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| Saint Acrylic on paper, 2014, 76.4 X 56.6cm |
Bonita Alice 2015
In Which The Horse Plays The Straight Man
Acrylic on wood panel, 2015, 35.5 X 28 X 2cm
The drawings and paintings in this and the previous post make up the exhibition Strangers Of Commanding Aspect. (Please scroll down to see earlier posts.)
The exhibition is my 8th solo exhibition and will open at Gallery AOP, Johannesburg, South Africa on April 18 2015.
Included here are texts by the artist and by Yvette Gresle who wrote the catalogue essay.
*Yvette is an independent art historian and art writer. She recently submitted her PhD dissertation to University College London (History of Art). Yvette is a London-based Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg.
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| In Which The Horse Plays The Straight Man Acrylic on wood panel, 2015, 45.7 X 61 X 2cm |
Obscured Proximities - Catalogue essay for Strangers Of Commanding Aspect, Gallery AOP, Johannesburg, April 2015
by Yvette Greslé
Broken asunder, yet made in the same
mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might
have been — all that; and he — But no. Between them lay the widest gulf that
can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he
was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other
(Virginia Woolf, Flush: a biography, 1933).[1]
As ordinary knotted beings, they are
also always meaning-making figures that gather up those who respond to them
into unpredictable kinds of “we” (Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, 2008).[2]
A sleeping dog, reminiscent of a greyhound, is wrapped up in a golden
blanket, its head resting on a black surface. The idea of sleep, and the
significance we attach to it, brings into view multiple departure points. I
imagine the symbolic, spiritual and psycho-analytic significance brought to
dreams and dreaming. Sleep is attached not only to rest, nourishment, insight
and healing but also to narratives of vulnerability, traumatic memory, mortality
and loss. The idea of sleep can also be political: what does it mean to close
one’s eyes, to feign sleep and the absence of consciousness? What does it mean
not to see, to enable complicitous relationships to that which is not fair,
just or ethical whether politically, economically, socially or environmentally?
As I write about Bonita Alice’s work I view Anima
(2012), a video work, by the artist Charlotte Dumas, of horses as they drift
into sleep and from consciousness (they are caisson burial horses of Arlington
National Cemetery in the United States).[3] Dumas films in silence,
and close proximity to the animals, in the darkness and shadows of the enclosed
space they inhabit at night. The video suggests points of connection with
painting, its stillness, silence and play on light, darkness and shadows. I feel as I look and the distance I
imagine between myself and the sleeping, shifting creature collapses, we are
imaginatively, affectively intertwined.
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| Untitled Diptych LHS Acrylic on wood panel, 2014, 40.5 X 30.5 X 5cm |
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| Untitled Diptych RHS Acrylic on wood panel, 2014, 40.5 X 30.5 X 5cm |
The spatial relationships staged between the sleeping dog enclosed in Alice’s circle, and the intricate patterning behind are ones of displacement and disorientation. We cannot know, with any certainty, where we are or what we are looking at. Is this an architectural site located physically and materially in the world or is the locus of dream-worlds, fantasy and psychic projection? Through the intricate design, reminiscent of latticework, I register the material substance of the wooden panel, the artist has chosen for her ground. As I look I become conscious of the pressures embedded in vision, as a personal and subjective process of relating to ourselves and others. My looking is neither distant nor detached. I am conscious of my subjectivity as woman and as human animal. I am aware that my vision is freighted with my own historical and social relation to animals and the choices and ethical concerns that accompany these. Violence is always potentially present in vision, in how we look and then pin down, reduce, close off, and flatten out. Donna Haraway focuses critical attention on the encounters between human and non-human animals, in scientific, social, personal, economic, cultural and political life: ‘All of these are figures, and all are mundanely here, on this earth, now, asking who “we” will become when species meet’.[4]
In 1933, Virginia Woolf wrote a biography of Flush the spaniel, which belonged to the English Romantic poet Elizabeth Barratt
Browning (1806-1861). Flush was
reprinted in 2005 by Persephone Books, London, a publisher that focuses largely
on ‘neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women’.[5]
Apparently Woolf was inspired by a new edition of love letters between
Elizabeth and Robert Browning, published in 1930, in which ‘the figure of the
dog made me laugh so I couldn’t resist making him a Life’.[6] The book, which was a commercial success, was
not a critical success and Woolf herself referred to it as ‘that silly book’.[7] But Flush
has also been taken up by feminist scholars and critics who focus on its social
commentary. The book tells a tale about how human animals project subjective
emotions, desires, longings, frustrations and so forth onto the bodies and
souls of non-human animals. It also imagines a relationship between a dog and
his mistress, the bonds of possession, love and power, and hierarchies of
class, and gender, which extend to the scientific-biological meanings of species,
and non-human animals in domestic and social life.
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In Which The Horse Plays The Straight Man
Acrylic on paper, 2015, 56 X 76.4cm
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In Alice’s paintings, multiple visual languages and iconographies, both familiar and strange, imagine encounters between human and non-human animals. Human hands emerge from the blankets of the dogs that rest or sleep. The hands point at subjects or objects that we cannot see or know. A figure, which appears human, but which might also be imagined as a creature of myth stretches upwards as he or she or it reveals an animal in repose. Phantasmic figures appear to merge with the substance of fabric, which veils, conceals or reveals. A white hand with exaggeratedly long fingers, ambiguously human, reaches out from a voluminous white sheet to touch the neck of a black horse. The gesture appears simultaneously tender and threatening: nothing is known, legible or explained, and we cannot see the figure to whom the hand belongs. Enclosed in the circle which has become a characteristic visual device in Alice’s work my looking is contained as if I were looking through optical devices deployed to magnify distant sites and scenes. The devices promise visibility, and proximity to that which we cannot readily see.
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| An Incident Acrylic on wood panel, 40.5 X 30.5 X 5cm |
These paintings obscure the borders and hierarchies imagined between species, and which have been so thoroughly overturned and critiqued in the scholarly work on human and non-human animals attentive to the ethics and politics of human-animal relations. In Haraway’s work we encounter cyborgs, monkeys and apes, oncomice, and dogs: ‘In every case, the figures are at the same time creatures of imagined possibility and creatures of fierce and ordinary reality; the dimensions tangle and require response’.[8] Alice talks about the relationship between pain and beauty in her work, and its politics: ‘There’s this thing about heightening pain by rendering it in a decorative, aestheticised tone […] My underlying content is a painful one. In this exhibition we are talking about a relationship that I regard as floundering in the aftermath of a betrayal, a failed relationship with massively destructive repercussions for animals on an enormous scale […] and quite possibly, emotional repercussions for all parties. The result is an anxiety that comes from both sides’.[9]
Alice’s paintings are beautiful and she is consistently attentive to how
things are constructed, crafted and made. In making these paintings, acrylic
paint on wooden panel, she departs from the dust work, which similarly explored
ambiguity and blurry borders between the human and its non-human others:
figures I imagined as ghosts, aliens and animated objects in proximity to
mountains, volcanoes, cliffs, oceans and indeterminate grounds.[10] Of her decision to
explore painting Alice draws attention to how she navigates across media. She
speaks of the pragmatic underpinnings of making a work but also alerts us to
the ambiguity that is present not only in the human/animal figures but also in
how she works with particular media, crossing processes and disciplines:
‘what’s guided me is the idea that actually very often I’m drawing when I’m
painting. Keeping this in sight helps me find my way with painting. This is how
an acrylic on paper work
landed up in the Jerwood Drawing Prize Exhibition
in 2014’.[11]
She says of the earlier dust works: ‘What guided me with the dust was a linear,
hard-edged way of making forms that came
from various, quite decorative traditions such as historical Japanese and
Chinese printmaking, and Indian miniatures.[12]
Untitled (Mound)
Acrylic on wood panel, 2014, 40.5 X 30.5 X 5cm
Visiting Alice’s studio in Dalston I am able to view not only the work
itself but also the traces and material culture of an artist’s process -
preliminary sketches, notes and visual sources.
There is an affective charge in Alice’s practice as a whole, which resists
an empirical fixing of the world, and there is a politics and an ethics to work
that is neither prescriptive, didactic nor self-explanatory. We, as viewers,
are invited to think more critically and more rigorously about how it is we
look, and what it is we see in the entanglements of Alice’s human-animal
figures in grounds that we cannot ever fully know.
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| Beast in Lace Acrylic on wood panel, 2014, 61 X 76 X 5cm |
[1] Woolf, V., Flush: a biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933). Available as a free e-book http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/persephone-ebooks (accessed 23 March 2015).
[2] Haraway, D.J., When Species Meet (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p.5.
[3] Charlotte Dumas: Anima and the Wildest Prairies at the Photographer’s Gallery, London, 6 February- 6 April 2015: http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/charlotte-dumas-anima-and-the-widest-prairies-2 (accessed 23 March 2015).
[4] Ibid., p.5.
[5] Persephone Books: http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/about-us/ (accessed 23 March 2015).
[6] Persephone Books: http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/flush.html (accessed 22 March 2015).
[7] Persphone Books: http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/content/persephoneforum/persephone-book-no-55-flush-by-virginia-woolf/ (accessed 23 March 2015).
[8] Haraway, D.J., When Species Meet, 2008, p.4.
[9] Interview (Bonita Alice and Yvette Greslé) 4 March 2015, London.
[10] Refer to the exhibition ‘Beast at Home at Gallery AOP, Johannesburg (6 March – 3 April 2010): http://www.artonpaper.co.za/view.asp?ItemID=39&tname=tblComponent1&oname=Exhibitions&pg=front (accessed 23 March 2015).
[11]Interview (Bonita Alice and Yvette Greslé) 4 March 2015, London. See also:
Jerwood Drawing Prize, 2014: http://www.axisweb.org/features/news-and-views/in-focus/jerwood-drawing-prize-2014/ (accessed 23 March 2015).
[12] Interview (Bonita Alice and Yvette Greslé) 4 March 2015, London.
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| Untitled Acrylic on wood panel, 2014, 51 X 40.8 X X 2cm |
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| The Dog Acrylic on wood panel, 2014, 35.5 X 28 X 2cm |
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| Tending The Dog Acrylic on wood panel, 2014, 35.5 X 28 X 2cm |
