Tracey Rose
Pickaminnie (Sue Williamson) (2008) and Floating Cloud Reigning Deer (AKA Daddy) (2008)
Pickaminnie is one of myriad characters in the Johannesburg version of the video installation The Cunt Show, 2008, after having been realised in several other locations. Subtitled The Cave, it was exhibited as Plantation Lullabies. Pickaminnie is portrayed by South African artist Sue Williamson, with a blackened face (> blackfacing). It is a comment on white neo-liberal leanings, and ultimately ‘Black desire’ by white subjects, racial and ‘chromological’. ‘Pickaminnie’ is a merger of Pickaninny and Minnie Mouse, both racist in their parodies of blackness (‘Pickaninny’ was a slur for Black children in slave-era America). Her pregnancy is an illustration of her sexual indiscretions, as she is still a schoolgirl in segregated education, wearing an apartheid-era school uniform.
AKA Daddy is another character in The Cunt Show and was portrayed by Rose’s father. While doing some community work in Johannesburg in the early 2000s, he hired a Native American costume to wear doing outreach work and never returned it. It later turned out from a DNA test that Rose and her sister have Native American ancestry. In the video Rose’s father, who is a teetotaller, plays an alcoholic chief, a reference to the connections between alcoholism and the disenfranchisement of landed indigenous communities. Once their land has been stolen from them, Western industrial culture offers no meaningful replacement as a way of life, constituting a psychological, metaphysical and physical theft.