Anticipated Memory
Brochure (available from our bookshop)

If cartographers represent space by drawing it in two dimensions on a map, and archeologists determine the beginnings of historical time by studying human artifacts, is it not possible to find a method of referring to our experience of the coalescence of space and time? Artists, such as Bonita Alice, do just that by articulating private utopias and interrupted narratives in which human longings find their space, in which time is suspended, and in which memory is anticipated.

The intersection between time and space is at the heart of Alice’s new work. Hers is a private world made visible, laying bare what Foucault would describe as ‘different’ worlds, or heterotopias. Drawing on the poetic reflections of Bachelard on internal places of day-dreaming and intimacy, Foucault set out to explore external spaces, “the space in which we are living, by which we are drawn outside ourselves, in which, as a matter of fact, the erosion of our life, our time, our history takes place”. In deciphering the complicated and often contradictory structure of various relational emplacements that constitute the outer space of our living experience, Foucault turns his attention to ‘different spaces’, specifically designating two kinds: utopias and heterotopias. Foucault, however, considers utopias unreal, whereas heterotopias, for him, are real places contesting the places in which we live, and creating transitional spaces and sheltering subjects in crisis.

Bonita Alice’s heterotopias take on various forms, ranging from freestanding and/or floating organic structures, to exploded views of amorphous objects, and perspectival recessional architectural drawings of cityscapes. She appropriates the language of architectural illustration in diverse ways to make drawings of objects and structures in section (exposing the interior), in plan (viewing the object from above), in elevation (a frontal view), and in perspective (showing perspectival recession). The impetus for her new work resides in six large-scale drawing she made for her previous exhibition, Promised Land (2004). These are metaphorical constructs, or blueprints, for three dimensional sculptural objects, expressing an advanced stage of mental thinking. Her thinking has subsequently become less concrete and more conceptual. Her drawings express processes of thought. And drawing, for Alice, is process.

“There is no way to make a drawing – there is only drawing,” Richard Serra remarked in a well-known interview . “Anything you can project as expressive in terms of drawing - ideas, metaphors, emotions, language structures - results from the act of doing.” Simply put, for Serra “Drawing is a verb.” For Bonita Alice, however, drawing is not only a verb; it is also a noun. It is ‘projective’, as Yve-Alain Bois defines it, because a drawing may also depict something that has been imagined before it is drawn, as opposed to being found through the process of making. The wool-dust Alice uses as medium with which to draw suggests something tangible in itself. It is, like memory, what is left behind when all else physical, emotional and spiritual has been spent and done. In this regard the wool-dust is akin to the laundered clothes Bonita Alice exhibited previously. She meticulously gathered discarded old clothes from the streets, washed them, and exhibited what was left of the clothes.

Where does life begin for any subject in a heterotopic world, Alice seems to be asking. In what ways does he belong there? How does he express his longings in such a world? Aharon Appelfeld argues that “to begin a new life there seemed to require a deliberate effort of forgetting. One learns how to live without memory the way one learns to live without a limb of one’s body, removing the story of my life from the mighty grip of memory and giving it over to the creative laboratory.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests ‘the art of intimation’, “speaking about the most personal and intimate pain and pleasure through a ‘cryptic disguise’.” W.G. Sebald proposes obviating personal time and space: “If I am walking through the city and look into one of those quiet courtyards where nothing has changed for decades, I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.” Alice relates to this by saying: “At the same time as feeling bonded to Johannesburg where I have lived all my life I feel at home - even more than ‘at home’ – in other places because they accommodate with sympathy a part of myself that I enjoy having confirmed externally.”

Bonita Alice attempts to come to terms with her invidious world. She has lived in Johannesburg her whole life. Her roots are here. But part of her has left the city: her family emigrated to Australia. Alice herself is about to emigrate to the United Kingdom. Her narrative here is being interrupted. Her current world will soon be relegated to memory; her new world, a utopia of the future. She seems to be letting go of something familiar in order to find something perhaps more important. Svetlana Boym calls this state, together with a romance with one’s own fantasy about that loss and that displacement, a state of nostalgia. She goes on to say that although nostalgia is at first glance a longing for place, it is actually more about a yearning for another time. Nostalgia is as much a retrospective issue as a prospective one. In Boym’s terms Alice articulates a form of reflective nostalgia in her art. She envisages memory and anticipates the future, focusing on the longing itself. This longing, however, is ambivalent, because it calls absolute truth into doubt, exploring ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different, temporally discontinuous time zones. As a result, Johannesburg as city becomes the embodiment of her nostalgia. She captures the city as the site of her memories, drawing perspectival scenes of the Gasworks in Milpark, the War Memorial in Saxonwold, and the streets of Braamfontein.

She takes a bird’s eye view or ‘tour’ of the city of her memories and of her future (nostalgia) in a cloud-like, hollowed-out shape that hovers above this world. These shapes are ambivalent: amorphous, like a cloud, or like flowing water; and solid, like a hole in the ground, or a grave dug into the earth. Accessing what lies beneath the surface of the earth, what Camille Paglia calls the chthonian, Alice presents another ‘view’ or aspect of memory in the form of what seems to be the shape of a cypress tree. This shape can equally strongly be read visually as similar to the slashes Lucio Fontana made on his canvases in the 1950s. They simultaneously represent artistic process, revealed in the dynamic gesture, the onslaught of the material that dominates and at the same time liberates it, and they create a sense of an external genital orifice.

Many of the shapes in her new work are made of, or drawn with dust, with the implication that we are dust, and our memories are as insubstantial as dust, and will return to it after our deaths. Bonita Alice seems to have shattered the dust of the experience of a lifetime in a city and this dust has fallen into a specific form, giving shape to her memories and her anticipated nostalgia. She seems to have ascended as a floating form, or descended beyond the surface of the earth, to visit, to witness, to remember, to imagine, and above all, to anticipate both her past, present and future narratives.

In a previous articulation of the ‘floating’ concept in her work, Bonita Alice used corrugated iron and washboards to intimate the intimate ebb and flow of life. She suggests the impermanence, the transience of time and space, contemplating whether living in a temporary shelter, like a corrugated shack, prepares one more, makes it easier, to die. In the end, Bonita Alice defies that fear, that return to the nothingness that existed before birth, and that awaits us again after death, as Gonzales-Crussi would have it. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, as Bonita Alice ‘processes’ her drawings. “In these works,” Alice says, “I reflect on utopia and its role for us in life and death. I align myself with the idea that the true significance of utopia is not as the fantasy of an ideal place, but rather the manifestation of a wish for a whole and enduring state of being. I am concerned with our inability (in the Western world, anyway) to live with the idea of the inevitability of death. Utopia reflects the fear of death and a wish to be reconstituted and live on in place, and time, if not in body.” Bonita Alice anticipates memory by providing temporal spaces that shelter subjects in crisis.

Wilhelm van Rensburg