Spectres of the Original and the Liberties of Repetition

Spectres of the Original and the Liberties of Repetition Leora Maltz-Leca

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ontemporary art is rife with images that reprise the icons of the European canon. Such rereadings, often understood in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s metaphysics of repetition as difference—as dynamic reinscriptions that parley with one another rather than inert copies of a stable original—have provided fertile ground for practices as diverse as those of Yinka Shonibare, Kehinde Wiley, Johannes Phokela, and Hassan Musa (Deleuze 1994).1 Certainly, the twin legacies of postmodernist appropriation and postcolonial refashioning have accustomed us to squaring up the work of contemporary African artists against their canonical, trans-Atlantic prototypes. And we have become equally accustomed to the inflated critical claims made for such refashionings: that they not only ironize, reread, or subvert their prototypes, but even (via Lacan) that these “returns” revive their weary originals (Felman 1987:55). But do they really? Or are some prototypes too depleted to be revivified?

What happens when the originating work simply collapses under the weight of its reprisals? Or withers into a spectral image, milked dry and rendered nearly meaningless by an onslaught of repetitions? At a certain point—as Andy Warhol knew all too well—repetition kills pictures. It is one such ghostly image, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Fig. 1), that I want to address here, considering less the 1830 painting itself than several of the countless afterimages it has spawned. For, as an enduring symbol of nation, Liberty has been called upon in recent decades to embody both the euphoria and the violence of political transition.

From instances of hostile regime change such as the 1968 Soviet takeover of the Czech capital to the independence movements of the postcolonies, a legion of images attest to what Kaja Silverman calls Liberty’s continual “re-authoring” (1988:84).2

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Liberty has equally resonated through post-independence states across Africa.3 Most recently, artists in post-apartheid South Africa have laid claim to this controversial figure, as three public art works installed in Johannesburg over the past decade affirm: Marlene Dumas’s 1998 tapestry The Benefit of the Doubt in the Constitutional Court (Figs. 2a–c), Reshada Crouse’s 1999 oil painting Passive Resistance, which graces the Johannesburg Civic Theater (Figs. 3a–b), and William Kentridge’s and Gerhard Marx’s 2009 sculpture Firewalker, which marches resolutely towards Queen Elizabeth Bridge from a traffic island near the downtown taxi ranks (Fig. 4). Each of these artworks was commissioned by, or donated to, the city of Johannesburg and its civic organizations over the past decade; all seize public space in the southern megalopolis that philosopher Achille Mbembe has called “the classic location … of African metropolitan modernity” (2004:373). But even as these monumental works call to Delacroix’s Liberty, this trio has become mere phantoms of their vaunted archetype. Haunted specters, they quarrel with the mythologized chimera of Liberty, taking issue with the fraught tradition of pinning regime change onto the body of the female nude. Drawing instead on South African histories of women’s resistance, in which female nudity has been repeatedly marshaled as a form of dissent, the Liberties circling Johannesburg hybridize their European template with local traditions of female political opposition to colonial and postcolonial male authority.4 Liberty’s appeal in South Africa circa 1994, just as the country was emerging from four decades of apartheid and refashioning itself into a new democracy, hardly needs dwelling on. Certainly the gathering of monumental females in the downtown melée of Johannesburg testifies to the elastic appeal of Delacroix’s image as a template for creating readable public art. Nonetheless, I want to pause at the strangeness of Liberty’s presence and to question

1 Eugène Delacroix Liberty Leading the People (1830) Oil on canvas; 260 cm x 325 cm Musée du Louvre PHOTO: ERICH LESSING, ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK.

the ongoing engagement with such an exhausted and seemingly discredited model. Like a specter—which returns, repeating itself, refusing burial—Liberty has always walked under the sign of repetition, trawling behind her a string of archetypes: from the Virgin Mary and St. Anne to the sixteenth-century Jesuit Mariana, a champion of the poor;5 from Classical and Neoclassical allegorical representations of women as wisdom, love, or hunterwarriors (Warner 1985),6 to non-Classical precedents like a 1637 theatrical production featuring an early political Marianne as a Jewish princess leading a revolt against the colonizing Romans (Ryan 1989:27). In this sense, Liberty confirms Deleuze’s notion that repetitions do not simply echo an original—that “there is no first term which is repeated”—but rather that lineages of images respond to one another, with every would-be origin collapsing back onto an earlier parent version (Deleuze 1994:17).

Perhaps the reiterative logic of appropriating figures such as Liberty is renewed in the southern context. To be sure, Liberty means differently in post-apartheid South Africa, raising another question about how far an icon can be reimagined without making recourse to a mythologized prototype a meaningless process. For it is a stretch to designate this motley, nay-saying troupe as Liberties at all. This may be partly because, formally and conceptually, all three stray farther and farther from Delacroix’s grand-manner realism, moving from allegorical naturalism in Crouse’s painting to painterly figuration with Dumas, and veritable abstraction in Kentridge’s and Marx’s sculpture. But it is equally a function of the phantom-like cast each rendition of

Liberty assumes: Crouse’s Liberty exhumes repressed debates around race and nudity, Dumas presents us with a ghoulish child haunted by the implication of child pornography, while Kentridge’s and Marx’s “anti-Liberty” flatly denies company with the entire tradition, reassembling Liberty as a shattered monument.

Each iteration, particularly the last two, thereby incorporate within the work’s formal structure an acknowledgment of the demise of their esteemed prototype, pressing the issue of if and when Liberty died. Or as Daniel Joseph Martinez asked recently, in a more accusatory mode: who killed Liberty?7 So how is it, then, that she is still sauntering around the streets of Johannesburg? Is Liberty not out of time and out of place flapping her flag on the fringes of Africa?

It is precisely Liberty’s flaunting of her anachronistic presence that arguably renders her so apposite to post-apartheid South Africa. For Derrida, the spectral indicates a time out of joint, in particular, a period unhinged by the tumult of regime change.

To this end, Specters of Marx begins with Hamlet’s encounter with his dead father’s ghost, and his famous declaration that “the time is out of joint” (Derrida 1994:1). The ghostly reappearance of Liberty, a macabre escort between political regimes, signals the untimely and the temporal crises that have long been understood to accompany revolution and its aftermath. As Derrida explains: “the more the new erupts in the revolutionary crisis, the more the period is in crisis, the more it is ‘out of joint,’ then the more one has to convoke the old, ‘borrow’ from it” (ibid., p. 137). For Derrida, despite its rhetoric of novelty, the sphere of

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2a Marlene Dumas The Benefit of the Doubt (1998) Tapestry PHOTO: COURTESY OF ZENO X GALLERY

2b Marlene Dumas detail of The Benefit of the Doubt hung in South African Constitutional Court, Johannesburg PHOTO: COURTESY OF BRONWYN LAW-VILJOEN

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the revolutionary and post-revolutionary invariably retrieves conservative visual prototypes, a seemingly paradoxical reversion to the familiar that explains both the tenacious afterlives of the neoclassical and the indefatigable reappearances of Liberty.

Future revolutions will, no doubt, pace Derrida, only witness further exhumings of this indomitable figure.

Derrida casts the notion of spectralization more broadly, too, suggesting that the act of borrowing itself enacts a form of summoning ghosts. “Inheritance from the ‘spirits of the past’ consists, as always, in borrowing,” he states (ibid.). Ancestors such as Liberty haunt the canon, as much beacons as pressure points.

When Derrida describes genealogies of repetition as “the rumbling sound of ghosts chained to ghosts” (ibid., p. 3), he evokes these coercive elements of tradition (as if Liberty forces her way into these disparate scenes), along with an uneasy sense of troubled images that elude being put to rest.

What does an image that refuses to die look like? One sober, if humorless, response is to resurrect Liberty as a painted specter, replacing her chiseled Grecian features with the skull of death.

Such renderings exist, of course, and Derrida’s thoughts on the spectral offer a lens through which to reconsider one of the most infamous of them: the mural commissioned by the Iranian government for the exterior wall of the US embassy in Teheran (Fig. 5). Outside this disquietingly empty building, which has lain abandoned since the 1979 hostage crisis spelled the end of diplomatic relations between the two countries, the morbid mural is repainted annually.8 The Teheran mural literalizes the ailing face

3 Reshada Crouse Passive Resistance (1999) Oil on canvas; 3 m x 6 m Nelson Mandela Theater, Johannesburg PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

of Liberty as a specter, standing like a ghostly palimpsest behind other contemporary renditions and discussions of her. As Lynda Nead argues with respect to the rich archive of Liberty images, such renegade versions “enable, indeed demand, a dialectical reading that bring into play readers’ conscious and unconscious affiliations to the visual historical” (Nead 1992:5). Deleuze takes a stronger position, proposing that the prototype already contains or implies all of its subsequent iterations, so that these future versions quote the originating image as well as the string of variations it has engendered. In this way, for Deleuze, repetitions do not overturn or reverse their prototypes, but simply fulfil some of the manifold possibilities entailed within them: “The variations express, rather, the differential mechanisms which belong to the essence and origin of that which is repeated” (1994:17).

Can we think about Liberty in this way? To be sure, Liberty has always been a flexible figure, shifted and re-imagined in response to the changing needs of the state. In the French context she stormed across canvases, violent and dynamic, during the heyday of the revolution, only to be sidelined, contained and dignified, for the republic that followed. But does Delacroix’s canonical rendition harbor within it the seeds of Liberty’s ghostly futures? At one level, as Pointon notes, the original painting certainly does associate Liberty with death: she walks on corpses and over murdered bodies, suggesting a metonymic slippage between freedom and death, or a necessary conjunction between revolution and violence (Pointon 1986:88). More abstractly, just as a concept is unthinkable without its opposite— in so far as the meaning of liberty depends on the existence of

tyranny—so too, a painting of Liberty is dialectically dependent on its as-yet-unpainted oppositional renditions. For the Teheran mural is not merely a picture hailing the death of the United States. It is an all-encompassing vision of the assassination of democracy, one which satirizes the notion of liberty, especially as it is purveyed by a country like the US, where such ideals often function as self-serving guises for neo-imperialist domination. In this public massacre of Liberty, we see the most cynical representation of what happens when a painting—or in this case, a sculpture—calcifies into a cadaver.

LIBERTY’S SOUTHERN SHADOWS: RESHADA CROUSE’S PASSIVE RESISTANCE

If Liberty had assumed a spectral air on the streets of Johannesburg by the 1990s, it was partly because the French Revolution and its signal protagonists had cast a long shadow over South African visual culture during apartheid. Journalists and writers spoke of “storming the Bastille” (Lelyveld 1985; Ndebele 1994:9), while Kentridge invoked the stereotypical decadence of the ancien régime as a parallel to white South Africa in drawings such as Embarkation (1987, after Antoine Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera of 1717) and Swinging Lady (After Fragonard) (Fig. 6; 1986, after Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing of 1767). Rhetorical parallels had only increased by 1989, the year that heralded South Africa’s transition to democracy and France’s bicentennial revolutionary celebrations. A few months later, in his release night speech in February 1990, Mandela famously advocated a “return to the barricades” (until a pledge of full democracy had been exacted from the National Party) (Mandela 1994:494).

Likewise, when Kentridge called his 1989 film Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, his title embedded the production in Paris, site of revolution, even as it inscribed the artist’s distance from this illusory origin. Little surprise that two years later Kentridge devised a film around a “Liberty”: Soho’s daughter Liberty Eckstein was slated to be the major character of Mine (1991).

However, she kept being chased out of the film, her failure to

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4 William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx Firewalker (2009) Mixed-media sculpture; 11 m Johannesburg PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

materialize likely evincing Kentridge’s reluctance to embrace an image associated with such utopian enthusiasms (Kentridge 1994:164).

South African painter Reshada Crouse, however, was less plagued by such doubts. According to the artist, Passive Resistance, her monumental oil painting commissioned for Johannesburg Civic Theater, eschewed the pugilism of Delacroix’s original to celebrate the relative nonviolence of South Africa’s transition to democracy and especially the role that women played in that accomplishment.9 Nodding to her venue, Crouse’s six-meterwide canvas showcases Liberty leading a troupe of forty local actors, her premise being to honor the oppositional histories of Resistance-era theater by highlighting both its critique of apartheid and its role in agitating for economic and cultural sanctions.10 But Crouse’s commission, won in 1994, just at the time of South Africa’s first democratic elections, stumbled headlong into the fraught issue of how to visualize the emergent democracy.

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For if Liberty has always been an abstract notion—notoriously difficult to personify, necessarily reductive—the idea of nation itself is equally fossilized. Crouse’s painting, and particularly her prolonged search for a model for Liberty, concretized these abstract problems, raising difficult questions about the color of the body of the rainbow nation.

In a textbook repetition of history, Crouse’s commitment to painting Liberty bare-breasted in this prominent public arena precipitated, as in the French prototype, a host of difficulties which reveal the anxieties around imaging the body of the new South Africa. First, John Kani, then head of Johannesburg’s Market Theater, refused to be led by what the artist frankly called her own “Aryan beauty” daughter, whom the painter had turned to out of convenience as her initial model. In an interview with New York Times, Crouse was quick to admit that her preliminary conception of the painting was “very politically incorrect,” for in it, the artist envisioned her daughter (who has often posed for Crouse as a Virgin Mary) leading a Zulu battalion through the streets. Although this original idea was accepted by the competition’s committee, Crouse’s accompanying written explanation promised a more racially and gender balanced representation for the final version (McNeil 1999).

However, several black female South African celebrities, including Sibongile Mngoma, a well-known singer and actress who had agreed to pose as Liberty, subsequently declined to be portrayed half-nude in this public venue. (Instead Mngoma retreated into the background of the painting respectfully clad in a bikini.) Crouse resorted to issuing a public call for Liberties in the nation’s flagship newspaper, The Mail and Guardian, settling on a pregnant actress of European descent for her model, whom she “creolized” with dark makeup.11 While Crouses’s model actualized the maternal elements long implicit in Liberty—what Silverman describes as a “fantasmatic mother, capable of effecting our imaginary union not only with her, but with the entire nation” (1988:13)—the painter’s choice of Camilla Waldman was racially fraught, insinuating, for one, that the sociopolitical construction of race, or what Franz Fanon (1968) called the “fact of blackness,” was something that could be painted on and off. To this end, Crouse told the New York Times: “We put dark makeup on for the photo shoot, but I’ve still got to disguise her, make her at least Creole” (Crouse in McNeil 1999). Understandably anxious about her choice of Liberty, Crouse added that Sibongile Khumalo, Mngoma’s aunt, had confirmed that Ms. Waldman “would do, with adjustments…. Make her nipples pitch black and give her dreadlocks, and she’ll be fine” (ibid.). Crouse’s interest in painting Liberty topless clearly outweighed for her the hazards of a hybrid, prosthetic Liberty. Yet why was it so crucial to the artist that Liberty be shown bare-breasted? Paradoxically, this may have been the sole element of Delacroix’s painting that enabled Crouse to invoke local histories of black female resistance—widespread yet unsung narratives of corporeal struggle in which strategic nudity is enmeshed in political protest.

“TO WALK NAKED”: A FULL-FRONTAL ATTACK ON MALE AUTHORITY

Crouse’s Passive Resistance summons not only the intellectual dissent of the theatrical community, but also the fiercely somatic

5 Artist unknown Mural, US embassy in Teheran, Iran PHOTO: COURTESY OF GIDEON MALTZ

6 William Kentridge Swinging Lady (After Fragonard) (1986) Charcoal and pastel on paper PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

conflicts of black South African women who, facing tanks and machine guns, have repeatedly stripped naked to defend their land, homes, and children. In so doing, they have “taken liberties” with their bodies, overstepping the bounds of public propriety. Although press censorship mitigated such incidents from entering the public record during apartheid, in 1990, when a group of Soweto matrons famously undressed to stave off bulldozers headed towards their shanty homes, their confrontation aired on national and international news and inspired a documentary titled Uku Hamba Ze: To Walk Naked. Recording the women’s public stripping, this film revealed, too, the humiliation expressed by these women in the aftermath of their trauma of self-exposure (Maingard, Meintjies, and Thompson 1995).

From a black woman’s perspective, the revolution in South Africa demanded wresting social and political liberties not only from the apartheid government, but also from male colleagues.

In 1994, on the eve of the first democratic elections and on the heels of the female victory of securing non-sexism, along with non-racism, as one of the core principles of the new constitution, Frene Ginwale, then a candidate for parliament, noted that the ANC “is the first liberation movement to link the emancipation of women to the emancipation of a country. Across Africa, it was national liberation first, women later, and of course the ‘later’ never came” (Ginwale in Cohen 1994). However Ginwale’s assessment was to prove overly optimistic, for the “later” never really arrived in South Africa either. For many women, the fight for liberty did not end with apartheid, and in the years since its demise they have reprised tactics of self-exposure to various ends, but always to buck government and male authority. South African women have disrobed to protest local leaders for land to grow maize, blocking roads and forcing cars to stop until they were arrested for indecent exposure (1999),12 and unclothed in defiance of police attempting to relocate them (Bredell, Johannesburg, 2001; “Stripping Away” 2001).

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FEMEN protest, IKEA Paris, October 2012.

8 Sokari Douglas Camp Underskirt Protest (2010) Painted metal PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Most recently, in February 2008, hundreds of South African women, many bare-breasted and clad defiantly in mini-skirts, marched on Johannesburg’s Noord Street taxi rank to protest the rape of Nwabisa Ngcukana, who was reportedly attacked for wearing a such a skirt. Days later, according to a local source, the victim “led hundreds of bare-thighed women on a protest walk through the now notorious taxi rank. Skirts and short hems high above their knees, placards waving wildly above their heads [stating] ‘We are not road signs. You will respect us’” (Nkosi 2012). As the female marchers exposed their breasts and thighs, some of the taxi-drivers flashed their buttocks and called the marchers “prostitutes” (BBC News 2008), echoing the criticism of two centuries before, when Delacroix’s Liberty was likewise called a “streetwalker” for brandishing a weapon against male authority. Four years later, in February 2012, a second attack on two teenage girls at the same taxi rank inspired another procession, this time headed by Gauteng Premier Nomvula Mokonyane, who donned her own incendiary mini-skirt. Daring the taxi drivers to touch her and experience the fury of a woman, she led the crowd in the apartheid-era chant of female liberation: “You strike a woman, you strike a rock and you shall surely die” (Khumalo 2012).

The strategic use of female nudity as a weapon of political resistance is, of course, not confined to South Africa, as attested by the nude female bodies at the Occupy Wall Street marches in October 2011 and the numerous global Occupy events they spawned, or by the 2004 Manipur protests in Pakistan, where women stripped to publicize the police killing of a suspected terrorist (Hussai 2004). The Paris-based feminist group FEMEN has also appropriated Liberty’s bare-breasted, slipped chiton aesthetic—now rendered as more of a fashion statement than anything else—staging protests for women’s rights in white tank tops painted with the words “Marianne en colère” which are ripped open to reveal their left shoulders and breasts (Fig. 7).13 But perhaps the most famous of these incidents took place in Nigeria’s Delta region in 2002, where hundreds of women overtook Chevron’s export terminal, holding seven hundred workers hostage and halting production for over a week, raising their objection to the multinational oil companies’ exploitation of their land. Anthropologist Terisa Turner explains their threats to strip naked, what she calls “the curse of nakedness” (Turner and Brownhill 2004:67), as follows:

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In much of Africa, women throw off their clothes in an ultimate protest to say “this is where life comes from. I hereby revoke your life.” Nakedness by elderly women, in particular, is used in extreme and life-threatening situations. Women wielding the weapon of the exposed vagina could be killed or raped. It is with the knowledge of the act’s life and death implications that women enter into such protest. Women who go naked implicitly state that they will get their demands met or die in the process of trying (ibid., p. 71).14

The dramatic Delta takeover cost the oil companies $2.5 million daily, but more than that, according to Turner: “between July 2002 and February 2003, the number of women engaged in naked protests grew from a few thousand in the Niger Delta to several hundred thousand worldwide” (ibid., p. 72). 15 This remarkable spike in harnessing the naked female body as a form of non-violent resistance have struck a range of observers as a supremely visual semiotics. Writing on one such Nigerian event in 2009, where a group of angry women led by Chief Ronke Okusanya marched bare-chested in protest of electoral fraud, the

9 Marlene Dumas Drie Vroue en Ek (1982) Mixed-media collage Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnheim PHOTO: COURTESY OF ZENO X GALLERY

10 Marlene Dumas detail of Benefit of the Doubt tapestry PHOTO: COURTESY OF ZENO X GALLERY

procession made international news when it was described in The Nation as a “form of performance art” (“The Naked Truth” 2012). While this attribution collapses the very real economy of political protests usually fueled by anger and desperation with histories of performance art in which nudity functions representationally rather than instrumentally, there is no question that the conjunction of bare breasts and political protest introduces a performative element into the political arena that draws on Delacroix’s painting of Liberty (and its subsequent iterations) as a historical sign.

And these signals run both ways: for contemporary artists likewise continue to be struck by the power of these events in the street. The sculpture Underskirt Protest (2010), for example, is the product of Sokari Douglas Camp having followed the British press coverage of the recent spate of female marches in Nigeria, especially the 2010 protests in Jos (Fig. 8). Here one of Camp’s signature metal personages, a topless women clad in the mutinous miniskirt, is mounted on an oil drum. Brandishing a pair of weapons, she is crowned by a web of branches that quote the boughs the Jos women had marched with. The intuition that the usually academic politics of the visual, especially the power

struggles over the representation and control of the female body, is being actualized in the street, invests these events with a relevance that adds to—or vies with—the archive of painted images of Liberty that artists already bring to their subject.

Camp’s work, like Crouse’s, is informed as much by local precedents as by European tradition of Liberty. Nigeria’s rich tradition of female protest dates back to the 1929 Aba riots, when thousands of Igbo women stripped and marched against British-imposed taxes. Here, as in South Africa, such public baring of the body—especially the post-menopausal body—strongly transgresses cultural mores and religious taboos. Confirming Turner’s research, many of the protesting women have spoken of the opprobrium their acts incited, one that duplicates the reprobation Delacroix’s male contemporaries leveled at his image of uncurbed female resistance. “‘La Femme est ignoble (despicable),’ her skin is dirty, she has only one leg, her figure is gross,” the French critics declared, pointing out Liberty’s under-arm hair and stout legs (Pointon 1986:83). In familiar fashion, one male witness to the 2001 protests in Bredell, South Africa described his “revulsion at looking at women as old as my mother, grandmother, and aunt stripping naked (tsola style) in front of media cameras and men as young as their sons—which in my culture is disgusting” (“Stripping Away” 2001). Behind this discourse of disgust, both generations of critiques can be read as attempts to neutralize the threatening presence of uncontainable female sexuality, which challenges not only the offending men in question, but also traditional religion and other male-dominated social institutions.

In Marcia Pointon’s landmark reading of Delacroix’s painting, Liberty’s charge through the streets of Paris is trumped up; her so-called threat is spurious (Pointon 1986). In her view, Delacroix’s gun-toting, flag-wielding, anxiety-inducing Liberty marks an abnormal inversion of the social order that perpetuates woman as a sign of difference, merely fortifying existent bina-

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11 Marlene Dumas Liberty (1993) Oil painting; 55 cm x 40 cm Private collection PHOTO: COURTESY OF ZENO X GALLERY

12 Eugène Delacroix Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Ruins of Missolonghi (1827) Oil on canvas; 208 cm x 147 cm Musée des Beaux-Arts Bordeaux PHOTO: A. DANVERS. COPYRIGHT RMN-GRAND PALAIS/ ART RESOURCE, NEW YORK

ries equating maleness with order and femininity with political turmoil.16 However, in post-apartheid South Africa, the local meanings that Crouse’s Liberty elicit inflect Pointon’s analysis in interesting ways: by invoking recent histories of protest, Crouse points to an ongoing process of revolution in which resistance against a hegemonic male order is written into the status quo as perpetually in motion. Such an idea is hardly new, retrieving, in fact, some of the earliest meanings attached to Liberty. According to Richard Sennett, the Liberty of 1789 functioned precisely in this way: “she gave a new, collective meaning to motion, flow, and change,” he writes, the flowing milk of her breasts functioning metaphorically with “lactation replacing respiration” as an image of movement (Sennett 1996:285, 291).17 Transferred to the South African context, Liberty appears to reactivate these early associations, serving as a sign of activism in process. Her pres-

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ence confirms how, for women throughout the postcolonies, the revolution never ends, but rather slips into an endlessly repeated struggle of re-enactments. In this way, rather than acting as a static sign of difference, Liberty’s nudity in the South African context cues an ongoing history of defiance that stretches back through apartheid and spirals forward into the future of a country scourged with misogyny and child rape.

Presaging Crouse’s conjunction of the bare-breasted black female body and the politics of defiance by more than a decade, Marlene Dumas’s 1982 collage Drie Vroue en Ek juxtaposes photographs of Pauline Lumumba, Betty Shabazz, and Winnie Mandela to pay tribute to the wives of these African resistance leaders (Fig. 9). Dumas’s painting pictures Pauline Lumumba marching topless and leading, according to a period source, “a wailing procession of other bare-breasted women through the streets of Léopoldville” (“The Congo,” 1961). Restaging Lumumba’s protest of the murder of her husband Patrice, Dumas links Lumumba’s public baring of her breasts with a poetics of resistance. In appropriating this particular image, Dumas, like Reshada Crouse, wrests bare breasts from their assigned place in the colonial imaginary as the overdetermined sign of the naked native; instead, she embeds strategic female nudity in the revolutionary moment, in the birth of the postcolony and, ultimately, in the street. For whether the site of barricades or the conduit of

passive resistance measures like processions, the street retains the memory of the revolutionary struggle. Thus limning a history of the modern black female body of resistance, Dumas dispels in one sweep the racist logic of difference that equates black breasts with nature, white breasts with culture (allegory).

13 Marlene Dumas Equality (1993) Oil painting; 55 cm x 40 cm Private collection PHOTO: COURTESY OF ZENO X GALLERY

14 Marlene Dumas Justice (1993) Oil painting; 55 cm x 40 cm Private collection PHOTO: COURTESY OF ZENO X GALLERY

MARLENE DUMAS’S BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT

Twenty years later, in a tapestry that now hangs in South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitutional Court, Dumas revisited the vexed convention of pinning political transition onto the female nude, and Liberty again walked naked across the threshold of nation.18 But whereas Crouse’s Liberty saluted Delacroix’s image in key respects, Dumas renounces it in the strongest of terms.

Eschewing Crouse’s realism and clarity of meaning, Dumas embraces the futility of representing ideals of nation, circling the limits of painting and prowling the border where lucidity bleeds into doubt. Indeed, The Benefit of the Doubt is Dumas’s title for the monumental Constitutional court tapestries (Fig. 10) into which she inserted her 1993 oil painting titled Liberty (Fig. 11).

Dumas’s inscrutable Liberty is a child who proffers stained hands that beg questions of guilt and responsibility. Her pre-pubescent body stalked by the twin specters of colonialism and pornography, Dumas’s Liberty tears at the tradition of the allegorical nude.

Turpentine-soaked slashes pin Liberty’s biceps to her trunk, her forearms splay out at the elbows, and blocks for wrists end in sprays of talon-fingers. But more than anything, it is Liberty’s

broken wings—her claw-like appendages—that signal Dumas’s distance from Delacroix’s original painting, where Liberté’s wind-whipped tricolore buoys her into a revolutionary future.

Accentuated with furrows of thick black paint and ringed with a nimbus of dry underpaint, Dumas’s ham-handed child splays her fingers in a maladroit gesture. As Marlene van Niekerk observes: “These hands do not grant liberty” (2007:112). Instead, the constrained limbs of Dumas’s version appear to retrieve the equivocal invocation of Delacroix’s other cardinal image of woman as nation, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi (Fig. 12). In the latter painting, Greece extends her arms in an open-palmed, ambiguous posture which emotes precisely the knot of contradictory signs that Dumas appears to reprise. As Pointon asks of Greece, so we must puzzle over Liberty: “Is her gesture one of surrender and/ or appeal? Is it sexual and/ or political?” (Pointon 1986:79) For Pointon, it is precisely the painting’s undecidability that facilitates the interpenetration of the erotic and the political,

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15 Marlene Dumas Give The People What They Want (1993) Oil painting; 55 cm x 40 cm Private collection PHOTO: COURTESY OF ZENO X GALLERY

creating an ambiguity which sparks both Delacroix’s paintings of women and revolution.

In Dumas’s painting, Liberty’s lofty title hangs off her pornographic, underage body like an ill-fitting dress, mooring the painting to an archive of fantasy images, yet pressuring meaning in its antagonistic juxtaposition of word and image. While titles such as Liberty have historically been applied to images of pornographic titillation to elevate nakedness to an allegorical ideal, Dumas trespasses on this polite chicanery by exposing it as one more pretense, a cloak to be peeled away. Thereby rejecting the bared breasts of Delacroix’s Liberté—and the metaphors of “naked” or self-evident truths that underpin such depictions—Dumas edges towards the view that truth wears many masks. The masked Liberty thus joins a trio of earlier paintings

by Dumas—images of Equality (1993, Fig. 13), Justice (1993, Fig. 14) and democracy (Give the People What They Want, 1992, Fig. 15)—which all prod timely political ideals through gossamer plays on covering and uncovering.19

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Each of these identically sized oils (40 cm x 55 cm) depict a prepubescent girl, shown frontally and cropped at the knees.

Coverings of various sorts bandage these bodies together: Justice’s eyes are bound in cloth, Equality’s face vanishes beneath an ashen mask, while Liberty’s features, traced in a bruised blue, echo this masked sensibility. The child in Give the People What They Want, by contrast, is as a figure of uncovering: she spreads open a cloth to reveal her naked body in a sinister suggestion of child prostitution. Equality can still be seen clutching tatters of her predecessor’s garb, but it has disappeared with Liberty. The penumbra of this garment nonetheless seems to account for the odd poses of both Justice and Liberty, as their outstretched forearms grasp for the ghost of that cloth, spectral ridges of which remain visible beneath buttery, concealing layers of paint. These tropes of veiling are, of course, precisely the metaphors in which European philosophers have long cloaked the notion of “truth,” allegorizing the concept as a woman to be unveiled—that is, penetrated—by rationalist inquiry. At the same time, in probing these valences of hiddenness and revelation, Dumas explores the structural condition of painting as an act of covering: an opaque medium of containment which works its self-effacement on the surface of a canvas, a piece of cloth much like the scant cream covering Liberty clutches around her.

Dumas’s considerations of paint as the medium of self-concealment are partnered with her musings on photography’s self-exposure. Ultimately Liberty and the string of paintings it emerges from all draw their contradictory logic from the colonial archive: Give the People What They Want is the closest emulation, but the whole group derive from an early twentieth-century anthropological photograph of a young black girl exposing her naked body to the camera (the specifics of which remain, characteristically, unrecorded). This historical trace of an illicit offering made to an unknown photographer casts a spectral pall on this group of paintings, as Liberty probes the discrepant meanings thrown up by the notion of exposure: of making something visible by uncovering it. What seems to be illuminated here is a resonance between the exposures of the photographic process (the source for most of Dumas’s work) and the pornographic self-exposure of the female subject. Such a parallel in turn calls up the animating metaphor of Delacroix’s painting that Silverman identifies, where “Liberty’s breasts and shoulders breaking free from her loose garment, [draw] a metaphorical connection between the political revolt of the people and the exposure of sexualized parts of the female anatomy” (Silverman 1988:5).

Dumas’s re-inscription of this self-revealing as a pornographic, possibly coerced act rather than a joyful stripping off the yoke of clothing again refuses the insistent metaphors that would hitch the naked female body to truth, liberty, and regime change.

In Dumas’s prominent public commission, pornography therefore bristles between the terms of art and politics as the painter compares the esteemed ideal of democracy with what she archly intimates may be its visual equivalent: the cheap thrills of pornography. For Liberty’s unveiling provocatively collapses democracy and pornography together by suggesting that both enact the titular directive of “giving the people what they want.”

Writing on this group of images in a February 1993 Dutch newspaper editorial titled “Give the People What They Want,” Dumas

explained: “1994 will see the first ever introduction of the democratic vote for all peoples in South Africa. I wouldn’t mount this show with this title there now. And as Spike Lee would say: If you don’t understand why not, you’re probably white” (Dumas 1998:71). In this way, although the painting’s title is merely a dry, formal definition of what democracy is—rule (kratos) by the people (demos)—its productive ambiguity rests not only in its implication that populism often cultivates the excesses of base desire, but also in its proposition that what the people want is to consume the raced, prepubescent, pornographic body. Dumas’s glossing of this work with an Oscar Wilde quote to the effect that one of life’s tragedies is getting what one wants (the other is not getting it) only ratchets up the tensions that define democracy, in Churchill’s famous 1947 formulation, as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”20 For some, Dumas’s infantilizing of Liberty defuses her eroticism. But for me, rather than mitigating the sexual undertones of the original, Dumas’ image makes overt—and uncomfortably so—the perverse sexualization of violence and power that structures Delacroix’s nineteenth-century painting. Dumas’s child clearly decries the ideals projected onto childhood as much as those of nation. Closely cropped, crushed up against the picture

16 William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx Firewalker (2009) Mixed-media sculpture; 11 m Johannesburg PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

17 William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx Firewalker (2009) Mixed-media sculpture; 11 m Johannesburg, viewed from behind PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

plane, her Liberty is painting as stain, or as van Niekerk poetically suggests: paint as taint (2007:112). Indeed, when Dumas caustically declared in 1993, the same year as her first rendering of Liberty, that she paints because she likes to be bought and sold, because she is a paint-stained “dirty woman,” (1998:75) she explicitly allies herself with the sullied Liberty, hairy-armed and shameless, “ignoble” and “dirty” as racist French critics protested at the time (cited in Pointon 1986:32). Rather than upholding male fantasies of the “pure” or virginal female nude, Dumas self-consciously claims the identity of the “streetwalker” or the prostitute (her frequent subjects), the so-called polluted, invariably racialized female body always waiting on the other side of

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the specious ideal of the feminine. Identifying both herself and the refracted subjects of her paintings with the tarnished and the whorish, the blemished, grimy woman, the artist retrieves the ironic, double-sided histories of revolutionary women who have been briefly untethered from hearth and home only to be recast as streetwalkers. Delacroix’s Liberté herself was of course identified with the street, regarded by contemporary critics as: “A dirty and shameless woman of the streets” and “the most shameless prostitute of the dirtiest streets of Paris” (cited in Pointon 1986:68).

Dumas’s title for her tapestry, The Benefit of the Doubt, is a relatively sanguine counter to her somber image; it nonetheless evinces suspicions about the dubious ideal of nation, and certainly about the ability of a capitalist democracy to deliver on its promises of equality and justice. Widespread fears about the derailing of the democratic process, coupled with ambivalence about the media-packaged rhetoric of the “rainbow nation,” weighed down the flags these Liberties were flapping around the fringes of Africa circa 1993. Robin Rhode, for example, tugged a brick flag across the cracked sidewalks of Johannesburg. In his vision, Liberté’s windswept banner is unequivocally grounded.

In Dumas’s, the flag is vanquished altogether, while the hands that would seize it have frayed into mere stumps. In this way, Dumas’s heavy-handed painting colludes with the image of Liberty’s leaden hands, encumbered with unknown burdens or unnamed guilt. Dumas’s translation of her painting into a tapestry only witnessed Liberty’s digits deindividuate further into ragged clubs, as form deformed further under the pressures of its new public site.

WILLIAM KENTRIDGE AND GERHARD MARX’S FIREWALKER

It is with these histories in mind—with Liberty having long functioned as an overdetermined sign in post-apartheid South Africa and with two other Liberties having already stormed downtown Johannesburg—that Kentridge and Marx’s elevenmeter high collaborative sculpture Firewalker was greeted by locals in June 2009 (Figs. 16–17). An abstracted assemblage of disembodied planes that coalesce into the image of a woman carrying a brazier of coals on her head, reporters hailed Firewalker with the headline: “JOZI GETS ITS STATUE OF LIBERTY.” “A monument to the everyday, the overlooked, and to the activities Notes My thanks to an inimitable mentor, Suzanne Blier, with whom I first broached representations of Liberty; to Patricia Phillips for prompting me to return to this topic quite some years later for a special issue of Public Art Review; and to Michelle Kuo for inviting me to consider closely Marlene Dumas’s painting in the pages of Artforum.

1 For Deleuze, variation is the condition of repetition. He introduces his book with this point: “variation is not added to repetition in order to hide it, but is rather its condition or constitutive element” (1994:xvi).

2 Joseph Koudelka’s book Invasion 68: Prague immortalized this event in numerous photographs that quote Delacroix’s painting through their triangulated compositions, the backward fluttering of a central flag, or a pair of legs striding purposefully across the frame.

In the postcolonial context, M.F. Husain, one of India’s most celebrated contemporary painters, has summoned

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that have taken place on that site for so many years,” Kentridge described the work, which pays homage to the resourcefulness of local female vendors who hawk roasted corns and sheep’s heads on nearby streets (Kentridge in Nkosi and Davie 2009).

Kentridge and Marx’s sculpture jests with the idealized tradition of Liberty. Radically localizing the generalized image, they ground Liberty in the geopolitics of the southern city, retrieving her striding body from the frame of history only to inflect it with narratives of economic struggle and enterprise. “She is a very particular Statue of Liberty,” Kentridge explained to reporters, “Johannesburg’s Statue of Liberty—which carries with it, at every point, either the history or the threat of its own collapse” (ibid.). Actualizing Liberty’s spectral fragility, the artists cast her as a ghost-like figure who disappears with the slightest shift of the viewer’s gaze. For despite its imposing size and sturdiness, the final sculpture retains a sense of ad-hoc flimsiness that betrays its origins as a desktop maquette cobbled together from tiny scraps of torn paper. Readable only from a single, head-on perspective, the work visually rehearses “its own collapse” as it disintegrates into incoherence when viewed obliquely or from behind. Thus trading the aesthetics of solidity and continuity associated with monumental sculpture for those of wobbly disjunction, Firewalker incorporates Liberty’s tenuous status as a sign into the formal structure of the work itself.

In a world where ideals such as Liberty strike one as dubious at best, and treacherous at worst, personifications of these archetypes become all the more urgently desired, all the more vehemently created, all the more desperate sites of displaced fantasy. Marx and Kentridge’s piece—and its enthusiastically misguided reception as Liberty—registers the indefatigable desire for tidy images of nation, for immaculate images of conception, for uncomplicated, easily readable symbols. Even as this work lampoons such traditions, public readings nevertheless remain determined to slot it into an archive of canonical images. In doing so, they underscore why, ghostly as she has become, Liberty will never die.

Leora Maltz-Leca is assistant professor of contemporary art at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently completing a book on William Kentridge titled “Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises.” lmaltzle@risd.edu

Liberty on numerous occasions, including a recent series of Mother Teresa paintings. In the first half of the twentieth century, Liberty surfaced on revolutionary posters throughout Europe, in John Heartfield’s famous Liberty Fights in Their Ranks, Madrid, 1936, and later in Red Grooms and Mimi Gross 1976 Ruckus Manhattan.

3 One of many examples is Eritrean painter Elsa Yacobs’s 1984 Woman Hero, where a woman in combat fatigues assumes Liberty’s signature triangular pose, her body twisted and her right arm drawn back to hurl a rock or a grenade. For an image and discussion of this painting see Christine Matzke (2002:22).

4 In the context of the Americas, Ester Hernandez likewise demonstrated Liberty’s receptivity to hybridization in her 1976 print, Libertad. Here the Statue of Liberty is chiseled away to reveal a composite body comprising Aztec imagery and figures, with the word “Aztlan” (homeland of the Aztec) etched onto the statue’s base.

5 Paul Troillas suggests that the appellation of Marianne derives from the combination of the names of the Virgin Mary and her mother, St. Anne, or from the frequently used diminutive for Mary, Marianne (Troillas cited in Ryan 1989: 27). What these narratives of origin all have in common is a religious, maternal conception, suggesting a probable slippage from Mary, mother of god and protector of the people, to Marianne, mother of nation and protector of the people.

6 Marina Warner argues that Delacroix’s use of the slipped chiton (which Crouse replicates) places Liberty in a Classical lineage of female warriors and hunters, explaining that: “In Greek art, the goddess who most frequently appears in a slipped chiton is Artemis, the goddess of the hunt....” (Warner 1985:278–79).

In Artemis, one finds an ancient fusion of virginity and pugilism that foreshadows the complex persona assigned to later European incarnations of Liberty as a virgin/warrior.

7 Daniel Joseph Martinez’s work Who Killed Liberty Can You Hear That, It’s The Sound Of Inevitability, The Sound Of Your Death (2012), a fiberglass cast of the Statue of Liberty which horizontally transected a gallery wall and featured a mirror at its base was shown in the artist’s exhibition “I Am A Verb” at Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles, September 8–October 20, 2012.

8 For the important differences between Delacroix’s painting Liberty On the Barricades and the Statue of Liberty, including the significant shift from the Phyrgian cap to the diadem or sunburst imagery associated with French royalty, see Silverman 1988.

9 Phone interview with the artist, Johannesburg, South Africa, March 2004.

10 Crouse explained: “Protest theatre, often bourne out of the Market Theatre, travelling abroad, brought home to European audiences and artists the need for outside pressure for change.......this creole South African Liberty....leads a mixed group of free thinking intellectuals who wield power only through the seduction of their artistry. This is their passive resistance, their contribution, which echoes the pulse of a revolution which itself was marked by its passive transformation” (Crouse, n.d.).

11 “It can be anyone who has contributed to the South African stage ... old or young, black or white, coloured or Indian,” the artist requested readers in print, with the promise to paint the winner into the crowd of the mural. Mail and Guardian, June 1998.

12 Mail & Guardian, 24 November 1999. This incident was also reported in The Namibian (www. namibian.com.na) and on BBC News. BBC’s Carolyn Dempster noted that “in rural areas stripping naked is a symbolic act signifying that a woman has reached the end of her tether and will be pushed no further.” “SA Farm Women Bare All” BBC, 24 November, 1999 13 See the group’s website for this event of October 26, 2012, which was staged in protest of IKEA’s removal of women from their Saudi Arabian catalog in deference to Sharia law. http://femen.org/en/news/page/2 14 The historic takeover at Chevron is featured as an online exhibition on the website of the International Museum of Women (imow.com). It inspired a radio documentary Delta on Fire: Nigerian Women’s Resistance, produced by National Radio Project’s Women’s Desk, and a film documentary, The Naked Option: A Last Resort, produced by Candace Schermerhorn.

15 Recent examples include a smaller Nigerian naked female protest against the oil companies in Obodogugu-Ogume (All Africa.com, July 18, 2008) while on April 23, 2012 the BBC reported on similar events in Uganda, where women marched topless to protest female politician Ingrid Turinawe’s public groping by arresting police officers.

16 Natalie Davis (1978:153) argues that ultimately female figures like Liberty or Joan of Arc reinforce the equation of male power with the ordered, normal world, functioning not as the sign of an enlightened or progressive society, but invoking the category ‘woman’ as a sign of difference. In Southern Africa, female figures who are part warrior, part prophetess have likewise emerged during times of instability, representing disorder. Perhaps the most famous example, thematized in South African writer Zakes Mda’s novel, Heart of Redness, is Nongqawuse, a teenage prophetess who believed that the Xhosa must slaughter their cattle and destroy their crops in order to purify themselves and rid themselves of the British.

17 It was only later that Liberty became a static figure, losing muscle and verve as she literally took a seat.

See Maurice Agulhon (1981) for an account of this shift.

18 The oil painting Liberty (1993) was integrated into a tapestry titled The Benefit of the Doubt, commissioned for the Palace of Justice in Den Bosch in 1998.

A duplicate tapestry was subsequently donated to the South African Constitutional Court in Johannesburg in February 2001. For an overview of the court’s art collection assembled by former Justice Albie Sachs, see Law-Viljoen (2009).

19 In 1993, on the occasion of her exhibition titled “Give the People What They Want,” which included the series of small oils Give the People What They Want, Equality, Justice, and Liberty, Dumas published a statement in Die Witte Raaf. Here she wrote about “Bad Girls,” “Cheap Girls,” “Sex and Violence,” and the upcoming 1994 elections in South Africa.

20 Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, November 11, 1947.

Worldwide, Africa Desk. February 21.

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