Acts of Transgression

Alan Parker, Sarah Nuttall, Nondumiso Msimanga, Lieketso Dee Mohoto–Wa Thaluki, Same Mdluli, Bettina Malcomess, Nomusa Makhubu, Massa Lemu, Mwenya B. Kabwe, Andrew Hennlich, Khwezi Gule, Gabrielle Goliath, Katlego Disemelo, Catherine Boulle, Jay Pather

Description

Fifteen writers explore the experimental, interdisciplinary and radically transgressive field of contemporary live art in South Africa, focusing on a wide range of perspectives, personalities and theoretical concerns.

Contemporary South African society is chronologically ‘post’ apartheid, but it continues to grapple with material redress, land redistribution and systemic racism. Acts of Transgression represents the complexity of this moment in the rich potential of a performative art form that transcends disciplinary boundaries and aesthetic conventions.

The contributors, who are all significantly involved in the discipline of performance art, probe its intersection with crisis and socio-political turbulence, shifting notions of identity and belonging, embodied trauma and loss. Narratives of the past and visions for the future are interrogated through memory and the archive, thus destabilising entrenched colonial systems.

Collectively analysing the work of more than 25 contemporary South African artists, including Athi-Patra Ruga, Mohau Modisakeng, Steven Cohen, Dean Hutton, Mikhael Subotzsky, Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama, among others, the analysis is accompanied by a visual record of more than 50 photographs.

For those working in the fields of theatre, performance studies and art, this is a must-have collection of critical essays on a burgeoning and exciting field of contemporary South African research.



Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction – Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle

Part One: Live Art in a Time Of Crisis

Chapter 1 Artistic Citizenship, Anatopism and the Elusive Public: Live Art in the City of Cape Town – Nomusa Makhubu

Chapter 2 Upsurge – Sarah Nuttall

Chapter 3 ‘Madam, I Can See Your Penis’: Disruption and Dissonance in the Work of Steven Cohen – Catherine Boulle

Chapter 4 The Impossibility of Curating Live Art – Jay Pather

Part Two: Loss, Language and Embodiment

Chapter 5 Corporeal HerStories: Navigating Meaning in Chuma Sopotela’s Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda through the Artist’s Words – Lieketso Dee Mohoto-Wa Thaluki

Chapter 6 A Different Kind of Inhabitance: Invocation and the Politics of Mourning in Performance Work by Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama – Gabrielle Goliath

Chapter 7 State of Emergency: Inkulumo-Mpendulwano (Dialogue) of Emergent Art When Ukukhuluma (Talking) is Not Enough – Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga

Chapter 8 Space is the Place and Place is Time: Refiguring the Black Female Body as a Political Site in Performance – Same Mdluli

Part Three: Rethinking the Archive, Reinterpreting Gesture

Chapter 9 don’t get it twisted: queer performativity and the emptying out of gesture – Bettina Malcomess

Chapter 10 Performing the Queer Archive: Strategies of Self-Styling on Instagram – Katlego Disemelo

Chapter 11 Effigy in the Archive: Ritualising Performance and the Dead in Contemporary South African Live Art Practice – Alan Parker

Part Four: Suppressed Histories and Speculative Futures

 Chapter 12 To Heal a Nation: Performance and Memorialisation in the Zone of Nonbeing – Khwezi Gule

Chapter 13 Astronautus Afrikanus: Performing African Futurism – Mwenya B. Kabwe

Chapter 14 ‘Touched by an Angel’ (of History) in Athi-Patra Ruga’s The Future White Women of Azania – Andrew J. Hennlich

Chapter 15: Performance in Biopolitical Collectivism: A Study of Gugulective and iQhiya – Massa Lemu

Contributors

Index

Sujets

• Queer
• ART
• Performance
• General
• General officer
• Performance art

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776142811
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Acts of Transgression
Nelisiwe Xaba, Sakhozi says Non to the Venus , 2012. Courtesy Institute for Creative Arts. Photograph by Ashley Walters.
Acts of Transgression
Contemporary Live Art in South Africa
EDITED BY JAY PATHER AND CATHERINE BOULLE
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Compilation Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle 2019
Chapters Individual contributors 2019
Published edition Wits University Press 2019
Images Copyright holders
Cover artwork Athi-Patra Ruga, The Future White Woman of Azania , 2012. Courtesy Institute for Creative Arts. Photograph by Ashley Walters
First published 2019
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22019022798
978-1-77614-279-8 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-280-4 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-281-1 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-282-8 (Mobi)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced in captions for the use of images. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced here; please contact Wits University Press in case of any omissions or errors.
The publication of this volume was made possible by funding from the Institute for Creative Arts, University of Cape Town.

Project manager: Robyn Sassen
Copyeditor: Alex Dodd
Proofreader: Alison Lockhart
Indexer: Sanet le Roux
Cover design: Hybrid Creative
Book design and layout: Hybrid Creative
Typesetter: MPS
Typeset in 11 point Crimson
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle
PART ONE: LIVE ART IN A TIME OF CRISIS
1 Artistic Citizenship, Anatopism and the Elusive Public: Live Art in the City of Cape Town
Nomusa Makhubu
2 Upsurge
Sarah Nuttall
3 Madam, I Can See Your Penis : Disruption and Dissonance in the Work of Steven Cohen
Catherine Boulle
4 The Impossibility of Curating Live Art
Jay Pather
PART TWO: LOSS, LANGUAGE AND EMBODIMENT
5 Corporeal HerStories: Navigating Meaning in Chuma Sopotela s Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda through the Artist s Words
Lieketso Dee Mohoto-wa Thaluki
6 A Different Kind of Inhabitance : Invocation and the Politics of Mourning in Performance Work by Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama
Gabrielle Goliath
7 State of Emergency: Inkulumo-Mpendulwano (Dialogue) of Emergent Art When Ukukhuluma (Talking) is Not Enough
Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga
8 Space is the Place and Place is Time: Refiguring the Black Female Body as a Political Site in Performance
Same Mdluli
PART THREE: RETHINKING THE ARCHIVE, REINTERPRETING GESTURE
9 don t get it twisted: queer performativity and the emptying out of gesture
Bettina Malcomess
10 Performing the Queer Archive: Strategies of Self-Styling on Instagram
Katlego Disemelo
11 Effigy in the Archive: Ritualising Performance and the Dead in Contemporary South African Live Art Practice
Alan Parker
PART FOUR: SUPPRESSED HISTORIES AND SPECULATIVE FUTURES
12 To Heal a Nation: Performance and Memorialisation in the Zone of Non-Being
Khwezi Gule
13 Astronautus Afrikanus : Performing African Futurism
Mwenya B. Kabwe
14 Touched by an Angel (of History) in Athi-Patra Ruga s The Future White Women of Azania
Andrew J. Hennlich
15 Performance in Biopolitical Collectivism: A Study of Gugulective and iQhiya
Massa Lemu
Contributors
List of Illustrations
Index
Acknowledgements
Acts of Transgression is dedicated to those whose lives may be represented by or reflected in performance, but whose existence is not a performance, and who are living manifestos of courage and dignity in the face of transgressions against the human spirit.
To each one of the contributors - thank you for your dedication to this project, for challenging and shaping our understanding of live art in South Africa. To the artists whose works are discussed in this book - thank you for initiating this research through your practice. We are also indebted to the artists, photographers, galleries and publications named in the captions for permission to reproduce images.
We would like to thank the University of Cape Town (UCT), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Donald Gordon Foundation for their financial support, and the Deans of UCT s Humanities Faculty, as well as the Board, for their institutional support of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) and the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) over the years.
The hard work and commitment of many project managers, technicians, artists and academics have been instrumental to the development of the Institute since its inception, and especially to the realisation of the Institute s Live Art Festival. In particular, we would like to thank: Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton, Samantha Saevitzon, James Macdonald and Bongani Kona.
I (Catherine Boulle) wish to make particular mention of Sheenagh Brighton-Goedhals, Margot Beard, Deborah Seddon, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, and most especially, Sally Boulle - brilliant women, brilliant teachers whose mentorship and wisdom have propelled me. My deepest gratitude is to Ben Stanwix who accompanied me on this long editorial journey with great patience and love.
I (Jay Pather) want to extend my deepest gratitude to my various colleagues and teachers from my early days at the University of Durban-Westville (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal) and New York University for planting seeds of curiosity and care that have endured. I want to acknowledge Jelili Atiku, RoseLee Goldberg, Guillermo G mez-Pe a and Lois Keidan who, from diverse regions of the world, have inspired me. I also want to express appreciation to my partner, Andre Links, for his love and support.
Introduction
JAY PATHER AND CATHERINE BOULLE
THE TIMES
On 2 September 2014, audiences entering the Cape Town City Hall on the seventh evening of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) Live Art Festival were hit with the pungent smell of cow dung - the sensory setting of Chuma Sopotela s Inkukhu Ibeke Iqanda ( The chicken has laid its eggs ). 1 Sopotela s series of slow and careful ritualised acts included writing Nkandla on the wall in dung, in reference to then President Jacob Zuma s private residence, revealed earlier that year to have been lavishly renovated with the use of public funds. In the course of the performance, Sopotela removed the South African flag from her vagina. Tebogo Munyai s Doors of Gold unfolded in an adjoining room, where the artist s naked body was foregrounded as a trope for acute vulnerability in his evocation of the Marikana massacre, but also of the erasure of black men who have died in South Africa s mines without record or ceremony. In yet another room, Limelight on Rites, by dancer and choreographer Sello Pesa, featured two performers dancing to loud music with and alongside a coffin, while others pitched funeral plans to audience members, similarly highlighting the black body as an expendable commodity for barter and trade - even in death.
These deliberate, sometimes opaque, sometimes stark gestures, and the many that preceded and followed in the Festival programme, seemed to search for a different language - a corporeal vocabulary of seepage and excess - to articulate the distension of the time. Performing states of despair and protest, attack and response, against an overwhelming onslaught on the black body by continued economic and psychic oppression, they cited the failure of systems of communication; a breakdown of language and logic.
Only six months later, Chumani Maxwele flung excrement at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes on the University of Cape Town s Upper Campus in an act of calculated political significance that was also a searing physical manifestation of emotional overflow. 2 Dressed in black tights and a bright pink hard hat with a placard that read EXHIBIT WHITE ARROGANCE @ UCT, Maxwele s striking intervention, as deliberate and crafted as a performance, cut through layers of obfuscation around institutional racism to give voice to an irrepressible anger and impatience at the slow pace of change in a supposedly postcolonial country.
This action, and the subsequent Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement to which it gave rise, tapped into expanses of feeling, which, once released, could not be contained. Emotion spilled out beyond the confines of rational response, rupturing attempts, of the kind that have become synonymous with South Africa s transitional reconciliation period, to neutralise expressions of pain or to silence outpourings of anger. Advancing a politics of radical action, the movement was a backlash against the rationalist imperative to put into words, a collective assertion that talking has proven ineffectual and that compromise has operated as a cover for a regime of forgetting. 3
In South Africa, live art is born of extremity. Its syncretic form has evolved in response to rapidly changing social climates, colonial imposition, cultural fragmentation and political upheaval; its affective tenor of excess and irrationality embodies the unpredictability of crisis. It proffers a new language that resists the narratives of certainty and linearity through which a neocolonial agenda has been perpetuated (even if sometimes inadvertently) in this country, reflecting - without seeking to resolve - the inscrutability and urgency of states of socio-political flux.
TROUBLING TERMS
In the west, too, performance art has its roots in times of extremity. It flourished in early twentieth-century Europe alongside the rise of fascism, culminating in movements such as Dadaism and Futurism. 4 Unable to