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
3
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.
7
‘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.
8
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.
9
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
11
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
13
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”
18
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.
19
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.
20
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
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