Siopis’s (2002) exhibition Sympathetic Magic at the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries consisted of a series of installations characterised by a conscious play with aspects of exhibitionism. For this series of installations, Siopis made use of some of the existing
117Preliminary work on this discussion was published in an article by Alison Kearney titled “The framing of objects in Siopis’s Sympathetic Magic” (see Kearney 2013). The material has been reworked for inclusion in this thesis, since my argument has become more sophisticated as the research has progressed.
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conventions of display, and deliberately contrasted them with an inversion of the same conventions through unexpected arrangements of objects, including her own previous artworks. In each installation, objects were presented in different arrangements that affected the viewers’ encounters with those objects. It is worth considering the series of installations in this exhibition in depth, because they can be used to demonstrate the effect that the framing in the field of exhibition has on our understanding of objects, as well as the agency that curators and artists have to direct the viewer’s gaze, and thereby influence interpretation.
The entrance of the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries opened onto a large
‘white cube’ exhibition space on the upper floor (referred to as the Gertrude Posel Gallery), customarily used for temporary exhibitions of contemporary art. A spiral staircase in the middle of the gallery led to a smaller, more intimate, exhibition space downstairs. The walls of this smaller space were lined with glass cabinets, specifically constructed for rotating exhibitions of artworks from the Standard Bank Collection of African Art housed at the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. For Sympathetic Magic, Siopis made use of both floors of the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, purposely utilising the gallery’s architecture, glass cabinets and permanent collection, in a series of interconnected installations made of a range of her own artworks, domestic objects, personal memorabilia and African artworks on loan from the Standard Bank Collection of African Art.
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On entering the exhibition, the viewer was confronted with the artists’ painting Melancholia (1989) suspended from the ceiling, so that viewers could see both sides of it. As discussed in chapter four, in this arrangement the painting was treated as an object, exposing the
painted image as the illusion it is (fig 5.6).
Fig. 5.6 Penny Siopis, Melancholia, 1986. Oil on canvas, 197.5 x 175.5 cm Collection: Johannesburg Art Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist.
Viewers were then confronted with what, from a distance, appeared to be a pile of used domestic furniture and other objects (fig. 5.7). Broken chairs, sets of drawers, carpets, souvenirs, and even a moth-eaten, taxidermied crocodile, were precariously perched on top of each other. The placement of heavy objects above the viewers’ heads was reminiscent of Duchamp’s (1938) 1200 coal sacks, in which apparently heavy objects were unexpectedly
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hung over viewers’ heads. In Duchamp’s installation the coal sacks were out of place, partly because they were in a gallery space, and partly because they were suspended. Similarly, Siopis’s displacement of the furniture turned the familiar in to something strange and unexpected, and created an uneasy feeling, as if everything might fall at any moment. These objects were not, however, merely piled on top of each other as they appeared to be, but were attached to a dome like structure that covered the stairwell. This structure turned the stairwell into a cave-like environment, through which viewers had to walk to get to the lower level of the gallery, and into which Siopis could insert different objects. Inside the cave viewers were immersed in textures, shapes, smells. The arrangement of objects was characterised by unusual juxtapositions: deep red velvet curtains next to army
camouflage.118 Many of the objects attached to the walls of the cave had been used, bearing the traces of their use, and connoted the detritus of many lives. In this installation broken toys, old clothes, used school books and souvenirs, were now elevated as part of art, but nevertheless presented in as if part of a pile of rubbish.
118 This was not unlike the unusual juxtapositions in Siopis’s previous installations like Reconnaissance 1900-1997, 1997 and Charmed Lives discussed in chapters three and four.
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Fig. 5.7 Penny Siopis, Sympathetic Magic, 2002. Installation view covering stairwell. Dimensions variable. Found objects including furniture, ornaments and lights amongst other things. University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Image courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery Editions.
The image of the pile suggests surplus, excess, and thereby loss of value. In the pile, the uniqueness of things was masked, because objects obscured each other. In this
presentation, the objects were not singled out as Melancholia and other objects in the vitrines downstairs were. The objects were heaped, as if discarded or forgotten. There was no clear hierarchy of objects; everything that was subsumed in the pile was treated in the same manner. In masking the specificity of objects, the pile is the opposite of a museum display, in which objects are singled out, and their specificity is foregrounded. When objects and artworks are part of a museum collection, and exhibited in the museum, they are placed in vitrines, under spotlights, and held up for a particular scrutiny, but in this arrangement as a pile, we can no longer see individual things.
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Imaging piles of things is a trope in Siopis work. Melancholia (1986), which Siopis (2014a, 59) describes as “an allegory of excess” depicts a banquet table, piled high with food,
ornaments that reference Greek antiquity, the history of art and vanitas symbolism; cowrie shells, porcupine quills and other exotic African objects. The perspective is such that the objects towards the back of the table seem to merge into the pattern on the carpet, enhancing the illusion of excess. There are piles in other of Siopis’s paintings, for example Patience on a monument: a history painting, (1988) (fig. 5.8), which was made through the use of photocopies of ethnographic representations of Africans, slaves in a chain gang, drawings depicting the colonial wars between the British and the amaZulu, which were collaged on to the canvas to form a background surface. It is against this backdrop that an African woman, swathed in fabric that drapes around her body, such as the carved folds of simulated fabric that was draped around marble statues of Greek goddesses, sits on a pedestal. The pedestal is made of a pile of things, similar to those depicted in Melancholia (1986), including a skull, books, African masks, paint brushes, flowers and canvases.
Suggested in this is that this pedestal is the woman’s history, piling up beneath her.
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Fig. 5.8 Penny Siopis, Patience on a Monument: A History Painting, 1988. (Detail). 180 x 200 cm, Oil and collage on board. Collection: William Humphreys Art Gallery, Kimberley. Photo: Alison Kearney.
Image courtesy of the artist.
In this panting, Patience is peeling a lemon, as she sits, waiting for a revolution or some kind of social justice from the disasters of war and pillage around her. In these history paintings, Siopis inverted the cannon through foregrounding those who were formerly left out of the grand narrative of history. Discussing her own use of the pile, Siopis (2014c, 116) compares the painted piles with the pile of objects in her installations:
…when the pile started in Patience, it was very concrete- a picture of a pile- but as the pile became the objects in the installations, it became less and less fixed. The pile disintegrates into bits and pieces, and transforms as it is distributed across the world. Singularity becomes multiplicity.
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Immersion
As viewers entered the cave created in the stairwell in Sympathetic magic (2002), they moved from being onlookers to experiencing the artwork from the inside; as if being part of the artwork. There was something profoundly affecting about being so completely engulfed.
Describing this installation, Siopis (2014c, 115) comments:
…you literally walk into the work in a way that makes it difficult to see where the installation begins and ends and where you stand as spectator. Sometimes you’re right in the things.
Sometimes they just spill out at you. They’re in the space of spectating.
Ironically, because of the way objects were layered on top of each other and crammed together, despite close proximity, viewers could not see the individual constituents clearly (fig. 5.9). Objects obscured each other, leaving only fragments visible such as a bit of fur, part of a tatty teddy bear, a Boy Scout’s uniform, immaculately ironed, unexpectedly kept pristine amidst this collection of cast-offs. At first, it was as if the immersion challenged the usual distance between artefact and onlooker to which one is accustomed in exhibitions.
Despite this immersion, the distance between the viewer and what is displayed, mentioned by Baxandall (1991) and Bourdieu (1993), is nevertheless maintained because even though viewers are immersed they are not permitted to touch the objects that make up the installation.
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Fig. 5.9 Penny Siopis, Sympathetic Magic, 2002. Installation view, (lower level), University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Image courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery Editions.
In Sympathetic magic, as with her other installations, such as Reconnaissance 1900-1997, (1997), familiar objects were made strange, evoking a Surrealist sense of the uncanny through the new relationships between objects in this arrangement. Viewers encountered seemingly familiar objects, in strange juxtapositions, and unusual positions. Many objects were on their sides, or partially obscured, heavy things were suspended above viewers’
heads. In Siopis’ installations, the uncanny is evoked in order to make us look again at those things that usually go unnoticed, thereby challenging what Miller (2005, 5) refers to as “the humility of things.”
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Fig 5.10 Penny Siopis, Sympathetic Magic, 2002 installation view, (lower level), University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Image courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery Editions.
By contrast to the immersion viewers experienced in the pile and cave, glass separated the viewers from the objects installed in the gallery’s permanent vitrines. In a vitrine along one of the walls was an installation of mannequins’ body parts stacked on top of each other, evoking a pile of corpses (fig 5.10). Next to this was a boarded up vitrine with light coming through the cracks in the panels. There was not enough of a gap between the boards to see what, if anything was inside the vitrine. This was reminiscent of the artist’s previous site-specific installation titled Permanent collection, (fig 5.11) for which the artist borrowed a
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number of African artworks from the Standard Bank Collection of African art housed at the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries.119
Fig. 5.11 Penny Siopis, Permanent Collection, 1995. Mixed media installation including African art, artefacts, in downstairs exhibition space of the University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries, as part of the First Johannesburg Biennale, 1995. Image courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery
Editions.