Tracey Rose
Span I & Span II (1997)
Span I was a defining early performance and resulting photograph, featuring paroled prisoner Michael Hanekom scratching phrases and sentences into the wall of the National Gallery of Art in Cape Town. Rose had been asked to show at the museum and when she walked in and saw the endless display of works by white men, and the total absence of artists of color in this South African national institution, her fury caused a desire to destroy the space. The form her destructive gesture took was the carving of childhood memories into the wall.
Hanekom had been released from prison the day before they started collaborating and Rose wanted to work with someone whose position questioned the elitist space in which she was working. Many members of the new government of the time had been imprisoned during apartheid and there is a long history of Coloured people in Cape Town, many of whom are descended from the Khoi people, being treated as criminals by the European colonizers.
Span II was also very much about color identity, this time examining its intricate relationship to hair. Historically, people in South Africa were racially classified according to their hair using the ‘pencil test’. Across Africa and the diasporas, hair is symbolically important and is a crucial element of Coloured identity politics in South Africa.
Rose’s knotting of the hair is partially a reference to Catholicism and the creation of Rosary beads. It is also an act of penance on her part for the fact that her light skin had led to her sometimes being misidentified as white within the colorist structures of South African society, something she has always virulently rejected as an insult. The television set plays an inverted recording of her hands working, which acts as a parody of the reclining nude as a passive, consumable woman in western art history, but also refers to the idea of Black labor and the history of Rose’s ancestors’ DNA line. The museum display case taps into the concepts of anthropology and ethnographic approaches to bodies – the viewing of people of color as exhibits.