Bruid – a workshop performance (2011)
Performance artist Celeste Coetzee.
I first met Celeste Coetzee on a visual arts workshop in May of 2011. At that point she was working intensely towards her final year BVA exhibition, and throughout the workshop she explored aspects of the Bride, or Bruid (Afrikaans). Informed by personal experience, her perspective developed out of a resistance to the patriarchal teachings of Angus Buchan, well-known for his book Faith Like Potatoes, and his Mighty Men rallies.
Although Celeste’s main focus was her planned potato peel performance and installation, she spent time at the workshop considering her performance garments. Wearing her own wedding dress – now a few sizes too small for her - and having created a Voortrekker bonnet (kappie) from domestic fabric, she moved through the surrounding Karoo landscape, a poignant and vulnerable figure. I took the photos of this impromptu performance, and they have haunted me ever since. The way that intriguing art should.
I was delighted when Celeste agreed to put them on outoftheCUBE as a selfie.
Her final exhibition at Grande Provence Gallery Franschhoek consisted of an installation where she performed nude, an act of great courage for a 53-year old woman. It caused a huge uproar and her exhibition was banned. Below are posts from her Bruid Facebook page.
mandy conidaris
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Celeste-Coetzee-Bruid-Ontklee/136247476484120?sk=wall
post 30 November 2011
Celeste Coetzee – in her live installation artwork, entitled BRUID [BRIDE] - adopts the cultural persona of the White Boer Afrikaner Woman, as an act of identity creation. She places this persona in the traditional context, and portrays her as a construct within the parameters and ideology of the Boer White Afrikaner man, derived from the God of Afrikaner Nationalism and Calvinism. She examines gender domination, where ideology and tradition operate as pro-actively used mechanisms, and interrogates the subservience the woman must exhibit within the ideological construct.
Her investigation is inspired by the fact that the attendants at lay preacher Angus Buchan’s Mighty Men rallies are predominantly white Afrikaner men. Her installation questions the viability of imposing patriarchal customs derived from the Biblical context on women in the postmodern, democratic reality after 1994. Her personal frame of reference – as inhabitant of a conservative, rural community during the apartheid years – guides her into a retrospective investigation, which becomes a journey into the self, and into the history of women in this community.
Buchan gained celebrity as a potato farmer, and his book and the film based on it are called FAITH LIKE POTATOES. The individual art works within the installation were created using potatoes as the medium, made through the customary domestic activities performed by women in a patriarchal context, such as preservation, pressing, peeling, knitting, embroidery, sewing, cooking, baking. During the installation period Coetzee, as the White Woman persona, will reside in the gallery. The installation space will be converted into a simulated kitchen, where she will continue to perform the tasks expected of this persona within this patriarchal context. Video projections and a narrative sequence of photographs will enhance the notion that the persona will continue to perform those tasks of maternal devotion in a manner of extreme idealisation, and subject herself to self-sacrifice in unconscious support of male subjectivity.
The wearing of the Voortrekker bonnet serves as a reference to her own past; her frailty, desolation, innocence, naïvety, and disillusionment form part of this experience of pain. Her inner life is exposed in the process, given that she displays herself as a construct to the outside world. There is nothing erotic in her nudity: in fact, the opposite, and serves as further exposure of her inner torment and unacknowledged frailty.
The artist hopes that this exploration will contribute to a redefining of the Boer White Afrikaner Woman, feminine domestic functions, and the role of motherhood. In this way the focus can shift to the singularity of every individual person, rather than remain fixed on gender roles and functions.
post 30 November 2011
The recent banning of Celeste Coetzee’s BRUID [BRIDE] performance from a Franschhoek gallery exposes the subjugation of women’s bodies under still prevalent male bias prejudices and mores and silenced a woman’s right to speak of her position.
Thinking women and men are invited to join in protest for freedom of expression and the emancipation of women in South Africa and the art world. The artist, with the support of other artists, is planning protest events in the next week. Details of these and how you can get involved will be posted soon.
post 02 December 2011
Bruid Ontklee protes
Potatoes will be peeled in a protest for freedom of expression at a lookout post on the Franschhoek pass tomorrow. Participants are to meet at the Hugenote Monument in Franschhoek at 11:00. We urge all other supporters to hold their own potato peeling protest wherever they are, even in their own kitchens, and to post the pictures or videos on the FB page. Remember to wear black.
from The Cape Times 05 December 2011
http://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/protesters-support-naked-artist-1.1192300#.U7wTqrFIPTo