Penny Siopis: Time and Again

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

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 compromised representations from which no simple escape is possible. This gives rise to a creative resilience and a refusal to accept that history will define us. ‘History’ in her work – and not only in the history paintings – is both a constraining visual and conceptual inheritance and a possible route to a new articulation of subjectivity and collective life.

As the contributors to this volume remind us, Siopis’s work is more profoundly political than many works that present themselves as pertinent to the moment. In Siopis we are often confronted by a more unsettling circumstance: that our experience of our own existence in the world can never be reduced to the platitudes of social and political discourse. Instead, her focus is often on narratives lurking beneath the everyday, on the unspeakable (as in the Shame paintings), on nameless dread (as in Pinky Pinky), on explosions that appear to question the very integrity of the self as a supposedly coherent construct (as in Who’s Afraid of the Crowd?).

What Siopis has always wanted to make tangible, it seems to me, is the moment when something new can happen through the body and the mind interacting with materiality. For the viewer, the only real contact with this event is through the eye – in film, also through sound. But in order to appreciate the open-endedness that is at stake, we must allow the eye and the ear to help us imagine the hand that worked here, as well as the belief in the many productive possibilities that accompanied the movements of the hand.

The element of risk involved in this is perhaps strongest in the case of painting, where the body physically marks the canvas with its presence. While this happens, history – including the history of art – is not simply a given; it has to be allowed to emerge; it is, as it were, invited in. First of all there is the hand, exploring that dangerous and exciting moment when the materiality of the medium will make manifest a link to the self and other people.

By following Siopis into these dangerous areas, allowing our act of looking to be as brave as her act of making, we begin to see the outlines of her ethics. Behind the methods described in this book lies the conviction that art offers us, as people in a country with a traumatic past, a place in which to enact our uncertainty and vulnerability. This is why her art, even when it deals with instability or despair, is never despairing; instead, it is affirming and exhilarating, alert to the aliveness we can discover in the world and in ourselves.

Siopis in her studio at Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, 2013

Newspaper cuttings on noticeboard in Siopis’s studio, 2014

Commentary

1

Becoming Alive Again

— Achille Mbembe

In 2012, Penny Siopis began what was to become a three-part work, a piece which remains unfinished as I write this in May 2014. After the initial splash of paint, the project seemed to lead nowhere. She jettisoned it. In that same year, her husband Colin Richards died. The devastation and stupor she experienced left her with no room to think creatively. Drenched with pain and grief, she found no interest in the world any more. Making things and painting pain might have been one way for her to commune with him. But how could she make art again without being mechanistic? And yet, what would it mean to never again make something, when her entire life had been lived through making things?

To the Studio

During those long months of reclusion, Siopis would buy newspapers from a man who sold them on the street by the traffic light. It turned into a ritual. Soon, apart from the company of a few friends, newspapers became her main point of contact with the world. In return, the world as it is made in the newspapers came into her last intimate space, her home. She would read them for their content in the form of news. But they were also a unique space she could inhabit. Unlike the immaterial and numinous space of the screen, they were tangible, made up of lines, headings, colours, stories, images. Each showed something of the world outside her home.

After some time had passed, she returned to the studio. Time in the studio was not the equivalent of a full return to life. Instead, it became bracketed time. Studio time was safe time. In the studio, she did not need to engage with the actual work of living. Or if she did, it was mostly in the form of thoughts. This is when she started working with cut-outs, with lines, words, all affixed to surfaces with visceral splashes. Gradually, texts or lines, most often scrambled and stretched, took the shape of concentric forms. They could still be read. But reading them required specific bodily movements.

The newspaper was itself a body with various parts. Its format, its texts, words and images had various shapes and colours. Black and white, red, yellow, blue. Multiple stories assembled and juxtaposed in the same visual field. Cutting these sections into ever smaller parts carried with it a strange sense of intimacy. Putting these miniature cuttings on the surface of a huge canvas gave her a sense of control. And yet the vast scale of the painting required surrender. In between splashes and accidents, the various colours she has always had under her skin began to emerge – red, ochre, orange. Soon, their association with flesh and blood, with trauma, love and eroticism, would become manifest. Perhaps she was back on the path to viscerality.

As she kept collecting newspapers, she became conscious of their relationship to time, a category that so centrally underpins her work. To read the newspaper is to go back in time. True, the encounter with a newspaper is an encounter with the ‘now’ and with ‘actuality’. But the ‘actual’ consists mostly of what is no longer and of what is not yet. Newspapers mark time in motion, that intermediary time between ‘before’ and ‘after’. When such time is counted in succession, each ‘now’ becomes different from the next, or the one before. The ‘now’ is also different from ‘yesterday’, the time of childhood.

In Siopis’s work, childhood has always been represented as a time of bliss and rupture, a primary fountain of creativity, of traumas witnessed or experienced, muddled up in the unconscious with pleasure and innocence. It is also a time of imaginative investments and attachments, of distance and proximity. It is a bank