Tracey Rose


Tracey Rose is a South African artist who lives and works in Johannesburg. Rose is best known for her performances, video installations, and photographs.

Artist's Statement

"Making work is a documentation of a journey – each stage, each process, each dilemma has to be worked through. At one time I felt pressured to do a lot of things at the same time, but now I want to take one step at a time. When you make an artwork you're not just doing something at that moment, you're contributing to an entire history of artmaking."

Biography

Tracey Rose was born in 1974 in Durban, South Africa. She attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in Fine Arts where she obtained her B.A. in 1996. She taught at Vaal Triangle Technikon, Vanderbijl Park, South Africa and at the University of the Witwatersrand. In February and March 2001 she was artist-in-residence in Cape Town at the South African National Gallery where she developed her work for the Venice Biennale 2001 curated by Harald Szeemann.
Tracey Rose is represented in the US by Christian Haye of The Project.
Since her mid nineties graduation from the University of Witwatersrand, Rose has had an extremely busy few years internationally, as her CV shows. In much of her work in this time, Rose has investigated questions of gender and colour, often through the visual motifs of her own body and body hair. In Ongetiteld, shown on 'Democracys Images' at Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden in 1998, Rose again used surveillance cameras to film herself shaving off all of her bodily hair. In the catalogue, Rose describes this act as being "about both demasculating and de-feminising my body, shaving off the masculine and feminine hair. This kind of de-sexualisation carries with it a certain kind of violence. The piece is about making myself unattractive and unappealing. But what was disconcerting was that I suddenly became attractive to a whole different group of people. Perhaps there was not enough of a sense of penance and flagellation in the work."
For 'Graft', the Colin Richards curated show at the SANG on the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Rose presented Span I and Span II. In this, Rose sat with shaved head on a sideways TV displaying a closeup image of a reclining nude, a classic art history image. Head bent, Rose busied herself with knotting strands of her own shaven hair. The bravura performance took place inside a glass cabinet. Rose says, "With my naked body on the TV I wanted to negate the passivity of the action of the reclining nude. In doing the piece, I had to confront what I wasn't supposed to do with my body. The work is a cleansing act, a coming out. The knotting not only invokes the rosary beads of my childhood, but also the working with one's hands, and the meaning of this handiwork as a form of empowerment". In Span I, the complementary part of the piece, a red-overalled prisoner incised text on to the opposite wall of the gallery, memories from Rose's childhood, often dealing with the role that hair, how straight it was, how curly, and thus how it defined race, had played in her childhood. "The wall's a purge and a perversion of the idea of a lack of penance, where I become vindicated through the act of employing an ex-prisoner to 'perform' my confession."

Work

Rose's work responds to the limitations of dogma and the flaws in institutionalised cultural discourse. Her practice, which is known for centering on performance, also includes photography, video, and installation. Always evident in her work is the artist's insistence in confronting the politics of identity, including sexual, racial, and gender-based themes. According to Jan Avgikos, "part of Rose's appeal is her fluid referencing of '60s and '70s performance art".
TKO is projected on a translucent screen; its images are hard to make out. A dark figure seems to be restlessly moving against a white background. A soundtrack records scuffling and a voice panting and groaning with growing intensity.
The performer is Mrs. Rose herself, filmed by four separate cameras as she works out with a punching bag; one of the cameras is embedded in the bag, which in part accounts for the film's vague movements. The impression of aggression and possible sexual violence is unmistakable, though what is happening is obscure. The technical knockout of the title is neither a victory nor a defeat but a matter of self-inflicted exhaustion.
The Felliniesque video Ciao Bella is on view in the upstairs gallery. Originally shown at the 2001 Venice Biennial, it's a stationary panorama in which several grotesque characters – again played by Ms. Rose – perform on a long altarlike tabletop. A schoolmarmish hostess comes and goes; a smiling blond nymphet in dead-white makeup flagellates herself; a woman in an 18th-century wig spasmodically spoons out chocolate cake; a black, nude woman is put on display and eventually hanged.
Ms. Rose, who is based in South Africa, has tackled ideas of gender and race in interesting, sometimes audacious ways over the last few years. On the evidence of this show, her forms are rapidly growing more sophisticated, her images sharper, her thinking more complex – all of which bodes very well for the future of an artist still only in her 20s.

''Ciao Bella'' (2001)

Rose's photographic works only truly gain import when viewed in conjunction with the action that unfolds within the baroque-styled picture frame that surrounds her video installation, a tripped-out re-enactment of the Last Supper. The action in the video is at once anarchic and fun, haphazard and absurd. On the left screen Bunnie, a rubber-clad bunny girl, jumps up and down ceaselessly, while a black, Afro-styled mermaid sits contemplating her bubble-wrap tail. In the middle Marie Antoinette slices a chocolate cake and doles it out equally onto various plates. Confrontationally poised next to her is Cicciolina, the porn art vixen. Also competing for attention, on the left screen, is a very adult-looking Lolita, the perpetually hunched Saartjie Baartman, as well as a character ceaselessly punching herself in the face with her boxing gloves.
The totality of the action unfolds against a backdrop of changing colours. Starting out with red velvet curtaining, the colour bleeds, meandering through changing intensities of blue, followed by a black and white stencil-type backdrop, before ending with the red curtains again. The red curtains are quite apt. The first words spoken in the video are Shakespearian, a quote from The Merchant of Venice, which references that well-known adage about the world being a stage, all the men and women on it merely players.
Having set up her classical milieu, Rose allows the action to meander playfully. Characters disappear and reappear, the visible parameters of the stage merely one of their playgrounds. The visual discord finally gains momentum when Bunnie executes some of the players with her shotgun. It is left for the primly dressed Mama character to clean up the mess, including giving the bloodied screen a wipe-down.

''The Kiss'' (2001)

The Kiss is a photograph of a naked black man and a naked white woman. The man is Rose's American art dealer; the woman, with the filigreed fulsomeness of a pre-Raphaelite figure, is Rose herself. The man is seated on a plinth, back upright, head in contemplative profile, lithe legs dangling in mid-air. The woman lies across him, an odalisque with legs and arms in a delicately tangled flutter. If there is lightness in the man's airborne feet, there is also a weightedness and, in his profile, the worn exhilaration of a black man's victory. The profile is strikingly marmoreal, though the self-awareness of the man adds that quicksilver quintessence. The woman, meanwhile, has a gamine-like shyness; her fluttering is also a kind of shudder. There is pleasure, there, in the making of that scene, pleasure and a fresh awakening.
Irrespective of the self-consciousness of the image, irrespective of the element of pastiche, what lifts the image above and beyond the influences and constraints that shape it is that sense of pleasure, of laughter, that lightness. Thereby, through laughter, through what Roland Barthes's famously termed jouissance or bliss, the iconic or representational quality of the work dissolves or, at least, is strategically foregrounded yet kept in abeyance. If the work is about race, about gender, it is also about something far greater: love. By this I mean that Rose has not only shown us the obvious, but through the obvious – racial conflict and sexual difference – she has managed to point a way forward. This way is one which eschews the pathological and perverse, which conceives of South Africa not as a place that is irresistible and unlovable but, all the more profoundly, as a place that is resistible and lovable. For Rose this resistance assumes a reflexive turn: it shows the object of critique, then approaches it at a glance. This glance, like the playful hooded eyes of the woman in The Kiss, is loaded in its seeming frivolity. That the work possesses a populist appeal, and, at the same time, is able to assist us in rethinking the pathology of our history, makes it all the more significant and durable.

Exhibitions

According to Sue Williamson, "Tracey Rose is not a practitioner who jumps at every curatorial opportunity offered her, and has been known to withdraw from more than one exhibition if the circumstances have not seemed right."
Rose's work has been widely exhibited in Africa, Europe and the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include "The Cockpit" at MC, Los Angeles, CA, "Plantation Lullabies" at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, both in 2008.
Recent group exhibitions include "El mirall sud-africà" at the Centre De Cultura Contemporània De Barcelona, Spain, "Mouth Open, Teeth Showing: Major Works from the True Collection" at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, "Memories of Modernity" in Malmo, Sweden, "Check List: Luanda Pop" at the African Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennale, Italy, "Heterotopias" at the Thessaloniki Biennale in Greece, and "Global Feminisms" at The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in Brooklyn, New York, and the 11th Lyon Biennale "A terrible beauty is born" in 2011.
Caryatid & BinneKant Die Wit Does and Imperfect Performance: A tale in Two States are among her most recent live performances, seen at the Düsseldorf Art Fair in Germany, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, respectively. In 2001 Rose was also included in "Plateau de l'humanite" in the 49th Venice Biennale curated by Harald Szeemann.

Solo exhibitions