The human face is the primary site of the visual arts, both because it is the most common subject and because it symbolises the sensory and cognitive mechanisms through which artistic meaning is created: seeing and being seen, interpreting information, communicating what is understood.
A year ago, at Stevenson Gallery Cape Town, an exhibition of portraiture titled About Face explored “the tension between seeing and being seen” in the work of 20 artists. Curator Lerato Bereng has both extended this concept and narrowed its focus in the twin exhibitions at Stevenson’s Johannesburg space in Parktown North (until January 24).
Nelly Guambe and Steven Cohen were among the artists included in About Face — and it is the face that dominates their new work, drawing the visitor into comparisons between their distinct styles and approaches.
Guambe’s Caras (Portuguese for “Faces”) features charcoal drawings produced in response to the devastation wreaked by Cyclone Idai in March 2019. The Mozambican artist was struck by “images of people united in abjection” in reportage on the storm and its wake. Her drawings are thus variations on the watery metaphor (merging with all-too-literal flooding) of the “sea of faces” making up a crowd.
By contrast, Cohen’s There’s Glitter In My Soup! emphasises the single, prominent face. Instead of the black-and-white of Guambe’s drawings, we have a muted-but-not-monochrome palette of grey and ivory offset by Cohen’s signature glitter, costume jewels and butterfly scales.
Cohen is probably best known as a performance artist, a high-heeled interrupter whose tall frame appears on city streets, in galleries and on stages in various states of dress and undress — always perfectly and extravagantly made-up and costumed. The result is somewhere between high camp and sociopolitical critique, the body of the artist simultaneously fabulous, fearsome and deeply vulnerable.
Now Cohen has taken the ephemeral, glamorous-shocking moment of performance and turned it into a more sustained, introspective and perhaps somewhat melancholic record of the act of “defacing”: taking off his make-up with adhesive tape. The powdered and glittered tape has been laid down horizontally, with facial features inserted and arranged along a vertical axis — the final effect patterning a face like the wings of a butterfly or the imperfect symmetry of a Rorschach picture.
The combination of these two exhibitions lures us into the racially skewed iconography of a mediascape (based on a history of misrepresentation) that has taught us to see white faces as singular — standing out, declaring “Here I am! Regard me!” — and black faces as collective and generalisable. The people of Mozambique and Malawi, displaced and killed in their thousands by forces of nature, could all too easily be fitted into a generic tale of African suffering.
Yet Guambe’s Mar de Gente (“Ocean of People”) in fact demands the opposite. The longer we look at her drawings and installations, the more detail we see and the more individuated each face becomes. Expressions of grief, stoicism, sorrow and fortitude can by turns be discerned. Guambe will not allow the viewer to see only distantly, unsympathetically, keeping the charcoal faces and the real (albeit anonymous) humans they represent at a remove. She wants us to recognise them and to feel with them.
Cohen — for all the ostentation or revelation we might associate with performance and with the unmasking that follows — remains hidden from us, enigmatic, a simulacrum we can observe but not identify with. He is somewhere behind and beyond the external markers of identity: white, male, gay, South African, Jewish.
In this way, Cohen’s self-representation and Guambe’s representation of her compatriots begin to merge. Because Guambe, too, portrays people whose experience cannot be captured by news headlines or simplistic categories of race, geography, lifestyle, livelihood and material comfort or deprivation. We may be moved by the plight of individuals who have been affected by a tragedy but our response should not simply be one of pity, however well meant, for that too can tend towards the condescension of treating people en masse.
Rather, the faces confronting us in these exhibitions — staring at us, even as we stare at them — insist that we try to imagine the inner worlds of others, even though we know that this is impossible.
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