penny siopis: who's afraid of the crowd?
DESCRIPTION
Stevenson catalogue 57, 2011TRANSCRIPT
PENNY SIOPISWho’s Afraid of the Crowd?
PENNY SIOPISWho’s Afraid of the Crowd?
14 APRIL – 21 MAY 2011
‘As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.’
The black and white images in this catalogue show some of
the references the artist drew on for this exhibition, which
included documentary photographs, pamphlets, newspaper
articles, postcards of 12th-century Japanese scroll paintings
and Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.
‘Fire is the same wherever it breaks out: it spreads rapidly; it is contagious and insatiable; it can break out anywhere, and with great suddenness; it is multiple; it is destructive; it has an enemy; it dies; it acts as though it were alive, and is so treated. All this is true of the crowd.’
‘Put your hand into water, lift it out and watch the drops slipping singly and impotently down it. The pity you feel for them is as though they were human beings, hopelessly separated. They only begin to count again when they can no longer be counted, when they have again become part of a whole.’
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, 1960
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Blow Up
2010
Ink and glue on canvas
200 x 300cm
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The Hungry
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
170 x 245cm
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Host
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
91 x 152.5cm
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The Sting
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
170 x 245cm
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The Survivor
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
61 x 76cm
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Cloud
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
51 x 76.5cm
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At the Root
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
170 x 250cm
Detail overleaf
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Time and Again
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
250 x 170cm
Detail overleaf
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As if a Rag
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
121 x 91cm
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Gulf
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
180 x 280cm
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Communion
2011
Digital video, colour, sound
Duration 5 min 30 sec
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Swarm
2011
Diptych
Ink and glue on canvas
Left panel: 200 x 180cm;
right panel 200 x 125cm
Detail of left panel overleaf
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Hostage
2011
Triptych
Ink and glue on canvas
200 x 125cm each
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Black Rain
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
91 x 60.5cm
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Ash
2011
Ink, glue and oil on canvas
180 x 200cm
Detail overleaf
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– rich scope for association, imaginative projection and
absorption. I think this strongly associative aspect is more
palpable in this show than before, and my use of the
medium is perhaps more exploratory and wide-ranging.
Can you talk a little about this ‘chance and
directedness’?
It’s really difficult to predict how the medium might
‘behave’. The glue is opaque white when I work, gradually
becoming transparent as it dries. So I can’t really see
what I’m doing. But I know the effects of my actions,
which are framed by the reference or idea that has
sparked my interest. Essentially I set the conditions for
something to happen on the canvas. The glue is very
viscous (sticky, somewhere between solid and fluid) and
this determines how the liquid ink is absorbed into or
lies on the surface. Each pigment reacts differently to
the glue. Working horizontally, I try to direct the flow of
the medium, dripping, splashing pigment and water and
tilting the canvas at different angles. The play of gravity
also operates in how the canvas itself dips in sections
where thick deposits of glue pool.
As the medium flows into formlessness, it dries into
form, which I might then strengthen into figuration. But
I try to keep figuration on the edge of formlessness,
and here the medium is magical. It freezes a moment
as the glue dries, giving an impression of an image in
the process of becoming. It looks like and is, literally,
action arrested. Where there is figuration, this effect is
enhanced. There are many other extraordinary chance
Kim Miller: Your work is always evolving, often
dramatically. How is this exhibition both a departure
from and a continuation of your recent work?
Penny Siopis: My interest in the multitude is new. What
continues is my concern with the critical possibilities
of painting, especially through the tension between
form and formlessness, reference and materiality, and
medium as concept. What also develops is my interest
in violence and ecstasy, a central feature of my 2009
show, Paintings.
What do glue and ink allow that other mediums do
not, and how has your method of working with them
evolved?
Glue and ink offer me a vital, radically contingent way
of working. Much of the sense of what I do is embedded
in the medium itself. I am fascinated by the strangeness
and openness of the dance of chance and directedness
of the process, and how this offers me – and the viewer
‘FIRE, WATER, FORESTS, SWARMS’
Penny Siopis discusses Who’s Afraid of the Crowd? with Kim Miller
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effects which I can harness, but only if I surrender to the
process and risk having to ditch paintings that don’t work.
All the works in this exhibit are highly abstracted.
And yet subtle iconographic references, traces really,
remain. How important is iconography to you?
I suppose they are abstracted, but the formlessness I
am after seems less about abstraction than materiality.
Iconography is important but always in dynamic
relation to materiality, of which colour is key. We can
recognise or code materiality in suggestive ways as
well – seeing phenomena like water, fire, forests, blood.
This is as important. In Time and Again I reference Edgar
Degas’ famous acrobat from Miss Lala at the Cirque
Fernando (1879), but the way the medium both shapes
and dissolves her form in the inflamed and liquefied
formlessness makes the reference unrecognisable. It’s
more the idea of the acrobat that interests me in figuring
a dynamic tension between ascension and descension.
In As if a Rag the largest part of the painting is a vertical
mass of hot colour, inflected with dark specks and with a
small head at the apex. The relationship of this head to
the mass encourages us to read the material as fire or
larva, or even skin.
But perhaps the piece At the Root speaks more
to your question. The pictorial reference here is of
a lynching in the United States. But nothing of this
iconography appears in the work. It is a large field of
high-pitched, green-yellow fractured surfaces, which
suggest a nature scene. Things that look like black
and white birds plummet towards a horizontal band
of formless red in which lines of words appear. These
are from the famous poem Strange Fruit, written by
Abel Meeropol in the 1930s to protest the lynching of
African Americans. The poem was made into a song
that became a rallying cry against racism. Even though
we might only make out the narrative content of the
work if we recognise the poem, the ‘torn’ surface, the
acid colour, the whole feel, suggest this is not a ‘pretty
picture’. Also, we placed a small photocopy of a lynching
near the work in the exhibition. Clearly reference is
important here, but literal depiction less so.
Do you see yourself ultimately stepping into total
formlessness?
I can’t actually see this happening. Even though I am
fascinated by Georges Bataille’s notion of informe
(formless) as a will to bring form down, absolute
formlessness seems impossible. But Bataille’s idea of
‘formlessness’ as an operation – an action and not a
product – chimes with what I am after, with my desire to
keep my process as open and performative as possible.
What themes anchor this exhibit and what is their
relationship to the medium? In other words, is the
medium critical to the message?
From what we’ve already said, the materiality and
strongly associative qualities of the medium, its
unpredictability and vitality, how my own energy is
registered and discharged in process, are primary. Yes,
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the medium is critical to the message.
The anchoring theme involves the idea of the
multitude in tension with the individual – a solitary
figure. Here I have been inspired by, among others, Elias
Canetti’s Crowds and Power (1960), an imaginative study
of mass behaviour which draws on a truly extraordinary
array of myths and historical and literary sources. He
discusses many different kinds of crowds but the one
that interests me most is his unpredictable ‘open’ crowd,
whose energies multiply, morph, take direction and grow.
His description of these crowds includes drawing on
nature symbols – fire, water, forests, swarms – and these I
found particularly resonant for my painting.
You often speak of the finished works as a reflection
and embodiment of your own personal energy. Are
there other ways in which they are autobiographical?
As I mentioned, my own bodily action is traced in the
paintings, especially the larger works, but there doesn’t
seem much specifically autobiographical here. Of course
all references are also moments of personal emotional
attachment, so perhaps in this rather oblique way …
Every piece in this show references specific traumas
that are either individual or collective. Are your works
commemorative efforts?
I suppose it depends on what one means by
commemorative. The paintings aren’t specifically
about making people remember. Generally, perhaps,
to commemorate means to fix moments, and I usually
want to keep moments in play. In another sense though,
the act of painting itself could memorialise an event, a
human action which, with a particular reference, speaks
strongly to history. I’m thinking here about Blow Up,
the painting that references the dropping of the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima. This and other references are
included as small photocopies in the exhibition
The video is different. It is about an Irish nun, Sister
Aidan, who was also a doctor, Elsie Quinlan. She was
murdered by a crowd of brutalised people during the
Defiance Campaign in the Eastern Cape in 1952. I didn’t
set out to commemorate her as much as use her story
as a meditation on the endless violence that seems
to trap us and make us tragic. It’s a story of mythical
proportions, not unlike those elemental Greek tragedies.
At the same time, I do want to remember her, and the
specific history in which she was murdered is critical. So
she is identified at the end of the video, and in this way
commemorated.
Looking at the paintings, I perceive a deep sense of
trauma and pain that is manifest in the medium itself,
and which is assisted greatly by the sheer scale of the
works, even as the subject matter fades away.
I think this is because of the strongly associative qualities
of the medium with the visceral body and the ‘larger
than life’ natural phenomena which might consume and
overwhelm us. This is where scale – and indeed colour
– is important. Also, because much of the surface is
made of bits of pigment and glue or evidence material
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wrenched off the surface, the suggestion of fracturing
and laceration is strong. In Gulf, for example, the painting
looks bruised, scarred and charred. But it also looks very
animated. The movement of formless smoke and fire
suggests perhaps the eternal wrestling between life-
giving and life-denying forces.
There are parallels between the video, Communion,
and the paintings. Yet they are quite different in both
medium and focus on individual/collective traumas.
Why did you include the film next to the paintings?
For many reasons. The moving image, the flickering
light of the projection and the sound animate the
viewing space in a different way to how the paintings
are animated in themselves. The idea of collateral
illumination is important here. Then the obvious
reference to the crowd in the video registers in the
paintings and back again, allusive and concretely
by turns. I liked this tension. But there are also film
sequences that link directly to the imagery of the
paintings; flames, for example. Some sequences are so
fractured as to render representation unreadable – a
formlessness that corresponds with the paintings. These
parts are actually bits of burned film, the product of
amateur camerawork like shakiness, light flares, and the
artifacts of old 8mm film – sprocket marks, dust specks
and so on. All this materiality of the film, especially the
literal burning of the celluloid, I see as analogous to
Sister Aidan’s traumatic event. The video brings specific
history to the scene.
What motivated you to focus, in the film, on an
individual story, as opposed to larger, collective
traumas?
Looking at individual stories has actually been a feature
of my video work over the years. But my interest in these
stories is really how their particularity brings wider social,
political and philosophical questions into the frame. This
is the case with Sister Aidan.
I came upon her story by chance. I was on holiday
in the Eastern Cape a few years ago. Browsing in an
old bookshop I found a thin book, Trust Betrayed, by JL
McFall. I think it was commissioned by her family. There
was a familiarity about the story, which harked back to
my experience of nuns at the convent I attended, and
their talk of their calling as a form of ‘sacrifice’. But it
also connected with more recent martyrdoms in the
struggle for liberation. Later I researched the case. I read
scholarly articles analysing the event in wider historical,
social and political terms. I studied court records of
the trial of those charged with her murder – a ‘crowd’
of eight within the larger multitude. I also looked at
newspaper reports of the case. Many questions emerged
about culpability and common cause – which of the
crowd committed the murder? The cause of death
became an issue. Pathologists struggled to determine
when and how she died, partly because sections of
her body were missing, some allegedly eaten. All this
research made it clear to me that I didn’t want to work
in a documentary way. I wanted a different sense and
sensation, another kind of ‘truth’.
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So I wrote the text myself from sources I had
researched. I situated her ‘voice’ (subtitles) in the first
person to mark an imagined narrator rather than
an empirical moment. Sister Aidan speaks her own
death, as if from the grave. This only emerges some
time into the piece. The text suggests an uneven self-
consciousness, perhaps echoing the voice in one’s head.
What allowed me to hook contingency to fact, however
loosely, was my selective use of text in combination with
film sequences. None of the film sequences connect
in any way to the empirical facts of the story. They are
found home movies shot in India, Greece, South Africa,
Madagascar and the then Rhodesia.
Is the film an attempt at recovery or to restore
agency to a victimised woman?
It speaks more to a consciousness than to her being a
victim. As a nun and political activist she was willing to
sacrifice her life. I suppose there is recovery through how
she is transfigured in the video. There is also something
redemptive in the piece, as in sacrifice. The sound is an
African lullaby which hushes towards the end as ‘her’
silhouette is framed against a waterfall which we might
recognise as the Victoria Falls. We know she is dead but
there she is!
How does our historical moment figure into the
work? I am thinking here about your focus on crowds
and multitudes, both human and environmental.
We see crowds demanding, and winning, democracy
in Egypt, and the devastating tsunami in Japan,
for example.
I actually started this body of work before these
happenings and thus became hyper-aware of how these
events played out and were imaged in the media. This
worked extraordinarily and strangely with what I was
doing. So much connected with Canetti’s words, like
his linking of crowds with fire. If anything marked the
energy of the crowd it was fire – even in the protests
that happened later in the usually sedate streets of
London. With Japan’s natural disaster things were tragic.
Seeing the catastrophic footage of wild nature smashing
bodies and structures into formless debris, and on such
a massive scale, was beyond belief. The natural disaster
recalled the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb,
fed by the fears of nuclear leakage. And this in turn
recalled Canetti’s comment in 1960 that ‘all the terror of
a supernatural power which comes to punish and destroy
mankind has now attached itself to the idea of the
“bomb”’. These events and images got under my skin.
Kim Miller is Associate Professor of Art History and Women’s
Studies at Wheaton College, Massachusetts. She is currently
completing a book on the extent to which women’s participation
in the liberation struggle is represented and remembered, and in
many cases forgotten, in post-apartheid visual culture.
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PENNY SIOPIS was born in 1953 in Vryburg, South Africa, and lives in Cape Town.
She is an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
She has exhibited widely, both in South Africa and internationally. This is her fourth
solo exhibition at Stevenson, following Furies (2010), Paintings (2009) and Lasso
(2007). Recent solo shows also include Red: The iconography of colour in the work
of Penny Siopis at the KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009), and Three Essays on Shame at
the Freud Museum, London (2005). Group exhibitions include Space, Ritual, Absence:
Liminality in South African visual art at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg
(2011); the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010); Peekaboo – Current South Africa, Tennis
Palace Art Museum, Helsinki (2010); and Black Womanhood: Images, icons and
ideologies of the African body, Hood Museum, New Hampshire, travelling to the Davis
Museum, Wellesley, Massachusetts, and San Diego Museum of Art, California (2008).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The artist wishes to thank Michaelis School of Fine Art for its
support. Special thanks too to Colin Richards for being so engaged in every way, Kim
Miller for her responsiveness to the work and Tamsyn Reynolds, Alexander Richards,
Alexa Karakashian, Philip Miller and the Stevenson gallery for all their support.
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www.stevenson.info
Catalogue 57
May 2011
Cover Blow Up, 2010, detail
Editor Sophie Perryer
Design Gabrielle Guy
Photography Mario Todeschini
Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town
Wildfire
2011
Ink and glue on canvas
50.5 x 61cm
