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Lot Essay
Marlene Dumas's paintings stalk a strange world of in-betweens. Just as she is from in-between several cultures, countries and origins, so too her pictures occupy ambiguous territories. In her 1994 painting The Cover-Up, the ambiguities begin with the situation. Is this vast scaled-up person a little girl lifting her skirts, or a non-gender-specific child lifting a medical smock? Looking at Dumas' work in general, one suspects that the subject is a little girl, that this is not a medical image but something somehow sinister, something ineffably wrong. The fact that this child is portrayed in a larger-than-life format makes it all the more disturbing, with this giant child towering above the viewer, a vast expanse of pallid child-flesh.
The stark light in which the subject (let us assume, despite the danger of assumptions, that this is a 'she') has been illuminated lends a strange and disquieting atmosphere to the painting, implying that there is something sordid and perhaps even criminal about the image. We begin to supply our own details. Is it in a basement? Was the original scene enacted under duress? What is the purpose of the original image? There is a sense of trauma, a suffocating atmosphere of foreboding that, like the picture itself, overwhelms the viewer. Dumas has deliberately placed us in an intensely uncomfortable, compromised position and abandons us there to the world of ambiguities and the world of our own sinister worst-case-scenario associations. With a title that hints at conspiracy and criminality, we cannot help but read awful horrors between the lines, and yet looking at the picture itself, those horrors are completely absent:
"...It's suggestive, it suggests all sorts of narratives, but it doesn't really tell you what's going on at all. Someone said that it feels as if something has happened, in the sense of an after-event, or alternatively that something's going to happen but you don't yet know what it is. It's as if I can make people think they are so close to me - that they believe I've addressed the painting directly to them. I give them a false sense of intimacy. I think the world invites you to have a conversation with it" (Dumas, quoted in B. Bloom, 'Interview', pp. 7-29, D. van den Boogerd, B. Bloom & M. Casadio, Marlene Dumas, London, 1999, p. 12).
The scale of The Cover-Up results in a vast amount of flesh being on display. Regardless of whether it is child flesh or not, there is enough skin on display to make sure that it is an issue. Is this picture a snapshot of a little girl playfully lifting her skirt or is it something darker and more disturbing? This picture, in Dumas' reincarnation, is patently not erotic, and yet deliberately touches upon raw issues of acceptable forms of eroticism, a subject that she has often explored:
"There seems to be an enormous loss of eroticism everywhere. Lots of people in their relationships are too tired to sleep with one another. On the one hand there appears to be an excess of anything goes and on the other, no one gets excited anymore. How can one make an erotic image? What is an intimate image? I get asked 'Why don't you work with a real model, why do you work with a photograph?' In England someone talked about the intimate relation an artist like Lucian Freud has with his models, but I don't want these people in my studio. I want this distance in my work and yet it feels so intimate...The imaginary interests me. Eroticism is when something hasn't yet happened, it's got the possibility and the tension" (Dumas, quoted in G. Jantjes, 'Marlene Dumas in dialogue with Gavin Jantjes', 1996, from the InIVA Digital Archive at www.iniva.org).
The various removes from The Cover-Up's original source photograph add a strange quality of the universal to it, as does the presence of a faceless figure. This could be anyone, and indeed one of the reasons that Dumas repeatedly uses photographs as source images is because they begin to lend a sense of personal reality. The characters depicted in her works hover on the outskirts of our own world of associations. Some are based on images that we may have seen before, faces that we may have seen before, while others, by adopting some of the visual idiom of snapshots or of journalistic photographs, evoke a world that is familiar enough to the viewer that we begin to associate. In The Cover-Up, this effect is made all the stronger by the complete anonymity of this non-specific faceless everyman child. She is designed to remind us of people, to force us to envisage people we know in the strange and sinister situation before us. By portraying someone who is not a part of the artist's own life, who is non-specific already at the point of appropriation and of being rendered in paint, Dumas creates a character that is all the more easily conceived as being from our own personal spheres, that can be hauntingly placed in the realm of our own personal acquaintance.
Bringing the character in The Cover-Up that little bit closer to home, Dumas forces 'the erotic possibility and the tension' into the domain of our own personal associations; the picture gains greater strength, becomes more bitter and more evocative. In this way, Dumas heightens the narrative ambiguity, raising the stakes in the picture, making us all the more aware of the dangerous in-between areas in which it functions. For The Cover-Up functions in the space in-between the child and the viewer and also, most importantly, in the spaces between the source image and the painter, and then between the painter and the viewer. The narrative that we supply happens entirely in the space between The Cover-Up and us. It is there that the painting becomes pointed, becomes active, becomes a weapon wreaking havoc in the world of our own interpretations. And it is there that the painting traps us. For our assumptions are dangerous. Dumas has supplied no information to lead us to the conclusions that result in our own discomfort before the work; it is her deft control of ill visual atmosphere and pure suggestion that seeks out our own moral Achilles Heel.
This realm of the in-between is at once as infinitely powerful as the human imagination (or conscience, even), yet it also illustrates the pitfalls of painting itself. With her skirts lifted above her head, the subject of The Cover-Up is revealing as much as she is covering up. Her face and head and indeed age are all concealed, yet at the cost of her flesh and her pants. And this is true of the picture itself, which manages both to reveal and conceal, to give so much visual information and yet to convey so little real information. The Cover-Up illustrates the ambiguities and pitfalls of painting, of pictures, of visual interpretation. The discrepancy between the original image and the one that we read before us, in short the fallibility of painting, is the very weapon that Dumas uses to illustrate the flaws in communication within the sphere of art, but also within the greater, all-encompassing sphere of the world at large.
The stark light in which the subject (let us assume, despite the danger of assumptions, that this is a 'she') has been illuminated lends a strange and disquieting atmosphere to the painting, implying that there is something sordid and perhaps even criminal about the image. We begin to supply our own details. Is it in a basement? Was the original scene enacted under duress? What is the purpose of the original image? There is a sense of trauma, a suffocating atmosphere of foreboding that, like the picture itself, overwhelms the viewer. Dumas has deliberately placed us in an intensely uncomfortable, compromised position and abandons us there to the world of ambiguities and the world of our own sinister worst-case-scenario associations. With a title that hints at conspiracy and criminality, we cannot help but read awful horrors between the lines, and yet looking at the picture itself, those horrors are completely absent:
"...It's suggestive, it suggests all sorts of narratives, but it doesn't really tell you what's going on at all. Someone said that it feels as if something has happened, in the sense of an after-event, or alternatively that something's going to happen but you don't yet know what it is. It's as if I can make people think they are so close to me - that they believe I've addressed the painting directly to them. I give them a false sense of intimacy. I think the world invites you to have a conversation with it" (Dumas, quoted in B. Bloom, 'Interview', pp. 7-29, D. van den Boogerd, B. Bloom & M. Casadio, Marlene Dumas, London, 1999, p. 12).
The scale of The Cover-Up results in a vast amount of flesh being on display. Regardless of whether it is child flesh or not, there is enough skin on display to make sure that it is an issue. Is this picture a snapshot of a little girl playfully lifting her skirt or is it something darker and more disturbing? This picture, in Dumas' reincarnation, is patently not erotic, and yet deliberately touches upon raw issues of acceptable forms of eroticism, a subject that she has often explored:
"There seems to be an enormous loss of eroticism everywhere. Lots of people in their relationships are too tired to sleep with one another. On the one hand there appears to be an excess of anything goes and on the other, no one gets excited anymore. How can one make an erotic image? What is an intimate image? I get asked 'Why don't you work with a real model, why do you work with a photograph?' In England someone talked about the intimate relation an artist like Lucian Freud has with his models, but I don't want these people in my studio. I want this distance in my work and yet it feels so intimate...The imaginary interests me. Eroticism is when something hasn't yet happened, it's got the possibility and the tension" (Dumas, quoted in G. Jantjes, 'Marlene Dumas in dialogue with Gavin Jantjes', 1996, from the InIVA Digital Archive at www.iniva.org).
The various removes from The Cover-Up's original source photograph add a strange quality of the universal to it, as does the presence of a faceless figure. This could be anyone, and indeed one of the reasons that Dumas repeatedly uses photographs as source images is because they begin to lend a sense of personal reality. The characters depicted in her works hover on the outskirts of our own world of associations. Some are based on images that we may have seen before, faces that we may have seen before, while others, by adopting some of the visual idiom of snapshots or of journalistic photographs, evoke a world that is familiar enough to the viewer that we begin to associate. In The Cover-Up, this effect is made all the stronger by the complete anonymity of this non-specific faceless everyman child. She is designed to remind us of people, to force us to envisage people we know in the strange and sinister situation before us. By portraying someone who is not a part of the artist's own life, who is non-specific already at the point of appropriation and of being rendered in paint, Dumas creates a character that is all the more easily conceived as being from our own personal spheres, that can be hauntingly placed in the realm of our own personal acquaintance.
Bringing the character in The Cover-Up that little bit closer to home, Dumas forces 'the erotic possibility and the tension' into the domain of our own personal associations; the picture gains greater strength, becomes more bitter and more evocative. In this way, Dumas heightens the narrative ambiguity, raising the stakes in the picture, making us all the more aware of the dangerous in-between areas in which it functions. For The Cover-Up functions in the space in-between the child and the viewer and also, most importantly, in the spaces between the source image and the painter, and then between the painter and the viewer. The narrative that we supply happens entirely in the space between The Cover-Up and us. It is there that the painting becomes pointed, becomes active, becomes a weapon wreaking havoc in the world of our own interpretations. And it is there that the painting traps us. For our assumptions are dangerous. Dumas has supplied no information to lead us to the conclusions that result in our own discomfort before the work; it is her deft control of ill visual atmosphere and pure suggestion that seeks out our own moral Achilles Heel.
This realm of the in-between is at once as infinitely powerful as the human imagination (or conscience, even), yet it also illustrates the pitfalls of painting itself. With her skirts lifted above her head, the subject of The Cover-Up is revealing as much as she is covering up. Her face and head and indeed age are all concealed, yet at the cost of her flesh and her pants. And this is true of the picture itself, which manages both to reveal and conceal, to give so much visual information and yet to convey so little real information. The Cover-Up illustrates the ambiguities and pitfalls of painting, of pictures, of visual interpretation. The discrepancy between the original image and the one that we read before us, in short the fallibility of painting, is the very weapon that Dumas uses to illustrate the flaws in communication within the sphere of art, but also within the greater, all-encompassing sphere of the world at large.