Disembodiment and the total body A response to Enwezor on contemporary South African representation

• Published in: Third text Vol. 12; no. 44; pp. 3 - 16
• Main Author: Axel, Brian Keith
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Taylor & Francis Group 01.09.1998; Kala Press
• ISSN: 0952-8822; 1475-5297
• DOI: 10.1080/09528829808576747

Counters the position taken by Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian curator of the Second Johannesburg Biennale held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1997, that representations of the black body in art reflect political control, and that the production of such images by white artists, in South Africa in particular, constitutes an ideological battleground in which the black body can be understood as at one with the body politic. With reference to the theories of Louis Marin, the author argues that the meaning of a representation is not an absolute, but depends on the perspective of the representer, the person represented, and viewer of the representation. He outlines South African Jean Comaroff's views on the figuring of the nation through representations of specific individuals and abstract types from the nation's history, and reiterates her concerns on the possibility of building a nation at a time when multiculturalism and internationalism are contributing to the disintegration of existing national identities. He reprises Enwezor's arguments, identifying contradictions in his position, based on his interpretation of the use of white women's bodies in the art of Candice Breitz and on his uncertainty as to whether the ideological fantasy involved in the white artist's use of the black body as subject matter is intentional or subconscious. He concludes by asserting that Enwezor's theory fails because it allows representation to collapse into the representative, and because it misinterprets the role representation in art can play in the development of the so-called `Rainbow Nation'.