Hybridity and Power in Georgina Maxim’s work
Zimbabwe
has a stunning and tragic history.
Thirty
– five years ago, the Zimbabwean political landscape looked markedly different
from today. Robert Mugabe had been elected president, a culmination of years of
liberation struggle. Soon enough the moral high ground on which the liberation
struggle was based was eroded by bad decisions and a world bent on taking an
active interest in what was going on in the country. Idealism was relegated to
the background, the economy went on a downward spiral and the country became
just another developing economy.
Zimbabwean
artists responded to these changes with calm mimicry and intelligent surprise. Cynicism
replaced hope as a guiding principle of its political discourse. In the realm
of poetry one recalls the disarming declaration by Freedom Nyamubaya when she
said:
Let my hand work
My mouth sing
My pencil write
About the same things my
bullet aimed at[1]
The
women who had fought alongside the men had soon after independence been
relegated to the same spheres as before the war; spheres of no influence.
For writers
like Freedom Nyamubaya, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera, the condition of
the African woman became a matter of immediate concern. It was a negating condition
that encouraged the exploration of and promotion of different forms of
feminism. Theirs became a social commentary that was to see a change in the
post-colonial literature canon of the country.
The
visual arts in the country on the other hand having long been identified as an
othered profession were slow to see issues of gender addressed. On a simplistic
level, ideas of sexuality and gender in art have been around since time
immemorial but historically, gender and art in Zimbabwe has almost been absent.
There is a distinct shying away from the overt tackling of feminine issues that
one sees in for example Judy Chicago’s iconic The Dinner Party perhaps
brought on by the a culture of not talking about sexuality and making such talk
taboo.
The
history of the visual arts in Zimbabwe is a long a sad one. The missionary
interventions by Father Hans Groeber at Serima Mission and Canon Ned Paterson
at Cyrene Mission presupposed that there had been no history of art in the
country[2].
Thus the two clergymen made it their mission to initiate and stimulate local
art and craft, thus ignoring centuries of craftsmanship.
It
did not help that players like Frank McEwen the first director of the National
Gallery of Rhodesia and Tom Blomefield[3] the
tobacco farmer turned sculptor cultivated a sort of mysticism around what they
called Shona art by playing a gatekeeper role as to what could be produced and what
had potential to sell. Frank McEwen especially did not like the artworks by
anyone who had been trained especially outside of then Southern Rhodesia
calling those artists corrupted[4]. The
artists ended up playing to the whims of the people who were apt to buy their
work. Hence there was for a long time no protest art in Zimbabwe.
When
Zimbabwean visual artists look at the world today, they see a world full of
possibilities and more accepting of differences. In the past, before the
missionary intervention, art was a communal effort and no distinct individual
had more authority or power of intervention. They collectively were
interpreters, seers, respected and yet with no signature for their authorship
despite the fact that there were masters of certain crafts and art forms. This
provided a mask for the artists, aiding the staged performance of a spiritual
belief, shape and form, recording an interpretation of aspects of identity, not
in their fixed but in their changing forms, in their fluent lucidity.
The artists
completed the message whether it was of initiation, marriage, birth or death –
the motions and movements collective and anonymous. This thus guided the
responses of the crowd, the interpretation of the future, and the most profound
knowledge of the world. Art was then ritualistic and functional.
Today
we have the individual artist. This is a modern construct in Zimbabwe and most
of Africa.
The
contemporary Zimbabwean visual art landscape is as varied as its habitats and
inhabitants; both of geography and of political experience. The art is more
public in the specific way that the artist now has a signature and bears the
burden of explanation, of being sought out for a response. The artist is called
out to explain satisfactorily or not, why they chose a certain form, medium or
subject. The relationship between history and the elusive nature of the present
is seen in the shifting boundaries that allow the viewer to travel beyond the realms
of imagination. The crossing and questioning of taboo shown in works like that of
Bulelwa Madekurozwa’s Sunday Afternoon 1996 Oil on canvas – the lovers, provides an
interrogative aspect to the art resulting in an inventive and engaging artwork
confirming the graceful courage that liberates from strictures of performance.
Georgina
Maxim[5] in
this regard uses assemblage to chronicle and explore the ‘inequalities and
equalities’ of a woman’s world[6].
Her world is no less a social commentary, speaking implicitly and explicitly of
the difficulties of being a woman – a woman artist – with an independent and
individual journey. Her work informed by the drama and trauma of life as a
female artist, Maxim’s practice is the epitome of the struggle that
characterizes and belies the situation of female artists in Zimbabwe.
Her
work Kupona is intellectually on
point, emotionally powerful. The assemblage is especially erudite work in
effective and sometimes witty language that explores the condition of the
female and generates a certain emotional response that is difficult to ignore. It
explores the genesis/creation narrative, exploring childbirth as more than just
a cause of celebration, more than a dangerous event that can prove fatal in
some cases. It is not just the birth of a child but the birth of the woman
herself; the primordial female self, hidden among the recesses of the soul –
the birthing woman that is part of the dawn of creation. The dresses that make
part of the assemblage are symbolic of the very feminine identity that she
explores. Her discovery of the dress and its meaning and the availability of
the dress in abundance as a second hand cloth has paved ways to make it easy to
illustrate, express and convey her ideas to everyone. Here, issues of dignity
resulting from the intrusion of foreign cultures and economic control are
obvious and difficult to ignore. The works when separated talk about several
different issues which the artist is most familiar with - miscarriage and need
to be pregnant as a personal fulfillment and purpose, the 'Juju' and 'Muti'
used to keep men/husbands in the household, self-beauty, cleansing and damage
of the 'Muti' and lastly survival of a mother with hungry children and making
do with what is available.
Maxim
explores more than the processes of assemblage. The very process is akin to the building or molding
of an identity. Whilst she explicitly decided not to focus on the victimization
and repression of women, one can read the pain and repression of women in the work.
Kupona specifically resists the
political correctness enforced by some branches of feminism as well as
ideologies which feminists claim are misogynistic such as psychoanalysis. Her
remarkably satiric glance at sexuality, power and authority is unique in
demonstrating her ability to operate within a conflict, to question, to linger
in the crevices. Her work is humanist. She gives women back their femininity.
The female previously placed in a supportive role is thus given her own place.
But
is this what Maxim wants? Does she want to give women their own place? Lacan in
response to Freud’s question, ‘What do women want?’ concluded that the question
must remain open since the female is fluid and fluidity is ‘unstable’. Thus we
slip back into a phallocentric system which relegates women to the margin,
dismissing them as unstable, unpredictable and fickle. Patriarchy subordinates
the female to the male or treats the female as an inferior male, and this power
is exerted, directly or indirectly, in civil and domestic life to constrain
women. Women as much as men perpetuate learned female characteristics as
natural and the acting out of these sexual roles in the unequal and repressive
relations of domination and subordination is what the Lifestyle Labels I assemblage explores.
In
the same vein, her on going work with nightdresses and petticoats continue the
exploration of the feminine form and the female condition.
The night dresses continue questioning what happens when the woman is wearing this dress, silk, smooth and sensual. She searches for the past, the evidence that continues to be left behind for all of us to see hate and or marvel. The work echoes Helene Cixous when she said, “Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.”[7] But consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity – a third person consciousness. Maxim here goes further than the body; she takes out an essentially feminine garment that is always hidden. This body of work explores the implications of the female garment, the petticoat which in a way symbolizes women’s autonomy and their impact on each other’s lives. The emergence of a mass of illusions and misunderstandings that only a psychological analysis can place and define have come to vilify this very intimate female garment. But it is the very same garment that knows the much cherished details of the feminine body, protecting it from shame and ridicule and keeping its secrets. It keeps the self, separate and unique. The self here is presented as unique, abiding and continuous substituted by the self as performativity, improvisational, discontinuous and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts.[8]
The
petticoat also is witness to the inhumane and painful acts that females face. It
is utopian to try to ascertain in what ways one kind of inhuman behavior differed
from another kind of inhuman behavior. The female artist has had to face two
hardships; being an artist and being female. She has had to face being measured
by the things that she has no control over; not quite fitting in, displaced.
These are the latent forms of psychosis that become overt as a result of
traumatic experience.
Ranciere
argues for art that, “would ensure, at one and the same time the production of
a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or
perpetual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny by that which resists
signification.” But
Maxim shows us that we can never step outside the process of signification on
to some neutral ground. Resistance to phallocentricism then must come from
within the signifying process. While the woman represents a subject position
banished to outer darkness by the castrating power of phallocentricism and
indeed because such oppression works through discourse, by phallogocentricism,
Maxim refuses to play sexual politics, “I feel as if this feminism issue
continues to be blown out of proportion. We can all stand our ground
without much fuss or demonstration. I actually believe we are more
powerful. I have discovered that allowing your work to do that for you is
quite enough”.
Maxim
brings some understanding of the complexities when observing her art. There is
no uniformity but a strong articulation of harmony. There are no prescriptions,
no decided parameters. There is encroachment, there is surrender; every
innovation leaves the landscape changed. The use of traditional motifs to
formulate an identity makes for an intelligent yet amusing interplay. The
carnival approach to visual art that Maxim uses – everyone wears a mask, the
boldness of style and irreverent double eyed view of subject matter – remind one
of the form of mimicry of a praise poet, always shifting, eluding, turning and
transforming.
The
words ‘identity’, ‘culture’ and tradition often sound fixed and are
increasingly amorphous, yet they are the most repeated currency for describing
the state of any post independent African creative effort. These are the
consequences of a lived reality that Maxim’s work explores; it is such a world,
dynamic and complex, its philosophies richly embroidered, not possible to be
summarized that she has to live in.
1.
Blakey, R Fanon
and Cabral: A Contrast in Theories of
Revolution for Africa, The Journal of Modern African Studies Vol 12 No 2
(June 1974) pp191 – 201, Cambridge University Press
2.
Cixous, H
‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ from Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1976 Vol 1, No 4 pp875 – 893 The
University of Chicago Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen
3.
De Kock, L 2013 The Confessio of an Academic Ahab: or how I Sank My Own Disciplinary
Ship. Lecture delivered at Stellenbosch University. 19 November 2012
4.
Mabasa, I (Ed) Mawonero/Umbono: Insights on Zimbabwean Art. 2015 Keber Verlag
5.
Meyer, M ‘Reclaiming the discourse of Camp’ from
The Politics and Poetics of Camp
edited by Moe Meyer. 1994 Routledge. London and New York
6.
Oguibe, O and Enwezor, O (Eds) 1999 Reading the Contemporary: African Art from
Theory to the Marketplace. Institute of International Visual Arts. London
7.
O’Toole, S ‘Becoming African’ in Art Africa September 2015 Issue 1
8.
Selden R, Widdowson, P Booker A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary
Theory 4th ed. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall-Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1997.
9.
Vera, Y
1998 Migrations of Identity in the
Visual Art of Zimbabwe Contemporary Art in Zimbabwe, Artoteek HIVOS CBK
[1]
Freedom Nyamubaya Introduction On the
Road Again
[2]
Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa, London 1960, p134
[3]
Ton Blomefield founded the artistic community at Tengenenge in Guruve Zimbabwe
in the 1960s
[4] Returning to the early conversations in
Mawonero/Umbono: insights into Zimbabwean Art
[5]
Georgina Maxim is a Zimbabwean artist and the co-founder of Village Unhu an
open artist studio
[6]
Borrowing from Virginia MacKenny’s review of Enwezor’s DOCUMENTA 11
[7]
Helene Cixous (1976) The Laugh of the
Medusa
[8]
Moe Meyer 1994
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