THE third wave of feminism hasn’t been too different to the second; women are again growing their underarm hair. Only this time they are dying it shocking colours and sharing images of their underarm-dos on social media. Artists with a feminist bent are not simply updating the approach of those before them, turning women’s “work” – domestic, feminine hobbies – into high-art products.
Think Judy Chicago’s decorative plates. Gay male artists have overtaken this approach. Appropriating the penis as a motif, and claiming female sexuality has been the route young artists such as Lady Skollie have taken.
Cape Town-based Kilmany-Jo Liversage, whose new solo exhibition, ominously titled ORDA716, has, since a spell in South America in the mid-noughties, adopted a predominantly masculine mode of expression – graffiti – to replay and reconfigure male and female fantasies that shape ideas of femininity.
Associated with tough urban environments, anger and rebellion graffiti, or street or urban art as it is now referred to, is almost always seen as an appropriate vocabulary for men.
Men are more able to “own” the street as they can enter unsafe areas more freely and tagging buildings is their way of claiming this liberty. Liversage does not quite spray her art and street name – Orda – on walls. Her territory is the canvas, painting.
She uses spraypaint and tagging and in doing so collapses the urban landscape, the street, into the domain of art.
Liversage is not a street artist who has climbed her way into the gallery, she is a fine artist who mimics the urban art vocabulary to reinvigorate painting and carve out a place for herself in this world.
Most importantly, the graffiti modes she adopts are used to deconstruct the female portraits she creates. It is not as if she is spraying over an existing image of a woman, like a billboard advert.
She (re)creates new images which she simultaneously destroys. She does this via tags and spontaneous marks. This push-pull condition of creating and destroying is one women know well. Women resent having to conform to ideals of beauty, though they do it and take pride in it. Looking stereotypically beautiful involves reconstructing your appearance in a way that can be destructive – the real self is lost, rejected.
The female subjects in Liversage’s shows – there are two staged across Joburg (at Lizamore) and Cape Town (at Worldart) – are breathtakingly beautiful. They are not real, but manufactured, appearing like carbon copies off an assembly line. This is reflected in the titles of the works – Frakta 716 or Audela 716– and the exhibition, which clinically refers to the month and year of the exhibition. In this way the exhibition and works appear to be mechanically reproduced.
This is further echoed through her mark-making; blocks of colour that appear like enlarged pixels. Her subjects are like female cyborgs, designed by men for men. As such, the future doesn’t promise an escape from patriarchal norms.
Nevertheless, there is nothing disturbing about Liversage’s art that might unsettle the viewer – this may be a shortcoming. Shouldn’t this future or phenomenon be chilling? This is not the response as it is relayed through these bold explosions of colour that swirl around or create pretty young faces.
Perhaps this is the point; her destruction of this beauty or any attempt to unsettle it (visually speaking) further serves to aesthetise it, just as graffiti gives Maboneng its edgy vibe. Liversage’s aesthetic is pleasing. It is “Happy Pop with a Street Digitised Futuristic twist.” It is hers, it is fresh and it is easy to consume – and make – she churns them out quickly – her solo exhibitions consist of 25 new paintings. We can’t expect Liversage to plot a path for women outside the immediate traps of beauty and appearance. She can’t open that door of possibility. Instead, she exposes how the digital era and new mediums don’t only advance the cult of beauty and appearances, but how new tools can insinuate it in a deeper way.
l Orda716 is at Worldart gallery until the end of the month, 021 423 3075, www.worldart.co.za