The Dog in the Night: Christine Dixie’s Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
Christine Dixie has, for a long time, been fascinated by a double spectre: Diego Velázquez’s 1656 painting Las Meninas and Michel Foucault’s 1970 essay on the same painting. These two ‘texts’ haunt her Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things, but have long held sway in Dixie’s imagination. The essay, which appears in The Order of Things, Foucault’s ‘Archaeology of the Human Sciences’, is about representation. Its central argument is that the painting is a depiction of the uncanny relations set in motion on the picture plane: the outward-gazing figures, the self-portrait of the artist, the encircling of the figure of the young princess by all of the other characters. Equally uncanny is the mirror image (of the king and queen) inside the canvas, as well as the luminous light that enters the room –the painting, the studio of the painter – from a window suggested on the right side of the picture. And perhaps most curious of all is the representation of painting within the painting, suggested not only by the artist’s presence in his own work but also by the wooden frame of a canvas presumably in progress on the left. It is as though the painter is watching himself at work.
In his preface to The Order of Things, Foucault explains that the philosophical and historical zone of engagement in his book is a ‘middle region’ to be found in every culture. It lies somewhere between the codes of a culture (those things that govern its language, values, hierarchies of perception) and the scientific theories explaining why order exists and how it is constituted. In this middle region, culture ‘frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones’ (xx) Foucault’s inquiry aims to ‘rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible’ (xxi).
It is significant, then, that as he sets out on this extraordinary inquiry into the order of things, Foucault should begin simply by describing the elements of a single and singular seventeenthcentury painting, as though in the space opened
up in the painting by the various lines of sight, the various gazes inward and outward, is that middle region he seeks to understand.
So where does this situate Dixie? When we enter the blue, submarine space of her exhibition, Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things, we enter the middle zone of Foucault’s text. But here, in this submarine space, the materiality of the work –paper, gauzy fabric, golden thread, copper, ink, embossment – is insistent, as are Dixie’s local iterations of ‘the order of things’. In the layered and labour-intensive materiality of her work – the prints, paintings, sculpture and video – she traces movements through vast arcs of time and space: ships float across the surface of the paper, connecting the twenty-first century to the seventeenth, the Infanta of Velázquez’s painting to slavery, pandemic to pandemic. Planes fly and land, taking off in Alexandria, Egypt, and arriving in Makhanda, South Africa, before circling away again. They transect a blue horizon, they crisscross the skies of a southern hemisphere, underneath the sign – the crux – of the skies of the northern hemisphere.
But not only planes: ships of sea and space drift across the picture plane, through clouds, through water. The world is inverted: the pilot of the space craft arrives in the depth of the ocean, the diver lands on the moon. These explorers are at once tethered and drifting off into the atmosphere. They pass fish and fowl, they float through space. They represent the event horizon, the moment of exploration and the end of the frontier.
The little princess – the Infanta Margaret Theresa who will marry the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I –traverses space and time, painting, dropping pigment as she goes, pointing up and beyond. She touches the plague doctor, with his strange conical hat and his beaked mask filled with sweet-smelling herbs that are thought to counter the miasma of the infected house. The plague doctor, his title
notwithstanding, is principally a recorder of deaths, a keeper of the numbers, a medieval apparition whose function is not so much healing as counting, imposing order on chaos, controlling through listing. We know him just as well now as our plague-killed ancestors did.
The princess also miraculously generates worlds with her brush. They come into being ‘out of the blue’, which means ‘from nowhere’ or ‘from left field’ – unexpectedly. She paints herself in repeated acts of self-generation: the artist begets her own consciousness through the materiality of paint and brush and canvas. The artist thinks herself into being. She inscribes but is also inscribed upon, she is an extension of the discourse of order, she is a proponent of codes that describe how the world is made, but also how it falls apart.
This imaginative, auto-generative impulse is given dramatic expression in the three series The Astronomer, The Blue Astronomer I and The Blue Astronomer II. In these works Dixie frees the figures in Velázquez’s painting from the room – the physical space and the space of representation – and gives them other roles to play: the dwarf Maria Barbola is the astronomer, one of the Infanta’s maids is the plague doctor. They also bring the seventeenthcentury into contact with the twenty-first: Isabel de Velasco, another of the maids of the Infanta, is transformed into a rap artist who wears Converse, the Queen’s Chamberlain, José Nieto Velázquez, who stands at the vanishing point of the painting and is either coming or going, is now a soutie, a soutpiel who straddles continents and is dipped in the salt of the ocean. As in the painting, he is between worlds, a figure who is perpetually arriving. And best of all, Velázquez himself is that most modern of representers, the photographer.
‘Man is a recent invention,’ says Foucault in his preface (xx). It is profoundly comforting to know that he is ‘a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form’ (xx). By knowledge, Foucault does not only mean empirical science, or even philosophy or history, but rather something beneath these forms, something that allows them to come into being,
a perception in each culture that knowledge can be described and embodied. Once a new body is found through which it can be expressed, we will be redundant.
What is so clearly also at play in this work, expressed perhaps most poignantly in Dixie’s video work, with its sounds of inhalation and expiration, its use of umngqokolo throat singing by women in the Eastern Cape, its beeping and sighing ventilator, is an acute awareness of the frailty of the planet and the tenuousness of our place in it. Things are turned upside down, to be sure, and this body of work is a site of mourning, death and, in its most optimistic moments, regeneration. Perhaps the most haunting motif in Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things , is the arrival, traversal and departure of the car in the video. The depiction of twin headlights lighting up the dark, approaching as though home is being reached, is a gesture that is – almost unbearably – poetically wistful. The lights suggest a way through, an arrival, but also perpetual departure and loss.
As Donna Haraway suggests in Staying With the Trouble, ‘Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with because we are in and of this fabric of undoing. Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think. Like the crows and with the crows, living and dead “we are at stake in each other’s company”’ (39).
And apropos Haraway, who has written extensively about interspecies collaboration and connectedness, it is the dog in Dixie’s work, an upward-looking and wise creature, who most understands what is at stake.
References
Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994
Donna Haraway. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016
The Astronomer
This cyanotype is part of a series of ten works titled The Blue Astronomer I., a body of work which engages with Michel Foucault’s text Las Meninas and Velásquez’s painting Las Meninas from a southern African perspective.
Medium: Collage, text
Image size – 556 (w) x 710 (h)
Framed – 690 (w) x 820 (h)
Date: 2020
1. Maribarbola - The Astronomer
2. Diego Velásquez - The Photographer
3. Dona Maria Augustine Sarmiento
4. King Philip IV - The Boatman - The Plague Doctor
5. Jose Nieto Velásquez - Soutie
6. Isabel de Velasco - The Rap Artist
7. Marcela de Ulloa - The Widow
8. Don Diedo Ruiz - The Conquistador
9. Nicolasito Pertusato - The Whistleblower
10. Infanta Margaret Theresa - The Boxer
The Blue Astronomer I
Medium: Cyanotype (Positive)
Image size: 405 (w) x 500 (h)
Date: 2022
1. The Astronomer
2. The Rap Artist
3. The Widow
4. The Boxer
5. Soutie
6. The Boatman
7. The Photographer
8. The Plague Doctor
9. The Conquistador
10. The Whistleblower
The Blue Astronomer II
Medium: Cyanotype (Positive)
Image size: 405 (w) x 500 (h)
Date: 2022
1. The Astronomer
2. The Rap Artist
3. The Widow
4. The Boxer
5. Soutie
6. The Boatman
7. The Photographer
8. The Plague Doctor
9. The Conquistador
10. The Whistleblower
The DisOrder: Trade-Off
The little princess – the Infanta Margaret Theresa who will marry the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I –traverses space and time, painting, dropping pigment as she goes, pointing up and beyond. She touches the plague doctor, with his strange conical hat and his beaked mask filled with sweet-smelling herbs that are thought to counter the miasma of the infected house. The plague doctor, his title notwithstanding, is principally a recorder of deaths, a keeper of the numbers, a medieval apparition whose function is not so much healing as counting, imposing order on chaos, controlling through listing. We know him just as well now as our plague-killed ancestors did.
Extract from The Dog in the Night: Christine Dixie’s Blueprint for the DisOrder of Things - Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
Medium: Monotype, collage, watercolour, drawing Image size – 530 (w) x 690 (h)
Framed – 660 (w) x 815 (h)
Date: 2020
The Disorder - Trade-off I
The Disorder - Trade-off II
The Disorder - Trade-off IV
The Disorder - Trade-off V
The Disorder - Trade-off VI
The Disorder - Trade-off VII
The Disorder - Trade-off VIII
The Disorder - Trade-off XI
Below the Crux I
Drawn with golden thread, a diagram indicating the revolutions of the planets in our solar system appears in the night sky. Below these distant rotations sail ships across the first page of the chapter Las Meninas, the famous analysis of the iconic painting by Diego Velásquez,in the book The Order of Things by Michel Foucault.
Medium: Etching, monotype, collage, sewing Image size – 556 (w) x 710 (h)
Framed – 690 (w) x 820 (h)
Date: 2020
1. Below the Crux I
2. Below the Crux II
3. Below the Crux III
4. Below the Crux IV
5. Below the Crux V
6. Below the Crux VI
7. Below the Crux VII
8. Below the Crux VIII
9. Below the Crux IX
Blueprint Transmission I
Medium: Ink, collage, sewing on Hahnemule paper
Size: 1 640 (w) x 1 250 (h)
Date: 2022
Unframed
Blueprint Transmission I
Blueprint Transmission II
The dog, a silent witness to the world around him gazes up at the night sky. In the waters below alongside fish swim astronauts and spaceships. It is a world where logic has been suspended, up ended.
Medium: Ink, collage, sewing on Hahnemule paper
Size: 1 640 (w) x 1 250 (h)
Date: 2022
Blueprint Transmission II
Blueprint for a Breathless World
Across these veils, which are the pages of the chapter Las Meninas by Michel Foucault, three characters interact, overlap, and infect one another: the ‘princess’, from the painting Las Meninas by Velásquez, a Plague doctor and a dog that bears witness to the narrative unfolding before him. The princess appears as a self-generating creative force, often with a paintbrush in hand, the plague doctor is a harbinger of death. In this installation the two figures at times overlap and merge into a single entity, it is not always clear where one begins and the other ends. The landscape in which this takes place depict mountain ranges that map the rise and fall of the pandemic, but equally refer to the Bubonic plague in the seventeenth century. In the night sky above float spacecrafts and astronauts, attached to the astronauts are the tubes and oxygen tanks needed for breathing. Below the tumult, in the quiet depths, swim schools of salmon.
Installation: digital print, painting, sewing onto voile
Size: 1 430 (w) x 1 970 (h)
Date: 2021
And finally in the distant glow
North America
Ghostprints for the Infanta
From the series Ghostprints for the Infanta - Caught in a Moment of Stillness is one in a series of eight mixed media artworks that call up ghosts from both the seventeenth century and the present. In this space come together the ghostly presence of the King and Queen in the mirror of the painting Las Meninas and the ghosts of those that have been lost to the pandemic.
The title also refers to the technical printmaking term – a ghostprint is the print that is pulled after the fully inked matrix has been pulled. In Ghostprints for the Infanta, traces of previous prints can be glimpsed, in this sense layers of history are embedded in the process of making the work.
Medium: Digital print, collage, woodcut, watercolour, sewing
Image size: 1 000 (w) x 710 (h)
Framed: 1 130 (w) x 850 (h)
Date: 2022
Manifested into pure spectacle
Our bodies, our faces, our eyes
Caught in a moment of stillness
In the midst of this dispersion
Ningxia
Alexandria
Damascus
Makhanda
Out of the Blue
Medium: Ink, collage on Hahnemuhle paper
Size: 1 250 (w) x 1 770 (h)
Date:2022
Unframed
Out of the Blue I
Out of the Blue II
Out of the Blue IV
Out of the Blue V
