Marlene Dumas at the Art Institute of Chicago
Time and Again Art Institute of Chicago Through May 25
As consumers of media --whether we're voracious, earnest readers of serious newspapers or passive sponges soaking up trashy television -- we inevitably become a bit cynical about images of death. Photographs of corpses, hostages, torture victims, and disastrous scenes have become pervasive images in Western culture, reinforcing our fear that mom was right: the world is full of crazies and bad people. Simul-taneously, the ubiquitous presence of violent images slowly numbs our natural inclinations toward horror -- it's precisely their journalistic characteristics that enable our apathy. Heartbreaking, disturbing, true images barely register in our consciousness as we conveniently escape to the Cartoon Network or click towards some harmless celebrity gossip.
When experienced as paintings, the same kinds of images, in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- their transmission through the comparatively old-fashioned, subjective medium of painting, resonate deeply. South African native Marlene Dumas, who now lives and works in Amsterdam, uses such photographic images as source material for her oil-on-canvas portraits, 12 of which are currently on view at Time and Again at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the museum's ongoing contemporary Focus series. Her medium of choice is, as she admits, an archaic mode of communication. "Everything everyone holds against painting is true," she states in the exhibition's catalogue. "It is an anachronism. It is outdated. It is obscene the way it turns any kind of horror into a type of beauty."
The vague nature of painting allows Dumas to remove the journalistic and political context from the images and re-contextualize them as works of art that have more to do with her medium, its traditions, and its limitations than with the accurate portrayal of human agony or violence. Yet, the current cultural climate of fear (of everything) propagated by media and government penetrates the hushed halls of the Art Institute, making it impossible to ignore the very timely implications of Dumas' work. Nearly all the subjects of her paintings here are dead, blind, or blindfolded, so no real suffering is apparent. Even their emotions, their gazes, their trepidation has been stolen, and are subsequently lost to us. As in any good horror movie, what we don't see is scarier than what we do see. What is left in the absence of consciousness in Dumas' subjects is, quite literally, a dead calm, an emptiness more chilling than their conscious gazes might have been.
The works in Time and Again reveal numerous connections to art history, some merely suggested and others patent references. In "The Body Bag" and "Gelijkenis 1" & "2," the exaggeratedly horizontal compositions clearly echo Hans Holbein's "Dead Christ." Other paintings, in which she studies only the heads of corpses, in tightly composed close-ups, establish a connection with the dynamic arrangements of Gericault and his fascination with accuracy in "Raft of the Medusa" (1818-19) before the advantage of photography. Thus, Dumas attempts to place her work on an art-historical continuum, and her intentions are so apparent that they obfuscate the message: painting is as lifeless as these subjects, a completely inadequate way to depict something as enigmatic as death and dying.
If Dumas' self-conscious posturing of her work in the realm of art history occasionally seems heavy-handed, a closer analysis suggests a sense of detachment that operates in her favor -- evidenced by her loose, imprecise handling of paint, for instance, or the juxtaposition of death-images with two confrontational portraits of Dumas' adolescent daughter, Helena. The gallery installation, experienced as a conceptual whole, supplies creepy parallels and grim connotations: the blank, imprecise white bandages covering the eyes of the subjects of a triptych, "The Blindfolded," are impossible to separate from the similar treatment of the post-bath towel that Helena wraps around herself. She is the only sign of life in these galleries, and yet her presence provides no relief. The two paintings of Helena evoke fragile innocence among mortality, but they are not sentimental or delicate. Instead, Helena challenges us, staring directly back as if to remind us that the cycle of youth and age, birth and death, grief and optimism, will inevitably continue whether painting does or not.