South African Art Now

MINNETTE VÁRI

In the late 1970s Coloured activist Allan Boesak, addressing a largely white audience at a political meeting at the University of Cape Town, listed the ways in which whites were advantaged over all other races. As a member of the audience, I stood up and protested that I regarded legislation that gave me rights as a white over other races not a privilege but a burden. Laughing, Boesak replied that whether I wanted those privileges or not, I had them.

And it was true. I lived in a white neighborhood and my children were in white schools, to name only two instances. Like it or not, I was complicit in the system.

This question of the complicity conferred on the owners of white skins—and the onus on them to apologize to the larger black population for the dehumanizing crimes of apartheid—is one that continues to be debated in the press. Artists, too, have been attempting to grapple with this history, a continuing theme in the work of Pretoria-born artist Minnette Vári.

Her black-and-white video Alien was made in 1998. Appearing naked and with her head shaved in the manner of a collaborator publicly exposed or a penitent, Vári acted out the actions of people seen in international TV news segments about South Africa. She emerges from a jail with arm raised, becomes part of a police action, visits a nature reserve as a tourist in a minibus, attends a conference, beats a drum. Her performances were then morphed digitally into the original clips that aired on TV news programs. But as her movements had not exactly duplicated the originals, her face and body twist and distort in angry and disturbing ways, a reflection of the way the schizophrenic lens of apartheid affected every action.

Engaging even more directly with the news clips, in Oracle (1999) the naked and malformed Vári is seen rapaciously stuffing into her mouth in a cannibalistic manner what first appears to be flesh. The “flesh” reveals itself to be news footage, “the conflicting histories of present day Africa,” says Vári.

Shown on the central exhibition of the 2001 Venice Biennale, curator Harald Szeemann’s The Plateau of Humankind, Vári’s Oracle attains its power not only through its gross and compelling imagery, which recalls Francisco de Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son, but also alludes to Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto of 1928, which argued that the “cannibalizing” and absorption of other cultures was a successful strategy for Andrade’s country (Brazil) to assert itself against European postcolonial cultural domination.

For Vári’s protagonist, however, the digestion and assimilation of the differing versions of history necessary to heal South Africa becomes a fraught and excruciating challenge. Despite her desire to collect it all into one body, the truth, it seems, can be grasped only as a chewed-up and half-masticated mess.

Oracle (still from video) 1999
Single-channel digital video work
Video: 2 minutes; Stereo audio: 6 minutes; loopedImage courtesy of the artist and the Serge Ziegler Galerie, Zurich
© Minnette Vári