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Abstract
Marlene Dumas's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, reveals a complicated economy of seeing as her paintings and drawings reject any easy recognition or simplification of aesthetic, cultural, or political meanings. The multiple series of faces rendered in eerie washes of watercolor and oil seem to suspend representation, projecting a discomforting knowledge of subjectivity as an always tense agitated terrain within which the viewer must stand complicit in relational contestation.
Notes
1Explaining the title of the painting and the title of the exhibition, Dumas states, it is “the best definition I can find for what an artist does when making art and how a figure in a painting makes its mark” (as cited in Butler, Citation2008, p. 194). The exhibition, curated by Cornelia Butler, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, June 22–September 22, Citation2008. It traveled to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 14, 2008–February 16, 2009, and to the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas from March 26–June 21, 2009. This essay reflects my experience of the installation at the MoMA.
2In an audio interview, Dumas (Citation2009) traces the multiple ideas that informed this painting from Arendt's writings to the Disney classification of the good blond girl and bad dark witch. See <http://www.moma.org/wifi/audio/FR/artwork.php?artwork_id=301>.
3This singular painting also relates to another gridded series of drawings, The Blindfolded (2002), that depict faces of men—wrapped in blindfolds, covered in bags, lying dead as if beheaded—inspired by newspaper photographs of men in the Gaza Strip that Dumas collected around 2002 (Mbembe and Nuttall, 2007, p. 127). These drawings are not included in this exhibition.
4Installed as a grid, the human scale portraits After Stone (2003), After Painting (2003), After Photography (2003), After All (is Said and Done) (2003) conflate the entropic force of the horizontal body with the fate of artistic genre, rendering both in the throes of dying.