Penny Siopis

Time and Again

For Colin

Introduction
Gerrit Olivier

29

Commentary

Conversation

Becoming Alive Again

Achille Mbembe

37
i
ii

10

Installation and Collection

PennySiopis in conversation with GerritOlivier

109
127

Figuring the Unspeakable

PennySiopis in conversation with GerritOlivier

139

Remembering Three Essays on Shame, PennySiopis,

FreudMuseum, London2005
Griselda Pollock

165

The Vitality of Matter: Notes on First Form,

Surfaces, Intimacy and the Social
Sarah Nuttall

181
Video Stories
PennySiopis in conversation with GerritOlivier

199

Penny Siopiss Film Fables

TJ Demos

209

Love and Politics: Sister Aidan Quinlan and the

Future We HaveDesired
Njabulo S Ndebele

219

A Retrospect
P
 ennySiopis in conversation with WilliamKentridge

227
vi

53

The Artists Will

Jennifer Law

v
6

Cake Paintings, History Paintings

PennySiopis in conversation with GerritOlivier

69

iv
4

43

Historical Delicacies
Jennifer Law
iii

Beginnings
PennySiopis in conversation with GerritOlivier

Painting on the Edge ofFormlessness

PennySiopis in conversation with GerritOlivier

251

An Artists Dance through Medium and Vision

Alessandra De Angelis

277

Penny Siopis: Desire and Disaster inPainting

Colin Richards

285
vii

Time Again
PennySiopis in conversation with GerritOlivier

289

Appendix

References
Index of Illustrated Works
Artist Biography
Exhibitions
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Acknowledgements

299
303
309
311
314
318
319

Penny Siopis

28

Time and Again

Introduction
Gerrit Olivier

1
The publication of this book coincides with a retrospective exhibition of
Penny Siopiss paintings, installations and films at the Iziko South African
National Gallery in Cape Town and Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg. The
phrase Time and Again, also the title of the retrospective, signals the return
of a representative collection of the artists work to the public domain. It also
alludes to recurring concerns in Siopiss work: the relationship between history
and memory in the movement of objects; the processes of physical decay
and ageing that lead to the completed work itself being subject to constant
change; the idea of repetition and difference extending into a future still to
be constructed; and a compellingly layered engagement with the social and
political changes and upheavals in SouthAfrica since the early 1980s.
Although Siopiss work evokes complex thought and reflection, many
viewers will remember the visceral impact made by the first moment of seeing.
The luscious decay of Melancholia, the excess of colonial imagery surrounding
Patience on her monument, the octopus as worm in Obscure White Messenger
are among the many memorable confrontations.
The tension between materiality and reference in Siopiss work interferes
with the distinction between form and content that underpins habitual ways
of looking. Whether the medium is painting, installation or film, materiality or
material process is as much the subject of the work as whatever subject matter is
ostensibly depicted. The assertive facture of the surface of the work is seen in the
early paintings, where oil paint is built up excessively so that it not only represents

29

Siopis painting Melancholia

in her studio at Wits,
Johannesburg, 1985

Penny Siopis

Time and Again

but also becomes the physical forms it depicts, wrinkling, cracking and decaying
as it dries over time. In the installations made over the years, the residue of time is
shown as much through the differentiated surface textures of each object and the
physical making of the installation as through the historical biography that could
be associated with that object. In the videos of more recent years, dust spots,
sprocket marks and interferences that disrupt narrative flow remind the viewer
that the film is an artefact.
This interest in form is present even in Siopiss most discursive political and
theoretical practices. Looking back over the thirty-five years of her work as an
artist, a range of contemporary and theoretical debates are readily apparent,
including feminism, critiques of colonialism and apartheid, a concern with
representations of otherness and the politics of stories marginal to grand
narratives. These engagements have often been articulated through personal
identification. In her work, the personal is not divorced from the political. Instead,
the use of her own body and that of her child, and the references to the family in,
amongst other works, My Lovely Day, show how the personal and the political
are irretrievably intertwined.
2
A look at Siopiss working methods is enlightening. In the opening essay of this
collection, Achille Mbembe draws our attention to an activity that is also visually
captured in a photograph taken in December 2013. We see Siopis in her studio
at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, looking at three panels with
runny surfaces of reddish pigment. These form the visceral base from which
human figures interact with text clippings arranged in dynamic patterns. The
floor is scattered with newspapers and her eyes are fixed on one of them.
What is happening here? In her random encounter with the news in the
newspapers that are spread around her, Siopis is not searching for something
specific; she is opening herself up to the possibility of an as yet unknown
connection. She is as interested in the material form of the newspapers as in the
stories they contain. The text itself its format, font, colour and scale marks the
human caught in a moment of time.
The creative and intellectual energy of Siopiss work is rooted in the intensity

30

Introduction

Gerrit Olivier

of such working practices, which turn the studio into both a working space and a
metaphor. As we see in the conversation between her and William Kentridge, both
artists imagine the studio as an expanded mind, populated by the experiments
of the hand and the eye in various stages of development. The conviction that
thoughts and ideas are also raw material, to be approached in visceral ways
through surrender, immersion and ritual enactment is central to Siopiss
understanding of her own working methods. Some of this is also evident in her
treatment of found objects and ready-mades from markets, junk shops and the
personal archives of strangers.
I would suggest that one way of looking at a work by Siopis is to imagine
that it doesnt exist not yet; to try and conjure the moment before anything had
taken shape; and to accept that it is in a space of imaginative enactment, where
ideas interact with material and form, that the work found its beginnings. There
was a giving over to the process, an immersion in it something that requires
trust and courage, and entails risk. As she herself explains, she is on the side of
Eros, committed to a belief in becoming instead of to the assurance provided
by completion.
3
Time and again, Siopis affirms the importance of form as a defining moment
in a radically contingent process. In grappling with a particular medium or
technique, what she calls first form marks a moment of recognition. That
recognition encompasses two elements. First form manifests itself seductively
as a kind of primary production of subjectivity through a knot of tactile or visual
apprehension. At the same time, it shows an aliveness that enables connections
to be made across space and time, to other things, other people and ideas.
The tension between form and formlessness which is so dramatically present
in many of Siopiss works signifies, philosophically speaking, an interest in ideas
of becoming. It is in the unstable moment where form contends with formlessness
that we recognize our own participation in matter, our own incompleteness and
the contingency of our own individual and social lives. In her approach, these are
not simply ideas; they are embedded in processes that seek to accommodate
uncertainty and vulnerability.

31

Penny Siopis

Time and Again

As Mbembe writes, in the seclusion of the studio, time is bracketed. But

it is not simply a time of waiting, inactivity or peace. Perhaps one could call it
a time of anticipation. By engaging with the materiality of her medium, Siopis
provokes matter to surprise her, to become eloquent. The studio becomes a
place of meticulous, attentive and open-ended contemplation and physical work,
a monastic space. While this is happening, analysis and critical reflection are
tentatively kept at bay all that knowledge about the world and art history, all
those images that tend to crowd the mind, wanting to be let in. Siopis, of course,
knows that this knowledge will enter the picture at a later stage. There may be
moments of deliberation, when she decides to mark that awareness through
conscious reference.
Since monastic activity can also become predictable and comfortable,
Siopis insists that in the interest of renewal and discovery, the habits of the
mind, the eye and the hand must be broken. This happens through experiments
with new materials and methods that disrupt accustomed patterns of work.
Yet even here, her single-minded focus on her chosen materials and working
methods is accompanied by an alertness to possibilities that may present
themselves on the margins. Thus her metaphor of immersion, of going
underwater to see what the breaking of the surface might reveal, goes hand in
hand with another: that of casting a stone into a pond, only to ignore the
big splash and explore a small ripple at the edge.
4
Much of Siopiss work is manifestly political. Yet the notion of art being
representational in any straightforward way, or serving any political or other
externally defined agenda, is not to be reconciled with her practice. Her creative
methods are rooted in a deep awareness of history and how our sense of history
is marked by the compromised representations from which no simple escape is
possible. This gives rise to a creative resilience and a refusal to accept that history
will define us. History in her work and not only in the history paintings is both
a constraining visual and conceptual inheritance and a possible route to a new
articulation of subjectivity and collective life.
As the contributors to this volume remind us, Siopiss work is more profoundly

32

Introduction

Gerrit Olivier

political than many works that present themselves as pertinent to the moment.
In Siopis we are often confronted by a more unsettling circumstance: that
our experience of our own existence in the world can never be reduced to
the platitudes of social and political discourse. Instead, her focus is often on
narratives lurking beneath the everyday, on the unspeakable (as in the Shame
paintings), on nameless dread (as in Pinky Pinky), on explosions that appear to
question the very integrity of the self as a supposedly coherent construct
(as in Whos Afraid of the Crowd?).
What Siopis has always wanted to make tangible, it seems to me, is the
moment when something new can happen through the body and the mind
interacting with materiality. For the viewer, the only real contact with this event
is through the eye in film, also through sound. But in order to appreciate the
open-endedness that is at stake, we must allow the eye and the ear to help us
imagine the hand that worked here, as well as the belief in the many productive
possibilities that accompanied the movements of the hand.
The element of risk involved in this is perhaps strongest in the case of
painting, where the body physically marks the canvas with its presence. While
this happens, history including the history of art is not simply a given; it
has to be allowed to emerge; it is, as it were, invited in. First of all there is the
hand, exploring that dangerous and exciting moment when the materiality of the
medium will make manifest a link to the self and other people.
By following Siopis into these dangerous areas, allowing our act of looking
to be as brave as her act of making, we begin to see the outlines of her ethics.
Behind the methods described in this book lies the conviction that art offers
us, as people in a country with a traumatic past, a place in which to enact our
uncertainty and vulnerability. This is why her art, even when it deals with instability
or despair, is never despairing; instead, it is affirming and exhilarating, alert to
the aliveness we can discover in the world and in ourselves.

33

Penny Siopis

Siopis in her studio at

Michaelis School of Fine
Art, Cape Town, 2013

34

Time and Again

35