Getting Heavy, Lightly

ARTIST DINEO SESHEE BOPAPE AND HER BEAUTIFUL DEBRIS

By Nicola Shepheard

Dreamweaverr, Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2008

A young man in a pea-green coat and a felt hat stands at the mezzanine balcony and begins chanting: “Fig-ar-o, Figaro Figaro Fig-ar-ooo.” The din in the Studio Musuem Harlem lulls as people search for the source, wondering if it’s part of the show. The crier, Pedro Jimenez, notices Dineo Seshee Bopape standing nearby, grinning at him. He explains he was trying to get her attention. “I’m bubbling with excitement inside,” she tells him. She’s at the group show opening to support her friend Jabu Arnell. Bopape and her minstrel do a circuit of the show, stopping every few steps for Bopape to hug someone. She pauses before a 1987 work by African-American artist David Hammons called “Free Nelson Mandela,” the mythic face stenciled onto torn, layered billboard papers. “Ahh, home!” she sighs, touching her fist to her heart. But it is Demetrius Oliver’s “Asterism,” a black suitcase brimming with spherical light-bulbs and anthracite, a mineral coal with a silvery luster, that gets the biggest reaction. “I’m in love with this piece!” she exclaims. “Its materiality, it’s so concrete and so light as well. There’s this physical light that bounces off it; although it’s heavy, it has this lightness similtaneously.”

The idea of being “light but heavy” comes up often when Bopape talks about her own work. In its materials and ideas, it is suffused with a heavy lightness. Mostly she makes videos and room-like installations from everyday domestic objects, paper and fabric. She arranges reflective surfaces — mirrors, foil, tinsel — to trick light into performing for her. Installations are made for a specific space, then dismantled. She puts herself in many of the videos, sometimes semi-nude, sometimes in drag. For her video installation for a recent major New Museum group show, she turned herself into a shaman-figure of indeterminate gender and intentions. The lightness in her work comes from its shimmering, glittering, starburst surfaces, which look playful, fun, shot with pop culture and kitsch: balloons, party flags, safari imagery, pop-song references. The heaviness lies in the metaphysical and psychosexual questions you slowly realize that she’s poking at, the disarming intimacy of her self-exposure, and the weight of history she carries as a black South African woman who turned nine the year Mandela was released from prison. Much of her work messes with ideas of gender and race. But her art is not, primarily, political or feminist. It’s just that these are (some of) the ideas looping through Bopape’s mind.

The distinction is subtle but critical, both to get her and to her, because it places her inner world, and her attempts to come to terms with things, or crack them open, at the center of her art; rather than making her a depersonalized mouthpiece for her generation, or for young black African women, or a screen onto which non-Africans project their ideas about black African women — something she hates. She’s much more “Being John Malkovich” than “The Power of One.” “Walking into one of her installations is like walking into an overstuffed, claustrophobic space; like walking into Dineo’s head and being lost in this beautiful but chaotic environment,” says Capetown-based curator Storm van Rensburg.

For art historian Genevieve Hyacinthe, the chaos is often the debris of social norms and accepted wisdoms. Hyacinthe once included Bopape in a show she curated and now wants to write a book about her. Bopape puts her in mind of Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely, known for his kinetic sculptures that self-detonated in galleries. “I feel that she’s really blowing up modes of decorum and behaviors as a move of freedom,” Hyacinthe says. “She’s blowing up expected behaviors for a black woman, and the appropriate modes of critique for black women artists. Sometimes you want to level your past. I don’t know where she’s going but it feels like she’s blowing up some stuff to go somewhere new.”

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Right now, in an Amsterdam gallery, you can walk into the beautiful debris from a messy break-up Bopape had following her two-year residency at the prestigious D’Ateliers artists’ institute in that city. “You Fucking Horrible Bitch!” at Mart House includes an eponymous series of seven paintings and “Love Strung,” a series of over 100 drawings inspired by Justin Timberlake’s song “Love Stoned,” which Bopape made in the break-up’s aftermath. The works are raw and often funny: vituperative outpourings, galpal-ish pep-talk, images of fireworks, high-heeled ponies and various phalluses. (The ex-girlfriend was “strangely charmed” by serving as Bopape’s muse.) The title painting, in ferociously dripping capitals, is displayed in the window. Gallery owner Andre Martens has seen passersby taking photos of it. Another text drawing is a certificate supposedly from an ex-lover for “the best blow job ever.” (A collector asked her out to dinner after seeing this in an earlier show. She declined.) Party decorations make reference to a 2008 break-up themed party/performance Bopape hosted in her Amsterdam studio, where she strung up boiled chicken hearts and arranged for actors posing as gallery-goers to repeatedly re-enact an argument she and her ex-girlfriend had via e-mail and online-chat, complete with acronyms such as LOL.

Showing me video clips in her Columbia University studio in Harlem, Bopape explains she was thinking about the roles you perform in a relationship. It had been her first lesbian relationship, and she was surprised to find herself acting out the stereotypical “wife” role. She was also thinking about the physical persistence of the past via memory. “I guess the actors were avatars,” she says. “I was thinking a lot about that word this morning: someone sitting in as you, a shadow of the real, how do you relive a memory? Where does the past go after it happened? It just sits within the normal everyday situation but it sits there invisible. The past is present in every situation; the memory sits with us in what is, for us, real space.”

The way Bopape talks about her own work is often speculative, musing, an unfurling of questions and possible answers. It’s as if she’s trying to figure it out, and re-figure it out, as she goes along. In person, Bopape is sensual, funny and generous. She loves dancing and reading psychoanalytic theory. She gives whole-body hugs and touches you on the arm. In New York, where she’s in the final year of her M.F.A. program at Columbia University, her look is vintage thrift-shop and hand-me-down with canvas sneakers and cropped orange-to-black dreadlocks. (Before settling on art, she wanted to be a fashion designer, and even designed her cousin’s brides’ maid dresses at age eleven.) Her walk and gestures are flowing, unhurried. She pauses to think. You get the sense that she’s somehow open at the edges, semipermeable. Joost Bosland, who works at Bopape’s South African gallerist, Michael Stevenson Gallery, likened it to being on V, the fictional perception-heightening drug in the television series “True Blood.” “I’ve walked with her around the streets in New York and she’ll notice something that I’ll walk past,” he says. She also knows her mind. “She doesn’t take shit from anybody,” remarks independent curator Melissa Mboweni. “She’s secure but that also has to do with knowing where you come from.”

While living in Amsterdam, Bopape became outraged by a Dutch festival tradition of white people painting themselves in black face and red lips. She wrote “Your Racism Hurts” on a placard and staged a one-woman protest. Reactions ranged from support to “go home”-type jeering; one driver accelerated towards her. “People were saying the festival was part of their tradition that, something that was valued, I said yeah, slavery was valued for a long time, apartheid was too.”

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Bopape was politicized at an early age. As a ten-year-old she would accuse her teacher of marking the black students harder than the white students at a newly integrated public school. She grew her nails to fight other children. She sang the Black South African national anthem under her breath to the apartheid version. Matlakala Bopape, now a regional director for the University of South Africa, says her daughter was protective of her three older brothers and her friends. “She was a very peaceful girl but when she grew up and saw how the country was and how things were she couldn’t stand back and it let go, so she was fighting for herself and other people.”

Dineo spent her early childhood in the Seshego township in Polokwane in northern South Africa. The family’s three-bedroom home was one of the “big houses” in the township, although there were more affluent families. Children played on the street, neigbors knew each other. The family moved to England for two and a half years when Dineo was five, for her parents’ master degrees. The township children were intimidated by her English accent and the black dolls she brought home (you could buy only white dolls in South Africa). Around the time Mandela was released, the family moved to the suburbs. Her parents, both teachers, were African National Congress (ANC) members. Dineo remembers the parties, the pride, and then the trauma at violence between the ANC and the majority-Zulu Inkatha Freedom party supporters. In the suburbs, racism was “in your face,” she recalls. “Swearing, people trying to bump you with their cars, setting their dogs on you.”

Her frame of reference was always wider than Polokwane, though. The family had many visitors from overseas. “She was exposed to the world while she was still young,” says her mother. “She’s been able to see different worlds, that has made her what she is.”

Longing for sisters, Bopape went to a girls’ boarding school in Durban. Later, she would mimic her plummy teachers in the video work “Round One,” which has the smart, stealthily funny, enwrapping affirmation and bubbling-up of celebration that is in much of her work. Although frustrated at her drawing style — “lines everywhere, really aggressive, expressive” — she kept winning art prizes at high school, and during a gap-year in England, decided to become an artist. She informed her parents she would put herself through art school if they wouldn’t help. Suddenly her fashion designer ambition didn’t look so bad to her mathematician father Mathume, who had wanted her to be a scientist, but she dug her heels in and went to art school.

Directly after apartheid ended South African art became hot. By the time Bopape started art school some of the heat had gone out of it, but among African art, South African art still attracts the most international attention. Durban, where Bopape studied, was a cradle for creatives and activists. The nation has a strong tradition of overtly political art, which is still being produced, but Bopape’s generation is exploring different territory. Explains van Rensberg: “There’s much more scope for artists to work in less political ways — work’s becoming much more personal, with a complexity of subject matter, and also the freedom to not be constrained by the big narratives, the big Truth.”

At the same time African identity, for Africans living on and beyond the continent, is being reimagined. Cameroonian, Johannesburg-based social scientist Achille Mbembe has defined Afropolitanism as “an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity — which does not mean that it is not aware of the injustice and violence on the continent and its people by the law of the world.”

There are two conflicting stories about post-apartheid South Africa. The optimistic one is about progressive laws, a functioning democracy, new malls and casinos, and the 2010 World Cup. The other story is about poverty, xenophobia, violent crime, and especially sexual violence. Daily life is unchanged for many South Africans. Artists will reflect the tensions between these two stories, argues Johannesburg-based curator Khwezi Gule, whether their work is cause-driven or not. It was the non-obvious but transcendent politics in Bopape’s entry for last year’s MTA New Contemporaries Award that helped win her over to Gule, who was one of the judges. Her winning entry was an installation called “Grass Green/Sky Blue, Grass Green/Sky Blue (because you stood in the highest court in the land insisting on your humanity).” The subtitle refers to a family friend of South African president Jacob Zuma who accused him of raping her. Zuma was acquitted of the rape in 2006, before he became president. He claimed the sex was consensual, and that the woman’s wearing of a kanga (wrap-around skirt) proved she wanted to sleep with him. The woman was harassed and vilified by Zuma supporters, and now lives in exile.

Grass green/sky blue, Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2008

Grass green/sky blue, detail, Dineo Seshee Bopape 2008

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Bopape’s work evoked a girlie safari wonderland. There was a stage covered by Astroturf, jungle-print linoleum, artificial flowers, umbrellas, sky-blue party flags, shiny fabric and pictures of wild animals. A video played of long grass in the wind. Gule’s initial impression was of something “flippant, frivolous … I was thinking she may be making a critique of Africa as a place of wild animals and safaris. The thing was very light-hearted and joyous, then I went to read the title and I realized it was actually about the person who accused Jacob Zuma, how this woman had been humiliated.”

Bopape explains she’d been reading a book about South African female public figures and had wondered how history would remember this woman. So she made the work as a kind of allegory. “As a result of all the trauma of it, maybe it’s an attempt to forget the story; the rape itself became perhaps less important than the fact that she’s had the courage to take him to court.”

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Place of the Object, Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2009

Bopape walks into her studio, flicks on the light, and says, “Something’s missing. I don’t know what.” It’s open studio day at Columbia University, when the public and gallery scouts get a preview of the graduate students’ work. Bopape has four installations on display. Along the front wall is “The Place of the Object”: a flimsy barricade of wooden posts, opalescent plastic, fabric, tasseled light shades, mirrors and foil wrapped around central heating pipes. Nearby, a video plays of her friend on a boat singing a sad love song in Turkish, framed by a board covered in purple hologram wrapping paper and festooned with fake green grapes. An unfinished video of the artist’s fragmented body plays on a desk covered with Astroturf. The piece that’s bothering Bopape incorporates her earlier video work called “Happy Hour,” a comment on forced cheerfulness for which she got six actors to laugh for an hour in an Amsterdam basement-turned-bar (audience reactions varied from laughter to discomfort). The manic energy is amplified by sped-up, jumpy editing. Surrounding the video monitor is a tatty, sparkley jumble: a stained toaster, pink sequins pooled in a cardboard ring, mirrors, a lamp, a gold mat, fake plants and print-outs of flower photos. A sign reads “the performance will commence in 20 minutes thank you for your patience.” (Later, whenever viewers asked when the performance would start, Bopape simply replies, “In 20 minutes.”) She quickly lays a floral fabric square on the gold mat, then some half-folded yellow and blue tent-striped plastic, a half-unrolled strip of Astroturf, and finally a print-out image of a big pink flower. Not perfect, but closer.

Bopape’s artistic process is one of discovery: elliptical and organic, contemplative, percolative. Ideas come from notebooks of drawings, conversations and observations. Once, a long-distance bus conversation with a woman with limited English led to a video work called “I Like.” It shows a close-up of her mouth saying what she likes. Like the bus conversation, it says a lot in simple English. The repetitive structure and Bopape’s warm, low voice is hypnotic: “I like my e-mail address, I like my family, I like my friends … I like feeling good, I like feeling helpful, I like feeling honest, I like milkshakes.” The ending arrives like a kind of absolution: “I like having a crush on somebody, I like walking in the streets without being harassed, I like feeling safe.”

“She uses the video with a sophisticated aggression that pulls you in with charm, but mocks you at the same time,” artist Marlene Dumas has said. Jon Kessler, one of Bopape’s mentors, believes her approach to video is her greatest strength. “It’s very much her own — that’s what every artist is looking for, the holy grail of making art, a distinctive style that is not like anything you’ve ever seen.” He points to the video installation Bopape made for last summer’s inaugural young artists’ triennial at the New Museum, “The Generational: Younger than Jesus.” Playing with distorted views of Africanness, it shows Bopape as an indeterminate shaman figure in a plastic-bag-cloud skirt and fake beard, holding a broken white umbrella. Trance-like, she/he dances. The refrain from the song “That Old Black Magic” loops. Her inclusion in the show has nudged up her profile, and today her work is fetching from $290 for a drawing to $4300 for a large painting. Kessler says the New Museum installation crystallized her strengths. “She’s referring to being an African artist in a distanced way. It’s super-super smart. And of the moment. She doesn’t make boring videos, she grew up on MTV and she has that desire to entertain and that’s not a bad thing.”

Bopape says she wanted to embody ambiguity. “This shaman character who’s both male and female, is this person a joker or are they sinister?” Cross-dressing and nudity are recurring motifs. In the slideshow “Silent Performance,” we see her wearing a bra, sock-stuffed mens briefs and a fake moustache. (One of her brothers once told her she looks better without facial hair.) Bopape is seen as brave for her physical and emotional self-exposure. Hyacinth: “There’s this norm in art history that the female body is a white female body. Dineo is brave — she presents her body in different provocative ways, different modes of display. She bares it all for her work.” But Bopape tells me she wishes she were braver, that she could put more of herself into her work. What’s holding her back? “Every work is a way to speak to, uncover thoughts, or to release thoughts,” she says, “and sometimes it takes time to come to terms with certain ideas or to open them up or to digest.”

Her latest artist statement says she aims “to yield to a lust of surface, light, color, sound … ” and to create physical objects that “ooze with misplaced sensuality, sadness, violence, desolation and happiness as do the videos.” It goes on: “personal/privatised dramas are teased out, sometimes close to oblivion, to arrive at … an orchestral discordant mess/harmony of small stories told in/light, sound, colour, space and language.” At a basic level, for Bopape, art is about communicating. She doesn’t want to be didactic, but is troubled when people find meanings she did not intend, or when something meant as critical starts conspiring with its object. “It’s a vulnerability that’s very close to the surface when her work is on show,” says van Rensburg. “Things are so emotionally connected that it’s sometimes very difficult for her to process when people don’t understand or don’t get it. That throws her completely.”

A video of her squishing her breasts together to a soundtrack of groaning and heavy-breathing was for her a psychosexual drama of ecstasy and pain, aggression and passivity, but was read by some people as a comment on the black female body. “I wasn’t speaking about blackness or whiteness,” she says.

Bopape plans to stay in New York for a few years after graduating, and is applying for an artist’s residency at the Studio Museum Harlem, which exhibits only black artists. The tensions and freedoms of being African out of Africa will keep feeding into her art. “She fits but she doesn’t fit: that’s the predicament that she finds herself in,” says Mboweni. “The rawness of that she captures in her work makes her that much more attractive. She’s sexy, her language is sexy.” Such is the brightly intelligent, saucy pleasure of the peepshow into Bopape’s mind that is her art: like light flashing off water, it’s the heady sensation of finding lightness in heaviness and heaviness in light.

Dreamweaverr, Dineo Seshee Bopape, 2009 (photo by Benoit Pailley)