AMANUENSIS FOR THE DEAD
C L I F F O R D B E S TA L L
AMANUENSIS FOR THE DEAD
C L I F F O R D B E S TA L L
“The awareness of death that defines human nature is inseparable from – indeed, it arises from – our awareness that we are not self-authored, that we follow in the footsteps of the dead.” (Harrison, 2003:ix)
Submitted in accordance with the requirements for a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art University of Cape Town Michaelis School of Fine Art November 2019
The work submitted in this thesis is my own; appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. The copyright for this thesis rests with its author. This copy has been supplied with the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. Š Clifford Bestall 2019
AMANUENSIS FOR THE DEAD I.
Amanuensis for the Dead is a haptic study
“It is through literature (and artistic works
in traumatic trans-generational experience.
more generally),” Gabriele Schwab suggests in
Returning to my past, I find in my own history
Haunting Legacies, “that one can tap into the
a site of unacknowledged pain laid bare. It is
experiences that were never fully known but
not mine, this pain, yet I find myself custodian
have nonetheless left their traces.” (2010:7)
of it. It belongs to my mother – a figure from
And so I return to the past that I might mend
whom I have been largely estranged. Her early
the holes in a history I never lived but which
trauma happened long before I was born, yet
has marked my life. I do so in the hope that
it has continued to affect my life as “post-
such a gesture might prove transformational.
memory”, where, as Marianne Hirsch writes, “postmemory describes the relationship of
In making these works, my process is not
the second generation to powerful, often
unlike feeling blindly in the dark in search
traumatic, experiences that preceded their
of unseen forms. Frottage (or rubbing) as a
births but were nevertheless transmitted to
technique brings veiled experience to the
them so deeply as to constitute memories in
surface. The individual images in this exhibi-
their own right.” (Hirsch, 2003:103)
tion are made manifest through this sensory, tactile process: one in which touch, trace
My engagement with theories of postmem-
and exploration makes visible that which was
ory and trans-generational trauma informs
hidden. Like an X-ray, the underlying struc-
both the process of my work and its content.
tures of the objects beneath the surface are
revealed. They emerge as graphite or printer’s ink finds and responds to their tangible hardness, just as an archaeologist’s trowel works a delineated area of excavation. It is a blind seeing-by-feeling, as I reach for forms beneath the surface – just as I reach, unseeing, for transgenerational meaning.
Digging Through Darkness #3, printer’s ink frottage on cotton, 163 x 87cm
II.
“He carries around within him a vast dark land: all the stories his mother never told him or that she hid from him; perhaps he carries with him even those stories his mother never knew or heard of, he can’t get rid of them but he can’t lose them either, since he doesn’t even know them, since all of this lies buried deep within him; for when he slipped from his mother’s womb, he was already filled with interior spaces that didn’t belong to him…” (Erpenbeck, 2013: xii)
It is in this “vast dark land”, this site of uncertainty, that I look for meaning. Here, where “deathwriting” and “blind seeing” begins; an attempt, as Peter Boxall described, “to make darkness visible, or to overcome the distinction between the light and the dark, the visible and the invisible.” (2017:192) My work begins with the fragmentary memory of a story, which my mother, Anna, once told me when I was a child. The story was later confirmed and consolidated in the more detailed version she related to other members of the family. In her initial telling, I remember a certain performative element. She assumed the tone and behaviour of a wounded child, speaking in a small, almost pitiful voice. “Like photography, traumatised bodies reveal their own optical unconscious,” Schwab writes of the children’s acute awareness of their parents’ somatic experiences; “it is this unconscious that second-generation children absorb.” (2010:14) Echoing Schwab,
Hirsch suggests that photographs are “often the primary generational transmission of trauma.” (2008:103) To my knowledge, there is only one photograph of my mother taken before I was born. In what looks like a box-camera image, Anna stares boldly – if not somewhat bashfully – at the camera. She is a black-stockinged teenager, dressed in what is likely the uniform of the orphanage she had been sent to some years earlier. She is a stranger who bears no resemblance to the woman I will come to know. There is not a glimmer of evidence in the photograph of her pain; nothing to suggest the loss of family or of her longing for them. She only once told me of that unhappy time, never again mentioning this episode of her life to her only child, choosing instead to reminisce on earlier experiences up to the moment when she was separated from her family.
This unwanted inheritance of trauma my mother left me was, up until her death, something I avoided, just as she did. And just as I have seldom acknowledged my own painful separation from her as a young boy. An old family graveyard bounded by a highway lies outside Johannesburg. Its markers and stones are testimony to the fact that before public health and clean water, what happened here, while a tragedy for those involved, was unexceptional for the period. In April 1928, Anna, her ten siblings and her parents contracted enteric fever from contaminated drinking water from the well on their farm. Six of her brothers and sisters died in hospital within days of one another. The rest survived. Anna was eight years old at the time.
Though desperately ill herself, Anna recovered and was taken back home to the family farm. Trying to understand the unexplained absence of her six siblings, she asked her mother why the graveyard had been “so busy.” She received no reply. This is the moment to which I return, a moment weighed with unacknowledged trauma and grief, one that the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham describes as “the phantom effect,” which exists in “the gap in knowledge where the trauma resides.” (1987:287) The image of a graveyard – like writer Alexander Stephan’s evocation of the “crypt” – exists as a place in the psyche of the subject into which the mourned object is “swallowed and preserved.” (Stephan, 2005:258) It is a place given to “the burial of an inadmissible experience”;
to that “segment of an ever so significantly lived Reality — untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual assimilative work of mourning — cannot be admitted as a loss.” (Stephan, 2005:258)
ritual of burial, that she was left “to grieve interminably in private.” (Harrison, 2003:55) For grief left unconsidered is, as Harrison suggests, “one of the most dangerous and potentially self-destructive psychic crisis.” (2003:55)
A few months after the deaths of her children, Anna’s mother died in childbirth. Her father was deemed to be incapable of raising his surviving children so Anna, along with two of her siblings, was sent by social workers to an orphanage in Ugie, a small town in the foothills of the Drakensberg that later would become the Transkei.
As an expression of her unprocessed loss, Anna tore herself out of many family photographs that included me, her son. Her motive remains unclear. It was perhaps prompted by the fact that her marriage ended soon after my birth, that she could not come to see herself as a young mother, or that she felt compelled to remove herself from the myth of happy familial self-presentation that was patently false in her lived reality. It could equally have been prompted by vanity – she was at this time a fashion model and may have given in to a fit of over-critical self-evaluation. Its effect on me, however, when I first saw these photographs, was that my mother had torn herself out of my life, that the act was one of violent erasure.
The deaths and sudden dissolution of her family marked Anna profoundly. Throughout her life she had bouts of uncontrollable anger that were directed at servants, lovers – one she shot in the leg with a pistol – and her son. It would seem that she was never afforded the full disclosure of family deaths nor the opportunity to mourn with the necessary
Fractured Digit, lithograph, 90 x 58cm
“The paradoxes of indirect knowledge haunt many of us who came after,” the academic Eva Hoffman writes in her reflections on the post-Holocaust generation. “The formative events of the twentieth century have crucially informed our biographies, threatening sometimes to overshadow and overwhelm our own lives. But we did not see them, suffer through them, experience their impact directly. ” (2004:9 -10) Many similar studies on the children of death camp survivors reference the fragmentary nature of parents’ narratives, which lie at the heart of the generation’s post-memory trauma. Abraham suggests that this transgenerational “haunting” is not an agency of the “phantoms” of the dead, as is the belief in many societies, but an invention of the living. He describes the phantom as the “formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious for good reason...it works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own mental topography.” (1987:287)
III.
Amanuensis for the Dead is, in part, a symbol-
similarities in their mimetic relationship to
ic burial of the grandparents, aunts and uncles
the world – I think again of the single image
that I never knew – my mother’s parents and
of my mother, and of her torn absence in the
her siblings – whose remains all lie in that
frames we shared. Where frottage references
family graveyard outside Johannesburg. It
surfaces and objects directly through touch,
offers the dead a way in which their legacy
photography does so optically.
can be reworked, the unsaid spoken aloud, the grief made admissible. “To be human
In the exhibition catalogue for Devil’s
means above all to bury,” Harrison writes.
Playground, the photographer Nan Goldin
“Vico suggests as much when he reminds
describes her camera as prosthesis: “It’s as if
us that humanitas in Latin comes first and
my hand were a camera. If it were possible, I’d
properly from humando, burying.” (2003:xi) In
want no mechanism between me and the mo-
engaging with past traumas, as Schab suggests,
ment of photographing.” (Goldin in McGrath,
the artist reduces its power to disrupt, to
2002b:162) For her, making – not taking – a
overwhelm or to take its inheritor by surprise
photograph is akin to a tender caress, eating
(2010:7).
or sex. Writing on Goldin’s work, Roberta McGrath makes the distinction “between op-
In my engagement with family history, I have
tic and haptic visuality” – citing writer Laura
found the tactile method of frottage to offer
Marks’ book The Skin of the Film (2000) – to
a somatic relationship with traces; be they
draw the distinction between the frottage
objects, textures or forms. The techniques
and photographic processes to demonstrate
of frottage and photography share many
that “while opsis is detached and maintains a
Detail of Draped Mirror #1, graphite frottage on cotton, 71 x 97cm
distance from its object, hapsis presses close to, has contact with [the skin]...that brings its audience into contact with the material forms of memory.” (Marks in McGrath, 2002a:162-4) In making the works exhibited, I lay paper or stretched cotton fabric over grouped objects, both found and augmented. The objects, momentarily hidden beneath their veils, reveal themselves as apparitions as graphite or rolling printer’s ink is rubbed over the unseen assemblage. Frottage is at once an unmaking and remaking – the objects’ rubbed presence affirms that there is something to be recognised. The material dictates the mark-making, and invites moments of unexpected impressions. In some works – those made on black cotton with graphite – the image hovers between the seen and the unseen, being visible only where the silver graphite reflects the light. In addition to the frottage works are a series of prints. The lithographs take as subject maps and grids, a recurring theme that denotes place of origin, and allows me to locate the transgenerational moment in time and space. The importance of place is also closely tied
to the family cemetery, where my mother too lies; her grave a site of psychic potency. While the maps pinpoint specific spaces, they also convey a sense of time, set as they are in different contexts to become the coordinates of that history and a nexus connecting a family of images that evidence searching: cartography, sites of archaeological digs, monuments, highways, those places selected with loose associations. In frottage, what begins as blind process begins to gain sight, to reveal a dark universe of obscured and hidden elements. The technique goes beyond a mere rendering of what lies beneath. It manifests a kind of geology; revealing layers of structure and forms deeper than opsis as the artist’s hands and eyes search for what cannot be seen. “Touch is the most fundamental sense to which all the other senses relate,” the artist Katherine Fries notes. “Indeed, touch reaches beyond surface associations by involving kinaesthetic, multisensory and haptic thinking.” (2017:27) The duality of hapsis and opsis is reflected in this exhibition’s two modes; two processes with two conceptual approaches to their shared subject. The frottage works are born
out of the feel, texture and weight of what lies beneath the intervening cloth or paper while the lithographs are collaged images composed digitally and printed mechanically. Some are later worked into and hand-coloured. In form, my work returns to sequence and series. I have worked in cinematography as a documentary filmmaker for the past 40 years, and it is to this “way of seeing” the number of triptychs and quadriptych exhibited evidence. Together they suggest the minimal “sequences” that describe frames of process trapped in step-time ( much like the sequential work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge). Recurring throughout the works presented is gesture of binding, unbinding, wrapping and unwrapping. Shrouds, too, are explored in several frottaged works as both the material and the subject. In these series, I give to my mother’s silent grief an image. The triptych, Draped Mirror #1, 2 & 3, reveals the uncovering of a mirror in three movements, as a cloth is drawn from its surface. Following a death, it is custom to many to turn mirrors to the wall or obscure them from view, so that the soul, on leaving the deceased’s body, does not become trapped
in its own reflection. Mirrors, it is said, are a rent or leak between the two worlds that separate the living from the dead. In another sequence of images, Persephone’s Veils, a cloth falls to the ground, frozen in its movement as in the frames of a film. The surrounding darkness evokes the realm of Hades, the underworld of classical Greek mythology in which the goddess Persephone is held captive. The motif of tools is present throughout the exhibition – the tools used for clearing a ‘dig’, an archaeological site in its first phase of excavation. They are bound or bandaged as if anthropomorphically wounded; as if they have passed through a dressing station after violent conflict or trauma.
Stratigraphy #2, hand-coloured litho, 63 x 45cm
IV. The traumas of parents are the inheritance of their children, and our ancestral past is very much present in our own lives, though it often remains opaque. It requires, I believe, an historical excavation to bring to light the events that stain and strain so many relationships between parents and their children, just as my mother’s unspoken loss tore her from me. Through an art practice that engenders research, acknowledgement and retrospection, my work gestures towards a reconciliation.
Site of Loss, hand-coloured lithograph, 63 x 45cm
BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Nicolas. 1987. Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology. Nicolas Rand (translator). Critical Inquiry. 13(2):287-292. Boxall, Peter. 2017. Blind Seeing: Deathwriting from Dickinson to the Contemporary. New Formations. 89-90:192-211. Erpenbeck, Jenny. 2013. The End of Days. Susan Bernofsky (translator). Boston: New Directions. Fries, Katherine. 2017. Touching Impermanence. PhD thesis. Sydney: Sydney University. Harrison, Richard Pogue. 2003. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. The Generation of Postmemory. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoffman, Eva. 2004. After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. New York: Public Affairs. Jacobs, Amber. 2007. On Matricide. New York: Columbia University Press. McGrath, Roberta. 2002a. Vision in the Realm of the Senses. Edinburgh: Napier University Press. McGrath, Roberta. 2002b. Nan Goldin: The Devil’s Playground. London: The Whitechapel Art Gallery. Schwab, Gabriele. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press. Stephan, Alexander. 2005. Exile and Otherness. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Stratigraphy #3, hand-coloured litho, 63 x 45cm
Draped Mirror #1, 2 & 3, graphite on black cotton, 71 x 97cm each Previous page: Unbound, frottage on cotton, 110 x 200cm
Digging Through Darkness #2, printer’s ink frottage on cotton, ed, 200 x 110cm Digging Through Darkness #1, printer’s ink frottage on cotton, ed, 180 x 99cm
Bag 2, monoprint, 60 x 42cm
Bag 3, monoprint, 60 x 42cm
Stratigraphy #4, hand-coloured litho, 45 x 63cm
Persephone’s Veils (triptych), graphite frottage on cotton, 96 x 73cm each
Stratigraphy #5, hand-coloured litho, 63 x 45cm
Shroud #2, graphite on cotton, 168 x 100cm Shroud #1, oil pastel frottage on cotton, 180 x 100cm
Design by Lena Sulik Printed by Hansa Print, Cape Town