Berni Searle

Liese van der Watt, 'Identity's lack, identity's excess: two works by Berni Searle and Minnette Vári'

Published in A Decade of Democracy, Emma Bedford (ed), South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 2004

'Identity's politics is naming' writes art historian Jane Blocker (1999:30) in a clever pun that captures the core of the polemic that has raged over identity politics since at least the late-1970s.1 Criticised for the exclusions that accompany all inclusions, and for the differences that are often violently expelled in the process of forging sameness, identity's politics are also, of course, apartheid's politics.

True, the oppression of the apartheid years produced identity not only as a site of exclusion, but also, more positively, as a site of effective mobilisation against oppression. Nevertheless, a decade of democracy has compelled all South Africans to think difference differently and to find ways to tolerate diversity - in short, democracy challenges us to revise our notions about identity.

This essay will look at two artworks that do just that: challenge us to think about identity in new and liberating ways, even prompting us to discard a concept that has become burdened with limiting essentialisms. I begin with a recent video work by Minnette Vári, entitled Chimera (2001) which revisits institutionalised history as it is documented in a marble frieze in the Voortrekker Monument, that "monolith to Afrikaner myth."2 What is revealed in Vári's intervention into this space is the uncanny presence of that which does not fit into the neat binary of civilisation and savagery, the excesses of an identity seemingly formed through contact and conquest. I then move on to consider a photographic installation by Berni Searle in which the focus is far more personal, a deliberate move away from official history to trace the micro-history of the personal: a strategic inquest that reveals the radical insufficiency of all identity.

i
The foundation stone of the Voortrekker Monument was laid in 1938, the centenary year of the Afrikaners's ancestors the Voortrekkers' so-called Great Trek into the interior of South Africa. Since its inception and in its eventual realisation and inauguration in 1949, a year after the apartheid government came into power, this massive structure was meant to commemorate, as it was put in the feverish apartheid rhetoric of the time 'the great civilising deed' of the Voortrekkers, namely 'the settling and securing of a white civilisation in the interior of South Africa.' (Moerdyk 1949: 45, my translation). This 'civilising deed' was visualised in a marble frieze and later in a series of tapestry panels that narrate the Voortrekkers' history as an unambiguous, tight progression from British rule in the Cape Colony to eventual freedom found in the interior of South Africa, wrestled from opposing forces with the help of God.3

More than five decades later Minnette Vári visits the Monument with video camera in hand filming the 92m-long frieze in a somewhat haphazard and ambulatory fashion, all the while recording the sounds and reactions of the many tourists that are now the most frequent visitors to this vast space. Under a democratic government the Monument has become privatised and marginalised, a huge white elephant bearing silent witness to the illusion of power that once aroused Afrikaners to unity and action. She remembers from her youth, as does so many white and especially Afrikaans-speaking people of her generation, the compulsory visits to this cold tomb, and the ambivalent feelings of horror and morbid fascination that the simplistic chronology of murder and war, of plunder and pillage, of conquest and settlement inspired in her.

Out of this ambivalence Chimera is born. In Greek mythology Chimera is a monstrous hybrid, amalgamated from the head of a lion, the body of a goat and the tail of a serpent or dragon. As such it lends itself to fertile metaphor ranging from domination and excesses of power (personified by the lion's head) to associations of evil and perversion (the goat's body) to slyness in the tale of a serpent. Chimera is also typically female and thereby engenders a horde of cultural prejudice such as seduction and destruction, sexual perversion, fickleness, death and finally also wintery coolness. The contrast between the Chimera and the image of the Voortrekker women depicted as staunch volksmoeders (mothers of the nation) in the frieze cannot be greater - she: sexual, threatening, perverse, wild; they: sanitised, maternal, incorruptible, loyal and inspiring.

Back in the studio Vári becomes the Chimera by filming herself in the guise of this hybrid figure, aided by various masks and disguises and accentuating certain attributes. This image of herself is digitally spliced into selected frames of the frieze, at times morphing with the marble figures and creating an unsettling interruption of chronology and an ominous animated presence that haunts these static scenes. It is a tactic that reminds of her earlier work such as Alien in which she also inserted herself into history, by using her naked body as an avatar for historical incidents and figures at the time of the first democratic elections. In Chimera though, her body is an avatar not for history, but for that which falls outside history: the things unsaid, the stories untold, the truths whispered and the lies proclaimed.

At this point the notion of the uncanny suggests itself. As formulated by Freud, the uncanny captures the sense of something being at once familiar and strange, and terrifying or disorienting on account of that ambivalence. That which is 'unheimlich' is so precisely because it is always related, through repression, to its apparent inverse, the 'heimlich' - the homely or the known. This work invokes the uncanny when we feel, through the figure of the Chimera, the hovering presence of that which is expelled from this sanctioned nationalist narrative but that we know, just know, lurks somewhere beneath the surface: fear, alienation, failure, eroticism, arrogance, pure heinousness. We sense it when the eerie visage of a grotesque mask replaces, just for a moment, that of a Voortrekker girl; when a lion's face merges with that of an assegai-wielding Zulu soldier; when an amorphous mass of body-in-cloth seems to ape and so emphasise the quasi-erotic swoon of a wounded Voortrekker girl.

The familiar unease typically invoked by the uncanny is accentuated by the soundtrack and the projection of these images onto four large semi-transparent screens. While the screens move with the air and images bleed through the transparent cloth onto the walls, floors and viewers, we are enclosed by a soundtrack which samples echoing sounds from the Monument with bits of conversation, howling wind and choral sounds. Like the images which flow through this space, these sounds are familiar yet we cannot place them exactly, they trap us in an eerie mix of memories, associations and desires that we cannot access, yet are unable to dismiss. "The unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow" writes Bhabha (1994:9) and is located "in that displacement [when] the borders between home and world become confused...the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting." Similarly, stealthily, Chimera disorients us, the excess of identity momentarily revealed.

ii
Berni Searle is no newcomer to issues of identity. In fact, elsewhere I have argued that too often her works are insistently read in terms of racial identity, an interpretation certainly invited by titles such as Discoloured, Colour me, Colour matters, A darker shade of light, Off-White and Snow White, but one that also seems to arrest her work in a certain place and time, specifically that of apartheid South Africa where she grew up categorised as 'coloured.' Here I will argue that Searle in fact questions the very basis of identity by asserting the self as endlessly fluid, indeterminate and complex, always involved in a never-ending process of becoming. Read this way Searle's art is less about identity politics such as race for instance, than about 'the lifelong process of coming to terms with the estrangement that is the soul of identity.'5

For Searle identity is never enough. She performs this lack by devising a practice that relies heavily on appearance and disappearance, visibility and invisibility. In Traces, for instance, the play with presence and absence is enacted in a series of six tall photographs, hung in two parallel rows, one row showing us the artist's naked body, covered in powdered spices, the other row the imprint of her absent body in the powders. Where the body is absent a postal scale at the foot of each photograph is filled with spices, as if Searle's body is somehow captured in these neat heaps of fragrant red, yellow and brown powder. And perhaps it is: The spices are a reference to Searle's ancestry with whom she feels a tentative connection primarily through the kind of foods her family eats. Her maternal great-grandfathers came from Mauritius (a cook) and Saudi, bringing with them distinct culinary traditions. Food, as in many families, becomes a site of communion and continuation with her family.

Yet it is a point of contact that also consumes her. Her ancestry provides an anchor, yet it weighs her down, as in another work, Looking back, where spices seems to enter every possible orifice, as she lies silently suffocating in the invasive powder. There is a paradox of course, the weight of powder cannot be much, yet it oppresses her, an indication that even tenuous links may become determining in the greedy politics of claiming identities. Hence, in Traces Searle stages an escape, we witness the trace of her bodily flight, yet she returns again and again to that invasive weight.

On the whole then, neither her absence nor presence seems final in Traces: the body present bespeaks disappearance as it is smothered and suffocated by the spices covering it, and the body absent is very much still present in the outlines left in the spiced powders. The body moves between absence and presence, never still, it appears and disappears. The multiple selves, situated in continual movement between appearance and disappearance, invoke ideas of reinventing the self over and again. These photographs simultaneously underwrite stasis and movement, liminality and legibility - they are a dialectic between presence and absence and between coming and going.

This play with invisibility becomes a politics of sorts in the way that performance scholar Peggy Phelan employs the concept when she advocates the power of remaining invisible - unmarked - rather than visible, because through visible representation "contemporary culture finds a way to name and thus to arrest and fix the image of that other."(1993:2) Phelan is suspicious of the political power traditionally assigned to the domain of the visible and to visibility politics and we may argue that Searle shares this suspicion in works that always posit the marked against the unmarked. Searle's strategy of in/visibility enacts her /our struggle for identity by being never completely anywhere. Her form is always changing, hovering between appearance and erasure

Perhaps it is helpful to approach these works as an 'aesthetics of disappearance' as Jane Blocker (1999: 24) has described the work of artist Ana Mendieta. And indeed, Searle's bodily imprints remind of that Cuban artist's practice in her American exile. Like Mendieta who left traces of her body in the American landscape, the image of Searle's body becomes a document - a trace - of previous actions and performances. These works implore us to ask - as in the title of Blocker's book - not "who" is (Ana Mendieta) Berni Searle? because this can never be determined, but rather "where" is (Ana Mendieta) Berni Searle? because she is always moving. As Blocker points out such a question emphasises the openness, the unfixity, the performativity of all identity. While "who?" implies an unconditional truth, "where?" implies contingency and mutability and thereby allows a discussion that bypasses essentialist categories. ( Blocker 1999:25)

It is precisely this aspect of identity as being incomplete, still in formation or somehow "not yet" that finally speaks loudest in Searle's work. As she performs the never-ending struggle to integrate various identities, we are made aware, as in the case of Vári's work, of identity's lacks and identity's excesses. Read this way the art of Minnette Vári and Berni Searle is not simply about the fluidity of identity, but seems to speak much more urgently about the radical insufficiency of all identity.

And it is a recognition of this, finally, that might move us to look for other, more sobering solidarities.


Bibliography
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Blocker, Jane. 1999. Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Moerdyk, Gerrit. 1949. "Die Voortrekker Monument. Betekenis en Simboliek," Amptelike program en Gedenkboek van die Fees ter Inwyding van Die Voortrekker Monument.
Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked. The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge.

Notes
1. For a by-now classic introduction to these polemical battles see Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking (1989). More recently the reader Reclaiming Identity (2000), edited by Paula Moya and Michael Hames-Garcia, has tried to articulate more positive ways to reclaim identity.
2. See Elizabeth Delmont, "Monolith to Myth," South African Historical Journal, 1993 (29): 76-103.
3. For a more detailed discussion of the frieze and the tapestries, see my 'Savagery and Civilisation: Race as a Signifier of Difference in Afrikaner Nationalist Art,' de arte 55, 1997: 36-47 and my 'The Comradely Ideal and the Volksmoeder Ideal: Uncovering Gender Ideology in the Voortrekker Tapestry,' South African Historical Journal, 39, November 1998: 91-110.
4. See my 'Disappearing Acts: The Art of Berni Searle' in Art South Africa 1(4) Winter 2003: 22-28. 5. Jane Blocker (1999:74) invokes the words of Octavio Paz to describe the exile of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.