.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'Three women and me: There was a time when I thought my central subject matter was sorrow. How to depict the sadness of the world and my guilt that I wasn't as sad as them. Now I think I better hurry up and depict joy, before my luck runs out' (Dumas, quoted in Marlene Dumas: Nom de Personne Name no names, exh. cat., Paris 2001, p. 37).
Painted in 1992, The Dance is unusual in Marlene Dumas' oeuvre for the clear optimism that it encapsulates. While the colour tones of this image allow it to retain some of the intense ambiguity that flavours so many of her greatest works, the fact that these white and black girls are holding hands and engaging in a dance is itself a source of celebration. This is a concept reinforced by the implication that Dumas herself may be one of these dancers.
Race has long held a pivotal place for Dumas, in part reflecting her background. Born and raised in South Africa under Apartheid, she was exposed, albeit from the more comfortable side of the fence, to the horrors, both active and passive, of the racist regime. In her pictures, she has long sought to portray the previously underrepresented majority, to give them a voice and a presence that was formerly lacking. In The Dance, this is seen in the fact that the two black girls form an equal part of the miniature parade, linking hands with the two white girls. This is an image of equality, and is made all the more emphatic by its context, by its background, by its being painted by a South African artist who has spoken so often and so openly on issues of race and racism. Her comments on 'white people' are themselves revealing, reflecting both her opinions and the means down even to decisions of palette that she uses in order to convey them through her pictures: 'White people,' says Dumas,
'... don't move too quickly to grey areas. Racism is (still) present tense history (all continents included). White people share a collective guilt that will not be forgiven in our lifetime. No matter how often we say we're sorry; how long we study the past; read and quote the right books; what our individual deeds are. This is our fate. This is the black and white of it' (Dumas, quoted in D. van den Boogerd, B. Bloom & M. Casadio, Marlene Dumas, London 1999, p. 140).
Thus the greys that permeate The Dance are a realm that the girls approach with trepidation. It is a minefield, a zone of unknowns, of hidden or assumed threats, and it is only through the reassurances of their black fellow dancers that the white girls can advance at all.
Dumas is painfully aware of her own ambiguous status, as a female artist in a man's world, as a white South African, as an expatriate, as an Afrikaner with a French surname... And it is this stalking of middlegrounds that has provided her with a unique perspective on issues of gender, race, identity, home, and that makes her works so potent. The grey areas within The Dance are designed to make the viewer all the more conscious of the grey areas that we all inhabit, in which we are all complicit, of which we are all afraid.
Dumas' use of photographic sources for her paintings heightens the viewer's awareness of the artist's position in The Dance. The fact that she uses a combination of found photographs, newspaper cuttings, magazine shots and her own snapshots as the basis for so many of her works adds a strange and disconcerting ambiguity. The viewer can seldom be certain whether a painting has its origins in a 'private' or a 'public' image, whether the photograph that has been used is a document that Dumas has collected, or whether it is a record of her own life. She has used photos of herself, of her family, from her childhood, as well as those of journalists. This mixture of sources lures the viewer into a state of uncertainty, and therefore of heightened awareness. Is this a Benetton ad, an adaptation of a still from The Shining? Certainly the atmosphere shares qualities that relate to both. Or is Dumas one of the girls? Is this a photo from her own childhood, or something that she has culled from some uncertain source? What is most important is the viewer's knowledge that one of these figures could be the artist. And, by using the same mechanism-- the figures with their backs turned to us, the facelessness inviting an Everyman identification-- that features in the most powerful and famous of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, the viewer too is invited to place him- or herself in the shoes of the dancers.
It is intriguing, looking at The Dance, to note not the similarities, but rather the differences between the source image and the resultant painting. For in the original picture, a whole group of children-- black, white, male, female-- are shown outdoors, holding hands in a ring, watched over by an adult. In this painting, though, Dumas has removed many of the figures, isolating a group of four, making them all female, and therefore, by implication, more vulnerable. Instead of the health and play implied by the outdoors scene of the photograph, Dumas has placed her dancing children within a forbidding and foreboding environment, facing a dark and oppressive wall. While the title claims that they are dancing, the viewer cannot help but suspect that they might be holding hands nervously, fearfully, while awaiting some sinister event that is off-screen, but nonetheless, through the atmosphere that Dumas has so deftly conjured, is implied. This appears to be a fragment from a mysterious sequence of events, the rest of which will remain tantalisingly unknown and unknowable. When asked if her work was narrative, Dumas tellingly replied:
'No, 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 et al., loc. cit., 1999, p. 12).
Dumas leaves a lot of the work to the viewer. Her painting deliberately gives only a limited amount of information. The decisions, the marks that she has made on the canvas, the transformation of a photograph into a painting, the editing of the original image... All these conspire to create a work that strikes and haunts the viewer, that dangles information before us and refuses to enlarge or expound, leaving us to work out our own interpretations. And the mystery extends even to the level of mood. The viewer is left uncertain as to whether this is a picture of hope, of fear, of despair, of joy, of celebration, or of some strange, ambiguous and therefore all the more human combination. 'The painting is the secret,' Dumas explained.
'The painting is not a pervert with a raincoat.
It turns its back on you,
and minds its own business' (Dumas, quoted in M. van Niekerk, 'Seven M-blems for Marlene Dumas', pp. 5-23 in Marlene Dumas: Selected Works, New York 2005, p. 18).
Painted in 1992, The Dance is unusual in Marlene Dumas' oeuvre for the clear optimism that it encapsulates. While the colour tones of this image allow it to retain some of the intense ambiguity that flavours so many of her greatest works, the fact that these white and black girls are holding hands and engaging in a dance is itself a source of celebration. This is a concept reinforced by the implication that Dumas herself may be one of these dancers.
Race has long held a pivotal place for Dumas, in part reflecting her background. Born and raised in South Africa under Apartheid, she was exposed, albeit from the more comfortable side of the fence, to the horrors, both active and passive, of the racist regime. In her pictures, she has long sought to portray the previously underrepresented majority, to give them a voice and a presence that was formerly lacking. In The Dance, this is seen in the fact that the two black girls form an equal part of the miniature parade, linking hands with the two white girls. This is an image of equality, and is made all the more emphatic by its context, by its background, by its being painted by a South African artist who has spoken so often and so openly on issues of race and racism. Her comments on 'white people' are themselves revealing, reflecting both her opinions and the means down even to decisions of palette that she uses in order to convey them through her pictures: 'White people,' says Dumas,
'... don't move too quickly to grey areas. Racism is (still) present tense history (all continents included). White people share a collective guilt that will not be forgiven in our lifetime. No matter how often we say we're sorry; how long we study the past; read and quote the right books; what our individual deeds are. This is our fate. This is the black and white of it' (Dumas, quoted in D. van den Boogerd, B. Bloom & M. Casadio, Marlene Dumas, London 1999, p. 140).
Thus the greys that permeate The Dance are a realm that the girls approach with trepidation. It is a minefield, a zone of unknowns, of hidden or assumed threats, and it is only through the reassurances of their black fellow dancers that the white girls can advance at all.
Dumas is painfully aware of her own ambiguous status, as a female artist in a man's world, as a white South African, as an expatriate, as an Afrikaner with a French surname... And it is this stalking of middlegrounds that has provided her with a unique perspective on issues of gender, race, identity, home, and that makes her works so potent. The grey areas within The Dance are designed to make the viewer all the more conscious of the grey areas that we all inhabit, in which we are all complicit, of which we are all afraid.
Dumas' use of photographic sources for her paintings heightens the viewer's awareness of the artist's position in The Dance. The fact that she uses a combination of found photographs, newspaper cuttings, magazine shots and her own snapshots as the basis for so many of her works adds a strange and disconcerting ambiguity. The viewer can seldom be certain whether a painting has its origins in a 'private' or a 'public' image, whether the photograph that has been used is a document that Dumas has collected, or whether it is a record of her own life. She has used photos of herself, of her family, from her childhood, as well as those of journalists. This mixture of sources lures the viewer into a state of uncertainty, and therefore of heightened awareness. Is this a Benetton ad, an adaptation of a still from The Shining? Certainly the atmosphere shares qualities that relate to both. Or is Dumas one of the girls? Is this a photo from her own childhood, or something that she has culled from some uncertain source? What is most important is the viewer's knowledge that one of these figures could be the artist. And, by using the same mechanism-- the figures with their backs turned to us, the facelessness inviting an Everyman identification-- that features in the most powerful and famous of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, the viewer too is invited to place him- or herself in the shoes of the dancers.
It is intriguing, looking at The Dance, to note not the similarities, but rather the differences between the source image and the resultant painting. For in the original picture, a whole group of children-- black, white, male, female-- are shown outdoors, holding hands in a ring, watched over by an adult. In this painting, though, Dumas has removed many of the figures, isolating a group of four, making them all female, and therefore, by implication, more vulnerable. Instead of the health and play implied by the outdoors scene of the photograph, Dumas has placed her dancing children within a forbidding and foreboding environment, facing a dark and oppressive wall. While the title claims that they are dancing, the viewer cannot help but suspect that they might be holding hands nervously, fearfully, while awaiting some sinister event that is off-screen, but nonetheless, through the atmosphere that Dumas has so deftly conjured, is implied. This appears to be a fragment from a mysterious sequence of events, the rest of which will remain tantalisingly unknown and unknowable. When asked if her work was narrative, Dumas tellingly replied:
'No, 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 et al., loc. cit., 1999, p. 12).
Dumas leaves a lot of the work to the viewer. Her painting deliberately gives only a limited amount of information. The decisions, the marks that she has made on the canvas, the transformation of a photograph into a painting, the editing of the original image... All these conspire to create a work that strikes and haunts the viewer, that dangles information before us and refuses to enlarge or expound, leaving us to work out our own interpretations. And the mystery extends even to the level of mood. The viewer is left uncertain as to whether this is a picture of hope, of fear, of despair, of joy, of celebration, or of some strange, ambiguous and therefore all the more human combination. 'The painting is the secret,' Dumas explained.
'The painting is not a pervert with a raincoat.
It turns its back on you,
and minds its own business' (Dumas, quoted in M. van Niekerk, 'Seven M-blems for Marlene Dumas', pp. 5-23 in Marlene Dumas: Selected Works, New York 2005, p. 18).