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Volume CXXXII, Number 19 |
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Searle spices up the art world
HANNAH DEAN
STAFF WRITER
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| South African artist Berni Searle spoke about her art on Monday night. Many of her pieces include photographs featuring the artist's body covered in various spices as she turns herself into a canvas. (Nancy Van Dyke, Bowdoin Orient) |
Berni Searle is art. She needs no canvas in order to display her artistic drive. Instead she uses her own body as a canvas and the living world as her paint box.
On Monday, March 31, Searle gave a lecture on her work entitled "In Your Culture?" She prefaced her lecture by addressing the current situation in the world. To do otherwise would have been contrary to her whole vision of the aesthetic world. Far from being abstract and untouchable, the aesthetic world is immediate, tangible, and a part of the living world.
Her installation entitled The Colour Me relies partly on its interactions with the viewer. The piece plays with several factors including the artists naked body and the use of red paprika, brown cloves, and yellow turmeric. In the photographs, Searle is smeared with the different spices. The images that result from this process of coloring the naked body defy a static definition of identity.
In several photographs, the artist gazes directly at the viewer suggesting confrontation and even a sense of eroticism. In her lecture, Searle noted that this gaze emphasizes the "significance of being able to look back" at the viewer and the power that this gives the subject even when the subject may be gazing at a figure of domination.
Hailing from South Africa, Searle noted that her work is often written off as a "cultural curiosity." However, her work is far too profound to be particularized as a product of a certain area of the world or a single culture.
She noted that aspects of her past constantly influence her work. On the other hand the purpose of her work is not autobiographical. Searle works to create art that is more about the viewer than the artist behind the piece. By employing installations, Searle works to "create a mutual space in which the viewer can question his/her own subjectivity. If art becomes purely autobiographical this threatens to de-politicize the work and trivialize it."
Speaking about her own work, Searle notes, "Without providing any definite answers, I think my work raises questions about attitudes towards race and gender. I think it operates on different levels and reflects different racial and political experiences but I don't think my pieces are limited by that. I hope they transcend and go beyond that, and provide a space for illusion and fantasy. They reflect a desire to present myself in various ways to counter the image that has been imposed on me. Race is inevitable in South Africa."
Searle continues, "The self is explored as an ongoing process of construction in time and place. The presence and absence of the body in the work points to the idea that one's identity is not static, and constantly in a state of flux."
In 2003 Searle was awarded one of the most longstanding art prizes in South Africa, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, which will enable her to have her first major solo exhibition in South Africa.
Prior to this, Searle's work primarily was known internationally. A resident of Cape Town, Searle has become one of the more visible of South African artists undertaking art projects and exhibiting internationally.
Trained as a sculptor, she frequently uses large-scale digital photographic prints which she combines with found materials to create her thought-provoking installations and video.
Searle's work was featured recently in the South African online art-zine Artthrob: "Using her own body as subject and point of departure, Searle experiments with the surface of her skin, often allowing it to be clad in layers of coloured and aromatic spices, leaving her bodily imprint on drifts of spices on the floor, or staining certain areas of her body with various substances, suggesting trauma, or damage."
Recent American exhibitions of her work include Still, at Axis Gallery in New York, The Field's Edge, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, Florida, and a solo museum show at the Matrix Contemporary Art Program, University of California, Berkeley.
Her work is currently on view at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in The Space Between: Artists Engaging Race and Syncretism.
Searle's visit is sponsored by the Bowdoin College Department of Art and the Robert Lehman Lecture Fund.
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