Marlene Dumas

For the last few years, Marlene Dumas' ascendancy into the upper ranks of contemporary artists has been accompanied by a growing sense of confusion as to just what her work is all about. Conceptualists bemoan her unapologetic use of painting's full range of emotional triggers; the politically correct accuse her of trafficking in other people's misery; and painters rally lemming-like to her cause, taking her impact on the art world as a sign from above that the long-awaited return to a painterly agenda is imminent. Needless to say, Dumas has no interest in being a spokesperson for any of these positions. Having been born and raised in South Africa, (but now living in Amsterdam), the artist carries with her a deep, lifelong aversion to the notion of subjecting any individual's endeavours to the strictures of a group agenda. But she also likes to go directly to the heart of the problem in her paintings, which even in the most tolerant of times is practically a guarantee that one is going to wind up being misunderstood.

Unlike other European-based, mid-career artists like Reinhard Mucha or Juan Muñoz, who put off their New York debut as long as was possible and were then met with indifference, Dumas' SoHo premiere could not have come at a better moment. As any New York art student could tell you, the cluster of issues that surround race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality have not faded away like other ill-fated -isms, but are mounting in art world discourse with greater intensity than ever before. Unfortunately, there is still very little thought given to formulating a way in which this critical energy can be channelled into something besides the same old photo/text party line. For this reason it was extremely gratifying to see an exhibition by an artist who had considered these issues from every possible vantage point, and opted to address them using brush and canvas as her soapbox.

And yet, coming as they do from a vaguely expressionist stylistic base, and landing in the midst of the present dilemma over style and content, one might have expected Dumas' vision to have been quickly co-opted by one camp or another. What occurred instead was a metaphorical parting of the waves that almost never seems to take place anymore, least of all in New York. Bearing the auspicious title 'Not From Here,' this body of work did much more than merely show Dumas off at her most incisive. It created an unexpected rift in the local conversation that suddenly allowed a broad cross-section of viewers a vantage point from which to reconsider a number of over-debated topics. From an installation perspective, for instance, the artist made use of unusual placements of paintings (hiding one behind a door, for example) in order to emphasise content over form. Even in terms of the way they were painted, these canvases openly challenged the viewer to reconsider her smudged and blurred surfaces as more than excursions into form or spatial articulation. In Dumas' work, such happy accidents invariably take the part of stand-ins for the scrutinised flesh of her subjects, in the same way that painting itself becomes a metaphor for formalism, that other, equally endangered, species.

If anything, Dumas' artistic temperament has become more brooding with her success. A deep cultural tension is revealed in works like Betrayal, which depicts a very young white girl standing knee-deep in water in front of another child, who is black enough to be her shadow. The atmosphere is further charged by the artist's comments about the works in the show: 'There's black and white as races. And there's black and white as colours. There's pink bodies and dark blue faces. There's black people who are yellow, and white people who are dark and skin's peeling off and the eyes left out, and sometimes it's also a little bit funny.' Obviously preoccupied with the monumental changes in her home country, Dumas reveals a core of infinite optimism in a tour de force like Young Boys, a nearly 10' wide canvas showing a mixed-race line-up of some 20 pre-adolescent youths, each naked and clutching his shoulders, as if waiting helplessly for a medical inspection. To suggest, in the face of such tender vulnerability, that we are all the same makes a mockery of how seriously race does affect people's lives. But to claim, as Dumas does, that 'You change the colour of something, and everything changes,' is to get a bigger and blunter dose of honesty than we have come to expect from almost any art today, least of all painting.