’m sitting here with Marlene Dumas in Ballagio on the edge of Lake Como during a break in an Art & Science Conference organised by Don Foresta. Let’s start by talking about the portraits; what is the sense of that person that you are trying to capture in those works?

Marlene Dumas: How far should I go back actually? When I was a student I did some figurative works and I also did things where I only made marks so I was very mixed up as to what I actually wanted to do. The first years in Holland I mostly used words and collages I think the first face that I made in Holland was actually the wife of Freud, it was called ‘Martha, Sigmund’s Wife’ and because of all the psychoanalysis in art theory I thought it was very nice to paint his wife instead of him. She looked like an angry version of my grandmother, Martha. I painted three Martha’s, Martha the servant girl, Martha my grandmother and Martha, Sigmund’s wife, so there had to be a likeness, so I also used a photographic source to help me. Another reason for making the portraits was what they stood for. On the painterly side I was always interested by what de Kooning once said that, ‘if you want to put something in the middle of a canvas just put it there’. I eliminated all the background and so the face becomes so big that it has a certain abstraction.

WF: You come originally from South Africa and you’ve made a whole series of black faces, but from what I can gather, it wasn’t in any sense to memorialise or create icons of these people. What made you make that work?

MD: At that stage there was this big controversy that you don’t speak for somebody else, so I’ve never specifically done a work that had racial implications. It was so loaded and a difficult subject, but then on the other hand, it’s also so strange because I paint my grandmother, and in all my works I used to explain why, and this and that. But it’s so simple really, because you have a face or faces and you’ve got a body and a history of painting and the more I answer questions about it the more I’m telling the viewer how they should look at it. I’ve made it so easy already and the difficult part is what do they think about it? It’s not that I’m trying to be difficult it is more I think, what in the end is the meaning of the work, it is when it’s finished and goes into the world, rather than what the starting point was.

WF: When I look at some of your works they don’t actually tell me everything. Sometimes I feel that the medium is eluding that very literal story.

MD: With my work because of the titles often, and also because somehow in the work it feels as if something is going to or has happened; a lot of people read it like that. If they look at a Vermeer of ‘Lady with Pearl’ then they don’t ask the same type of questions.

WF: That is interesting because with a Vermeer you feel that it is the definitive statement. With a number of your images I feel that there’s something in the process of happening.

MD: Yes, I know I’ve said many times that I am looking at myself as a third person and sometimes I think OK, let somebody else try to work it out. I don’t always know, I mean I speculate on certain things too. I like the tension today we were talking about the ambiguity, almost as a quality of all good art. So I feel a bit bad to tell you that ambiguity is my thing. Is it because I like images that you have got to search or need a little bit of straightening or is it only due to the time that it’s made in wallpaper and when I’m old, dead and gone, it will be looked at totally differently. For example, the four babies that I’ve done, they’re the origin of the species; people have written about it, also women writers who say that they look like monsters. But the longer I see them the friendlier they look to me; all I did was that I made the scale bigger and that’s often used to create obviously some affect on one. It’s not something I invented; so anyway the babies are bigger. I remember when I made them I was looking also at ‘who painted babies?’ Most of the baby paintings that I knew were reasonably soft but there’s a painting of Frida Kahlo, of her own birth and you’ve got a few others. I’ll come back to the first question I suppose, life is hard yah, but probably when I’m supposed to answer totally other questions, you know I‘ve often said that I use second hand images and first hand emotions. After my daughter was born I was extremely busy with the baby, how does it feel, what is the baby? It was also a challenge to make an image of that, how would one tackle that? It was two related things but, it was the same thing with the black drawings, when I was making it, it was obviously not babies, they aren’t really that neutral and neither is it if you pick out one group of people. It makes you realise that if you have a group of white people that that seems to be the norm. Why doesn’t one say ‘Oh what’s so strange about a group; I’ve got a group called [‘Gurosis?’] which is a little bit light green and I don’t know where that comes from, but people are always more interested in the black one. As you say some questions are more loaded, even if nobody wants to say ‘it’s no problem’, it’s the same thing with the babies in a funny way. I don’t know if they are so gruesome, and I’m not saying I was the first because I don’t find this ‘first thing’ so interesting, but I like the form of younger women and children and babies. People are saying ‘Oh they’re so pleased that I did the baby because they always wanted to do a baby’ and so now I think maybe in a few years, if you look back, you won’t see it as so monstrous.

WF: A kind of consistent theme in your work includes love, eroticism, sexuality the use of what’s called pornographic imagery. What are you trying to express or unpack there?

MD: Well firstly I always say this to students, the fact that you are attracted to something doesn’t guarantee that it will be a good artwork but if you’re not attracted or for some reason you are disgusted, but in some way attracted, to your subject matter, then nothing comes out of it. That’s one thing, that the human figure has been my subject since I was small, it was something that always interested me. For example after the faces in the eighties, I did these different faces and portraits and then someone mentioned that the human face, two eyes looking at you always has a certain attraction. I’m simplifying but obviously when I thought ‘can I also make a good painting that attracts you?’ There’s no face on it, if I use the body not the face, so then you use the naked body because you’re not interested in the decorative aspects of clothing, you want to have it as naked and as honourable as possible. Then you get all kinds of problems; how does that read and apart from that, well never mind all the readings or misreadings that can be made from a naked body without a face. We know, everyone knows the tale of ‘Olympia’, most of my people always looked at you so if the subject looks at you it has a different effect obviously from them not looking at you. Then, I don’t know what to say about more pornographic imagery, but there are only a few things you can do with one another; either hit one another on the head or sit on chairs or lie on beds or make love or die. Well you can cry, but that’s why I wish to grow extremely old; I would like to tackle more of those very old themes that have always existed in art and also with the more pornographic image. I’ll say more about that now; someone said ‘but why is the woman young’, and ‘ why don’t I have more men’; but I have got men. I saw Rembrandt’s portrait’s of himself getting older and he is one of the few painters in the Western painting tradition who has actually, there must be more, done such beautiful elderly people. I actually think there are two works, I’m not quite sure of the date now, maybe the 90’s, one is called ‘Porno Blues’ and the ‘Porno Escollage?’ and ‘Porno Blues’ was actually to do with a whole type of re-thinking about pornography, the over exposure and the problems with the naked body. This lady is actually sitting all alone in a sort of mirage, she’s got a bit of the blues, but it is also as a whole, to do with sex, so much sexual imagery around, everyone seems to, well not everyone, have a bit of a problem with it if you talk to them individually. But ‘Porno Escollage’ for example, people never want to talk about that, maybe I didn’t make it so clear it was only clear in the title but I have used the body for so many different reasons. What if I would say ‘I want to make an erotic image’ and not say, ‘I want to use it for.’ then it is also very difficult and so I use the pornographic imagery in a sense to see if I could make it. I don’t know if I can say that, but make them erotic. I always think if you are in a relationship how would one show that difference, where do you find it, find that someone does whatever they want with you; how do you then paint that? How do you paint the difference between that and the commercial? So those were the type of thoughts, Yah.