Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden at the Tate Modern on the 3rd of May, 2015
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, May 2015
Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden at the Tate Modern on the 3rd of May, 2015
Paul Murphy, the Tate Modern, May 2015
The first painting in this exhibition which grabbed my attention was Dumas’s portrait of Phil Spector. Firstly, his police mug shot without his wig. Secondly, replete with wig at his murder trial for the killing of actress and fashion model Lana Clarkson. Dumas’ seems to become more obsessed than preoccupied as her painting career develops. She followed up these works with portraits of Lady Di which seems sculptured and austere and Naomi Campbell which seems a more personal and subjective work and in keeping with the mix of the figurative, expressionist and primitive that typifies her work.
Marlene Dumas (1953 - ) was born in South Africa but grew up in Holland. Her painting reflects upon her early life in Africa evidenced by her involvement in painting and putative involvement in radical politics (and the politics of Africa which is not often seen in the work of European artists) as well as an engagement with importing documentary techniques into her painting. There are real glimpses of an important artist at work in this exhibition but also of a sensibility leering towards the lurid and morbid.
Twelve supposedly Great Men are on show too, gay heroes such as Alan Turing, Oscar Wilde and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1995 – 7). However, the homage is belated and sometimes Dumas’s attraction to their celebrity appears ghoulish. Indeed the thin washes and blurred images she employs do conjure up ghouls because there is little sense of comedy in any of these paintings but also the influence of Gerhard Richter (1932 - ). Richter is unconsciously acknowledged in Dumas’s work Lucy (2004), an image of a female Chechen fighter shot dead by security forces at the Moscow theatre siege in 2002. The work points to painting sequences of the RAF completed by Richter in the 1970s and even earlier works that debate the consequences of WW2. But Dumas’s images are still more striking than Richter’s since they combine an assured technique with a self-consciously primitive emphasis. However, when Dumas is on the trail of celebrity her work seems puzzling and bizarre rather than being personal and confident. There is a great deal here that is predictable, imitating rather than criticizing or commenting on tabloid culture.
The painting of Lucy is contrasted with a similar image conjured up in “Stern” but in fact it’s a painting of Ulrike Meinhof after her suicide in 1976. The title comes from the name of the magazine that first featured this image. Dumas’s implies several themes: political violence, extremism and women’s involvement in these. Meinhof’s brain was subjected to an autopsy because the cause of death, suicide or assassination, had to be determined, as was that of Charlotte Corday (1768 – 1793). She was the assassin of the political journalist Jean – Paul Marat (1743 – 1793), killed by Corday in his bath where he lay soothing the pain of a terrible skin condition. As if to extend the theme Corday’s brain is also the subject of a canvas, Skull (of a Woman) (2005) although it could indeed be anyone’s brain. Thus these canvases are linked thematically yet the subject matter sensationalizes and comments, is both simultaneously morbid and voyeuristic. Corday’s prosecutors were puzzled by the question of why a woman could go to such extremes (even though she claimed at her trial that she had saved 100,000 lives for she blamed Marat solely on the terror). Corday’s neat self-justification probably maintained that Marat had a power of life and death which he did not possess and the killing of Marat fed the flames of the terror rather than putting them out. Dumas’s inconsistency is revealed when she depicts the desolation of Pauline Lumumba when in 1961 her husband Patrice Lumumba was assassinated after becoming the first democratically elected president of the Congo in Leopoldsville (Kinshasa). Dumas’s canvas The Widow (2013) elevates Pauline Lumumba’s bare breasted protest, evoking again a symbol of the French Revolution, into a tangible protest against political violence. However, it is hard to know what the artist’s stance really is except that her views have changed.
One of the great portraits by Dumas in this exhibition is her work For Whom the Bells Toll (2008) a re-working of an image of Ingrid Bergman from the film of the same name. It seems incredible that an artist can take such unappealing subject matter yet fashion a supreme work of art from it but this is what she has done and it makes some of her later portraits of celebrity explicable even if they are not of such high quality. The image is suffused with tragedy possibly explained that it was made at the same time as the death of her mother. It is clear that Dumas feels she must destroy what she has created, that women have a place in the world rather than in the home, they have the right to be artists but also that women have the right to express themselves in terms of violence (Corday) and protest and mourning (Lumumba). Amongst all the politically correct sermons there is also a secret room full of the artist’s response to pornography (or some would say the artist’s porn but the sense of comedy is never at work in Dumas’s oeuvre) from an exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery, Soho in 1999. Political, aesthetic barriers are the subject matter of Dumas’s work but it is sometimes unclear as to whether the artist is demolishing or erecting them.
Comments