Marlene Dumas, “Measuring Your Own Grave” at MOCA, Grand Avenue
June 22 - September 22, 2008
The work of Marlene Dumas fetched the highest price of any living female artist recently at a Christie’s auction, baring witness to her commanding presence in the art world, as well as the resurgence of painting over the last decade. MOCA is lucky enough, as are its patrons, to host the first “mid-career” retrospective of the South African-born painter’s dark though expressive works, open this week until September 22.
For those of you unfamiliar with her simultaneously quiet and disquieting portraits, Dumas nearly always begins with source materials such as Polaroids, news clippings, or the art of other photographers. This fact is no mystery, due in part to her growing popularity and by extension, the popularity of her method, but also simply by the poses of her subjects that somehow admit the interference of the camera’s eye. She then translates the images into paint, quite aware that she is transforming their expression and meaning in the process. The result is usually dark, with smoky and elusive shapes created by water-saturated brush strokes that barely give form to her close-up and over-sized portraits of children, prostitutes, and especially for this US tour, Marilyn Monroe.
MOCA held a talk with Dumas at the show’s opening day where she spoke of the effect the medium of painting has on perception, and how this trope functions as the fulcrum for much of her art.
“Painting makes us introspective, while a picture of death makes us only think everyone else is dying,” she explained of her series of dead young men whose images she took from news clippings. Rendered in paint in the museum landscape, Dumas acknowledged that such images become existential, as opposed to their solely political existence on a news page.
Dumas uses this effect that the medium has on the subject to explain away descriptions of her work as being violent or vulgar. While she does paint the dead and nude, she is quick to defend her work by juxtaposing it with actual pornography, actual or simulated violence, and suggests that hers is by comparison quite “introverted and quiet.” True, Dumas never depicts the actual violent or sexual act, always the human subject, de-contextualized on an over-sized canvas.
Dumas preserves in the eyes of her subject that awareness that they are being photographed, something that painting from life, a non-instantaneous process, can only create the illusion of. The result is room upon room is filled with muted portraits that stare ingenuously back at the viewer. One portrait that does not stare back is the notorious Dead Marilyn, painted from the actress’s autopsy photograph in comparatively light blues and whites. While the rest of the show’s contents are confrontational both in their gaze and subject matter, the portrait of Monroe is a subdued and much more conducive to the voyeurism of art-looking.
The exhibition at MOCA displays these canvases not chronologically, despite its status as a retrospective, but thematically. Dumas herself instructed the audience to pay close attention to the dates and themes of the works, through which one could trace issues which recurred to her in life. “Certain things were problems that I struggled with in a specific way, and I didn’t solve, and later I chose I different way to do it” she explained.
Though the frontality and scale of her works is also quite political as it indicts the viewer to bare witness to execution, drug overdose, and sex, Dumas’ interest in perception would leave the final verdict to the viewer. For instance, the show does not have to be a heavy experience despite the death and sex and dark paint, as she admits herself of her sex and pornography material, “children mostly find them funny.”
Photo by cyancey via Flickr
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