Ingrid Winterbach’s art exhibition I’ve got the darkness, baby is on at Gallery @ Glen Carlou until 19 March 2023. Andries Gouws, philosopher, painter and Ingrid’s husband, sheds light on Ingrid’s work as a writer and artist.
Ingrid Winterbach in her studio.
Both as a painter and as a writer, Winterbach creates work that is fun, beautiful and playful – but only for the viewer or reader who has let go of conventional notions of what is fun, beautiful or playful. She is thoroughly steeped in both art history (inter alia, by having lectured in the subject at Stellenbosch University for 13 years) and the great Western novelistic tradition. Thus, behind the apparent crudity and naivety of her artistic iconography, lies a deep and sophisticated knowledge of the Western artistic tradition, up to and including modernism and contemporary art. (And also, one may add, an ability to draw like a classically realistic virtuoso when it suits her.) Whether as a novelist or a visual artist, she does not wish to repeat what she already knows and loves, but to break new ground – to do something, moreover, which she herself has not foreseen, something she herself finds surprising, instead of executing a preconceived plan. As such, her work continues the modernist revolt against that which is too easily digested (because it is too familiar) – a revolt which gets renewed urgency in the light of today’s culture of consumption, instant gratification and short or fragmented attention spans, especially as that appears in our addiction to social media. A choice for a sort of aesthetically and intellectually low glycaemic index, rather than a high one, so that the nutrients contained in the work are released only slowly.
Winterbach frustrates the viewer’s expectations of what is satisfying, edifying or otherwise interesting. Both as a writer and as an artist, she could have this device emblazoned on her banner: Frustrate the expectations of the public! Something is suggested, a meaning seems imminent; but there is no closure, the dots are never connected.
Meaning remains in flux; there is an ongoing postponement of resolution, balance, arriving at a state of rest. The rest of a geometric or aesthetic balance, of domesticity, of that which is pure and untainted.
According to Arnaldo Gunzi*, “No new music arises from order. No new picture emerges from order. No new idea arises from order. Only from chaos.” Winterbach has a great tolerance for chaos. Her process involves dipping into and out of chaos, and this is preserved in its result. I suspect that this is part of the reason her work provokes discomfort, or even anxiety, in many people. (The lack of clearly readable meaning often induces anxiety, perhaps because it is experienced as disorder, while closure, resolution and the like are associated with order.) Confronted with her work, unprepared viewers often find it ugly and inaccessible – or at best puzzling. However, in her work, the disorder is a feature, not a bug.
(All photographs in this article supplied by Andries Gouws and Ingrid Winterbach)
Winterbach constantly reinvents herself in her visual work. She tends to work in series, with works in each series clustering around one theme and sharing certain formal features. (Of the series represented in this exhibition, I here discuss only two; I hope that what I say about them will also illuminate works belonging to other series.)
The first set of works I would like to discuss features figures – often an artist with a model – in a stripped, dungeon-like basement, shown in an awkward travesty of linear perspective. The windowless walls of these subterranean spaces often have a single crude door through which something threatening and abject intrudes – something nameless suggesting an efflux, sewage, excrement, blood or some other bodily fluid, but in its menace suggesting malignant agency, like a hostile tongue. In its indeterminacy, it becomes something like the abject as such – Freudians could even say: the return of the repressed. (In one reading, the cellar is a bunker in which one renounces the riches of the world at large – South African or global – in an attempt also to shut oneself off from its misery; the intruding shape then shows the failure of this attempt.) Together with the recurrent heaps of worms or entrails (a reference to Anish Kapoor) in these spaces, and the lack of furnishings and adornment – carpets, curtains, pictures on the walls – these are the opposite of ordered, cosy, homelike spaces in which any disorder – everything undesirable – is kept at bay. As nothing much is happening in these spaces except for the threatening shape intruding through the door, this intrusion would seem to be the most likely content of the inmates’ consciousness or conversation – if there is any such content, consciousness or conversation, that is.
Exactly what these subterranean spaces are, is unclear – the presence of the artist and model suggests a studio, but other archetypal associations of subterranean spaces enter, too: the underworld, or hell; the place where the underclass dwells; a dungeon or KGB interrogation space. Finally, for depth psychologists, it will doubtless conjure up the subconscious or unconscious.
The figures in these spaces (and elsewhere in Winterbach’s work) display an attenuated or truncated subjectivity and agency, so different from the dignity of the figures in the great works of the Western tradition (though somewhat akin to Guston’s rudimentary figures, which at times are reduced to a head or Ku Klux Klan hood).
Far from being heroic and potent, the comically hatted male artist (Winterbach’s alter ego?) seems at a loss, pathetic or ridiculous. Not somebody who exudes confidence in his ability to stand his ground. The power of the fabled male gaze is nowhere to be seen. The male figure is decidedly everything but “noble in reason, infinite in faculty, In form and moving … express and admirable, In action … like an Angel, In apprehension … like a god” (Hamlet). Either he seems beset by paralysis, or, when he does stride with more or less force, it is to no discernible purpose, an exercise in futility.
The naked female figure (here the model, elsewhere unidentified or Freud’s Dora) fares no better. Winterbach’s female figures are seldom exemplars of beauty. They aren’t well proportioned, don’t show the critical correct ratio of hips to waist, are top-heavy; and their bodies bulge in all the wrong places. They’re not trying to be attractive or seductive, it seems, and wouldn’t be seductive even if they tried. For them, every day is a bad hair day. (The way in which the female figures’ hair often sticks out horizontally behind them, as if defying gravity or being blown by a gale, is actually very funny.) Their skin, which evolutionary psychologists tell us can signal underlying health to would-be mates, is blotchy and lumpy. Their features, inasmuch as they can be identified, are coarse. Rather than being gloriously, intimidatingly, beautifully and powerfully nude, in the mode of the archetypal classical nude, they are naked – a nakedness indeterminately placed, or veering, between shame and indifference to their own appearance. (In this sense, they are closer to the unerotically naked figures in medieval depictions of hell.)
The typical hero in painting is somebody who is the protagonist in a known story (David, Samson, Perseus, Hercules – or Judith, as a female example), laden with significance and purpose. Without a story going somewhere, no hero; and without a hero, no mythical story. So, the unheroic appearance of the protagonists and the absence of a plausible storyline in Winterbach’s images reinforce each other. (Something similar happens in her novels.)
Winterbach’s figures are stripped down, as in caricature or comics – or in Samuel Beckett – to only the most rudimentary level of existence, subjectivity or agency. At this level, no intercourse between them, whether social or sexual, seems possible. There seems to be no hope of interaction or mutual comprehension. This also implies that they cannot be the protagonists in a romance or story with moral significance. And one cannot safely say that this is a dire state of affairs, as nothing indicates an unfulfilled desire or yearning in these rudimentary beings.
We see here that frustration of the viewer’s expectations which we previously identified as typical for Winterbach.
Part of the reason her figures have an attenuated subjectivity and the viewer’s expectations are frustrated is that Winterbach is as interested in the how of painting as in its what. She explores, plays around with and revels in the possibilities of paint qua paint, and in various modes of representation. She seldom goes for a realistic rendition of determinate features or particularities of subject matter in a painting. This will lead to great attention on the two-dimensional surface of the painting, often to the neglect of a third dimension. And to the possibilities of applying paint in different ways: as impasto, as thin glaze, crudely or elegantly, layered or not.
If everything is ordered, if everything has found its optimum place in the whole, then one becomes reluctant to move anything about, try new combinations, experiment, play around instead of carrying out a work plan. Winterbach’s process is one of repeatedly retreating from order, redoing previous orderings, descending into some measure of chaos where new relationships and juxtapositions can arise. This process leads to incongruent and dissonant combinations of disparate elements, with the elements themselves often carrying dark, harsh or otherwise disturbing connotations.
Her combination of elements is not governed by any imperative that the elements must all cohere in a formal or ideational sense, so that their combination will read as something “pure”. Accordingly, Winterbach feels free to use images or texts from popular culture – songs, comics or other sources – and to lift elements from other artists: Bacon, Anish Kapoor, Schnabel and, in previous phases of her work, Guston, Giotto, Cranach, Bellini.
Winterbach’s inventiveness pays special attention to new combinations of elements, tending to draw obsessively on a fairly limited stock of iconographic elements at a time, with the stock of favoured elements gradually shifting over time. Thus, at one moment we have the cellar with skewed perspective, the unspeakable tongue intruding through the doorway, the Kapoor-derived heap of entrails; while in previous phases, comic-like skulls, Guston-derived hands holding shields/dustbin lids, and images from Japanese painting manuals may have predominated. The pathetic-alter-ego, ludicrously hatted male painter does keep on recurring in her work, decade after decade, and his unglamorous, naked model is also ubiquitous, as are her other naked avatars, such as Dora.
In contrast to the intrinsically sparse elements used by abstract artists like Mondrian, those of Winterbach have the aura of archetypes, pregnant with suggestions of meaning. Cellars, heaps of intestines, human figures, easels, all evoke meaning.
Among Winterbach’s stock of elements are words, rendered crudely – cacography, rather than calligraphy. The precise import of these words tends to be opaque, but being words they are bound to produce a plethora of meaning effects. In the Dora series (the second series I discuss in this piece), we’ll for instance have “Freud”, “Herr K”, “Dora”, “Ida” or “Ida Bauer”, the real name of Freud’s Dora. Neither the words nor the images are determinate enough to express any specific narrative or ideational content. Winterbach does not write or paint in a way that requires her readers or viewers to recognise the sources of her references or citations. The paintings in Winterbach’s Dora series do not attempt to spell out the details of the history of Freud and Dora explicitly – if that were even possible. What we do see is Dora having to make her way through vertiginously precarious surroundings, lacking markers of what is up and what is down – strange, unbeautiful shapes, sometimes like elongated viscera, sometimes almost amorphous. Straight lines and taut shapes are absent. Everything verges on chaos. (As often in Winterbach, all of this is about as far as one can get from anything normally associated with “good composition”, which typically strives for harmony, stability and an order that the viewer can immediately recognise as order. How totally different from the balance and closure found in a Mondrian or Piero!)
The frustration of the viewer’s expectations regarding what is to count as a good composition goes hand in hand with Winterbach’s frustration of the viewer’s or reader’s desire for narrative closure – a story whose ending ties up all loose threads and puts an end to all previously unresolved tensions. Sometimes Dora (and the artist herself?) seems to be walking an alarmingly slack tightrope that meanders through three-dimensional space. Vulnerable, unprotected, alone. Simultaneously, she is making her way among the clumsily written names of the protagonists and, in some paintings, pieces of text that describe her situation in simple or amusingly opaque theoretical terms.
Having such an iconographic stock at hand allows Winterbach to shoot from the hip – she fears preciousness like the plague – and focus rather on variations on these elements and how they are juxtaposed. Both as a writer and as a visual artist, she is a relentless killer of her darlings (or perhaps elements from her stock iconography never even become darlings to her), never reluctant to paint or edit out something which lacks the edge she is seeking, horrifying the onlooker by destroying what already seemed so pleasing. Work that is carefully seeking to achieve some ethereal beauty or harmony does not lend itself to this approach, where a figure in a painting can be painted in four or five different places and different versions on the canvas before a final version is settled upon. (It is instructive that the archetypal modernists Picasso and Matisse, who would repeatedly completely alter the composition of one and the same painting, worked quickly, not striving for the smooth finish of traditional painting in a realist mode – which had been part of its status as a luxury object.)
The same goes for her colours, which are not conventionally beautiful or harmonious. In Winterbach’s use of colour, her process is again decisive. She will experiment and change fearlessly. Rather than trying to figure out the correct colour in advance, she plunges in with some colour or other, but changes it without compunction if it does not achieve what she wants – if need be, repeatedly. The upshot is a use of colour that is often strange, but surprising, exciting or even delightful.
As Winterbach’s husband, I am intimately acquainted with her creative process, which is a great plus if one wants to write about her work. But, as her husband, I simultaneously realise that I cannot pretend to be unbiased regarding the value of her oeuvre, of which I am in awe (also because the fearlessness of her creative process is so very different from how cautiously I myself proceed when painting).
I have tried to give a description of her artistic process and its results that is informed by the reasons she herself occasionally expresses for her artistic choices; by my sense of other, intuitive and unexpressed reasons guiding these choices; as well as by my idea of other reasons why such choices could make sense. Though I do not, as is common, invoke any cause, theory or ideology that would justify her work, I believe that my description amounts to a rationale for her work, and that it will help viewers gain an entry into her work.
References:
* https://towardsdatascience.com/one-must-have-chaos-to-be-able-to-give-birth-to-a-dancing-star-354afc7ac648; accessed 21 Jan 2023
Also read: