Marcus Verhagen: 'An Art of the Commonplace'
In: Annotations 2: Sonia Boyce: Performance. Edited by Mark Crinson. London: Institute of international Visual Arts, 1998, pp. 10-15
Clichés, in Boyce's work, are at times startlingly seductive. In Coloured , for instance, the words in their rectangles, each representing some idea or attribute commonly associated with Afro-Caribbean culture, have the jaunty charm of a sixties album cover, their colours cheerfully clashing and their various fonts creating lively subsidiary patterns. The colour scheme and font of each boxed term seem to expand on and confirm the associations of the word in question, as if sign and meaning were organically connected, as if commonplaces were self-generating and reliably informative. But this impression is soon dispelled. For one thing, the piece's glossy appearance turns out on closer inspection to be slightly deceptive. The words are not printed or air-brushed but cut out and the intervention of the artist's hand, however discreet, weakens the containment and hence assurance of the commonplace. The work has neither the seamlessness of mass culture, nor, for that matter, the anxious authority of the Original Work of Art (what Walter Benjamin called its 'aura'); rather, it has something of the doubleness, the interstitial inventiveness, of a scrap-book. Like a scrap-book, it locates meaning not in specific messages but in the continuities and lapses between them. And here the lapses may be more important than the continuities. In trying to make sense of the various words on offer, we are eventually forced to recognise that they do not necessarily add up. Classic and disorder, virgin and savage, panther and minstrel - these words sit uncomfortably together, interrogating one another across the surface of the piece. How, the viewer is bound to ask, can we rely on commonplaces when they create such an unresolved picture? By speaking in a variety of different voices, Boyce de-naturalises the cliché, she shows that it is historically constructed and specific, and in doing so tentatively suggests that it can in time be rethought.
In Coloured, tensions exist not only between words but also within them. Boyce, it seems, has a taste for terms with dual meanings (soul, mass, etc.). Revealingly, many of those terms (roots, kinky, lock) refer on some level to hair, a signifier that crops up frequently in Boyce's work but points in many directions at once - to assimilation and apartness, adornment and dissimulation, nature and artifice. Hair, in other words, is particularly unstable in its meanings; quite apart from the puns in such words as roots or kinky, it lends itself to a punning of sorts in the broader language of identity. That, surely, is why it appeals to Boyce, who is constantly uncovering the pun in the commonplace, the heterogeneous in the homogeneous. Boyce's purpose is not to deny difference (racial or sexual) altogether but to reconfigure it in terms altogether more flexible, humorous and self-reflexive than mainstream culture generally allows. Of course, that piecing-back-together-again is not an unambiguously easy or rewarding process; after all, Coloured mystifies before it offers any solutions and those solutions are never more than temporary. It is not for nothing that the piece is difficult.
In one respect Boyce's work is in perfect accord with mainstream culture. For her as for the copy-writer, identity is fixed, if at all, in and through the workings of fantasy. In Coloured, words such as nig nog, diva, freak and cult all speak of the self and the other in the language of the desiring imagination. And in that language some of our most cherished distinctions threaten to unravel: the public sphere is penetrated by the private, the political by the sexual. What motivates both the commonplace and Boyce's questioning of it is, it would seem, desire. But there the similarity ends, for mainstream culture cannot afford to address our fantasies too openly for fear of breaking the spell, while in Boyce's work the breaking of spells is itself a turn-on - the demystification of one fantasy is the pretext for the activation of another. In fact, in such pieces as Heads One and Two or Tongues the demystification and re-engagement of fantasy are effected simultaneously, through the proximity of the viewer to the photographed body. Our closeness not only consumes and depletes the usual essentialist narratives of difference, it is also powerfully erotic, not just because it gives the viewer the perspective of a lover, but because it conveys and enjoins a thrilling (partial) loss of identity.