Penny Siopis

Colin Richards, Griselda Pollock, Njabulo Ndebele, Sarah Nuttall, Achille Mbembe, Jennifer Law, Kentridge William, T.J. Demos, Alessandra Angelis, Gerrit Olivier

Description

With her earliest work, Penny Siopis established herself as one of the most talented and challenging visual artists in and beyond South Africa. Penny Siopis: Time and Again engages in a variety of ways with her work of the past thirty-five years. A conversation between the artist and the editor, Gerrit Olivier, unfolds throughout the book, giving the reader fascinating insights into her working methods, her strong interest in form and different genres, her theoretical concerns and her views on the position of art in a socio-political context. The first chapter by Achille Mbembe, on her latest work, considers how creation takes hold in the wake of loss. Siopis’s abiding interest in what she calls ‘the poetics of vulnerability’ – manifest in a tension between materiality and image – coalesces with her explorations of history, sexuality, race, memory, estrangement and violence in her paintings, installations and films. With reference to works such as Patience on a Monument, Pinky Pinky, Shame, My Lovely Day, Obscure
White Messenger and Communion, these themes are explored in commentaries by TJ Demos, Jennifer Law, Njabulo Ndebele, Sarah Nuttall, Griselda Pollock and Colin Richards. A conversation between Siopis and William Kentridge illuminates the trajectory of their own work and that of South African art. The elegant design of the book showcases what Alessandra De Angelis calls the ‘incredible beauty’ of Siopis’s work. The vibrant imagery is testimony to Siopis’s ability to combine profound ideas with forms that have a visceral impact on the viewer. As suggested by the title, this book is a stitching together of memory and the promise of return, of loss and creation in a process of perpetual renewal.
Chapter 1 Becoming Alive Again — Achille Mbembe

  i Beginnings — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier

  ii Cake Paintings, History Paintings — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier

Chapter 2 Historical Delicacies — Jennifer Law

  iii Installation and Collection — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier

Chapter 3 The Artist’s Will — Jennifer Law

  iv Figuring the Unspeakable — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier

Chapter 4 Remembering Three Essays on Shame, Penny Siopis, Freud Museum, London 2005 — Griselda Pollock

Chapter 5 The Vitality of Matter: Notes on First Form, Surfaces, Intimacy and the Social — Sarah Nuttall

  v Video Stories — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier

Chapter 6 Penny Siopis’s Film Fables — TJ Demos

Chapter 7 Love and Politics: Sister Aidan Quinlan and the Future We Have Desired — Njabulo S Ndebele

Chapter 8 A Retrospect — Penny Siopis in conversation with William Kentridge

  vi Painting on the Edge of Formlessness — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier

Chapter 9 An Artist’s Dance through Medium and Vision — Alessandra De Angelis

Chapter 10 Penny Siopis: Desire and Disaster in Painting — Colin Richards

  vii Time Again — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier

Sujets

• Arts visuels
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des Arts
• Histoire des arts visuels
• ART
• General
• General officer
• Artists

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781868148158
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 20 Mo

Extrait

Gerrit Olivier is professor of Afrikaans and Dutch Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He currently teaches in the Wits School of Arts.
PENNY SIOPIS TIME AND AGAIN
P E N N Y S I O P I S
Edited by Gerrit Olivier
T I M E A N D A G A I N

For Colin

Introduction — Gerrit Olivier
Commentary
Conversation
1 Becoming Alive Again — Achille Mbembe


i Beginnings — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier

ii Cake Paintings, History Paintings — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
2 Historical Delicacies — Jennifer Law


iii Installation and Collection — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
3 The Artist’s Will — Jennifer Law


iv Figuring the Unspeakable — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
4 Remembering Three Essays on Shame , Penny Siopis, Freud Museum, London 2005 — Griselda Pollock

5 The Vitality of Matter: Notes on First Form, Surfaces, Intimacy and the Social — Sarah Nuttall


v Video Stories — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
6 Penny Siopis’s Film Fables — TJ Demos

7 Love and Politics: Sister Aidan Quinlan and the Future We Have Desired — Njabulo S Ndebele

8 A Retrospect — Penny Siopis in conversation with William Kentridge


vi Painting on the Edge of Formlessness — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
9 An Artist’s Dance through Medium and Vision — Alessandra De Angelis

10 Penny Siopis: Desire and Disaster in Painting — Colin Richards


vii Time Again — Penny Siopis in conversation with Gerrit Olivier
Appendix
References
Index of Illustrated Works
Artist Biography
Exhibitions
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Siopis painting Melancholia in her studio at Wits, Johannesburg, 1985
Introduction
— Gerrit Olivier
1
The publication of this book coincides with a retrospective exhibition of Penny Siopis’s paintings, installations and films at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town and Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg. The phrase ‘Time and Again’, also the title of the retrospective, signals the return of a representative collection of the artist’s work to the public domain. It also alludes to recurring concerns in Siopis’s work: the relationship between history and memory in the movement of objects; the processes of physical decay and ageing that lead to the ‘completed’ work itself being subject to constant change; the idea of repetition and difference extending into a future still to be constructed; and a compellingly layered engagement with the social and political changes and upheavals in South Africa since the early 1980s.
Although Siopis’s work evokes complex thought and reflection, many viewers will remember the visceral impact made by the first moment of seeing. The luscious decay of Melancholia , the excess of colonial imagery surrounding Patience on her monument, the octopus as worm in Obscure White Messenger are among the many memorable confrontations.
The tension between materiality and reference in Siopis’s work interferes with the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘content’ that underpins habitual ways of looking. Whether the medium is painting, installation or film, materiality or material process is as much the subject of the work as whatever subject matter is ostensibly depicted. The assertive facture of the surface of the work is seen in the early paintings, where oil paint is built up excessively so that it not only represents but also becomes the physical forms it depicts, wrinkling, cracking and decaying as it dries over time. In the installations made over the years, the residue of time is shown as much through the differentiated surface textures of each object and the physical making of the installation as through the historical biography that could be associated with that object. In the videos of more recent years, dust spots, sprocket marks and interferences that disrupt narrative flow remind the viewer that the film is an artefact.
This interest in form is present even in Siopis’s most discursive political and theoretical practices. Looking back over the thirty-five years of her work as an artist, a range of contemporary and theoretical debates are readily apparent, including feminism, critiques of colonialism and apartheid, a concern with representations of ‘otherness’ and the politics of stories marginal to grand narratives. These engagements have often been articulated through personal identification. In her work, the personal is not divorced from the political. Instead, the use of her own body and that of her child, and the references to the family in, amongst other works, My Lovely Day , show how the personal and the political are irretrievably intertwined.
2
A look at Siopis’s working methods is enlightening. In the opening essay of this collection, Achille Mbembe draws our attention to an activity that is also visually captured in a photograph taken in December 2013. We see Siopis in her studio at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, looking at three panels with runny surfaces of reddish pigment. These form the visceral base from which human figures interact with text clippings arranged in dynamic patterns. The floor is scattered with newspapers and her eyes are fixed on one of them.
What is happening here? In her random encounter with the ‘news’ in the newspapers that are spread around her, Siopis is not searching for something specific; she is opening herself up to the possibility of an as yet unknown connection. She is as interested in the material form of the newspapers as in the stories they contain. The text itself – its format, font, colour and scale – marks the human caught in a moment of time.
The creative and intellectual energy of Siopis’s work is rooted in the intensity of such working practices, which turn ‘the studio’ into both a working space and a metaphor. As we see in the conversation between her and William Kentridge, both artists imagine the studio as an expanded mind, populated by the experiments of the hand and the eye in various stages of development. The conviction that thoughts and ideas are also raw material, to be approached in visceral ways – through surrender, immersion and ritual enactment – is central to Siopis’s understanding of her own working methods. Some of this is also evident in her treatment of found objects and ‘ready-mades’ from markets, junk shops and the personal archives of strangers.
I would suggest that one way of looking at a work by Siopis is to imagine that it doesn’t exist – not yet; to try and conjure the moment before anything had taken shape; and to accept that it is in a space of imaginative enactment, where ideas interact with material and form, that the work found its beginnings. There was a ‘giving over’ to the process, an immersion in it – something that requires trust and courage, and entails risk. As she herself explains, she is on the side of Eros, committed to a belief in becoming instead of to the assurance provided by completion.
3
Time and again, Siopis affirms the importance of form as a defining moment in a radically contingent process. In grappling with a particular medium or technique, what she calls ‘first form’ marks a moment of recognition. That recognition encompasses two elements. First form manifests itself seductively as ‘a kind of primary production of subjectivity through a knot of tactile or visual apprehension’. At the same time, it shows an aliveness that enables connections to be made across space and time, to other things, other people and ideas.
The tension between form and formlessness which is so dramatically present in many of Siopis’s works signifies, philosophically speaking, an interest in ideas of becoming. It is in the unstable moment where form contends with formlessness that we recognize our own participation in matter, our own incompleteness and the contingency of our own individual and social lives. In her approach, these are not simply ideas; they are embedded in processes that seek to accommodate uncertainty and vulnerability.
As Mbembe writes, in the seclusion of the studio, time is bracketed. But it is not simply a time of waiting, inactivity or peace. Perhaps one could call it a time of anticipation. By engaging with the materiality of her medium, Siopis provokes matter to surprise her, to become eloquent. The studio becomes a place of meticulous, attentive and open-ended contemplation and physical work, a monastic space. While this is happening, analysis and critical reflection are tentatively kept at bay – all that knowledge about the world and art history, all those images that tend to crowd the mind, wanting to be let in. Siopis, of course, knows that this knowledge will enter the picture at a later stage. There may be moments of deliberation, when she decides to mark that awareness through conscious reference.
Since monastic activity can also become predictable and comfortable, Siopis insists that in the interest of renewal and discovery, the habits of the mind, the eye and the hand must be broken. This happens through experiments with new materials and methods that disrupt accustomed patterns of work. Yet even here, her single-minded focus on her chosen materials and working methods is accompanied by an alertness to possibilities that may present themselves on the margins. Thus her metaphor of immersion, of going underwater to see what the breaking of the surface might reveal, goes hand in hand with another: that of casting a stone into a pond, only to ignore the big splash and explore a small ripple at the edge.
4
Much of Siopis’s work is manifestly political. Yet the notion of art being representational in any straightforward way, or serving any political or other externally defined agenda, is not to be reconciled with her practice. Her creative methods are rooted in a deep awareness of history and how our sense of history is marked by the comprom