ABSTRACT

Consuming Cultures is concerned with the interrelationship of gender and the circuits of consumption, distribution, production and reproduction. The book looks at the ways in which gender intervenes in all parts of the circuit or the linkages between different elements.

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Summary

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References

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The way we look to a distant constellation That’s dying in a corner of the sky These are the days of miracle and wonder And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry It was a dry wind And it swept across the desert And it curled into the circle of birth And the dead sand Falling on the children The mothers and the fathers And the automatic earth … Medicine is magical and magical is art The Boy in the Bubble And the baby with the baboon heart And I believe These are the days of lasers in the jungle Lasers in the jungle somewhere Staccato signals of constant information A loose affiliation of millionaires And billionaires and baby These are the days of miracle and wonder This is the long-distance call © 1986 Paul Simon/Paul Simon Music (BMI) In its ability to embody the union of science and nature, the embryo might be described as a cyborg kinship entity. Sarah Franklin (1993a: 131)

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a white childhood’s dependency on a black nanny, where nannies were part of the domestic sphere. For me these works raise the issue of how innocence and power are reflected and enacted by and through the process of racialization in that relationship. There are two things I want to tease out here. So the first question concerns the idea of subjectivity in your work, and the links you’re attempting to make in a number of the pieces, between the racialization of the working-class black women and the negation of her subjectivity through that process. Perhaps your Tula-Tula series embodies these ideas most clearly (Figure 1). But your work also suggests that at some level there is a shared history of pathologizing sexuality to which both black and white women have been subjected in South Africa. How do you make a clear distinction between the kind of pathologization through racialization on the one hand, and on the other, the history of how white women’s sexuality has also been contained and confined through the oppressive structures of apartheid? Penny Siopis: It is a distinction that I found difficult to untangle. Patriarchal oppression occurs in both, but the mediating factors are complex and differentiated. I wouldn’t say there is an equivalence of a shared relationship but I think there’s something to be said for both which is produced around gender. I think it’s a bit like the problem of actually talking about women in any general way. I think one has to first make a kind of general point that there is something, if you like, in common, but not necessarily equivalent, and certainly not equivalent in this situation, because obviously the pathologizing of gender is one thing, but then there’s another thing which makes an issue of race, which is a kind of double subjection for black women. AC: You see I think that this is also further complicated, particularly in the South African context. In your work there seems to be a historical slippage between the representation of the control and pathologizing of white women and their sexuality, which is specifically located in the nineteenth century, and the divide between white and black experience which continues today. In other words one can be very clearly located and specifically seen as something which is of the past (although the ramifications continue in all sorts of ways), but

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the other has a very clear presence in the way in which lived relations are played out, especially in South Africa, between black and white women and also in terms generally of black women’s experience here. So I think it’s a really sensitive issue and it’s very difficult to negotiate in a way that doesn’t reduce women to an essentialist category. Do you think that there is a danger that that historical slippage then creates another kind of slippage where the differences between the power relations, between white women and black women are erased? PS: I think in a way this is almost impossible to answer. What I have tried to do is rather open up the question. The question of difference you point to is not stable. I consciously exhibited just the traces of these women, the outward signs of women who worked as nannies in white households, for example. Everyone in South Africa knows that the uniforms in Maids are the uniforms of black maids. I specifically wanted them exhibited in close proximity to Foreign Affairs (Figure 2). Foreign Affairs is a work using images of medieval restraints and scolds’ bridles together with an image of Saartjie Baartman. Her face is centred on a mirror. When you look into it, it is as if you are held there by her. The images of the scolds’ bridles are interspersed with texts from the Weekly Mail newspaper published during the State of Emergency. AC: During that period whole paragraphs and sentences in various newspapers were inked out by the censor? PS: Not exactly. The Weekly Mail chose the device of blackening out text or leaving white spaces to signal the work of suppression of information. I wanted to suggest a relationship between contemporary censorship and ideas about having the right to speak—having or not having a voice. The medieval masks are also about speaking, or not being able to speak. If women spoke too much they were punished and things put on their faces, restraints on their tongues. This brings me back to the issue of subjectivity—subjectivity in terms of how my subjectivity would be produced or changed, having had the experience of being brought up or nannied by a black woman, and how hers might be altered. So in a way that whole relationship between class, race, subjectivity and the idea of gender was for me an enquiry into all those things and the ideas that almost can’t be spoken. I wanted to try to face it, not

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erase it or avoid it. The last would have been simpler and easier, but not viable for me. AC: The issue of subjectivity and power relations particularly between the white child and the black nanny in South Africa is especially complex. PC: Yes, and that’s why it’s interesting to deal with. In some ways the black nanny may seem to have the power if you like, when she’s bringing up the small white child. But she’s always disadvantaged, even when she has that little baby, who she loves like her own child and who loves her, in a sense, like a mother. Then that relationship changes as the boy becomes an adolescent and older. What interests me is what happens in that experience. My interest here was probably stimulated, provoked or sharpened by the birth of my own child. AC: So one of the aims of your work is to signal the difficult ambiguities of that relationship—the loss in a sense, on both sides as well as the complex power relationship. In other words you want to make explicit that forbidden longing which is later denied in adulthood, by the white male child? PS: Yes, amongst other things. There’s trauma involved like the trauma involved when a child loses his mother. There’s trauma for the mother, and if one tries to read this psychoanalytically, the child has to have trauma to have a voice. The mother in effect loses her voice. In South Africa for white women this is not necessarily the case, but for black women that actually is the case in reality, so what I tried to do in Tula-Tula (Figure 1) is make a physical and material representation of the loss of that voice which actually doesn’t happen to white women. This is a ‘difference’ of the kind you mentioned earlier. White women actually have power. I wouldn’t say they have power in quite the same way as white men. They don’t. But they have or have had, for instance, more power than black men. AC: And that power actually relies on a relationship with black women based on their subjection. So it’s a relationship of both dependence and subjection. PS: Yes, and what I’m trying to do is draw attention to the fact that there are some similarities possible through gender emanating from patriarchal oppression and there are some connections that can be made across class and race. But there are, of course, differences too, perhaps absolute, that remain separated no matter what you think. AC: One of the series which plays on that ambivalent relationship of dependence, subjection and shared identifications is Royal Vermont: Hand Painted (Zulu Maiden) and Royal Vermont: Hand painted (Ndebele Girl). The piece consists of two plates, one with an adolescent Zulu girl and the other

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suffers also in some measure afflicts the black woman because she loses, not only her voice, but her authority—little as it was—in relation to white women. She had something with this child. Then she loses the child. The child quite literally goes away to school and she is structured into a different relationship with it which involves rejection. That child becomes a person who calls her by a name that is not her name, that orders her around. He might even use her body sexually, and he becomes the boss, the master. The loss that she suffers is all the greater because she has experienced a genuine affection both from and for the child who has now withdrawn from her. And he must suffer some loss in relation to that black woman. And I suppose what I’m trying to work through is the nature of that loss, such trauma which occurred in the apartheid years—things that can’t be spoken. I’m completely fascinated by this incredibly powerful constellation of relations and feelings as something that is just so much part of this society and cries for representation. AC: Do you think you’ve actually been able to represent in some way that psychic dimension of loss to both parties that you were talking about? PS: There is an asymmetry here. I cannot and do not claim to do justice to ‘both’ parties. I’ve tried to put objects which speak, if you like, socially and psychoanalytically. These objects are resonant, suggestive. AC: The three works which make up the Tula-Tula series, perhaps more than any other, try and resolve in a representational form the absent psychic dimension of that loss. You’ve deliberately used the image of your brother as a child as a way of bringing in a personal dimension. PS: I’ve used a blown-up negative from a photo of my brother with his nanny. The image itself is very suggestive in terms of the mother/child relationship. The nanny is sitting down with him on her lap and his hand is on hers. There are lots of details which would signify to a South African viewer—the child’s little hat, his sandals—things typical of a white little boy child. I’ve tried to work up the negative spaces of the photocopy, particularly around her face and his face. Because it is a photographic negative, she’s in fact white, if you like, colourwise, and he’s black, but his eyes are white. I’ve tried to invert value-laden colour. His eyes are in some ways absent or blank because in the original photograph they would have been black. Thinking psychoanalytically about vision and power the child’s ‘blank’ eyes and the nanny’s gaze become crucial details. She looks down at him and he looks out at the viewer. I’ve also deliberately and painstakingly built up her face materially with paint because I wanted to produce a strong point of identification. The act of painting, the physical presence of working up the surface tends to create an affective relationship which may

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erected in the 1980s in honour of the ‘victims of terrorism’. Obviously the victims were supposed to be white and terrorists assumed to be black. So I’ve used the inscription, ‘terrorisme’, an Afrikaans word, and juxtaposed it with the image. The word points to an actual historic monument in South Africa and has arisen from an identifiable historical period of oppression. In a sense it signals the idea of the split identities of black women as both ‘comfort’ and ‘threat’, as perceived by white people under apartheid. Black women were obviously seen as the people who would look after their children, love their children. But at the same time they’re seen as the ‘enemy’. AC: And, of course, what their relationship with the white child effectively did was remove from black women the opportunity to care for their own children or indeed, in some cases, to even produce their own children. So this was yet another form of containment under apartheid. PS: Yes, and another thing which interests me is that the nanny’s role of surrogate mother also made her a threatening figure and the target of many myths during the years of the ‘swart gevaar’ or ‘black peril’. During this time there were always stories going around that if, for instance there was going to be a black take-over that one of the most terrifying places would be in the domestic space because that was where black women had power and opportunity. And I experienced an anxiety about that so-called split subject—my beloved nanny—when I was little. That in the end makes the subjectivity of black women really complex and virtually impossible to represent for me, other than through lots of fractured, different stories and different images and different ways. AC: The thing which interests me about the Tula-Tula series is that here the ambivalences are contained within a single series and repeated in different ways. The fact that you gave it the name of a famous Zulu lullaby tula-tula—is also significant. Again it’s about a potentially ‘shared’ experience between black and white. Paradoxically the white child recognizes and is soothed by the lullaby which also nurses and comforts the black child. At the same time the pose in the snapshot is resonant of Christian religious iconography and consequently the viewer becomes conscious of an uncomfortable juxtaposition between violence (‘terrorisme’) and the nurturing sacrifices one might associate with the Madonna figure. PS: ‘Tula’ is also a command to ‘keep quiet’ or ‘become quiet’. If one thinks of the sign of ‘tula-tula’ you hear the voice of a black woman and that’s a kind of nourishment. AC: AC: You mentioned the difficulties in dealing with subjectivity. One of the big questions this raises is whether or not it’s possible or even desirable to

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try and represent, or signal, another kind of subjectivity for black women in South Africa, especially as a white woman. Related to this issue is the fact that many of the representations of black women in your work are representations of subjection. Do you think there could be a charge levelled at you in the sense that the images and the sign of black women in your work is constantly one of subjection, and that the voices and experiences of resistance and agency for example, are not actually present except in signalling the ambivalent relationship between the white child and the nanny? I ask because I’ve been very aware having just spent a few months in South Africa of the incredible ways in which any women who were committed to challenging the regime and involved in the struggle, but in particular black women, have been almost erased from representations of the history of the Liberation. You rarely see acknowledgement of the repercussions for women, of the ‘Bantu’ system or apartheid’s policy of ‘separate development’ which forced the women to carry on an independent life with very few resources, separated from their husbands, where they continued the struggle on the domestic front. I find it disturbing that there’s so little acknowledgement in the official representations of the struggle here of the activity of women. Even the famous domestic workers’ march in Pretoria in the 1950s is never chosen as one of the constantly repeated iconic images of the struggle. On the domestic front and in the homelands during apartheid, women were absolutely central. You could even say that black women made the whole thing possible. There seems to be a kind of amnesia about women’s struggles and women’s voices. It is a depressingly predictable absence. It may seem a bit crude, but I wondered if you had considered this in terms of the kinds of images of women that you’re using in your work? PS: I think this is a really interesting question. I have never felt confident about representing black women’s resistance and would feel uncomfortable with my work being read like that. I am interested in relationships, not speaking for people. I am speaking for myself. Other people are involved of course and this has implications concerning race, class, gender. But what I did do in the earlier works, in, for example, the history paintings, is to place the presence of black women, as historical protagonists, in the frame, in the picture, on the historical stage. Yet even here there is an ambivalence which interests me. In later works it’s been different because I shifted focus into other aspects of power relations. The way representation of the struggle and in particular representations of women in the struggle has in fact now been taken up by people in power, by the ANC, for example, has

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changed things a little. There have been programmes on television and in the electronic media about women in the struggle. But these representations could be seen as problematic because they legitimatize a patriarchal discourse to look as if there is an acknowledgement of women’s role in the Liberation struggle. In this sense it may be something of an empty gesture, especially if one takes into account that the focus of these programmes is often on women as the power behind the struggle. Before we had the transitional government, for example, there was a clause that stated that each region of the country had to have delegates of both sexes, so there were women around, but those women didn’t speak much, they weren’t significantly empowered. But for all this, my interest in the exhibition of my work ‘Private Views’ in September 1994 was not about reflecting on this kind of question. I wanted to explore more the internal complexities of my own experience of being racialized. AC: So in a sense, ‘Private Views’ was a very personal exhibition exploring your own subjectivity? PS: Yes. The change of government and the slow changes in power relations has given many artists and certainly me the chance to be able to explore these things and I think that’s actually very productive. The psychic dynamics of what’s been going on have not been sufficiently dealt with because there’s been little space to do this in culture. It’s tended to be about positioning, about contestation, about opposition—these are the issues and this is how you relate to them. AC: And did you also feel obliged, strategically, to make that position explicit so that it was less ambiguous to the viewers? PS: I think that the confusions or ambivalences that are part of my work seem more viable because now there is the time for reflection. It’s also part of trying to understand the larger questions, why there’s been racism in this country and how to come to terms with being implicated in that history of racism as a white woman. AC: I would like to turn now to one of the figures that has consistently appeared in your work over the years: the image of Saartjie Baartman. The work of scholars like Sander Gilman and Bernth Lindfors have been important in bringing her complicated history to light—the way she was displayed as a freak spectacle for the delectation of European audiences in the nineteenth century and the European fascination with her buttocks, particularly the steatopygia and also her genitals. It was a fascination which resulted in the final invasion of her body under the French scientist Cuvier’s scrutiny, when he dissected her genitals and then published his findings as an illustrated document. She’s clearly an iconic figure for you and provides a

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thread which runs through all your work. For me it’s a very interesting thread because her case obviously highlights very clearly the historical relationship between science, pathology and the masquerade of scientific objectivity, particularly in the development of racism. It also highlights the way in which women’s sexuality, and black women’s sexuality in particular, was pathologized and spectacularized. You’ve also talked about the importance of the work of Julia Kristeva for you and it seemed to me the way in which you were engaging with the figure of Saartjie Baartman was as the sign of the ‘abject’, in the sense of abjection that Kristeva discusses. For example, for Europeans, Baartman was evidently an object of both disgust and desire through their scopophilic obsession with her genitals. Representations of her are constantly inscribed within this notion of the ‘abject’ and within a pathologizing discourse. These are also very negative images of a black woman because she has no voice, has never in fact been given a voice, despite the wealth of scholarship which has centred around her case. The focus has been very much on different aspects of that history and on the way in which European representations of her and the circulation of her images reproduced certain obsessions with black women’s sex. Could you say something about the way her representation functions for you? In what ways is she iconic and how can you use Kristeva’s concept of the ‘abject’ productively? How might you be using the historic figure of Baartman to say something about the relationship between the representation of black and white women’s sexuality in South Africa? PS: I think what interests me is how, as you said, she’s both an object of fascination and disgust. She’s an emblem for me, she’s a story. She is also a real person which is a sign for the way racism functions in some ways, even now, even though she’s a historical figure, how fetishism works. Its often said that the site of difference in relation to women is the genitals and that with race the site of that difference is say colour, skin colour. So for me Baartman’s story and representations of her raises huge issues in this country around the conjunction of gender and race, sexuality and race and there are many reasons why I suppose I have been affected by her story. As a sign she seems to do that for many people. Yet her story, because it’s quite singular and what happened to her is not a theory, not a distant thing, even though she’s a long-gone historical figure—has actually been incredibly productive in raising critical issues around the relationship between gender and race in South Africa. So I suppose that’s how she’s functioned in the public domain, and although it’s very sensitive material to use, there is something very important about engaging with this material.

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AC: You’ve been consistently concerned to explore the relationship between black women and white women’s sexuality. But how does your use of historical representations of Baartman impact on the kinds of links you want to make in relation to the way in which white women’s sexuality has also been historically inscribed within a particular kind of pathologizing discourse? PS: White women are often absent from Baartman’s story. I’ve tried to address this. In Dora and the Other Woman I’ve looked at Saartjie Baartman in relation to Freud’s Dora and I have been quite explicit about the relationship here. Dora’s sexuality was fragmented, taken away from her, in a sense by Freud. She was made an object. While her genitals weren’t literally put into a bottle and preserved like Saartjie Baartman, she too was actually objectified and turned into a spectacle. In that work I copied quite literally and painstakingly nineteenth-century French and British caricatures of people looking at Saartjie Baartman. The idea of looking and the idea of objectification was the connecting theme in both those women’s stories. But clearly even within that scenario power relations are played out ‘differently’. That is why I used caricatures. They were obviously representations, I was simply re-representing them. So on this occasion I actually made a direct connection between the way white women’s sexuality was pathologized in psychoanalysis, most of all through Freud, and the image of Saartjie Baartman. But more recently I started using the cast of Saartjie’s face because it is in fact the nearest to a trace of her we have. It’s like an indexical sign. It’s as close as one could get, I suppose, but it’s still a mediation, it’s a cast. When I’ve used Baartman’s image, I’ve always marked it as a mediation even in the subtlest of senses. This has involved including the odd contingent effects of the contexts which framed her—the packing crates, the protective cushions, etc. AC: So, for instance, in some of the other works, for example Exhibit Ex Africa, you don’t include a representation of the cast of Baartman’s genitals but a ‘real’ piece of cloth, a Victorian ‘apron’, as a way of suggesting the cloth which was wrapped around the cast of her body parts in the storeroom of the Musée de L’Homme in Paris where you saw them (Figure 4)? PS: Yes. But the apron also obviously refers to the ‘tablier’—a term used to refer to the shape of her genitals. AC: I’ve seen the photographs which you took of the plaster casts of Saartjie Baartman at the Musée de L’Homme and the way in which she’s literally packaged and crated in the storeroom of the museum. And I’ve also seen those horrific casts of different African women’s genitals, totally disembodied with anus and vagina wrapped in cloth, in a kind of fetishistic

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AC: In relation to the act of viewing what this seems to do is suspend or extend the ‘fantasy’. It suspends disbelief. In other words, by covering the suture it also enables a kind of voyeuristic fantasy to continue. PS: It doesn’t reveal the terms of its violent construction and that’s what’s really interesting. AC: In Exhibit Ex-Africa, for example, you’ve shown the cloth (the ‘tablier’) with, as it were, an absent centre. For those of us who have seen those photos of the casts at the Musée de L’Homme this is a very poignant image. But a lot of your work deals with the question of subjectivity (your own in particular), and sometimes this involves using symbolic items that are only really accessible to you. Perhaps the image of the cloth wrapped around its absent centre is one of these. I’ve seen the photographs that you took surreptitiously at the Musée de L’Homme. I know the absent centre that they disclose, but most viewers of Exhibit Ex-Africa won’t. So there are different levels of meaning in your work, as with many artists. There are always spaces which are not necessarily accessible and can only be appreciated through a different kind of interrogation of the work on a very personal level. And then there are other figures which are so iconic that there is no mistaking aspects of their significance, like the figure of Saartjie Baartman. Do you see the more obscure references as a problem in work which purports to be so centrally concerned with larger political issues? PS: I think things sometimes function metonymically. There’s a sense if you look at that cloth, even if you don’t know what it is, you would soon realize that it is covering something up, so to speak. This could be seen then as something ‘missing’. The cloth then, placed in close proximity as it is to the more obviously identifiable images of Saartjie Baartman, would be read through the context that her images produce. This kind of ambiguous lack is really important to me. I think it makes the viewer active in projecting meaning. I would not want my work to be seen simply as didactically political, so I would not see this degree of ambiguity as a problem in relation to the apparent political positioning of my practice. What I found interesting is when I took those photographs I felt very voyeuristic, horrified and shocked all at once. I also felt that I should see these things. It was an odd sort of defiance. I needed to see them but I was horrified nonetheless. I photographed them and I’ve had the photographs for years. AC: Those casts in the Musée de L’Homme are powerfully horrifying objects. Much of your own work has dealt with the idea of the cast, the imprint of the body’s traces. For example in the video Per Kind Permis sion: Fieldwork (Figures 5, 6, 7) you’ve used the repetitive and painful act of plastering,

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AC: If Saartjie Baartman’s story could be seen as paradigmatic of a western scopic impulse do you think it is also necessary to address what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has spoken of as the need for a ‘simultaneous other focus’? In other words do you think it is important to engage in the ‘other’ side of this colonizing gaze or is this impossible without doing epistemic violence? PS: Certainly I have given much thought to this. I am interested in the question of epistemic violence and have struggled to find a way to work through this issue in making art. I think for me art is exactly the place to do this. As an overdetermined practice I feel art offers a space to search and tease things out a little. What is very important for me is that I do whatever I do within the context of a relationship in which I am obviously and often visibly implicated. AC: Something you’ve also spoken about is your concern to make ‘whiteness’ ‘visible’ in your work and to address the way in which it has become a transparent, naturalized category. PS: I’ve been nervous about exploring ‘whiteness’ and I think I was even nervous when I worked with the idea of making an issue of an apparently invisible whiteness, facing ‘race’, which meant whiteness as well as blackness. But I think that it is always a difficult thing to start talking about whiteness if you are white, especially in South Africa at the moment, when there are other kinds of discourses, or shall I say popular myths around whiteness, which are actually very reactionary. My interest in whiteness as a concept could be confused with the misconception of whiteness as ‘ethnicity’. AC: Do you mean the whole issue of acknowledging white ethnicities as well as black, as part of a supposedly ‘progressive’ agenda, but one which might wrongly suggest an immediate equivalence of power—a kind of power sharing? PS: Exactly, and this is not the case even under the new democracy. Why I want to produce these images here is specifically in relation to the media and the kinds of myths that are being produced and the way in which some are trying to assert whiteness as a positive thing now, in the best sense, as ‘white’ was also positive under apartheid of course. To some degree, I can understand this. But I think it can, once again, erase, suppress or distort lived relations in this country. AC: I think in South Africa in particular, the whole issue of how to make visible that absent centre, the idea of whiteness, is very very difficult especially if you deal with it as a category of ethnicity because it can so easily be confused with the apartheid rhetoric of ‘separate but equal development’

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that depended on a particular concept of ‘ethnicity’. That whole notion of ethnicity here, because it’s been part of the political project and ideology of apartheid, makes it so much more difficult to unpack the idea of white ethnicities and how these have been constructed, without reproducing the worst aspects of that ideology. PS: Strictly speaking, white ethnicity does not exist. There is Afrikaner ethnicity, for example, in which race (as in white) is of fundamental importance. But the whole issue is very complex. That is why I have been held back in many ways. I suppose I couldn’t find the forms for dealing with ‘whiteness’ without falling into that trap. AC: Is there a kind of a crisis in terms of areas of representation for people working as visual artists here? Is there a way in which a whole body, a whole iconography, a whole way of framing one’s work is now no longer viable? For example, the issue of gender can be raised in a way that wasn’t something that many artists felt they could prioritize previously if they were committed to the struggle against apartheid. All those ‘grey’ areas were politically and strategically not useful things to focus on at that time. So, it seems that now, there’s both a crisis and a new freedom for artists. The way some critics are now responding to your own work is perhaps symptomatic of this shift—and it signals a potentially new problem. Are you concerned with the way artists are, in some quarters, now being encouraged to see aesthetics and politics as necessarily autonomous realms, partly as a respite after the more explicitly ‘political’ work during apartheid? Is there a danger that work like yours, which engages with the subjective and the private might easily be read as comfortably a-political in this context? PS: In a way. And it makes my practice very problematic because if I do want to explore the political dimension of sexuality and the realm of privacy it does not mean that I am giving up the political at all. Just because one’s not literally painting images of the liberation struggle does not mean that you are not political, or that you don’t have a political positioning personally apart from the context of the work. AC: Are you anxious that your work is now going to be recuperated into a much less politicized set of discourses around which sexuality is seen as a way of escaping an engagement with some of the more difficult issues post-apartheid? PS: This is always a risk. It always was. In fact strongly ‘political work’ was appropriated itself in the past. I think that we’re going to see a lot of such displacement in the public realm. What’s already happening in the work around sexuality that’s been done, especially with the younger generation

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of women artists, is that they’ve tended to be interested in what they call ‘post-feminism’ and not politics—as if somehow the issue of gender is now neutral, neither here nor there, or more about sexual preference and pleasure. They don’t even seem to acknowledge that pleasure has a political dimension. AC: The ‘post-feminism’ agenda is something which is also common to Europe and North America. But what’s interesting is that I think here in South Africa, it’s framed in a very particular way. A lot of women that weren’t engaged in the struggle and who maybe even supported apartheid through apathy and through indifference are probably only too relieved to agree with this agenda, since it effectively lets everyone off the hook. And now there’s a furious celebration of pleasure, but an uncritical pleasure, devoid of a recognition of the way in which pleasure itself is socially and also politically constituted. It’s almost an evacuation of the ‘political’ all together, partly out of guilt, perhaps, as a result of collusion in this history of criminal indifference. There seems to be a desire on the part of some artists also to absolutely erase this aspect of their practice because they see no imperative to deal with it anymore. In one sense this is all very predictable and understandable but I suppose the worrying side to this development is that artists can actually end up facilitating a kind of amnesia. PS: I think that corresponds to other things that are going on in South Africa. Many people feel that it’s dangerous to dwell on the past and the future simply means a sort of pursuit of cheerful individualism. We need a broader definition of the ‘political’. In my own case, for me not to take on the issue of ‘race’ would be an evasion, and for all the difficulties presented by the questions of representation which we’ve touched on here, the absence of ‘race’ in my work would be as politically problematic as it would be aesthetically restrictive. Notes

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Notes

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