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Abstract
In September 2010, an exhibition by South African artist, Senzeni Marasela, opened at the Axis Gallery in New York. Featuring various works in fabric, their iconographies centered on two individuals. The first was Sarah Baartman, a Khoekhoe woman known disparagingly as the “Hottentot Venus” who was exhibited in the United Kingdom and France in the early nineteenth century. The focus of pseudo-scientific interest for Europeans, her body was dissected and kept in the Musée de l’Homme before finally being repatriated to South Africa in 2002. The second was Theodorah Marasela, the artist’s mother. Moving from a rural area to Johannesburg in 1966, Theodorah’s likely alienation in a city where apartheid had impact on her mobility would have been compounded through her suffering from a form of bipolar schizophrenia. In this article, it is suggested that the artist does not represent Sarah Baartman and Theodorah Marasela as passive victims of their circumstances but instead with agency and capacity to articulate resistance. It is argued that the works’ feminist meanings are furthered through their taking the form of domestic objects such as doilies and runners, by being constituted from garments, or by including fabrics and needlework techniques that are themselves resonant with meaning.
Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to Senzeni Marasela for taking time to engage with me about her work. I am indebted to Gary van Wyk and Lisa Brittan of the Axis Gallery in New York for kindly providing me with images from Marasela’s exhibition in 2010. My research toward this chapter was made possible through generous financial support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. Please note, however, that any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed here are my own, and the NRF accepts no liability in this regard.
Notes
1 Born in Thokoza, the first black township on the East Rand and about 24 km from Johannesburg, Marasela was educated at a private Catholic school in nearby Boksburg and was in her late teens by the time of the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. She studied for a Bachelor of Fine Art degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg between 1995 and 1998. She was the recipient of a residency at the South African National Gallery as part of the “Fresh” programme in 2000, from which a catalogue on her work (Bester Citation2001) was written. Her work has featured regularly in one-person and group exhibitions both in South Africa and abroad since then. Her most recent one-person exhibition was “Senzeni Marasela, Waiting for Gebane: Dolly Parton” at the Toffee Gallery in Darling, South Africa, in 2018 (see Schmahmann Citation2018).
2 Khoekhoe refers to a group of people in southern Africa who were pastoralists and kept animals and were denigrated by being termed “Hottentots” by colonial settlers.
3 She is quoting from Morrison (Citation1992, 24).
4 See the artist’s website, http://www.theartofsenzenimarasela.co.za/index.html, for an indication of the range of her works.
5 The commentary on the show by the Axis Gallery can be found at http://www.axisgallery.com/Axis_Gallery/Senzeni_Marasela.html. See Khan (Citation2017) for a short engagement with a 2011 iteration of Marasela’s Covering Sarah and its iconography.
6 The earliest key article is a discussion of stereotypical constructions of black bodies by Sander Gilman (Citation1985), one critiqued by Zine Magubane who takes issue with his contention “that there was a core image of the Black woman in the nineteenth century” as well as a conception that “the fear of the anatomy of the ‘other’ is the source of negative representations of Black sexuality” (Magubane Citation2001, 816).
7 Baartman was known for many years as “Saartjie” (pronounced “Saar-key”) and there is no record of the name she was given at birth. As “Saartjie” is a diminutive (meaning “Little Sara” or “Little Sarah”) and is thus potentially demeaning for an adult woman, the designation of her as “Sara” or “Sarah” is generally preferred. “Sarah,” an Anglicised version of “Sara,” is the name that appeared on her certificate when she was baptized in Manchester in December 1811. As it is also the name Senzeni Marasela uses in titles for her work, it is the name I use in this article. (See Holmes Citation2007, xiii–xiv for discussion of Baartman’s first name.)
8 Crais and Scully (Citation2009) suggest, however, that her birth date was sometime in the 1770s in the region slightly further north called Camdeboo.
9 Shortly after she was displayed in London, Zachary Macaulay, a prominent anti-slavery campaigner, raised concern in the press that Baartman was enslaved and had been put on display against her own free will. A legal case was consequently opened. But during an interview with representatives of the court, Baartman claimed nothing was amiss—possibly because dissemblance was her only option but perhaps because she was genuinely optimistic that she might glean some profit from her display. The charge was consequently dismissed.
10 Baptized in Manchester on 1 December 1811, Baartman would have been able to marry. Records indicate that she did in fact do so, but the name of her spouse is unclear. It seems she may have been pregnant but lost the child.
11 It is unclear when exactly the display of Baartman’s remains was dismounted. Holmes cites Philip Tobias (Citation2002, 107–110) for the indication that the effects were removed from public display by 1976. But Tobias does not in fact say this. Rather he observes that, after his own visit in 1955, Stephen Gray reported having seen her brain alongside her skeleton in the late 1960s while Stephen Gould was shown bottled specimens (i.e., in storage) in April or May of 1982 (Tobias Citation2002, 109). Lindfors (Citation2014, 31), however, writes: “These antiquated human relics were finally removed from the public eye in 1982 after protests were made by groups who found the exhibit offensive and demeaning to women as well as to Africans.” But his source for this information and date is not given.
12 Siopis had endeavored to glean access to Baartman’s remains in 1986 when, as winner of the Volkskas Atalier Award (and later the Absa Atalier Award), she was given the opportunity to spend some months in Paris. Unsuccessful in these attempts, she would glean access to some of these effects in 1988 when she appeared at the museum with a letter of introduction by world-famous paleoanthropologist, Philip Tobias. Baartman would appear in her Dora and the Other Woman (1988) via representations of the caricatures of her in the popular press—a device that she repeated in Exhibit: Ex Africa (1990). The latter (which is discussed in Schmahmann Citation2017) is particularly relevant to Marasela as it includes a textile object—an apron. As an artwork in the collection of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Marasela has doubtless had opportunities to examine it directly.
13 Napoleon had ordered that the Medici Venus be brought to Paris in 1802, and it would be returned to the Uffizi only in 1816. Like Sarah Baartman, then, the work was an enigmatic import in Paris.
14 This is in the caption to the relevant image, reproduced on the sixth page of a section of eight pages of plates included in the volume.
15 While writers occasionally refer to “Baartman” as “Baartmann,” as is the case in this instance, the former spelling is more usual. “Baartman” means “bearded man,” as Holmes (Citation2007, xiiii) notes.
16 Blourokke means “blue dresses” and refers to the garments worn by female members of the church. An offshoot of the Apostolic Faith Mission, the church—which is otherwise known as the Latter Rain Mission—conceives of itself as a Pentecostal Evangelical Church. It was founded in the town of Benoni (just east of Johannesburg) in 1927.
17 The term “Khoisan” refers to both Khoekhoe and San peoples, the latter of whom were hunter-gatherers and often designated by the term “Bushmen.” Holmes (Citation2007, 192) notes that it is generally accepted that Khoekhoe and San cultures became distinguished from each other only during the Stone Age, when the former began to practice animal husbandry. She observes that Khoisan “is now used when speaking of the long shared history of South Africa’s first peoples, to explicitly reject both antiquated notions about ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentots’ and the freight of racism inextricable from the etymology of these terms” (Holmes Citation2007, 192).
18 As I have noted in a publication on Penny Siopis’s parody of this same image (Schmahmann Citation2017), Lewis’s print was by no means considered of lowly pedigree: as Crais and Scully (Citation2009, 74) point out, Lewis was well connected and in fact undertook commissions for the royal family.
19 As with Lewis’s broadsheets, Huet’s work—along with that of Berré and Léon de Wailly who were also present when Baartman posed—extended beyond the realms of the elite to a popular market. Holmes (Citation2007, 137) observes: “Colour prints and posters of their work was reproduced and sold in great quantity all over Paris, and their illustrations of new exotica at the zoo was particularly appealing to the general public.”
20 In Huet’s image, it is the lack of any “exotic” accessories that works to construct Baartman as a specimen: in other words, her body—starkly outlined—has no cultural adornments that would distract from his “impartial” record of the facts of her physiognomy.
21 Marasela told me about Gebane (she refers to him by his first name only) in an interview with her on 17 Aril 2018. Gebane eventually showed up out of the blue after about fifteen years. Despite having absolutely no contact with his wife, he was enraged to discover that, having assumed he had left for good, she had established a relationship with somebody else and the couple had children together. Having paid lobola (bride price) for his wife, Gebane—who was unemployed and an alcoholic—simply assumed she would wait patiently until he chose to return.
22 Marasela provided me with the date of her mother’s arrival in Johannesburg during my interview with her on 17 April 2018.
23 In a work comprised of five photographs the artist made in 1999, while heavily pregnant with her son, she had shown herself outdoors and with her gaze towards her family home and with an empty chair alongside her—a motif she had associated with her absent mother. As the artist explained, the work dealt with her mother’s “physical absence at I time I needed her most. Yet in the absence she is present—represented by the empty chair” (quoted in Schmahmann Citation2004, 46).
24 See Schmahmann (Citation2004, 86–88), where I explore Penny Siopis’s depiction of a hysteric in An Incident at the Opera (1986–87) and Dora and the Other Woman (1988)
25 The artist does not recall its exact wording (Interview, September 10, 2019).
26 The Group Areas Act of 1950 implemented into law the idea that only one supposed “race” could live in any particular neighbourhood.
27 Driver (Citation2013, 208) notes that Bester’s sculpture “is a construction from scrap metal one of whose parts is stamped ‘Made in England’.” Notwithstanding Willie Bester’s critique of colonialist practices, the sculpture has been the subject of contestation, with criticism that its representation of Baartman is demeaning. Following the #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015, there was a decision to shroud the sculpture—presumably temporarily. The debates in this regard concerned art acquired for public settings such as libraries on campuses, where users of the space have not chosen to view the work concerned. They are therefore somewhat outside the scope of this article.
29 See reproductions of these at http://www.theartofsenzenimarasela.co.za/page-2.html.
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Notes on contributors
Brenda Schmahmann
Brenda Schmahmann is Professor and the South African Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. Her research is focused on gender as well as public art in South Africa, and she has specialist interest in women’s collectives who work with embroidery and textile arts. She is author of Through the Looking Glass: Representations of Self by South African Women Artists (2004), Mapula: Embroidery and Empowerment in the Winterveld (2006), Picturing Change: Curating Visual Culture at Post-Apartheid Universities (2013) and The Keiskamma Art Project: Restoring Hope and Livelihoods (2016) as well as more than 70 articles or book chapters. She edited Material Matters: Appliqués by the Weya Women of Zimbabwe and Needlework by South African Collectives (2000) and co-edited Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910– 1994 (2005) with Marion Arnold, Public Art in South Africa: Bronze Warriors and Plastic Presidents (2017) with Kim Miller and, most recently, Troubling Images: Visual Culture and the Politics of Afrikaner Nationalism (2020) with Federico Freschi and Lize van Robbroeck. [email protected]; [email protected]