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EMILY STAINER, Menagerie, installation, ongoing
Photo by Martin Effert ©

Emily Stainer is a South African artist and art historian, working in mixed media and installation. Stainer is interested in the politics of display and the gaze. Her work is structured to display elements of contradiction, to suggest variety, and comic contrast, ambiguous shifts: the world of childhood games and fantasy play versus the domain of adult knowledge and sexual corruption, the security of the domestic space versus the uncertainty of public scrutiny, the aesthetics of intricacy and detail versus the grotesque.

Stainer was educated at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Exhibitions include MENAGERIE, The Sub Station, Johannesburg, 2003; 20:20 MAPPING TRAJECTORIES, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2003; SEX & KULTUUR, Community Arts Project Complex, Cape Town, 2003; MENAGERIE, The Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, 2005.

Menagerie

The collection of parts that comprises Menagerie includes found and made components, caged creatures, stuffed birds, boxed peepshows, toy-like theatres, mechanised jumping-jacks, gyrating doll parts, miniature worlds, indicators of domesticity and devices of display. These all contribute to an all-encompassing, multi-sensory experience; intensified in a confined space of display.

It is possible to read the installation that constitutes the boxed-theatres and caged arrangements of Menagerie in various – and sometimes contradictory – ways. The term ‘menagerie’ derives from the French word ménages, meaning a domestic environment or the management of a household. In the seventeenth century, however, the dictionary of the Académie Française (1684) defined ‘a menagerie’ as a site where princes ‘keep rare and foreign animals’. These contradictions form part of this installation. From our historical perspective it seems bizarre that slaves once formed an acceptable part of many a household. This installation seeks to convey the elements of the strange and fantastic that coexist with the familiar and domestic.

Historical menageries emerged in seventeenth-century Europe as a result of the burgeoning cult of the curiosity. Included amongst the collections of botanical specimens, mineral artefacts, paintings, medals and automata, housed in royal cabinets of curiosities, were often menageries of live exotic animals. Human beings with remarkable physical peculiarities too were exhibited. Freaks and black ‘savages’ littered eighteenth-century London’s show scene; indicators of man’s enduring fascination with and exploitation of ‘the Other’. Saartjie Baartman, a young woman of Khoisan descent, was exhibited as a ‘museum piece’ in early nineteenth-century London. She was displayed naked to expose her exotic and erotic differences. The same sentiments that were to prompt a disgust with the practice of slavery were behind widespread protests on the part of the British public against her inhumane treatment.

Menagerie deals ostensibly with the politics of the gaze. On the one hand, the gorgeousness of velvet, varnish and gilt provide the temptation of spectacle and pageantry that pave the way for a public pleasure show. On the other hand, the voyeuristic nature of the work confronts the viewer with his or her involvement in the insalubrious act of looking.

A paper theatre speaks of the impermanent and transient world of childhood games, but the display boxes that constitute this menagerie collection, have moved from the safe domain of the nursery. My theatres shift from the toy playhouse to the modern cinematic experience and from mythical worlds to erotic ‘Red Light District’ window displays. My cages are copies of elaborate, ‘gilded’ birdcages, meant to house exotic and charming feathered creatures, birdcages belonging to the Victorian drawing room or nursery. And yet they are also strongly reminiscent of the barred enclosures found in nightclubs and strip joints, containing gyrating women, women quintessentially on display to titillate the opposite sex. These boundaries, between theatre, birdcage and sexual advertisement, are easily blurred; they all rest on established practices of display, spectacle and pageantry, where dialectic relations are set up between audience and participant, viewer and scrutinised object.

It is sometimes difficult, in Menagerie, to determine whether the animated dolls’ limbs are those of an adult or a child, causing a merging of an uncomfortable binary. The uneasy act of watching a child’s pair of disembodied legs, opening and closing, resonates strongly with the taboos of infant sexuality. This disturbing image is reinforced by various shadowed images.

Menagerie was not conceptualised as a critique of the sex trade or indeed of the slave trade, but at the same time, South Africa has an appalling record of sexual violence committed against women and children. This permeates my work. Various statistics draw attention to the vulnerable and unbalanced status of women and female children in developing countries and Africa. Next to drugs and weapons, trafficking in humans is the third most lucrative crime in South Africa. Many individuals are forced into working as sexual slaves.

In a country with such elevated levels of HIV-infection, sexual exploitation has become a death sentence. Children orphaned by HIV/Aids are particularly susceptible to abuse. Since the beginning of this year over 900 children have disappeared in South Africa. Triptych I was made at a time when the South African media was focusing on child kidnappings and infant rape. Forming part of the structure of the piece, partly hidden amongst Victorian paper cuttings, are newspaper transcripts alluding to these atrocities.

In Menagerie, the boxed theatres foreground the ‘doll’, trapped in a never-ending cycle of movement, doomed forever to be on display in her underwear. She is impaled on the strings that make this mechanical violation possible. She stands outside time and defies death, in a way that is the antithesis to ourselves, who are subject to time and must face the inevitability of mortality.

The potential inertness of the boxed collection is counteracted by the mechanised workings and hum of automata, inducing the idea of the mechanical timepiece in an allusion to time and mortality. A veritable memento mori, designed to suggest an atmosphere of brooding menace

The caged items – stuffed birds and mechanised body pieces – exude an aura of enigma, as the decorative becomes the bizarre. During the Victorian period, the embalmed animal conjured up various associations, Celeste Olalquiage writes how, ‘time is presented (in Victorian interiors) in the form of death: dried flowers, stuffed animals, the claustrophobic clutter of a place where there is no space for movement nor windows for light or air.’

The Victorian drawing room is also an index of British Colonialism. Although slavery as an accepted practice was largely outlawed by the British Colonialists, in effect the practice of Apartheid meant its de facto continuation for much of the twentieth century in South Africa. While Menagerie is permeated by many historical allusions, its major concern is with the hidden practices of human bondage that still exist today.

Emily Stainer, 2007