Tracing: Berni Searle

African Arts, Winter, 2004 by Liese van der Watt

The story of South Africa's liberation is most often told in the grand narrative of the struggle and liberation of an oppressed people. But what follows that moment of freedom? How do we measure democracy or gauge our transformation over the last ten years? Quantifying new houses that were built, electricity supplied, and water pipes laid, or assessing black equity and political representation are reliable ways to survey our democracy and its failures. But what is inevitably obscured by these public narratives are the more intimate accounts of personal discoveries that are, partly, the result of a changed political landscape.

Berni Searle's emergence as an artist of international repute coincides more or less with South Africa's first decade of democracy. Much has been written on Searle's work over the last few years, (1) especially in the wake of a series of major prizes she has won since 1998. Often texts about her work have fixated on her subversion of racial categories, a legitimate focus given South Africa's apartheid past, but one that also obscures the more organic and complex development of her oeuvre. In considering the chronology of her works from student days onwards, one realizes that her work is never overdetermined by race or identity politics, but rather proclaims a far more subtle process of ongoing interrogation, exploration, and discovery through the confluence of a number of different factors.

In a 2003 documentary directed by Cape Town artist Vuyile Voyiya and American art historian Julie McGee about the experiences of black artists in contemporary South Africa titled The Luggage Is Still Labeled, (2) Searle speaks about feeling isolated and alienated when she first entered the University of Cape Town's Michaelis School of Fine Art in the mid-1980s. While the film posits this as a fact of her blackness, one realizes that her alienation had as much to do with her gender position in a predominantly male environment, especially at the level of instruction, as with her racial position in a primarily white institution. Thinking back to those days, Searle speaks frankly about her frustrating search for role models and texts to help her theorize ideas that were perhaps not yet clearly articulated, but present in embryonic form. (3) While a certain level of political consciousness was probably inevitable for anyone growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in a "colored" community in South Africa, translating those concerns into the cultural realm proved to be a complex process. Scouring the library shelves for relevant literature, Searle found resonance with the identity politics of black British theorists such as Kobena Mercer and Paul Gilroy, who at the time were starting to question the inclusivity of Britishness. African American women artists such as Pat Ward Williams and Lorna Simpson expressed in visual terms critical ideas that Searle could selectively draw on.

After graduating with a BA in fine art in 1987 and a postgraduate diploma in education in 1988, Searle taught art in a Cape Town high school for two years and then re-entered Michaelis, registering for the masters' degree in sculpture in 1992. While this was clearly a valuable time for accumulating technical expertise and consolidating an affinity for the three-dimensional form--something that is still visible in her photographic works today--the search for both form and content continued. Her body of work presented for the masters' degree in fine art in 1995 shows abstract, voluminous structures in cement, ciment fondu, steel, wire, bronze, and glass that seem somehow incongruous with the much more intimate and lyrical works by which Searle is recognized today. Created a year after the first democratic elections, these works were meant to question euphoric ideals of nationhood and nation building in a lexicon strongly mediated, even regulated, by context and instruction.

Take, for instance, For Fatherland, a monumental work in three components, measuring, as a whole, 181cm x 172cm (6' x 5 1/2'; Fig. 4). Three vertical structures are placed in a half-circle, their form vaguely reminiscent of Gothic architecture, thereby imbuing the work with an enshrined, sacred quality. Embedded in the glass are traces of stick figures, left there through the process of sand-casting. The work is meant to be a monument to notions of self-sacrifice in the name of the nation and nationhood. Like the empty wire flags in the lower part of each structure, these ghostly stick figures are a cynical comment on the misplaced ideals of patriotism and nationalism.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

At the risk of essentializing, one could argue that this kind of sculpture resembles exactly the abstract, minimalist, solid, and masculine works that many feminist artists rebelled against when they deliberately reinserted the female body into their work in the late 1970s and early 1980s in a symbolic gesture to politicize the personal. By contrast, these early student works of Berni Searle now seem strangely anonymous and conceptually unstructured, somewhat stunted by an environment where there were no female mentors and too little exposure to the kind of feminist theory that would later play a formative role in honing her artistic vision. Yet these works make sense within her larger oeuvre because they explore at a collective level ideas about identity and race that Searle would later address on a personal level, albeit with infinite more subtlety and nuance.