Marlene Dumas in conversation with Gavin Jantjes
Amsterdam 15th December 1996
In: A Fruitful Incoherence: Dialogues with Artists on Internationalism. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998, pp. 50-63.
GJ You have a wonderful name, it has a sense of fame and stardom. It could belong to a movie star or a writer but you are a painter.
MD I have a French surname but I can't speak any French. I was born in Cape Town in South Africa. South Africa is my fatherland, Afrikaans is my mother tongue. All my family still live there. It's where I went to school and grew up. My university and art training was in English at the University of Cape Town, and at the end of the Seventies, I came to Holland to continue my studies and to see the world.
GJ Today, some twenty years later, you are recognised in Europe as a Dutch artist and in Africa as a South African artist. How do you manage to juggle these worlds?
MD I think "juggle" is a good word. When I left South Africa I always thought I'd come back, I didn't leave forever. When I was small my family took me to the Wildtuin (National Park) to see the animals, and my mother would complain that I never looked at my surroundings. "You're not looking outside of the car, you're just drawing, you're making your own little world". In a sense because I work with images, and I love all pictures, I carry my world of images, like a tortoise carries his shell. My studio is my shell, I carry it around with me. Sometimes I feel that my studio is my home.
GJ I could take that remark one step further and say that rather than locate yourself in a geographic space such as Europe or Africa, the location for home is actually something we call art. In the arena of art you feel at home.
MD. Yes, I'm embarrassed to say it. I'm glad that you said it. As I get older I'm trying to be more honest with myself. It took me a long time, when asked what I did, not to say I am a student, but to admit that I'm an artist. That's what I do and that's what I want to do. And that's very difficult because I used to say to my Dutch colleagues: "You don't know what guilt is". My generation of Dutch artists think that they have never done anything wrong in their whole life. I thought that I should not be an artist because an artist is not a good thing to be, and I wanted to be a good person. How can I be a good person if I want to be an artist. So therefore I'm not going to admit to what I want to do. Admitting that art in a sense is one's home has to do with this notion of identities. People are locating their identity much more in a group identity. To say, "Well I'm not quite like that" sounds somewhat irresponsible and decadent.
GJ We are all very individualistic that's the reason we have become artists. Art offers us an arena in which to maintain our individuality while still referencing the group. The notion that we have arrived at an "in-between" of being between places is an important part of a contemporary notion of internationalism. Internationalism is in the process of being defined as an in-between.
MD Yes I like the word "in-between", that art is about the space between people. It's not an imitation of reality. Art is dealing with what you cannot really see, with all the things in-between. All the unclear non-transparent relations between things. Art, almost by definition, works within that sort of area.
GJ Your work is very much like that. It deals with relationships.
MD I think this is what confuses certain people, because on the one hand the work is very simple, you can see what is depicted. You don't have to ask what is that? It is a human figure. But you still have to decide for yourself what is going on with its image. That confuses them. The relation of title to the image adds another layer of confusion, if they perceive the work as realism or literalism rather than something else. I like to play with this type of tension.
GJ There is something the viewer has got to do when he or she looks at your work. You have to look and think beyond first references.
MD When I was at art school I wanted painting to have a stronger connection to reality, to be more like 'real" life. I wanted to be a photographer because I thought it was closer to real life. People who made paintings or fantasy images where figures floated in the air were removed from reality, I thought. Performance artists seemed closer to the real thing. But I really love to make images with my hands. If I want to tell you I love you, I can write you a letter. So why bother to make an enormous painting? I had to resolve this contradiction. I started to use all the things that bothered me about painting. I realised that I don't want to make a human being. I'm not God. I'm making something else. When I started to embrace the ambiguity of the image, and accepted the realisation that the image can only come to life through the viewer looking at it, and that it takes on meaning through the process of looking, I began to accept painting for what it was.
GJ You are painting the human figure at a very strange moment in European art history. The human figure has almost disappeared as a painted image. You seem to be alone in the world painting the human figure.
MD Yes and no, it depends where you are. When one talks in England about painting, they are much more concerned about the figure. They have big fights about it all. I find that quite interesting because on the one hand I use the figure, and on the other, I also see myself as a bit of an abstract artist. I used to like abstract expressionism. Who didn't at a certain stage? Using the figure is a funny thing and it may look more old fashioned or reactionary to some, but on the other hand it's more socio-politically active because it works with the human psychology and it makes conscious all our visual prejudices, for example. People cannot help but look at a face and try to work out what it's trying to tell them etc. Also in all levels of society things like an expression of a face or a naked body have a universally significant interest. In the psychiatric hospital, outside of the art world or in the street, all different types of people relate to the human figure immediately. And it's this popular aspect that I like. I like to be popular.
GJ The human figure opens a series of debates, the question "Who am I?" being an important one. When one asks that, one automatically asks the subsequent questions "Who are you, who are they, who are we?" In painting, that question has somehow almost been put to one side. The direct route that your work points to confronts us with images of ourselves. It returns us to the question of "who am I?". Certainly in Europe today it is a very important question because it asks who am I as a European? In fact that question is being answered more by people who have entered Europe from elsewhere rather than by Europeans looking at themselves.
MD Yes, and you know this word "European" is also for us coming from South Africa, a difficult word. I'll never forget how all the different political terms kept on being changed and you used to have "Europeans" and "non-Europeans", and then you had "black" and "white", etc. When I came to Europe, people saw me as European because I am blonde, but I felt so non-European or not European. What is this European thing? The people from here never seem to have questioned that, but are now forced to question all these things. They've gone and colonised everywhere and now people come back to them and they are confused. In a sense I find this a very lively time. I'm pleased that at last they realise that this is what the whole world is about. I like the diversity in Holland now. It's livelier now in terms of different peoples than when I got here. Oh! I found it extremely white and boring 20 years ago.
GJ Your work addresses this because it creates a dialogue. I feel that there is a conversation taking place between what you place in space as an image and the viewer. It's as if someone has walked into your room and it's rude to then sit still and ignore them. One has to say "Hello here I am, deal with me", even though the work is a reflection, an image, and not a three dimensional person. Do you think that your work is a conversation?
MD Yes. But a friend of mine, an abstract painter, accused me of cheap trickery. He said that because my images always have eyes looking at you, people are immediately confronted. It's no different from a child's drawing - a circle with two holes and a little mouth. You immediately have the face of God looking at you, and people have to respond even if it's a bad painting. The confrontation prevents a distinction between interesting and uninteresting paintings, everything is considered wonderful because they feel every work engages them. I started to think "Oh my goodness, is that all I'm doing?" There are times when I make one work which I think is better than other work done in a particular a period. A work that taught me something and made a new step. Don't Talk to Strangers is such a work: it used the beginning and end of love stories, it had the beginning and ends of letters and stuff. I really liked that work but I thought, is that all I'm doing, juxtaposing opposites? I have a beginning and I have an end? Dualism is oversimplification.
With the face it was the same. Was I only making these faces look at you? But then I thought why not, this is my field of interest, and indeed if you fail sometimes it becomes kitschy. You are playing on this edge of sometimes very simple, low sentiments. A bit of sexuality, a bit of sadness and so on . . .
GJ However, if I look across ten years of your practice, it covers an array of important questions for our time. You have made us face these questions by placing them in our space. You mentioned earlier that you make an image and you're not God. You made a series of pictures with the face of Jesus Christ. What does that conjure up in somebody who is very religious, or has a very religious interpretation of their culture? How have atheists and agnostics reacted when confronted with those faces? Does it disrupt or enhance notions of spirituality? Then there is somebody who has a completely different religious experience: Buddhists, Muslims, Jews who live in Europe. They would all have to deal with those images and I think this confrontation with the image of Christ as different, is very interesting for someone now, at the end of this century.
MD You use the word confrontation. I was asked to make a calendar for the United Nations. I could use images (and I paraphrase here) that would not offend any other group and had the same meaning all over the world. I thought "let someone else do this". Comedians say that you cannot be a comedian if you cannot insult somebody. In a sense I don't want to make art that is nice to everybody. On the other hand, I'm not interested in deliberately insulting somebody else. There is a confrontational aspect definitely.
GJ One of your earlier works looked at the world of fashion and you talked about how one could interpret something across the world. This notion of a fashion face is a good example. The ubiquitous face one sees in New York, Sidney, Kwala Lumpur, New Delhi; you took this image of the fashion face and dealt with it as art.
MD I've just recently shown in Japan. I heard that Naomi Campbell is very famous there. They really love her, although they don't really like racial mixing. They accept her because it works in a different way but they don't pull it through to other things.
As a painter one had the male artist with his model. Picasso and his model. But who are the models of our times? Not the individual artist with his model. The fashion model is the model of our (everyone's) times. I am never totally systematic. I always mix my things. The one hundred faces that make the work called Models are a mixture of fashion models, artist models, the Rembrandt models, and film stars. I used Anita Eckberg out of Fellini's "La Dolcé Vita". Also interesting was Claudia Schiffer who imitates Bridget Bardot and the different blondes who imitate one another. Because I use photographs mostly, I feel that someone who has been photographed has become a public image. All these women have in one sense or another been a model already. Someone said this group of faces represents a stream of consciousness. Because I use the images from newspapers and magazines which are all over the world, all these faces have been seen somewhere, some more than others. People sometimes think they recognise their relatives in these groups.
GJ There is a notion of an 'international face'. Yet if one were to use that definition it would show the phoneyness of the term international. You said that Naomi Campbell or Claudia Schiffer are not accepted in certain places because of what the culture thinks of them, because of the representation or framing of who they are. Behind the phoney fashion face there remains the question "Who are you?" and "Who is the other?" This rubs against the notion of a bland internationalism shaped through a style of fashion photography that claims these faces to be internationally famous.
MD I want to ask you about this term international visual art. Why not multi-cultural? or is this a tautology?
GJ It is a tautology. I have been using the term internationalism as an open ended term. I have not used multi-culturalism because I think that certain associations both historical and cultural make it a discourse of the past. We speak of internationalism because it allows us to understand what is happening in the world on the back of those historical notions of multiculturalism.
MD But don't you think internationalism has got the same. . .
GJ I personally tend to talk of a new internationalism. I want to see an internationalism that constantly questions contemporary practice. Whenever someone wants to use the term internationalism today, at the end of this century, he or she has got to think very clearly about how that term should be used.
MD It sounds as if one's trying to sell something. Peter Styversant! You should smoke it all! Then I thought about intercontinental but that's just like a hotel. So every time the term changes it sounds as if you're trying to sell something. And if you ask me if I practice internationalism it sounds as if you consciously want to speak Esperanto or something. And that's not what I'm trying to do. But let's get back to the international face. . .
GJ I think that what I want a new internationalism to signal is the particularity and the specificity of others. It is a notion that asks you to be open minded about what you experience in the world of contemporary visual art, and not to assume. What old internationalism did was to assume.
MD Assume, that is a terrible word. This makes me so angry, but is also interesting in relation to my work. When people describe the work, all their assumptions are often already in the work. It is interesting to see how little they realise they assume. Coming from South Africa has taught us a lot of things. I would agree with your earlier point of why we are more aware of certain things. When I teach I'm very weary of certain terminologies coming too easily.
GJ The principle of questioning is central to how I interpret it. I'm not saying that the arts have a giant social or moral responsibility, that's not what I'm asking. Art has to have at its centre a principle of questioning. Art is not telling. It asks questions to which you have to respond. If we look at art in that framework then I think it becomes a very exciting place to be at home in.
MD At a certain stage in Holland I did try to study psychology. I thought like Duchamp that painters were stupid. The longer I have been busy in this field the more complicated I see it is. I realised that this is not a stupid field at all. It is actually very rich. If you start at one small place, like how does an image work and what happens to images, how do we use the human face? You are in this web of intricacies. So I hate it when people try and describe the kind of art this period should have. There are so many wonderful things that people can be interested in and it's wonderful that it is so diverse. I don't want to force people to look at my art at all. I'm very happy if someone gets excited by it and I'm still surprised that they do. But if someone prefers football that's fine. I never go to the opera but I was not brought up with the opera. I don't have time to go to the opera, but it's wonderful and it's there and you can discover it.
GJ It's the diverse nature of what reality is. Being open minded about all those sorts of things. . .
MD Yes. Sometimes people say to me "Why do your images make one a bit scared?". For me this is the nature of reality. If I make a work too sweet, it's not like I experience life, I don't think life is that sweet.
GJ Writing about your work is an integral part of it. When you make a catalogue you are concerned about what is being said and communicated. It is part of the structure of how you operate as an artist. Language therefore plays a role, but because you are this nomadic person, your language is not perfect in any one way. You speak Dutch, and English, with imperfections. You're very interested in slang. The idea of an evolving, syncretic language, one that absorbs and melds words, is a very live part of your and my experience. When we talked earlier you mentioned André Brink1 and Afrikaans. If we think about Afrikaans as a language, its development and history is one of syncretism. Look at all the French, Dutch and English words in Afrikaans, even certain strange Malaysian words.
MD Yes "Pisang" (banana) is Malay.
GJ It is a syncretic language and this is its hidden beauty.
MD I think the Afrikaans language has got this directness, this slang like thing. Something else that I never thought of the French have male and female words and we don't have this except for 'Moeder taal en Vaderland" (mother tongue and fatherland) but you don't say the boat is a she. I get irritated when I draw a 'wortel' (carrot) and it is suggested that I want to draw a penis. If I want to draw a penis I'll draw one. With certain things I'm complicated because I'm unclear. On an emotional level I can be quite confused. But with certain things I'm quite simple and direct. In language I don't think of everything in terms of its gender.
When I started to give talks around my exhibitions I realised that all the terminology was extremely boring. I wanted to be a poet. Who didn't when they were young? Speaking about my art, I made a deliberate choice to talk more like a pop song, not to say "I deconstruct and I reconstruct and I de-contextualise or re-contextualise". Find a simpler expression that means the same bloody thing but say it so that it has rhythm and it moves. That's why especially younger people like it such a lot.
GJ There is a connection between the nature of the syncretic, the simple directness of pop lyrics and slang and the Afrikaans language we both grew up with. There is an immediacy. It gave me the ability to mix and be direct, not to be scared to take something from elsewhere and syncretize with something else. I don't want to assume anything, but this is very much what happens in the process of how both of us work. I'm not afraid to take from Europe and Africa and both their traditions and try to create something completely new from them. And I feel you have the same attitude.
MD Yes. Everyone knows that if you really want to learn a language quickly or understand someone of a different place, fall in love with them. If I am a bit in love with you, I want to do certain things like you do. I also want to leave certain things that you do. To assimilate other peoples' things is not only about colonising someone else, it's because you like them. Someone said that if you just use from everywhere aren't you then, what is the word
GJ Appropriating?
MD Yes or eclectic or one of those words. There are also art works which I don't like, which indiscriminately use a Buddha's head with that of Christ and another culture's thing on top of it. That's not what I want to do. I want to use what organically fits me somehow. When I had my first show in New York, Not from Here, a critic wrote that I was "trafficking in images of misery". I thought come on, I don't use anyone else's misery. I use second hand source material but I have to have first hand experiences. I have to know what I'm doing.
GJ Eclecticism is a negative recognition of difference. If you look out of your window into Amsterdam it is an eclectic city, it's made up of little bits. There is also an assumption in Europe that it is pure, it is not mixed. That is a complete illusion.
MD Yeah. That's utter nonsense.
GJ Europe would not be what it is today if it never was mixed. One of the things those who come to Europe remind Europe of, is the fact that it has emerged through this syncretic process, from an eclectic array of notions, desires, practices, histories, you name it. But that together they say something new about a culture.
MD When I had to choose an art work to write about, for a newspaper, I chose a Goya. When I began the article I spoke to a friend about the other aspects this Goya had. He said to me Spain had the Moors, the Gypsies, they had Africans and you can feel that in the work.
A lot of things emerge from ignorance. The fact that everything has always been so mixed. . . It is just out of ignorance that people don't know it. It isn't that suddenly things have become mixed, it's only become clearer because people are having to admit what they did not want to admit or remember, this syncretism. But it's always been like that.
GJ At the Tate Gallery in 1996 you showed a collection of water-colour and wash drawings that displayed a great emotional and sensual use of the media. In particular you showed large full figure ink drawings. The washes looked and felt like skin. This exhibition returned us to drawing and painting, forms of practice that dominated thirty years ago.
MD I must give credit to Clemente. He used gouache and water-colour in a different way. I thought that was nice. At art school you stretched your paper and then did the most terrible little landscape using this media. The physical act in using these materials returned me to my old love for abstract expressionism and action painting. In a funny way with these drawings lots of other old loves could enter the work. It's the primitive act that I like. In that sense, the word primitive is well used. I am a primitive person. To sit at a computer is a more sophisticated act, not a better act. I don't like the physical movements of machines. I don't like to look at a screen. I do so little with my body. In the movements of the drawing I can use my physicality and directness.
The skin-like effect returned me to the photographer's darkroom and the washing of prints. I work on the illusionistic aspects of the eyes but to get the skin so smooth I don't touch the wash once its laid down. I allow the water to go its own way. It's very much about how you physically handle something. You have to take your time. It has meditative aspects for me.
Some people prefer my drawings which are rougher. I have a group called Rejects which the Germans prefer because they think it's more emotional. I find I put myself under pressure by restraining the gestural and trying not to make certain manneristic marks which I like to do. I like the combination of control and accident. There is a give and take. Lose control, keep it, lose it.
GJ The way you hang your work is very particular. Portraits are seldom hung individually. You hang them in groups and you rearrange and replace those groups, but they always seem to hold together as an entity.
MD Before I used the figures, there was a time when I used collage. I would introduce naturalistic aspects and would have more abstract gestures. In a sense making these groups has to do with making collage. Making a big composition using loose elements. It does have its difficulties.
GJ The paintings of the babies which stood on the floor, or the portraits of Jesus Christ or the Black Drawings hung in a group.
MD I recently gave a collection of drawings to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town called The Next Generation. To many people the individual or portrait element was lost in the group. Hung further apart one can relate to the individual drawing as a portrait. Hung closer together one has to deal with them as a group. Some people find this irritating because you cannot look at one without also considering those next to it. Some say it's arbitrary and that I make too many. They prefer the early individual works which set up a "coupled" relationship. It's much more intimate. It's like a pin-up - you can't have a whole group you have to have one.
Black Drawings was a very important work for me. Up to then I would never have made a group with such a title. The title was neutral or how shall I say it, it gave as little direction as possible. All the drawings are literally different tones of blackness. It was the first time I worked on very thick paper and they had multiple layers of blackness. I have never worked with something so black. It was lovely to work with the different tones of blackness. When I decided to do it I was quite nervous because a lot of the discourse which I believe in demands that one speaks for oneself and not for others. I thought "How is this going to be seen". A white woman making black drawings etc. The thing that made me feel freer to do it was that I was a bit tired of always doing the same white faces and noses, and I found it beautiful.
GJ It is a very challenging work.
MD In terms of all these groups it is one of my favourites. Obviously one can never do it like that again. You do it once. Now when I use blackness or whiteness I play with it much more loosely. In the Next Generation I deliberately let the lights go into the darks and it becomes colours and not really race. But initially I was very specific.
GJ The full torso figures at the Tate, because they were simply pinned to the wall with the pelvic area at eye level, and the sensuous feel of the media, made them as powerful and challenging as the Black Drawings.
MD When you do something for the first time and it works, you are more excited. Making Black Drawings into a group, I was so excited and a bit afraid. And with the figures at the Tate I have never made such a big drawing which included the bodies. What was I to do with the sexual parts, etc. It was a work that was a new step.
GJ The other insight it gave was to the way you work. When you use oil paint there seems to be a sense of the work being a narrative, as if the work aims to tell one a story. Whereas the drawings, the portraits and the torsos, simply engage you with the figure. The one form of practice seems to be informing the other, reminding one that the simple, direct image can engage highly complex issues.
MD I don't quite know. I definitely have more problems with painting than with drawing. I have always made drawings. They have so many functions. I can make caricatures of people, but is that art? I feel so free with the drawing and have problems with my painting. I haven't quite worked out why. Maybe it's the assumed authority of painting . . .
GJ Maybe it's because a painting is something which is layered and the drawings are immediate. They come down straight from the spirit. You spoke earlier of a meditation and I think there is a certain spirituality in placing something down, straight from your soul, whereas the painting has to be worked through.
MD One has to be quick with the washes otherwise every intervening mark can be seen. With painting you can build it up and take your time. Some people say that my paintings are best when they are like my drawings. It is also a question of concentrating with the drawing or you lose it; with painting you can cover it over.
GJ I want to ask you about the titles you give your work.
MD There was a time when I made a point of giving my work direction with a title. I loved titles. I hated people with untitled works. But now I'm almost ready to go completely untitled and let viewers think what they want. When I gave Black Drawings its title, a German newspaper published the work with their own subtitles, like "Is black beautiful?". It infuriated me because I took so much trouble with the title. A lithographic series of babies which I called Fear of Babies was sometimes interpreted by others as "I hate babies". So when I had my daughter, people would comment, "Oh she's changed her mind about babies". In that body of work there were other works with titles about Chernobyl, or political situations. None of that seems to be remembered. So if they don't read my titles anyway why bother. I'm not off titles totally but because the face can be used for so many things and with the viewer bringing so many meanings to the work I sometimes think I should drop it.
I had two works, one called Porno as Collage and the other Porno Blues. These were works about pornography, they were not pornographic works. People often want to know how I got to this subject and they wait expectantly for my answer. My work is about the body. My figures are never engaged in dramatic physical battles, it's about the little gestures between bodies; what are the things that people do to one another? It's not strange that I arrive at this subject.
GJ I don't find this strange at all. Just a few blocks from your studio is the red light district of Amsterdam which is a feature of this city. I see you reflecting a reality you have to deal with every day.
MD What has happened? There seems to be an enormous loss of eroticism everywhere. Lots of people in their relationships are too tired to sleep with one another. On the one hand there appears to be an excess of anything goes and on the other, no one gets excited anymore. How can one make an erotic image? What is an intimate image? I get asked "Why don't you work with a real model, why do you work with a photograph?". In England someone talked about the intimate relation an artist like Lucien Freud has with his models, but I don't want these people in my studio. I want this distance in my work and yet it feels so intimate. The fact that someone sits still for hours in a certain position, I can't find this erotic. The imaginary interests me. Eroticism is when something hasn't yet happened, it's got the possibility and the tension. These things interest me. Some of my naked images are not erotic. Snow White With Broken Arm has a naked body but it's not intended to be an erotic image that attracts you. The full figure drawings for the Tate, I wanted you to be attracted to them. If you compared the drawings to photographs of naked women it would be totally different. It is not the real thing. I know there is a difference and I do reflect on these things.
GJ Your work points to two emotions, fear and desire which are so much part of eroticism. Also the beautiful and the ugly being so close to each other.
MD So many people are unhappy because they think they are not attractive enough.
GJ I want to return to where we started out, namely being from two places and having a location in the middle. The work finds this middle by asking questions about the polarities it stands between. The fact that someone could ask "Why is Marlene Dumas, a white South African making a work called Black Drawings"? A challenging question that some may not have thought about posed by the work. It's part of your history, you are entitled to challenge the limitation of clichéd thinking that frames what you are supposed to do or not. We've talked a little bit about that earlier as a confrontation but it's more accurate to speak of it as an engagement.
MD There is another anecdote about Black Drawings. When it was exhibited in a group show in Washington, they put little plaques explaining the work to people. The curator assumed that this was my reaction to apartheid. To me it was the other way around. It was a freeing from apartheid. When I objected, he explained that they were trying to help. But they did this in completely the wrong way. They were so concerned about being politically correct that they were politically wrong. In this show I had another group that showed dark women's backsides. You don't really know what race they are. A guard in the museum came to me and asked "What are these women looking at?". "You know" he said "I think it's a naked man." What was very funny was that the source material actually came from a fifties nudist book. These guards were all black and it was very nice talking to them. I find that guards relate well to the work. They always ask me questions. While curators' responses are often too predictable.
A woman guard in South Africa came to me and said "I am asked questions about this work."(The Next Generation) She wanted to know more about it. Her first question to me was so beautiful: "How did you make it?". While a white woman journalist from some magazine asked the wrong first question: "What is the symbolic meaning you're trying to convey". By asking the question on how the work was made, she allowed me to explain issues of race and how the colours could run etc. And she finally said "It's a very spiritual work".
A Dutch newspaper critic described the Black Drawings as a work about an abused people. In Philadelphia a black guy came up to me and I was so pleased when he said "It's very strong portraits of black people." It was nice to see this big difference, especially from a black man who I thought was going to make a negative remark. The Dutchman's remark displayed his guilt.
GJ You've just described another scenario in which assumptions are laid bare. It's your work which allows that to unfold and this unfolding process places Europeans in a slightly discomforting position...
MD [Laughs] Slightly discomforting is a euphemism.
GJ That is very much how the work seems to function for me. The difficulties Europeans have with it is reflected in how the work is received in the various venues. And it always brings us back to the question of who we are at the end of the century.
MD There is something I wanted to say about fear. With the babies, women who had children were upset because I seemed to be making monsters. I was really trying to express the enormity of a new being coming into this world. It's not a pet or a toy. It's not a Pampers baby. It's this new life with all the potential for evil and good. This reaction of not wanting to show or acknowledge one's fears . . . one is no longer scared of black people because one is a civilised, liberal person and one loves one's children. I've always loved African sculpture even when it made me a bit scared. I want this in my work too. There are so many fears. Losing a friend, death etc. or the fear that can overcome you when flying. Maybe we should have little dolls for passengers to exorcise their fears.
This is something I've found in Holland but it's changing with the new generation. In my time I found that nobody dealt with things like fear, love, or desire in their work.
GJ Do you think that is part of a social malaise the Dutch have? They believe that their social, liberal society doesn't really have these problems?
MD I must say in their defence that they did make me conscious of whether one had to have pain and conflict as subjects in order to make art. I recall once when I recognised a certain arrogance in myself, thinking that my work was better by definition because I was taking on the real problems. One should watch out for that as well. All the cultures of Europe have wonderful things to tell us. It's horrible but it's true, in certain circles my work is very fashionable now. There are types of terminology used for it. I feel sorry for those whose work at present does not fit into "the body", "multi-culturalism" etc.