Zanele Muholi & The Making of Rodin // Tate Modern, London

A Clayton

The game of the gaze rarely has a winner. I am not going to attempt a dissection of the concept here - many essays and more qualified theorists have done so. Zanele Muholi’s photography insistently motivates that deeply challenging experience, which gets to the core of representation in art. You are invited to really look at every face in front of you, and every face looks back. Muholi’s documentation of Black trans and queer lives, in and beyond arpatheid South Africa, is a powerful evocation of art as activism. Their work surveys hate crime, collective empowerment, phases of transition, and a defiant exploration of self. As the first Tate Modern trip post-lockdown, this exhibition demonstrated just how educational art can be; this is about the way we look and see, the purpose behind the lens and the layers of meaning that emanate from those eyes. As a snapshot into the injustice and discrimination, based on gender and sexuality, upheld by the arpartheid regime, the subjects participate as recorded testimonies of individual and collective LGBTQ+ experience.

There are 9 rooms; the sheer volume of work is overwhelming, at times unyieldingly confrontational. The Faces and Phases series, a living archive of Black lesbians, transgender and gender non-conforming peoples, is a platform for expression, marking the changes in the participants’ daily lives. According to the exhibition text, Faces and Phases visualises Muholi’s belief that ‘we express our gendered, radicalised, and classed selves in rich and diverse ways.’ (@ Tate Modern 2021). Having spent the last year staring at faces confined within the rectangular limitations of Zoom, there is something to be said for the compelling nature of real portraiture, seen en masse, as if being ‘seen’ has never been more important. Gone is the time for taking faces for granted. Muholi’s work is captivating and mesmeric, and I could not imagine visiting this exhibit with the crowds of pre-Covid times. However difficult this period of cautious reopening will be, the space that limited capacity tickets gives you is excellent, especially in the context of this kind of artwork.

We then shuffle through the empty industrial bowels of Tate Modern to have a whip around the Rodin. Billed as a landmark exhibition, The Making of Rodin could not be more contrasting to Zanele Muholi. The atmosphere is starkly different; the curators have conceived this as a pseudo-studio space, an insight into the process of the prestigious sculptor, as opposed to a retrospective. Yet both are archival, one dead, one living. And they are both about bodies, the study of peoples, with both artists documenting the human form with demonstrable fascination into the facets of representation. Having visited the Musée Rodin on my final day of a coming of age interrailing trip over a decade ago, I remember being absolutely captivated by the mottled surfaces of the bronzes - I feel like it is part of my art history. Rodin’s understanding of material is unconventional, stark and physical. So to witness the process was insightful - a dressing gown dipped in plaster as a method to grasp sculptural drapery, for example, was especially fun. Apparently Rodin sculpted his infamous Burghers of Calais as naked forms, and then dressed them in plaster drapery to achieve that such realist representation. The inclusion of watercolour studies was a welcome break to the white plaster surrounding us, a stained glass annexe of the exhibition. Interestingly, and especially considering Muholi’s exhibition in juxtaposition, the curators have acknowledged the Whiteness of Rodin’s work, with a wall panel of text discussing the idealised marble white bodies of art history being interpreted as the pinnacle of European civilisation. The decision to include this information - that so much visual culture is based on a mistaken superiority complex - is an important one, where the juxtaposition of Rodin with Muholi is confidently articulated. Not to mention the gendered relationships between sculptor and sitter, evidenced in the busts and studies of Ohta Hisa (Hanako), Hélène Von Nostitz and Camille Claudel. Whilst all three may have been professionally and personally influential for Rodin, this exhibition highlights the gender inequality underpinning their relations.

What a day out. Many things were learned. Happy to be back.