54 During the most stringent period of the lockdown in 2020, South African artist and senior lecturer at Rhodes University, Christine Dixie, produced DisOrder – Trade-Off, the first of a series of works engaging with the impact of COVID-19. The work, comprising nine prints, alludes to a media discourse about a necessary “trade-off” between, on the one hand, damage to the economy that would result from the lockdown and, on the other, dangers posed by the spread of infection if people were not kept apart from one another. Dixie was listening to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year while making this work. Defoe’s book, while first published in 1722, focuses on events in 1665, when the bubonic plague resulted in London losing about 15% of its population, and she was alert to the way in which that plague too compromised commerce and exchange. Between writing and making: Trade-Off by Christine Dixie at the Gallery of the SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture However, “trade-off” also alludes to a complex relation of language to image. This interest in language has its origins in another large project by Dixie – To be King. An installation and video with stop-frame animation that the artist first exhibited in 2014, To Be King is a reworking of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, in the light of Michel Foucault’s famous study of the work in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, first published in French in 1966 and in English in 1970. Foucault explored the complexity of the relation of language to image in his essay on Las Meninas, writing that “the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms; it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say”. This engagement with the relationship of image and language is developed further in this exhibition through the showing of DisOrder – Trade-Off along with a recent artwork, Extract, constituted from a written text in which Brenda Schmahmann engaged with DisOrder – Trade-Off and its meanings. The text, part of a chapter Brenda Schmahmann authored for A Show of Hands: Crafting Concepts in Contemporary Art, edited by Ileana Parvu, Berlin: De Gruyter (in press), is configured into a work comprised of six components which allude to an open book. DisOrder–Trade-Off features three key actors or protagonists – a princess, a plague doctor and a dog. The exhibition includes Blueprint for a Breathless World, a work in diaphanous fabric, and in which these three figures also appear. Derived from Las Meninas, the princess, the plague doctor and the dog appear as central figures in The DisOrder – Trade-Off as well as in Blueprint for a Breathless World. Prof Brenda Schmahmann, SARChI Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg (left), and Christine Dixie, senior lecturer at Rhodes University (right) at the TradeOff exhibition at 33 Twickenham Avenue.
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