Forthcoming in Crossings #8, 2006

Gifts and Transgressions: Marlene Dumas’s

Underground

Carol Archer

Well, perhaps I’m so afraid of this building precisely because it’s made

of crystal and it’s eternally indestructible, and because it won’t be

possible to stick one’s tongue out even furtively.

Don’t you see: if it were a chicken coop instead of a palace, and

if it should rain, then perhaps I could crawl into it so as not to get

drenched; but I would still not mistake a chicken coop for a palace out

of gratitude, just because it sheltered me from the rain

—Dostoevsky, Notes from

Underground1

Figure 1. Marlene Dumas, Underground (detail showing twenty panels), 1994-

1995

Underground (1994-5) is a mixed media work on paper

consisting of twenty eight unframed panels, each depicting a

close-up representation of a face, arranged in a grid on the

gallery wall. Seeing this work in London’s Tate Gallery in 1996,

I was immediately struck by its disjunctive appearance. Why is

Underground such an arresting artwork? Almost all of the panels

contain two radically different styles of markmaking. A bold

rainbow-coloured palette jars against the restrained black and

white ink painting that it partially obscures. These contrasts

2

point to a remarkable feature of the piece. Underground combines

child-art with the work of a professional adult artist.

The painting is a collaboration between Marlene Dumas, a

South African born artist (1953-) who has lived in the

Netherlands since 1976, and her then five-year-old daughter,

Helena. The Tate catalogue cites the artist’s account of how the

work came into existence:

Helena decorated, improved and worked on my black and white

drawings, which she found boring, with colour. “It was her

underground.” She worked against me. I allowed her to play with my

drawings so I could do other work. This was not set up as an art

project in the first place. She “recast” my original models into

her own stories. One was kidnapped, she said, and one walked into

a horse.2

Dumas describes the collaborative process in terms of the

child’s subversion of her work, amplifying the resonances of the

title, Underground. The title also refers viewers to the layered

structure of the work. Had Helena been restricted to black media,

her marks would have merged to a more significant extent with

those already laid down by Dumas. As things are, there are only a

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few panels in which Dumas’s work is all but obscured by the

child’s contribution. In the rest, the work of both mother and

daughter can be clearly discerned.

The meta-communicative frame provided by Dumas’s statements

and title encourages the viewer to read the painting in terms of

the relationship between the two grounds, and indeed, the two

artists. The viewer is cued to notice the degree to which the

monochrome layer of painting has been “cast underground” by the

more recent and vivid overlay, the professional artist’s work

eclipsed by that of her daughter.

This paper explores the nature of the collaborative

relationship evidenced by Underground. In the first section, I

offer an historical perspective that places child-art in relation

to “proper” adult art. The second section explores the resonances

of Underground’s two layers, Dumas’s monochrome “foundation layer”

and Helena’s brightly coloured overlay. The third and final

section examines the reciprocities and transgressions which

typify the interaction of the two. It is argued that Underground

questions the ethical values of a contemporary art world that

1 ? Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. and ed. Michael R.

Katz (New York: Norton, 2001), 25. 2 Dumas is cited in Catherine Kinley, “Marlene Dumas.” Marlene Dumas, 2

April – 30 June 1996, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1996), unpaginated.

4

privileges competition, exclusivity and the masterful, unitary

and adult artistic voice.

Child-art and “Proper” Art

The familiar idea that children produce a special kind of

art did not emerge until around the end of the nineteenth

century. The nineteenth century “cult of childhood,” which may be

traced to the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, constructed the

(naturally good) child as antithetical to the corruption of

culture.3 Within a Romantic tradition, with its rejection of

classicizing rules and intellectual constraints, child-art came

to stand for spontaneous, unaffected and above all, natural

expression.

Modernist artists were inspired by child-art for similar

reasons. The category of child-art, like “primitive” art, was

celebrated as an “other” to be appropriated into modern art.

Andrea Walsh notes that artists like Klee, Miro, and Picasso

“revelled in the sensual or emotional qualities of immediacy,

spontaneity, purity, and indeed innocence they felt to be

essential to … the art of non-Western peoples” and children.

3 Claire Golomb, Child Art in Context: A Cultural and Comparative Perspective

(Washington: American Psychological Association, 2002), 117.

5

Select examples of such art were “appropriated for adult use” and

constructed as “antithetical to the calculated art forms from

which modernist artists sought to free themselves”.4 The art of

children, along with that of “primitives”, naïve and psychotic

artists, was also of special interest to Jean Dubuffet and the

Art Brut group. Rejecting the classical and fashionable art,

these artists were inspired by a child-art they conceived as a

pure creative product springing from the inner being.

The case for the complicity of modernist art in the

“othering” of colonized people has been strongly made.5 But the

manner in which children and child-art have been constructed in

relation to western adult norms has been less thoroughly

interrogated. The notion that the art of the child, or anyone

else for that matter, could be utterly original or natural is

problematic. Writing of “outsider art”, for example, David

Maclagan argues that while it is “by definition, anomalous and

exceptional, it does nevertheless arise from a context, or a

number of contexts, that cannot be eliminated from culture”.6

4 Andrea Naomi Walsh, “No Small Work: Anthropology, Art, and

Children,” <http: //www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Inkameep/english/

research/pdf/VMC_NoSmallWork.pdf> (accessed May, 2005), 2.

6

Figure 2. Marlene Dumas, Underground (detail showing four panels), 1994-1995

Yet descriptions of child-art as natural and acultural have

proved persistent in educational discourses. Despite the Romantic

interest in childhood, it was not until the end of the nineteenth

century that artists and educators such as Franz Cizek began to

look seriously at child-art. Cizek began teaching art to children

in 1897 in an area that is now part of the Czech Republic.

However, his method, based on the promotion of “natural

expression”, was inherently contradictory. What he approved as

“natural” were those qualities and forms “already designated as

5 See, for example, the essays in Susan Hiller, ed., The Myth of

Primitivism: perspectives on art (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).6 David Maclagan. 1991. “Outsiders or insiders?” In Susan Hiller,

ibid., 42.

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‘natural’ in his mind”. What’s more, Cizek, a practising artist,

was inevitably influenced by the art of the day, so that Fauve

and Expressionist painting became the unofficial models for child

art.7

Child-art became a repository for adult ideals. Philip

Meeson has argued that in 1920’s Britain, for example, Roger Fry

linked the ideals of freedom, liberty and individualism with

French art, and particularly Post-Impressionism. The claim is

that Fry’s “proselytizing work on behalf of Post-Impressionism”

influenced the teaching of art in the British educational system

until the 1950’s.8 In a similar vein, Christine Stevenson and

Margaret White have argued that the selection of winners in the

International Children’s Art Exhibition held each year in Delhi

from 1949 to the middle of the 1970’s reveals a bias towards

certain, adult-imposed ideals of what constituted child-art.

Stevenson and White report the manner in which the selection of

the winning works was justified in the magazine documenting the

7 Philip Meeson, “In Search of Child Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol.

25, No. 4, Autumn (1985): 365-7. 8 Meeson’s claim is not that British children were deliberately

taught to emulate French art. His more subtle contention is rather that

the ideals which that art was taken to embody were introduced to

children through art education. Ibid., 367.

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1956 competition. The winning works of art showed “a sense of

composition, fluency of line and a sensitive interpretation”

while “paintings done in a very literal naturalistic idiom were

again rejected”.9 The value of child-art was thus determined by

its proximity to a prevailing modernist aesthetic.

In the post WWII context, child-art was a means by which

political idealism could be promoted. Character traits thought to

be common to children across cultures, such as “directness,

honesty, frankness, sincerity … were linked with a pervasive

post-war optimism.” While children’s art was employed in many

exhibitions to promote peace and international co-operation,

little information was offered about the specificity of

particular artworks or the contexts in which they had been made.10

In the 1960’s, however, structuralist thought posed a

challenge to romantic and essentialist conceptions of child-art,

encouraging the analysis of how it works. Stevenson and White

position a recent exhibition of children’s art within a genealogy

that emphasises the communicative and contextual aspects of

9 Cited in Christine Stevenson and Margaret White, “Children’s Art

Exhibitions: their contexts and challenges,” Children’s Environments 12

(3) (1995). <http//www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/12_3/12_3article1.pdf>

(accessed May, 2005), 3. 10 Ibid., 4-5.

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child-art. The Hundred Languages of Children exhibition, which toured

the USA and Australia in the early 1990’s, included works by

children who participated in the Reggio Emilia early childhood

programme in Italy.

Reggio Emilia exhibitions do not frame children’s works of

art as artistic “products”. Instead, child-art is presented as

works-in–process that function in a comparable manner to the

photographic records and audiotapes that are also vital elements

in exhibitions. The inclusion of such materials is intended to

reduce the distance between the art gallery and everyday lived

experience, and to allow visitors an insight into the processes

by which children learn.11 This contrasts sharply to the modernist

tendency to constitute child-art as the “natural” antithesis of

its adult counterpart. Highlighting the role of socio-cultural

factors in the processes of artmaking, such exhibitions present

the art of children as part of ongoing dialogues with other

children and adults.

11 Ibid., 6.

10

Figure 3. Marlene Dumas, Underground (detail showing four panels), 1994-1995

A layered dialogue

Dumas’s statements foreground the contexts and processes

which generated Underground. Viewers are reminded of Helena’s

status as the less powerful, but far from impotent, partner in

the project. Dumas tells an interviewer that Helena refused a

second opportunity to collaborate artistically with her,

intimating that this activity, once it became patently non-

transgressive, lost its appeal.12 The artist’s statements

encourage viewers to read the work not merely as a dialogue, but

also as a power struggle: “‘It was her underground’. She worked

against me”. Helena found her mother’s works “boring,” Dumas

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reports, and reinscribed the faces with new stories: “One was

kidnapped, she said, and one walked into a horse”.13

Another quotation from Helena accompanies one of the

boldly reworked panels reproduced in the Marlene Dumas: wet dreams.

watercolours book. Dumas’s ink painting disappears under Pollockesque

blood-red splatters. On the forehead of the depicted face, an

idiosyncratic black and red trail emerges from a large area of

red pigment. The reference to blood and wounding is plain, and

underlined by the quotation which reads: “Helena said: ‘It’s

easier to draw sick people. You give them a wound, you make them

cry, and then you give them a band-aid’”.14

Underground is thus contextualised as a process that

occurred between an adult and a child, and the viewer is invited

to read the work from the child’s perspective. As one scans the

panels of Underground one finds other faces to which Helena’s

band-aid comment might equally have referred (fig. 1). A green

12 Dumas reports: “Helena enjoyed working (as if applying make-up) on

top of my drawings, because she was never allowed to do so. When later

she was asked to repeat this action again, she said ‘no’”. In Thomas

Knubben and Tilman Osterwold, eds., Marlene Dumas: wet dreams. watercolors

(Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, Städtische Galerie Ravensburg, 2003), 82.13 Dumas is cited in Catherine Kinley, unpaginated.14 Thomas Knubben and Tilman Osterwold, eds., Marlene Dumas: wet dreams.

watercolors, 127.

12

band-aid is painted on the forehead of one Japanese-looking face,

and twin trails of green “blood” appear to descend from it. And

the two rectangles that appear beneath the eyes of a turquoise

and pink “masked” face invite the same interpretation.

This wound-and-bandaid iconography may be located within a

broader preoccupation with the fluids that can emerge from faces.

The face that bears the green wound also appears to cry green

tears. In addition, a yellow trail of dots issues from the nose

and bypasses the corner of the mouth, indicating mucous and

perhaps saliva. A large red patch on the forehead of a somewhat

Gauguinesque face appears to be the source of drops of blood,

while blue tears stream from both eyes down to the chin. And an

African-looking face also appears to cry blue tears, while a

rather unformed young-looking dial (with startling red eye

“whites”) features a cluster of lilac dots below the nose (fig.

1). On another panel, tears are expressed as a bordered area of

circles that extend downwards from one eye. Cobalt blue-filled

circles give way to a row or two of “outline” circles and then to

a pattern of rectilinear marks which suggest both ladders and

variations on the letters H and A, the child’s initials (fig. 3).

The technical and representational possibilities of dots and

spots are explored in a number of other panels. On one face a

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scatter of pink dots across the nose and cheeks suggest freckles

while on several others large pink and red spots appear to

signify cheeks. On the Gauginesque face, red spots invite

interpretation as pimples, measles, freckles and blood. The

Pollockesque face already mentioned, and another face which is

covered in red and blue splashes of pigments, evidence another

means of arriving at a “spotty” effect. A sequence of small

circles that emanate upwards from the right eye of the

aforementioned African-looking face, leading to a flower-filled

“thought-bubble”, attest to the child’s familiarity with the

language of cartoons and animation (fig. 1). Scarlet measles,

acne and/or polka-dot imagery is most fully articulated on a face

(fig. 2) that also sports red lashes and a wide smile (along with

three small handprints across the forehead). This face also

features a large red dot between the eyes (a caste-mark?) and a

semi-transparent brown spot which appears to emanate from the

right nostril. Is this an especially abject variation on the

mucous theme or a nose-ring gone wrong?

Jewellery and “make-up” abound in Helena’s layer of

Underground. One face has been adorned with matching floral

earrings, hair slides and a headband, all in hues that harmonize

with the mauve of the “lipstick” and the third eye/caste mark at

14

the forehead. A bright red floral choker at the neck matches the

spots that cover the lower part of the face (fig. 1). A panel

such as this flies in the face, as it were, of conceptions of

child-art as acultural.

In ways that a five-year old child could not have fully

understood, Helena’s contribution to Underground is refreshingly

silly, rude, excessive and irreverent. All of the faces she has

touched have become stranger as a consequence. Before evaluating

what is at stake in the relationship between the two layers of

the work, I want to look separately at the resonances of Dumas’s

contribution.

The portraits in Dumas’s black and white “foundation layer”

are highly allusive. While the majority appear to reference young

female adults, a range of racial backgrounds — Asian, European

and African — is represented. Like the Gauginesque model, many of

the faces appear familiar. One face bears a strong resemblance to

fashion model, Naomi Campbell. Another, with her upward glance,

is reminiscent of Saint Teresa. Perhaps the source material for

this face derived from a painting by an “old master” or a

photograph of an inmate of a nineteenth century mental

institution.15 The artist’s statements support these speculations.

Writing of her 1994 Models series, Dumas remarks that her “source

15

material has crossed many centuries”. She adds that she likes to

“travel in time, to tear out pictures and make them mine, to take

other people’s muses and make them mine” so that the “spirit of

their former masters and mistresses still linger among them”.16

The gridded arrangement of the panels on the wall calls to

mind the institutional photography of identity cards and prisons.

Most heads conform to the frontal or profile angle of the mug-

shot. While the grid format draws attention to the differences

between faces, as Dominic van den Boogerd notes, “one can hardly

speak of unique portraits of separate individuals”.17 Ernst van

Alphen’s observation, made with reference to Dumas’s Models

15 Dumas’s ongoing interest in the photographic image of Naomi

Campbell is evidenced by a series of large paintings exhibited at the

Venice Biennale in 1995. Both the Campbell portrait and the face

reminiscent of Saint Teresa may be found in Thomas Knubben and Tilman

Osterwold, eds., Marlene Dumas. wet dreams. watercolors, 90.16 Dumas is cited in Jessica Morgan (ed.), Marlene Dumas: One Hundred

Models and Endless Rejects (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art and

Osterfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 29. 17 Dominic van den Boogerd makes this comment with reference to a

number of Dumas’s other works (“One hundred and eleven black faces, 100

models, twenty four languishing lovers”) but it is just as relevant to

the black and white layer of Underground before Helena’s intervention.

“Hang-ups and Hangovers in the Work of Marlene Dumas” in Dominic van den

Boogerd, Barbara Bloom and Mariuccia Casadio, Marlene Dumas (London:

Phaidon, 1999), 68.

16

series, is also pertinent to the faces in Dumas’s layer of

Undergound. He points out that “the portrayed figures are not

endowed with subjectivity in terms of original presence, but they

acquire it in relation to one another”.18

The cropped monochromatic faces of Dumas’ “foundation layer”

of Underground, also borrow from photography its “what has been”

quality. Roland Barthes proposes that the “photograph does not

call up the past” nor “restore what has been abolished (by time,

by distance)” but attests “that what I see has indeed existed”.19

For Susan Sontag, too, the photograph provides evidence of the

reality of the past. It is “a trace, something directly

stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask”, a

“material vestige of its subject in a way that a painting cannot

be”.20

Dumas’s works, however, demonstrate that paintings that

reference photography can also generate a “what has been”

quality. Even when a panel depicts a person who definitively

belongs, like Naomi Campbell, to the contemporary era, Dumas’s

black and white photographic-style rendition imbues it with a 18 Ibid., 68.19 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by

Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 82.20 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor, 1977), 154.

17

diffuse sense of loss and “pastness.” The subjectivity of the

portrayed faces, already downplayed by their arrangement in a

depersonalising but egalitarian grid, is further undermined by

their association with another era.

If one attempts, for the moment, to see past Helena’s

overlay to the expressions on the faces in Dumas’s foundation

layer of Underground, what emotions can be discerned? Most of the

faces appear to have somewhat blank or vacant looks. In some

panels slight smiles or frowns are evident in the original

monochromatic layer. Two African faces look glum and worried, and

the expression on the face I linked to Saint Teresa evokes a

somewhat dilute form of ecstasy (figs. 2 and 3).

What emerges from this brief survey is that the faces in

Underground, as presented by Dumas, exhibit a low-key affective

range and a sense of “pastness”. Dumas’s layer of Underground

invokes the levelling effects of time and mortality, sharing with

Christian Boltanski’s haunting photographic installations, a

quality that van Alphen has called the “holocaust-effect”. 21 If

works that evoke the “holocaust-effect” remind us of “pictures of

survivors of the holocaust just after they were released”, van

Alphen stresses that this is not the result of artists directly

referencing such images. Indeed, he links the “holocaust effect”

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in Dumas’s 1987 group portrait The Teacher (sub a) to Dumas’s

experience of an apartheid culture that “fixed identities on the

basis of the most superficial exteriority”.22 Such works

destabilise standard definitions of portraiture because the faces

they depict have become “exchangeable”, evoking anonymity and an

“absence of ‘presence’”. Such faces appear “almost dead”, van

Alphen writes, and this generates a second kind of absence — the

lack of a “referent outside the image”.23

If the faces depicted in the black-and-white layer of

Underground are leached of individuality and presence, the manner

in which the position of enunciation is occupied in the work is

similarly downplayed.24 The traces of the artist are haunted by

the ghosts of other pictures, other reproductions, and other

artists. The notion of the singular artist is destabilized.

Moreover, the manner in which the position of enunciation is

occupied here points not to mastery, but rather to the limits of

21 Ernst van Alphen, “The portrait’s dispersal: concepts of

representation and subjectivity in contemporary portraiture” in Joanna

Woodall (ed.), Portraiture: facing the subject (Manchester and New York:

Manchester University Press, 1997). Van Alphen notes that Boltanski has

never used such pictures, and has rarely used images of Jewish children.

248.22 ? Ibid., 251, 252.23 ? Ibid., 248.

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representation. To the extent that it can be defined as

portraiture, Underground might be expected to memorialise or bring

viewers close to the subjects it portrays. Instead, the

“holocaust-effect” produced by the Underground underlines the

work’s limited ability to make those subjects present.25

Despite its photographic resonances, Dumas’ layer of

Underground is painterly. Yet, the ink has been applied in a way

that emphasizes, rather than obscures, “accidents” which are part

and parcel of making (rather than taking) pictures. One notes,

for example, “corrections” to the line of the chin of the

“glitter-bearded” and the Gauguinesque faces, and the drips which

extend from the lower parts of a face adorned with coloured-in

hand motifs (fig. 1). Other panels reveal the manner in which

concentrated ink spreads on wet paper. Even before Helena’s layer

of the work is taken into account, then, the notion of the artist

24 My use of this phrase is informed a distinction made by Elizabeth

Grosz between the author “in real life” and the traces of the author

that appear in the text. Drawing on Emil Beneveniste’s work, Grosz

argues that a defining condition for the feminist text is that it

evidences a manner of occupying the position of enunciation that departs

from masculinist norms. See the essay titled “Sexual Signatures:

Feminism After the Death of the Author” in Elizabeth Grosz, ed., Space,

Time and Perversion: essays on the politics of bodies (London and New York: Routledge,

1995).25 ? Ibid., 248.

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as the singular and masterful creator of the work of art has been

unsettled.

In summary, then, what are the salient features and

qualities that each layer of the collaboration brings to the work?

The traces of the artist in the black and white layer of

Underground are understated. The position of enunciation is

occupied in a manner that draws attention to the limits of

artistic mastery and the inherently social nature of the artistic

voice. The faces in Dumas’s foundation layer of Underground evoke

depleted subjectivity and absence, qualities that distance them

from the here-and-now world, and the sympathies, of the beholder.

Helena’s layer of Underground, on the other hand, employs a

bright and varied palette, lending the work a playful and

cheerful ambience. If the faces in Dumas’s original layer of the

painting are distant, Helena’s interventions make them present to

the viewer in a visceral and determinate manner. Mucous and

tears, wounds, blood, measles and band-aids, along with

definitive signs of emotion, propose figures who, if not

necessarily happy or well, are very much alive. Classic frowns,

rendered in red, have been added to both the Gauguinesque face

and the glitter-bearded girl, while the outlining of the mouth of

one African face (fig. 3) adds a determined set to that face that

21

one doubts was present in Dumas’s original rendering of it. The

purple mohawk on the aforementioned portrait, and the addition of

prominent jewellery and garish makeup, functions to emphasise the

contemporaneity of the reworked faces. If some of them look

strange and even grotesque, their difference from each other is

no longer at issue.

Which brings me to a final area of comparison between the

two layers of Underground: what does the coloured layer of the work

reveal about the manner in which the position of enunciation has

been occupied? An unsophisticated artistic presence in the work

is indexed by the preoccupation with spots, decoration, the

exaggeration of salient facial features and the to-and-fro style

of colouring that appears on a number of panels. At the same

time, however, some panels evidence marks reminiscent of fauvism,

expressionism and abstract expressionism. And the bold and

colourful “signatures” that emanate from the mouths of two of the

faces could be read as a reflexive gesture. If a painting always

presents the painter, as well as what it depicts, these two

panels name names (fig. 1).

Expressionist markmaking and reflexive gestures aside,

Helena’s layer of the work indexes a relatively rudimentary level

of skill when measured against Dumas’s layer of Underground. But of

22

course such a comparison is patently unjust. This is the work of

a real five-year-old child, not an avant-garde artist emulating

one, and viewed within the frame of child-art, the great variety,

subtlety and experimentation of Helena’s markmaking comes to the

fore. Even if Dumas had not supplied quotes from Helena and

detailed the process by which Underground was generated, I suspect

that few viewers would fail to realise that the work involved

collaboration with a child.

This work gives the oft-repeated phrase, “a child could do

that,” fresh significance. Underground allows the viewer to

compare what a child actually did with what an adult did,

challenging her to decide, given the child-art component, how to

evaluate the work. Perhaps the viewer who identifies Underground as

having been partially done by a child would prefer to see the

whole work cast out of the privileged cultural zone of the

gallery of contemporary art. Or, at least, to see it located in a

more suitable place — in an exhibition specifically dedicated to

child-art. Alternatively, she might read Underground as “serious

art”, the complexity and subtlety of which is only enhanced by

the clever addition of a screen of childish “noise.” The ideal

gallery-goer and scholar, on this view, would be one canny enough

23

to look beyond that “noise”, while appreciating its value as an

audacious stunt.

Or, as I have done in the preceding paragraphs, the viewer

might attempt to take both the child-art and the “proper” art

layers of Underground as semantically productive components of the

work, and begin to explore the relationship between the two.

However my own strategy up till now, unlike the two approaches I

have just now set up as straw dogs, has not attempted to come to

grips with the differing levels of value and artistic legitimacy

which each of the two layers, considered separately, would be

attributed within the contemporary art-world. Until this issue is

addressed, conclusions about what the work means cannot be drawn.

What is at stake is whether, given prevailing norms, it is

legitimate to take the topmost layer of the work seriously at

all. In the concluding section of the paper, then, I want to

further explore the relation between the child-art and the

“proper” art layers of Underground, locating that dialogue in

relation to contemporary art-world norms.

Gifts and carnival ambivalence

24

The two layers of Underground may be characterised as an

artistic gift exchange. In colloquial usage, the word “gift” is

used to mean something which is given rather than exchanged. But

in his influential work titled The Gift, Marcel Mauss demonstrates

that gifts also entail obligations — to give, to receive and to

reciprocate.26 According to Mauss, gift-giving entails a gain in

the prestige of the giver. If the accumulation of wealth is a

characteristic feature of capitalist societies, expenditure and

giving are the defining feature of societies of the gift. Gift

economies are thus primarily relational, and all kinds of things,

from people to services to favours, may be drawn into the system.

Yet gift culture has ongoing social significance within

modern capitalist societies, albeit in reduced forms. In her

study of gift culture in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Davis

claims that despite differences in the styles and prevalence of

gift exchange across cultures and in particular historical eras,

it has remained a significant “relational mode”:

Though there are big shifts in systems of gift and exchange over

time, there is no universal pattern of evolutionary stages, where

26 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies,

trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen & West, 1954).

25

a total gift economy dwindles to occasional presents. Rather, gift

exchange persists as an essential relational mode, a repertoire of

behavior, a register with its own rules, language, etiquette, and

gestures. The gift mode may expand or shrink somewhat in a given

period, but it never loses significance.27

How does the relationship between the two layers of

Underground constitute a gift economy? Dumas’s statements frame the

work, from the outset, as a familial gift exchange: “I allowed

her to play with my drawings so I could do other work. This was

not set up as an art project in the first place”.28 And, according

to Dumas, Helena was aware that she had received something

special: she “enjoyed working … on top of my drawings, because

she was never allowed to do so”.29

But this gift is no longer a private affair between a mother

and her daughter. The pragmatic motivation for the gift, Helena’s

reported response, and of course the finished work, are all

discourses that exist in the public sphere of contemporary art.

So how does the beholder of Underground read Dumas’s gift to

27 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison:

University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 9. 28 Dumas is cited in Catherine Kinley, unpaginated.29 Dumas is cited in Thomas Knubben and Tilman Osterwold, 82.

26

Helena? To answer this question I will return to the two (straw

dog) viewers I hypothesised in the previous section, both of whom

were unwilling to engage seriously with the child-art component

in Underground.

How would the viewer who would banish child-art from the

mainstream contemporary gallery read the gift implicit in the

work? A lapse of judgement? A case of parental pride clouding the

perception of merit? She might argue that the work is a

fundamentally misguided attempt to blend the public and the

private — a special exchange between a mother and a daughter,

perhaps, but not something to flaunt in the “serious” world of

contemporary art.

My second hypothetical viewer, it will be recalled, can

tolerate the child-art layer in Underground but is unwilling to

engage with its contribution to the overall meaning of the work.

Antithetical to the prevailing norms of the contemporary art

scene, it is construed as “noise” that adorns or interrupts the

proper work without contributing substantially to its content. On

this view, Dumas’s gift to Helena amounts to the partial

sacrifice of her own art to child-art. And the gift Helena’s work

offers to her mother’s layer of the painting lies in its

capacity, like the minimal drapery that enhances the nude, to

27

emphasize the preciousness of that which it partially eclipses.

Helena’s gift is thus construed, in terms recalling Jacques

Derrida’s parergon, as a supplement which is neither truly part of

the “proper work” nor yet detachable from it.30

The parergon, in Immanuel Kant’s formulation of the term, may

take the form of the frame around a painting, the drapery on a

statue, the columns that adorn a building or the text that

precedes or follows the “proper work”.31 But despite its status as

an “add on” element, Derrida’s claim is that the parergon performs

a crucial role. It structures the work from the margins.32 From

this point of view, Helena’s gift to the work does more than

highlight, through an unfair (as well as odious) comparison, the

merits of her mother’s work. If Derrida is right in asserting

that the parergon always compensates for a lack in the “proper

30 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian

McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 56.31 ? Immanuel Kant, “The Critique of Judgement.” In Vol. 42 of Great

Books of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 486.32 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 54-61. More precisely, Helena’s

layer of the painting structures the work from that part of the “frame”

that Louis Marin has called the “field of representation” in his essay

“The Frame of Representation and Some of Its Figures.” In Paul Duro,

ed., The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80-81.

28

work,” the child-art layer contributes something vital and

constitutive to Underground.

What lack in Dumas’s original pieces might be offset by the

addition of Helena’s overlay? Dumas’s observation that her

daughter found those works “boring” provides a clue. Monochrome

portrait heads were already an artistic staple for Dumas by the

time Underground was produced. Chlorosis (1994), the Models series of

one hundred drawings (1994) and the ongoing, and open-ended

series titled Rejects (1994-), are all works of art that consist of

large numbers of monochrome portrait heads. A gift inherent in

Helena’s contribution to Underground, then, and one that is

comprehensible even to the viewer who is unwilling to engage with

its artistic specificity, is the novelty it brings to Dumas’s

standard fare.

Children are typically encouraged to give their artworks to

adults, rather than to exchange them for money on the open

market, and one assumes Helena’s work on Underground was no

exception. Dumas, on the other hand, sells much of her work, and

by the standards of the capitalist art market, is highly

successful. Described as the “auction darling” of 2004, her works

have commanded prices upwards of a million U.S. dollars.33 Yet

Dumas has risked the value of this work by allowing her

29

daughter’s intervention. Indeed, the artist has foregone the

opportunity of putting this particular work on the market at all

— it remains in the artist’s own collection.

The status of Dumas’s art as eminently saleable merchandise

does not appear to play a significant role in the relationship

between the two layers of Underground. Instead the work evidences

an experimental and welcoming orientation towards the artistic

interventions of the child. The fact that Dumas has not added a

third layer to the work, arrogating the final word to herself, is

further evidence of the generosity of the gift to her daughter.

Nonetheless, borrowing Mauss’ terms, there are certain kinds

of prestige or honour that accrue to the artist as a consequence

of this gift. This sharing of artistic control with a child

amounts to an artistic innovation. It also indicates that the

artist is neither “precious” about her art, nor overly concerned

with the material rewards it brings. In these senses, Underground

33 Richard Polsky, writing for the internet-based Artnet magazine in

2004, described Dumas as “this year's auction darling.” He noted that

“veteran auction watchers” were amazed by the “outrageous prices”,

sometimes upwards of a million dollars, that “good” Dumas paintings

could command — a situation Polsky forecast was set to continue into

2005. “Art Market Guide 2004”, Artnet Magazine,

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/polsky/polsky12-23-04.asp

(accessed May, 2005).

30

does not represent a significant departure from the norms of

avant-garde art. As Pierre Bourdieu notes, the art world

resembles an inversion of the ordinary economic world. In this

game of “loser wins”, the accumulation of profits, the

achievement of honours and the approval of cultural institutions

are not necessarily considered virtues.34

Even as Underground represents an instance of gift-giving

which potentially enhances Dumas’s prestige, it is a work of art

that entails respect for the integrity and specificity of the

child’s work. This gift means that Helena’s art appears in

“proper” contemporary galleries and is reproduced in high-status

publications. Dumas has written her daughter into her “artistic

passport”, as it were, allowing the art of the child into

territories that would otherwise be off-limits. If Helena chooses

to become an artist, her career should be off to a flying start,

since she has already participated in the contemporary art scene

at an uncommonly early age. Of course, the full value of this

aspect of Dumas’s gift would likely have been lost on its young

recipient. It would not however have escaped the notice of many a

34 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson

(Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 39.

31

practising artist, only too aware of the fiercely competitive and

elitist ethos that prevails in their field.

Dumas’s highly referential layer of Underground is laden with

what Bourdieu has called “cultural capital.” He argues that a

“work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who

possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which

it is encoded”.35 This code, or cultural capital, “equips the

social agent with empathy towards, appreciation for or competence

in deciphering cultural relations and cultural artefacts”.36 The

boldness of Dumas’s gesture, in including Helena’s work within

her own, may be read as a sign of the “precocity” which Bourdieu

locates as “an effect of seniority” with regard to “legitimate

culture”.37 But does Dumas’s relatively secure position in the

contemporary art world really mean that she can single-handedly

offer a place in that world to her daughter?

Bourdieu’s conception of the “field of art” is useful here.

It has been described as a “radical contextualization” because it

35 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 2.36 Randal Johnson, “Editor’s Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu on Art,

Literature and Culture” in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production,

(Cambridge: Polity, 1993), 7.37 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste, 70.

32

theorises the complex relations between artworks, artistic

producers and audiences, and the individuals and institutions

that legitimate cultural products.38 According to Bourdieu, the

“field of art,” in this late stage of its historical development,

has become elastic enough even to assimilate naïve artists such

as Henri Rousseau — but only under certain conditions. Rousseau

could be incorporated into the field because he was “reinvented”

by existing members of that field. However, even when such an

artist is allowed entry to the field, Bourdieu claims, he will

never achieve the position within it of an “ideal-typical”

painter such as Duchamp. While the latter was “born into a family

of painters, the younger brother of painters, [and] has all the

tricks of the trade at his fingertips,” Rousseau “does not know

what he does, because he knows nothing of the field he stumbles

into, of which he is the plaything”. The latter does not possess

“the whole history of the field,” although he may be “‘created’

as a legitimate producer” by his artist friends.39 For Bourdieu,

the “limiting case” for the field of art is constituted by works

38 For a cogent summary of the Bourdieu’s notion of the “field of

art” see Randal Johnson’s “Editor’s Introduction”. In Pierre Bourdieu,

The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993),

9.39 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 61.

33

which have “no recognized producer, raw art (of naïfs, madmen,

children, etc.)” and which are “entirely ‘produced’ by a sort of

impresario (e.g. Dubuffet)”.40

Helena’s work, despite the fact that her contribution is

named, is not independently recognised by the field and her

contribution has indeed been “produced” by Dumas. It is a foreign

element that has been smuggled past the cultural border-guards,

as it were, by virtue of Dumas’s unassailable credentials. Part

of the gift of Helena’s artistic input to the collaboration,

then, is that it provides a visual means of unsettling the

judgements of legitimacy and value that prevail in the

contemporary art-world. Helena’s work allows Underground to

undermine the current borders of that field by flaunting a

successful instance of infiltration by an outsider — something

that Dumas, a recognised “insider”, could not have accomplished

alone.

The notion of gift-culture provides a means of

understanding the personal and political reciprocities which

inhere in the relationship between the child-art and the “proper”

art layers of Underground. The two layers of this work of art are

the site of an exchange of gifts between a mother and her

40 Ibid., 275.

34

daughter. But this is a gift-culture that refuses to submit to

the rules of the contemporary art-world. It entails the granting

of a “head-start” in the contemporary art world to one’s kin, and

the partial elision “legitimate” art by the work of a child. And

what’s more, a mother and daughter dialogue has been inserted into

the enunciative position normatively occupied by a lone masculine

voice.

This work of art invites the scholar to take a brief

vacation from solemnity. After teasing out the issues of

mortality and depleted individuality raised by the monochrome

layer of Underground, it is refreshing to find oneself counting

Helena’s runny noses. The humour and irreverence of Underground is

located in the relationship between the two, very different,

layers. If Helena’s contribution may be understood as a parergon

which brings freshness and novelty, it also performs a satirical

function, rendering Dumas’s layer of the work somewhat stale and

frozen.

The humour implicit in Helena’s transformation of Dumas’s

work finds a parallel in Duchamp’s addition of a moustache to the

face of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. This audacious gesture challenges

the authority of the canon. Making one’s mark, establishing one’s

own art as different to, and ahead of, that produced by other

35

members of the field is, for Bourdieu, a key feature of its

history: “The history of the field arises from the struggle

between established figures and young challengers”.41 Helena’s

“mark” is all the more cheeky because, unlike Duchamp’s, it

resists assimilation into the field of “serious” art.

It is appropriate, then, to invoke Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion

of carnival at this point because it theorises moments during

which “life came out of its usual legalized and consecrated

furrows and entered the sphere of utopian freedom”.42 During

carnivals, Bakhtin asserts, the hierarchies which pertain in

everyday life are overturned in favour of a new set of laws to

which officialdom, along with everyone else, is subjected.

Bakhtin locates in both Rabelais’s writing and the popular-

cultural forms contemporary to him “an attitude in which the

high, the elevated, the official, even the sacred, is degraded

and debased”.43 This is a suggestive notion with regard to the two

layers of Underground because they document a suspension, and

indeed a reversal, of the normal hierarchies which structure the

41 Ibid, 60.42 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by H. Iswolsky

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 89.43 Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: an introductory reader (London and New

York: Routledge, 1995), 68.

36

relationships between mother and daughter, “proper” art and

child-art.

What is more, the transformation effected by Helena’s layer

of Underground shifts the faces in question from the classic to the

grotesque. Bakhtin’s classic body is one where all that

“protrudes, bulges, sprouts or branches off … is eliminated,

hidden, or moderated.” It is an “individual, strictly limited

mass”, with all of its orifices closed and its façade made

“impenetrable.”44 The monochromatic faces rendered by Dumas, with

their subdued moods, implicit “pastness” and photographic

flatness, appear “sealed off” in a psychological, as well as a

physical, sense.

Helena’s work, however, opens up those faces. They are made

to leak mucous and tears and blood. Many have spots and wounds,

prominent and strangely-shaped features and alarmingly-coloured

eyes. Bakhtin’s notion of grotesque realism involves just such a

degradation of the classical: “the lowering of all that is high,

spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is the transfer to the material

level, to the sphere of the earth and body in their indissoluble

unity”.45

44 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 320. 45 Ibid., 19-20.

37

Helena’s artistic intervention is carnivalesque in that it

honours inventive freedom and departs sharply from the

established truths of serious portraiture. The addition of

grotesque elements to Dumas’ faces typifies Bakhtin’s “carnival

spirit” because it catapults the senior artist’s sombre and

historically-resonant “foundation layer” into uncharted artistic

territory.

The masks and clownish make-up which feature in a number of

panels constitute an additional carnivalesque feature of

Underground. In the eighteenth century, the mask was associated

with hypocrisy and the inauthentic. For Bakhtin, however, masks

and clown figures are “connected with the joy of change and

reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of

uniformity and similarity”.46 The mask is associated with

“transition, metamorphosis, the violation of natural boundaries”

as well as “mockery and familiar nicknames”. 47 And because it

both covers up and distorts its object, it makes contradiction

salient.

The humour in Underground’s reversal of artistic and familial

hierarchies has a carnivalesque dimension because it is

46 Ibid., 39.47 Ibid., 40.

38

ambivalent, rather than simply parodic or ironical. The work is

structured according to “the qualitative logic of ambivalence,

where the actor is also the spectator, destruction gives rise to

creativity, and death is equivalent to rebirth” rather than “the

true or false, quantitative and causal logic of science and

seriousness”.48 Helena’s transformative layer of Underground buries

her mother’s painting, even as it revitalises it. And this

ambivalent gift is playfully delivered in the non-official idiom

of the child-artist — a person whom Bourdieu might describe as

the “plaything of the field” par excellence.

The gift exchange that inheres in the two layers of

Underground implies a non-hierarchical and participatory process

that has taken place between a mother and a daughter. Dumas’s

gift to Helena, first and foremost, is that she makes space in

her work for genuine artistic dialogue.

The dual manner of occupying the position of enunciation in

Underground calls to mind the heterogeneous language that Bakhtin

associates with the novelistic genre. In Underground, however, the

use of “now one language, now another”, the “verbal give-and-

48 John Lechte is drawing here on Julia Kristeva’s work on carnival

ambivalence. In Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: from structuralism to postmodernity.

(London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 8.

39

take” and the “dialogue of languages at every point in [the]

work” is a “quarrel” that implicates two distinct artistic

presences.49

However, Underground’s “quarrel”, and more specifically

Helena’s contribution to it, becomes disturbing to the extent

that one takes into account the depleted presence of the faces —

mostly non-white, non-masculine others — that it partially

buries.50 Viewed in relation to Dumas’s subject matter, Helena’s

carnivalesque work on Underground, has a somewhat sinister

quality. The child’s contribution has however been “framed,” in

the sense of “a set-up”.

49 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: four essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans.

Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,

1981), 314.50 ? In this respect, Underground is reminiscent of the repeated

superimposition of the golden-haired Margarete over the ashen Shulamith

in Paul Celan’s famous poem, “Fugue of Death”: he hunts us down with his dogs in the sky he gives us a

grave

he plays with the serpents and dreams death comes as a

master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamith

Paul Celan, Selected Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger and

Christopher Middleton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 33-34.

40

According to van Alphen, Underground amounts to “an embrace

of mother and daughter.” Dumas has allowed “an invasion of

individual artistry”, surrendering “her unique status as an

artist”, he claims, and “since it is her own daughter, this act …

can only be seen as an act of love”.51 Yet if Helena’s

contribution to Underground appears less than innocent in relation

to the subjects the black and white layer of the work portrays,

it should be remembered that the child’s work has been “produced”

by the senior artist. The innocence and disinterestedness of the

maternal gift, in turn, is called into question.

This deeply ambivalent work of art foregrounds process over

product and playful dialogue over univocal mastery. Recalling

Adorno’s claim that it is the constitutively disjunctive work

that stands the best chance of achieving a measure of autonomy

from the reified conditions from which it emerges, might

Underground be understood as the site of a utopic glimmer?

It has been demonstrated that the artistic voice posited by

Underground is neither unitary, masculine nor exclusively adult.

The painting underlines the limits of artistic mastery. If

Underground is the site of a gift-exchange between a mother and 51 ? Ernst van Alpen, “Facing defacement”. In Ernst van Alphen, Art in

Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (Chicago and London: University of

Chicago Press, 2005), 148.

41

daughter, the work also records familial, artistic and

representational acts of transgression.

Yet, Underground is also a humorous work. How seriously,

then, should its gifts and transgressions be taken? If carnival,

on Bakhtin’s view, is “a second life of the people, who for a

time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality,

and abundance”, it is also characterised as a very temporary

departure from the structures that usually regulate ordinary

life. Perhaps a carnivalesque work such as Underground merely

reinforces prevailing norms by providing momentary relief from

them, along the lines of the safety valve. Against this, however,

John Lechte notes that carnival “is never serious unless we

understand that to refuse to give seriousness absolute power is a

serious matter”.52 The competing layers which make up Underground

unsettle the norms of the contemporary art world. A site of

lively, and eminently inventive play, Underground is a work that

goes some way towards sacrificing the “what is” in favour of the

“what is possible.”

52 John Lechte, 9.

42

Notes

43