Wilma Cruise’s Cocks, asses, &, shown at the Oliewenhuis Reservoir in Bloemfontein from 7 July - 16 August 2009, was opened by Dr Gerhard Schoeman, Senior Lecturer at the University of the Free State, whose insight into Cruise’s work is an important one for viewers of the exhibition.
Cocks, asses, & at iArt Gallery : 11 November - 9 December 2009.
“As for animals being too dumb and stupid to speak for themselves”: being and nothingness in Wilma Cruise’s Cocks, asses, &
Let me begin my remarks on Wilma Cruise’s exhibition Cocks, asses, & with a quotation from South African author J M Coetzee’s novel from 2003, Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee’s book continues his ongoing meditation on our ethical relationship with animals, in a manner that seems especially pertinent to a discussion of Cruise’s artistic exploration of the fraught and complex relationship human beings have with animals and with themselves. In Cruise’s work animals feature as our living and feeling counterparts or totems; their lives and deaths are imaged with the same sensitivity and urgency with which Cruise images human beings. Both intertwined and apart from humans, animals in Cruise’s work appear as witnesses to the precariousness of being in the world. Tangled with the fragility of human beings, animals matter.
“If I do not convince you”, states the public intellectual Elizabeth Costello toward the end of her seminar on the poets and the animals in Coetzee’s book, “that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animal being. That is why I urge you to read the poets who return the living, electric being to language; and if the poets do not move you, I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner”. Costello’s seminar ends in dissension: some listeners take issue with her strong belief that our ethical relationship with animals ought to be the same as our ethical relationship with human beings. After listening to Costello’s first lecture a Jewish poet fails to show up at the dinner following her talk, in protest against her equation of the slaughtering of cattle with the slaughtering of Jews in Nazi death camps. As he writes in a letter to her: “Man is made in the likeness of God but God does not have the likeness of man. If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews. The inversion insults the memory of the dead”.
It is not my intention to engage you in an ethical debate tonight; let us leave that for the time being to Coetzee and the philosophers. Instead, by way of Coetzee I wish to remark on the multiple ways in which animal and human beings in Cruise’s exhibition cross each other; open to, yet push down on, one another; move closer, yet pull away. The works in this exhibition are all about the shifting, clear and obscure relationships of human and animal bodies in space: bodies that are mute, enclosed, weighed down; bodies that are free standing, porous, and light; small and larger bodies which, in different ways, affect us, the world, as well as space itself.
If sometimes one body relates to another through sound alone; other times the relation is completely determined by mute feeling - a sensing in the dark. We respond in multiple ways to other bodies in space; we are affected by them, sometimes ambiguously. At times I extend into you; but you are not me. I am here; but why not there? Our bodies contain universes of other bodies, known and unknown to us. The writer Franz Kafka wondered whether there can be anything more foreign than our own bodies. And if French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva is right, we are strangers to ourselves - than strangeness is a condition of all sentient beings.
It strikes me that disaster binds human and animal in Cruise’s exhibition; the disasters of war and history, the disasters of belatedness and life unlived. Cruise was born in 1945 and grew up during the Cold War; a period over-determined by the threat of total world annihilation by nuclear holocaust which, following in the wake of the horrors of World War II, perpetuated hypertrophic anxiety, isolationism, and insularity. Moreover, the production of constant anxiety of mute threat by the Apartheid regime in South Africa, which derived from Cold War tactics, as well as the anti-communism propaganda of the Ronald Reagan era resulted in atrocities that, at least to J M Coetzee, continue to disgrace and estrange us. This bears on our relationships with animals as well. Today the disasters of global warming, mass viral annihilation and nefarious cloning fill all of us with dread. Human as well as animal life, perhaps like never before, find themselves teetering on the edge of nothingness, almost on a daily basis.
From this perspective, the apocalyptic disquiet and the horror of nothingness pervading Cruise’s work recalls Italian sculptor Marino Marini’s eponymous evocation of modernist anxiety, the horse and rider series which, during World War II, symbolised for him suffering and homelessness; but also English sculptor Henry Moore’s thousands of drawings of the underground air shelters in London during World War II. The installation of Cruise’s work here in the Reservoir in particular summons to mind the claustrophobic apartness and entombed-ness of the bodies in Moore’s drawings. The dread of total destruction that clings to Cruise’s figures also brings to mind the horrible headless mob in Magdalena Abakanowicz, Crowd, from 1986-7, which in turn calls forth Alberto Giacometti’s spindly figures existentially lost in space.
More recently, Cruise’s work is tangled with the work of the contemporary British sculptor Antony Gormley. As with Cruise’s sculptured bodies, Gormley’s confront us with intense containedness and aloneness, with bodily being experienced as distance and proximity. Gormley’s sculptures, like Cruise’s - blasted figures in an apocalyptic landscape still to come - seem to be intense, phenomenological studies in what it means to be and to experience a body in the world. They remind me of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thoughtful words in his book The visible and the invisible (1968): “We understand then why we see the things themselves, in their places, where they are, according to their being which is indeed more than their being-perceived - and why at the same time we are separated from them by all the thickness of the look and of the body; it is that this distance is not the contrary of this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous with it. It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication. It is for the same reason that I am at the heart of the visible and that I am far from it: because it has thickness and is thereby naturally destined to be seen by a body”.
In the final instance, Cruise’s sculptures, etchings, drawings, and writing jointly thematise the process of making art - something both physical and mindful; involving materials near at hand, yet also artistic solutions that seem way out of reach. The different materials Cruise beats, cuts, pushes into, and inflicts with stains, marks, bruises and imprints insist themselves as thick matter. Suggestive of William Kentridge’s technique of inscribing and erasing, Deborah Bell’s mytho-poetic staining and layering, and Marlene Dumas’ figuring and disfiguring Cruise’s mark making attests to absorption in the materiality of work - as a contest against nothingness, which is simultaneously inseparable from it.
From there the materiality of signs extend into the materiality of human and animal bodies - alone or together, flank to flank; absent and present, alive and dead in memory and in space. That these totemic images and objects, of decidedly incomplete and fragmented bodies and relationships, seem markers or portents of a fall from grace into arbitrary signification, an idea originating with the tripartite sculpture Adam and Eve before the fall (2006-7), only adds to their material fragility and pensive existentiality.
Dr Gerhard Schoeman
Bloemfontein, 7 July 2009
