more than one layer to the art and life of tracey rose
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15/05/2019 More than one layer to the art and life of Tracey Rose | Arts and Culture | M&G
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ARTS AND CULTURE (HTTPS://MG.CO.ZA/SECTION/ARTS-AND-CULTURE)
More than one layer to the art and life of Tracey RoseZaza Hlalethwa (https://mg.co.za/author/zaza-hlalethwa) 29 Mar 2019 00:00
MMENTS (HTTPS://MG.CO.ZA/ARTICLE/2019-03-29-00-MORE-THAN-ONE-LAYER-TO-THE-ART-AND-LIFE-OF-TRACEY-ROSE#COMMENT_THREAD)
Free to be: After being in the industry over twenty years, artist Tracey Rose enjoys the fact that, now she is an academic, she cansay and write what she likes. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
(https://mg.co.za/article/2019032900morethanonelayertotheartandlifeoftraceyrose)
A stillness is required to engage seriously with the work of Tracey Rose. Perhaps this has to do
with the attractive, carnivalesque, risqué and nofuckstogive nature of her medley of
installation, photography, video and performance work.
Tracey Rose "The Prelude The Gardenpath"Tracey Rose "The Prelude The Gardenpath"
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Leading up to her showcase at the 58th Venice Biennale, the Mail & Guardian arranged to have
a sit down with Rose at the University of the Witwatersrand’s school of arts, where she now
teaches, to review her 23 years in art. It’s the end of the first term and her firstyear students are
finalising projects and okaying their plans with Rose in the drawing room on the first floor when
we meet.
When we are in her thirdfloor office, she sits, elevates her injured foot, and offers cake before
the conversation unfolds.
As an artist, Rose bloomed in democracy’s teething years. She remembers how this restricted
the way her work was being engaged with because the art world was mostly looking to South
Africa for an apartheid retrospective.
“It did the work a disservice because there was no sort of development from the critique. But
there was a point where I consciously cooned. That was me dealing with an audience, media and
art consumer that’s predominantly white.
“The performance that happens as an artist within that space becomes a political decision to
keep the work alive, relevant and moving. If I didn’t I would be ostracised even more,” Rose
admits before adding that her work went beyond addressing apartheid.
“It was more interested in how to transcend the body” — an interest that Rose drew from the
Catholic doctrine, which sees the being as mind, body and spirit.
She often places herself at the centre of her own art, as in False Flag: A Deed in 2 Acts. (Photo: Art Basel)
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The need to explore transcendence with her body is evident in Rose’s ongoing use of her
physical form as a visual motif, as well as in the essentiality of performance in her practice.
In TKO (Technical Knockout) (2001), Rose is seen relentlessly sparring with a punching bag
from four different camera angles.
“That came about because I wanted to beat up a curator who wanted to do a piece on apartheid
again, because there was just this glut of apartheidtures.”
One of the cameras is positioned inside the punching bag, allowing the viewer to see the
punches coming at them, as if to encourage the viewer to identify with the punching bag and
transcend their human form.
In preparation for TKO, Rose took up professional boxing at Nick Durandt’s gym for two years
before filming.
In Ciao Bella (2001), a threescreen video installation reenacting the Last Supper, the body is
stretched beyond the expected norms by the act of Rose switching and morphing into all the
installation’s characters. For Ongetitled (Untitled) (1998), she films the act of ridding her body
of all its hair in an act to surpass the feminine and masculine cues of the human form. Waiting
for God (2011) sees her embodying the oftenquiet, tiresome and intangible act of faith by
quietly waiting on the Mount of Olives in a twohourlong video installation.
Rose goes into great detail about her performance work and the “extreme relationship that I
have had with art and pushing the parameters of freedom of expression.
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Pushing boundaries: Tracey Rose’s KKK Supreme (top) and Lovemefuckme (below) show her more radical side. (Photos:Courtesy of Goodman Gallery)
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“I want to know how do I keep expanding what’s possible in the legal range with my body. It’s
kind of theatre for adrenaline junkies. Once you start performance art, you keep chasing the
dragon,” she bellows in laughter.
Exiled
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In 2008, Rose was “kicked out” of her art home, Goodman Gallery. Shortly thereafter, her New
York gallerist, Christian Haye, closed his Harlembased gallery, the Project, in 2009.
“I was persona non grata for a while. At some point … the invitations stopped because I was just
too fucken radical. I was too extreme for many curatorial palates. I’m still trying to figure out
how to articulate that period sufficiently.
“So I started feeding off Jo’burg in a way that was incredible. I would club without drugs or
alcohol from 9pm to 2am with just water. I was going into trances on the dance floor. I was
connecting to this city on a vibrational level,” she says, with a smile.
Born in Durban, Rose moved to Johannesburg when she was seven and, as such, considers it
her true home.
“Growing up in Jo’burg, I was accustomed to an amount of freedom and access. It’s amazing in
how welcoming it is. It’s like the ideal art world because it allows everybody to come into it, to
assimilate, to move around and expand it,” Rose explains.
“I stopped looking at art for a while, actually.”
TRACEY ROSETRACEY ROSE
Global Feminisms: Tracey RoseGlobal Feminisms: Tracey Rose
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She says she does not get this sense from the contemporary art scene because of how it
welcomes “sameness” and “mediocrity” with open arms. She attributes this to the nature in
which art is being engaged with by the media, scholars and buyers.
“I stopped looking at art for a while, actually. It’s no longer this holistic thing that you’re looking
at. It’s a statement. It’s about poverty, it’s about the global crises, postcolonial this, that. Tick
box, tick box, tick box. It’s got all these fucking issues and I’m just looking at shit. There’s no
kind of material engagement.”
But Rose also acknowledges the role that art institutions play in producing homogeneous art.
“It’s much bigger than just the choices that people make. If you do not know what’s available for
you to consume or engage with, you’re not going to do that.”
Most of what she recalls of her fine art training at Wits consisted of a European take on the arts.
When it wasn’t the work of the Old Masters, the art theory included a white feminist take on
contemporary art or the simplification of work by black artists to “township or primitive art”
categories.
“It was all these derogatory spaces where we weren’t allowed to take the work seriously. It was
almost as though they were intellectually underdeveloped.”
The veil that clouded her perception and aspirations as an artist was removed in 1995 during
the first Johannesburg Biennale. Titled ‘Africus’, the biennale was the South African art world’s
international comingout party. Now that cultural boycotts were no longer in play, the biennale
tried to restore the country’s artistic dialogue and exchange with the world.
“… people from all over the world, who are the most rigorous thinkers, were making work out of
stuff in real time. That’s not necessarily paint on canvas; it’s material and matter that speaks. It
blew my mind. I cried for a year. I couldn’t. I had a breakdown because I realised the depth of
the deception and how far and controlled it was. Seeing people of colour make art in my lifetime
blew me the fuck away,” says Rose.
“It’s important to know who came before. All those amazing people … I carry them with me in
my work,” she says, after referring to her first encounter with contemporary artist Carlos
Capelán from Uruguay.
Now based in Sweden, the 71yearold Capelán is known for the atmospheric nature of his
installation work on displacement and dislocation.
“I don’t get why these kids think they’re the first. There’s a lacking in historical referencing and
reverencing. Their art doesn’t take any risks. It doesn’t love itself. It doesn’t love people. It’s
only interested in power; not even power, it’s all vanity. And I don’t think people are looking at
books enough.”
Rose sighs while running a hand through her loose hair in what looks like frustration.
Process makes practice
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The layers of materiality in Rose’s work can be attributed to a number of things. The first is an
arresting sensation to create the work.
“When the work comes, this idea, it’s more of a sensation and vision. This isn’t a hobby, it isn’t a
job. The work eats me until it gets made. Once I get the message, it has to be done.”
Over the years, Rose has come to perceive the role of artists as that of neoshamans, with the
mandate to cause shifts that will birth a healing.
In addition to her heeding a higher call, what informs her work is a combination of personal
experiences as well as her insatiable interest in information.
“Artists have got to be the interpreters and intermediaries in spaces. So they consume
information, they go into these vile, volatile environments and you take all of it. They
reconfigure it and put it through their being and then they create these things that cause a shift
vibrationally, spirituality, intellectually and emotionally for the people that engage with it.
“I am also a glutton for information. I consume information all the time. I read. It infiltrates the
work.”
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Lucie’s Fur Version 1.1.1 – La Messiea (2003). Photo: Courtesy of Goodman Gallery
Once the ideal picture exists, the concept then passes through a series of negotiations, mostly
financial, before reaching the form that will be showcased to the public.
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“The work that I’m making happens, stylistically, because of all the financial restrictions that I
have to go through in order to make it. Sometimes I hustle, I ask for favours. Sometimes I’m
using a lesser kind of grade of material, but I know it’s like that because of the necessity of
having the work made. That adds a richness to the work.
“Shit, lack is a component in my work. Well, it’s lack and necessity. The lack of having and the
necessity to make it are what contribute to my technique.”
“there are more gentle ways to make art.”
Five years ago, Rose had a son. She has restored her ties with Goodman Gallery and created
new ones with London gallerist Dan Gunn, and she has taken on the coordinating role at Wits’s
fine art department.
“I like to think that I’m going into war whenever I make work. Well, I used to but now I’m not as
aggressive.”
She laughs, before adding that “there are more gentle ways to make art. I mean, I’m still here.”
With its objective centred around healing, the often textless or unexplained territory that Rose’s
work plays in may not always unfold as it should.
“You could read so many things into the work, issues like identity, belonging, feminism,
queerness, but also issues of Western culture,” explains Khwezi Gule, who met Rose “around
2007, 2008”, and cocurated her midcareer retrospective Waiting for God at the Johannesburg
Art Gallery in 2011 All of these things are tightly packed into her art works and we have to
throw them apart little by little to get to the core,”.
Describing his engagement with her work, Gule says it is too layered to unpack in a short
conversation. And, as she put it earlier, this can often restrict the public’s engagement with her
texts.
With an awareness of this, Rose is currently working toward a PhD with the hopes of
intellectually justifying her canon of work on her own terms.
“When you start to perform a particular character for the media or historians, you get locked
into them. So even when you start writing, there’s no space for your words to be published. Now
that I’m an academic, I can say what I like and write what I like. When I write what I like, it’s
going to be fucken dangerous.”
Venice Biennale: Third time’s a charm
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The 58th Venice Biennale marks Tracey Rose’s third instalment. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
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Curated by Nkule Mabaso and Nomusa Makhubu, the South African Pavilion at this year’s
Venice Biennale will feature artists Dineo Bopape and Mawande Ka Zenzile alongside Tracey
Rose.
This will be Rose’s third Venice Biennale after a 12year resistance to participate. The first
participation was in 2001 under the curatorial mentorship of the “godfather of curating”,
Harold Szeemann. The second time, which Rose does not speak of too fondly, took place in
2007. Its curators, Simon Njami and Fernando Alvim, collaborated on the African Pavilion to
exhibit Checklist: Luanda Pop. Because it drew predominantly from Angolan Sindika Dokolo’s
collection of contemporary African art, Rose thought it was “problematic” to have one source
represent a continental pavilion.
“I have been asked for the last two Biennales. I said no because they were a mess. I’m not gonna
put my name to that. I’m not going to endorse mediocrity.”
She goes on to explain that, having worked with Mabaso and interacted with Makhubu’s work,
accepting this year’s offer was easy.
Under the title The Stronger We Become, the department of arts and culture selected the
curators and artists to represent the country with themes of social, political and economic
resilience. This is in response to the biennale’s broader curatorial theme, May You Live in
Interesting Times, set by this year’s curator Ralph Rugoff.
In an introduction published on the Venice Biennale’s website, Rugoff said he wanted to take a
serious look at “art’s potential as a method for looking into things that we do not already know
— things that may be off limits, under the radar, or otherwise inaccessible for various reasons”.
When Rose received the invitation “about a month ago”, she was asked to present one of her
existing works.
“I said no,” she shrugs before leaning her head against the wall, contemplating how much she
wants to share about the piece she will be presenting. “I don’t want to talk about it much
because I’m a little insecure about how it’s going to be financially possible to pull off. But the
content that I have in mind is so important that it can’t wait another two years. Also, it’s so
provocative I want to do it now.” — Zaza Hlalethwa
The Venice Biennale runs from May 11 – November 24. Visit labiennale.org
(https://www.labiennale.org/it) for more info
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