Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden

Love versus Death is an early monumental installation encountered at the beginning of this major Marlene Dumas retrospective at Tate Modern. Comprising four sheets of blueprint drawings flanked by two ‘clue-strips’ (as Dumas terms them) consisting of clippings, photographs and texts. With content exploring love, affection, death and suffering, by means of images taken directly from the mass media, this work, which questions the relationship between source and image, is like a container for the themes and practices which have preoccupied Marlene Dumas throughout her career.

A South African born artist who has lived in Holland throughout her professional career, Dumas’ work explores identity and meaning through the lens of the mass media’s preoccupation with the twin poles of ecstasy and tragedy. Her focus is very particularly on the person negotiating existence in the tension between love and death with portraits and solitary figures predominating, often enlarged in series or sequence.

The title of this retrospective, ‘The Image as Burden’, is taken from a small painting from 1993 in which a male figure holds a recumbent female. The source for the image is a still from the film Camille in which Robert Taylor carries a swooning Greta Garbo in his arms but the image also recalls a reversed pietá and references the historical reality that men have produced the majority of images of women. Dumas is aware that all images are loaded with references which it is as difficult for the artist and viewer to hold in mind as it is for the man in the image to hold the woman he carries. The man in the image is holding the woman with compassionate concern, a characteristic which could also be applied to Dumas as she seeks to hold her subjects and their multitudinous references before her viewers.

Throughout her career Dumas has painted images with Biblical references (she says that the stories of the Bible were among those which she loved to illustrate as a child) and more particularly images of Jesus. Although she has produced significant series of images of Christ, such as 'Jesus Serene' and '(In Search of) The Perfect Lover', only one image of Christ has been included in this show. 'Solo' is a painting of the crucifixion from an exhibition entitled Forsaken which featured four other crucifixion paintings alongside images of Phil Spector, Amy Winehouse, Osama Bin Laden and his son Omar. Fathers and their children is the link between these disparate images, with Dumas’ crucifixion scenes focused on the moment that Christ feels forsaken by his Father and cries out in anguish at his sense of being abandoned and alone.

Dumas said that the portraits in Forsaken betrayed states of mind, in particular, the loss or death of love and beliefs that we have forsaken; tragic lives and falls from grace. It would be easy to think that this statement sums up her oeuvre but, as in her early installation, death is combated by love. You can’t let it end that way, Dumas insists; after all, you can’t make art if you’re dead. The source and the resultant painting are not one and the same. The meta-physical imagination of the artist resurrects or makes new meanings from the ashes of the old. In this sense the spiritual ecstasy Dumas explores in 'Jesus Serene' and, especially, '(In Search of) The Perfect Lover', is procreative and characterises this retrospective as fully as does her Websterian possession by death.

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Eurythmics - Thorn In My Side.

Leonard Cohen: self-deprecating and humorous

One of the things I love most about the work of Leonard Cohen is his self-deprecating humour. Lines, which sound like personal credos although sung by the characters he creates, like, "I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that Time cannot decay/I'm junk, but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet" from 'Democracy', every line in 'Tower of Song' where Hank Williams coughs a hundred floors above him, or this, from 'Going Home':

"I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit ...

He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tune."

There is real self awareness and humility here combined with the distance and irony of setting these lines ostensibly about himself in the third person. Victoria Segal notes Cohen's self-deprecation in an excellent review for Mojo of Cohen's new album Old Ideas.

Also included in Mojo's Cohen feature is a personal piece by Will Oldman describing Cohen's influence on his inspiration and work. In this piece he writes about being introduced to Cohen's music via The Best Of ... and Death Of A Ladies Man, the controversial 1977 Phil Spector-produced album. Oldham writes that he feels privileged to have been introduced to Cohen through the latter album "because to love something through its flaws provides a richer love."

Death Of A Ladies Man breaks the mould of the Cohen stereotype as sombre, introspective folk-poet by taking the vibe of Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35' and giving free rein to the carnal, humorous aspects of Cohen's work. If you haven't heard it or have filed it away on a shelf somewhere, then get it out and allow your expectations of Cohen's sound to be shattered.

Oldman perceptively writes that there is something about Cohen's lyrics "that pullls you in without revealing itself entirely but it holds you there on each listen":

"It's a combination of of humour, modesty, nihilism, despair, joy and appreciation done by someone who has the ability to put language first as a poet.

Somehow he has the ability to shine a light on our finer qualities as people in a way that you feel that you have an ally: even if you're looking at the beautiful and the ugly in the world, you can value it. I can look around at the good and the bad and say, Well, this is humanity and I'm going to keep on dealing with it because I have this man who is doing that too."

For more perceptive words on Cohen listen to Malcolm Guite's On The Edge talk by clicking here.

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Leonard Cohen - Iodine.