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Image as Burden, 1993
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As I was perusing art articles this week, the title of the recent
Marlene Dumas exhibition at the Tate Modern in London really caught my attention:
Image as Burden. The meaning of this phrase wasn't immediately apparent. Dumas is known for her very evocative and expressive portrait paintings, often done with wet-in-wet watercolours. If "the image is a burden," who is being burdened? The artist? The viewer? The subject of the portrait? (I think of Gertrude Stein being concerned that Picasso's portrait of her had no resemblance and his reply,"It will").
The Tate's press release explains: "
The title of the exhibition is taken from The Image as Burden, 1993, a small painting depicting one figure carrying another. As with many of Dumas's works, her choice of title deeply affects our interpretation of the work. It hints at the sense of responsibility faced by the artist in choosing to create an image that can translate ideas about painting and the position of the artist. For Dumas it is important 'to give more attention to what the painting does to the image, not only to what the image does to the painting.'"
Tate Modern This burden of the image might relate to the ineluctable power of the human face. An unavoidable empathy and relationship is immediately formed between the viewer and the work (human babies process faces long before they recognize other objects). In Dumas's work, the process of painting is as powerful as the image itself. In a conventional painted portrait, the focus is often entirely on the subject (the posed model), but in Dumas's work there is an exciting tension between process and content, resulting in some very expressive and enigmatic portraits. Her process-oriented work both deflects and enhances the image.
Image-based artwork has its own challenges in our image-obsessed world. Perhaps we as an audience sometimes suffer from "image fatigue". We encounter thousands of photos of people on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et. al, or on TV. The
Dumas show's portrait-filled walls seem overwhelming (see image below). Yes, we feel an immediate empathy on seeing a painting of a human face, but how is that feeling affected when the portraits are presented in a wall of faces? Curatorial decisions regarding display have a huge impact on how we read the work. Is the individuality lost? Or is the display (the work of
Christian Boltanski comes to mind) a way to emphasize the constant struggle i between individualism and conformity? In the image below, Dumas seems to capture both a sense of the individual and of
anonymity. There is also a sense of humour in the title
Reject. What is a dog doing there? Its presence changes everything. Perhaps the "burden of the image" is its to fulfill multiple roles: Dumas's images are carriers of deep, dark narratives and, at the same time, the results of a casual experimentation with the painting process (she says, "When I start work on a painting, it's total kitsch!"). These contradictions between concept and process coincide with many of her conflicting thoughts about art making, fame and meaning examined in this article in
The Observer.
For an overview of Dumas work at the Tate:
Bold Graphic Disturbing: The Art of Marlene Dumas in Pictures. 
