| There is a difficulty in viewing the artwork of Marlene Dumas. Questions arise. What is pornography? What is nude? What is naked? How does the reliance on the photograph as an almost exclusive source material make authentic the complete realization of the art? Does the source lead to ambiguity? Is it all sex and skin? What is beauty? What is ugliness? Is the human body the measure of all things? There is effrontery in the exhibition title, Measuring Your Own Grave, which comes from a painting made in 2003 where a figure bows toward the viewer, stretching its arms the width of the canvas, suggesting that the space of the canvas becomes the figure’s coffin or grave, or as the artist assumes, that this measuring is equal to the process of representation itself. A difficult equation. The world as it appears in the work of Marlene Dumas is bleak, black, and filled with doom. |  |
Harriet Zinnes
There is a difficulty in viewing the artwork of Marlene Dumas. Questions arise. What is pornography? What is nude? What is naked? How does the reliance on the photograph as an almost exclusive source material make authentic the complete realization of the art? Does the source lead to ambiguity? Is it all sex and skin? What is beauty? What is ugliness? Is the human body the measure of all things? There is effrontery in the exhibition title, Measuring Your Own Grave, which comes from a painting made in 2003 where a figure bows toward the viewer, stretching its arms the width of the canvas, suggesting that the space of the canvas becomes the figure’s coffin or grave, or as the artist assumes, that this measuring is equal to the process of representation itself. A difficult equation.
The world as it appears in the work of Marlene Dumas is bleak, black, and filled with doom. Flesh is always there (always a vulva and anus view), but it never seems to be related to love and fruitfulness. Skin skin skin, and bare is the body. As the critic Lisa Gabrielle Mark notes in the catalogue to the exhibition, few artists “have dared to evoke the erotic flush and existential terror of motherhood, a trajectory that begins with the warmth and intimacy of sexual desire, and eventually meets the cold indifference of the outside world.” No wonder Dumas insists, “I paint because I am a woman.”
Even morality has its questions. As the artist wrote in l974, “The guilt of never knowing if one has done the ‘right’ thing…I see it in my own eyes.” Yet perhaps the fact that Dumas insists that you don’t “take” a painting, you “make” a painting asserts at least an aesthetic morality.
As Cornelia Butler, organizer of the exhibition writes, “Portraits of the living, portraits of the dead, horizontals, groups, dead girls, big babies, crying women—this is the shorthand, typology of subjects that Marlene Dumas has used in her ongoing exploration of portraiture.” Dumas was born in l953 in Cape Town, South Africa, and has been a resident of Amsterdam in what she has herself considered a kind of self-imposed exile since l976. It seems she did not want to move to such a throbbingly artistic city as New York because race relations in the United States reminded her of the apartheid from which she was escaping. What the artist does not escape is what Edmund Munch concluded painting rather than photography can represent, namely, the heaven and hell of portrayals of birth, sex, and death.
