[CONVERSATIONS]

‘Who do you think you are? Authorship & Homeland’

I’ve got a membership. Luxury. I feel rich. I walk straight in.

Pristine white walls. Quiet. Everything you would expect from visiting an Art Exhibition.

I start floating between the few that are speaking, whispering. Trying to catch snippets of their conversations. Foreign language. Can’t translate. Walk on…

…French.

Conversation irrelevant; ‘Vans…Puma,’ shoes. I move on.

The array of languages present perhaps reflects Tate as a tourist attraction or Dumas’s internationalism?

‘She’s prolific’

It’s a Saturday. But the space is breathable.

In Room 1 you are faced with Rejects. They look like watercolours but are much more complex than that. Ink, acrylic paint and chalk. Layered too. And pinned directly to the wall.

 

‘How do you sell a work when it has holes in its top corners?’

The alarm goes off. Again. Everyone wants to get a closer look at Rejects. 

‘It’s torn.’

 

I love this show. One room down. Thirteen to go.

‘Once artists get famous, they get a bit lazy…’ The show is structured within a loose chronology. It spans Dumas’s entire career.

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Round #2.

I’ve got a membership. Luxury. I feel rich. I walk straight in.

There’s a tour group. He speaks and it reaches them via earphones. How modern. Tate. The suited crowd, an office outing? can wander as they please and still be a part of the tour. It also mutes the children. It’s half term this time. Dumas, a living artist, made heavy contributions to the show, and this is evident in the wit of the show. Going back to Rejects, for example, an Alsatian is pinned amongst the crowd.

‘It’s very powerful’

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There is so much of Dumas in room 3.  Her written piece Home is where the Heart is is Great. She writes fluently and the wit re-emerges. Attention must be paid to her titles. These ambiguities reassert and change the way we interpret her work.

Home is where the Heart is

My fatherland is South Africa
my mothertongue is Afrikaans
my surname is French.
I don’t speak French.
My mother always wanted me to go to Paris.
She thought Art was French,
because of Picasso.
I thought Art was American,
because of Artforum.
I thought Mondrian was American too.
And that Belgium was a part of Holland.
I live in Amsterdam
and have a Dutch passport.
Sometimes I think I’m not a real artist
because I’m too half -hearted;
and I never quite know where I am.

Marlene Dumas
1994

‘Was race important for her, living in South Africa?’ ‘She didn’t speak the language.’

Room 5 is in line with room 1 and Rejects. It becomes about the ‘aesthetic diversity’, and a viewer claims not all pieces are great, but they work well as a whole.

‘Colour is not a race’

Dumas worked from postcards and (Afro)-American magazines. This was her main way of experiencing culture as TV was banned in South Africa until 1979. She was interested in black portraiture in the 1980s:

In the catalogue an interview by Yuko Hasegawa:

YH: How do you say what you want to say while distancing yourself from such power structures and hierarchies? Why did you make paintings with black people only or others with all women?

MD: Why not? In the famous paintings in Western art history, black people are usually depicted as servants – for example, Manet’s Olympia. There are very few paintings of black people anyway. If the world was truly rid of racism it would not be seen as a strange thing not to see white as the norm.

It was a book that got Dumas started on the Black Drawings 1991-2 – a collection of European photographs that had been used as postcards showing Africa from the beginning of the last century. These photographs showed the way European colonists looked at Africans, how the Western world portrayed the black body – ‘how this has changed…’


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