Minnette
Vári
Chimera
Michel Foucault suggested that the word ‘monster’ refers back to the
Latin, monstare, to put on show as a spectacle, and not as an object.
The idea of creating something illegitimate, which doesn’t belong or fit
in, is central to the monster myth. Like folk tales and children’s stories,
they are moralistic, suggesting a way of posing issues of beauty, evil, power
and good. Perhaps the confusion of dialectic categories is the greatest heresy,
combining fur with feathers, tame with wild, edible and inedible. They become
significations of our worst nightmare, but also points us to what a sense of
freedom might be. Chimera, the title of Vári’s video installation,
refers in Greek mythology (Khimaira) to the fire breathing she-monster represented
as a composite of a lion’s head, goat’s body and dragon’s tail.
The mythologies and legends of ancient and modern cultures teem with an enormous
variety of monsters and imaginary beasts, many of which can be found at the
gates of Hades. A great number of these are composites of different existing
animals that emerge from various cultures, from Babylonian winged bulls and
leopards, to Hindu winged elephants and Western Chimera, who according to legend
was slain by Bellerophon, mounted on the winged horse Pegasus. The English poet
Milton has described the chimera of an author as a vain, foolish, incongruous
fancy or creature of the imagination.
In addressing her own history Minnette Vári works here within the confines
of the Voortrekker Monument, inaugurated in 1949 as a monument to Afrikaner
Nationalism and built to describe the significance and meaning of the Great
Trek to its descendants. A covenant was established that gave birth to the Afrikaner
nation who left the Cape Colony between 1835 and 1854. Depicted in a marble
frieze of 27 bas-relief panels is the everyday perseverance, heroism, illness,
death, conquests and trials of the Voortrekkers. The frieze of 92 meters long
is housed in the Hall of Heroes. From the pristine glow of the Quercetta Italian
marble emerges the incarnation of Chimera where Vári has captured
on video the entire frieze of Voortrekker figures, reanimated with additional
footage, producing a procession of monochrome ivory amalgams of human and animal
aberrations floating in a dreamlike moment. The Chimeras interact with each
other, echoing a strange freakish version of historical events frozen in time
and ideology.
Jean-Francois Bayart has described South Africa as being “precisely and
fully in the process
of inventing illusions to the conceivable since there is no agreed upon reality,
as yet, to which a single discourse can be referred”1. For Njabulo Ndebele,
the history of South Africa and particularly Apartheid is described as follows:
“If today they sound like imaginary events [it is] because, as we shall
recall, the horror of day-to-day life under apartheid often outdid the efforts
of the imagination to reduce it to metaphor”2. That is the danger, that
apartheid is just a story, a memory, an illusion. The chimera of political ideology
is represented by a lion’s head: an embodiment of the disastrous reign
of a tyrannous and perverted ruler who dominated reality to the extent that
reality surpassed our wildest imaginings. The properties of the she-goat are
revealed in the sexual aspect of the Chimera and the serpent’s tail represents
the corruption of the spirit through pride and vainglory where the ideals of
nationalist separation inevitably led to failure.
Chimera has been conceived in addressing the complex contradictions
that exist in post apartheid South Africa, by drawing an analogy between a past
that is monstrous and the monsters of ancient mythology. Cultures dominate one
another, history is written, stories are told and heroes are born. From the
Voortrekker Monument we discover the cold, one-sided historical account that
is anointed as history and in effect then, truth. Minnette Vári chronicles
the evidence of a perverted narrative of denial and forgetting. She brings into
question the way that histories are written, represented and commemorated. Her
Chimeras, like that of the Voortrekker Monument figures, are etched in time,
perpetually for all eternity. Vári’s Chimera excavates the
allegorical tradition of European art and mythology. It is a language predicated
on disrupting the illusion of the exotic, grotesque and unfamiliar. Ranging
from the cabinet de curiosités to the display of Saartjie Baartman, mankind’s
fascination with nature, culture and history has led to inconceivable deviations
with regards to race, genetics and extreme creations. Chimera plays some
of these deviations against one another and what emerges, is a poignant but
elusive narrative that resonates between the broadly historical and the intimately
personal.
Text by Clive Kellner
Independent curator, Johannesburg
1 Jean-Francois Bayart,
‘The State in Africa, The Politics of the Belly’, Longman, London,
1993
2 Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, Negotiating the Past, ‘Memory, metaphor
and the triumph of narrative’,
Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1998