Between Men and Monuments: The Art of Paul Emmanuel

by Pamela Allara and Mark Auslander

 Paul Emmanuel,'s recent exhibition, "Men and Monuments," opened at the Wits Art Museum (Johannesburg, South Africa) on March 3, 2020 and was closed prematurely due to the national public health shutdown.  The exhibition now exists through the memories of those who viewed it  leaving behind powerful after-images, which we continue to reflect upon. 

Photograph taken to create a banner for
The Lost Men France
2014
Photographed by Charl Fraser
Courtesy of Goodlight Studios and Art Source South Africa

We begin with Pamela Allara address at the "Men and Monuments"  exhibition opening, Mark Auslander next considers the current scenario in this moment of national and global confinement in light of Paul's 2018 work, "Rough Collar." We conclude with Paul's own artist's statement on the 2018 piece, created for the future exhibition, "Substance of Shadows."  

I. Opening Remarks 


Pamela Allara: Monuments are public sculptures or structures we tend to walk by without thinking about who or what is being honored. Most often these structures are designed to be permanent, to freeze history into an immutable form.  But recently, both in the United States, where I abide, and in South Africa, monuments have become lightening rods for increasingly splintered democratic citizenries. What are we to do with all those men on horses whose deeds we no longer admire? What is the appropriate form and content of monuments today?

The origin of the word in Latin is moneo means to remind, advise or warn. In that sense, monuments are designed not simply to commemorate past events or persons, but to speak to both the present and the future. Paul Emmanuel, who has been rethinking the conventions of monuments for nearly two decades, recognizes the futility of attempting to embalm the past, especially in the current,  post-1994 era when South African history is being re-examined,  contested and revised to include numerous voices and perspectives.

The Lost Men France
1 July – 1 October 2014
Counter-memorial, World War One Centenary
, Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the
Somme, Picardy, northern France
Five pigment-printed photographs (500 x 500 cm each),
 silk, steel
7 x 7 x 300 metres
Photographed by Paul Emmanuel
Courtesy of 2014 Centenaire de la Première
 Guerre Mondiale and Art Source South Africa

The title of Emmanuel’s decades-long project is direct: Lost Men. The term is resonant, speaking to both lost lives and lost histories. Because history is narrated by wars, the majority of monuments are memorials, commemorating wars, and celebrating the assumed heroism of those who died. Lost Men, with the ‘left/right’ marching rhythm of its name, puts the sine qua non of war up front: the violent death of human beings.

The Lost Men project begins with a local armed conflict and expands to what became designated a World War. In 2004, a year marking the 10th anniversary of South African democracy, Emmanuel installed Lost Men Grahamstown at the site of the Xhosa wars with the British between 1820 and 1850. There for the first time Emmanuel used his naked body as a surrogate wall on which to inscribe the names of the Lost. Because he was only able to obtain the names of the Xhosa dead through the letters written by British soldiers, Lost became the apposite term: they had been lost to white men’s history.  Now resurrected to share a temporary space with those they fought against, the Xhosa combatants became, briefly, comrades, joined in death.  Emmanuel’ use of his white body to emboss the names of various races and ethnicities might be considered problematic, but it is evidence that history has been selectively told from white point of view.

The Lost Men France
1 July – 1 October 2014
Counter-memorial, World War One Centenary
, Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the
Somme, Picardy, northern France
Five pigment-printed photographs (500 x 500 cm each),
 silk, steel
7 x 7 x 300 metres
Photographed by Paul Emmanuel
Courtesy of 2014 Centenaire de la Première
 Guerre Mondiale and Art Source South Africa

In Lost Men Mozambique from 2007, Emmanuel continued to investigate the politics of memory, to borrow Karen von Veh’s term, by joining names of Mozambican and South African Lost Men during the 1980s civil war. However, because Mozambican authorities refused to release those names, Emmanuel’s skin was embossed instead with ‘Unknown Soldier’ repeated in Shangaan and Portugese. The term reinforces Emmanuel’s effort to make underscore the fragility of memory: even if proper names are available, they reduced to a mere string of letters when all who may have remembered them are gone. What do we really know about those who have died in war? They are all unknown.

The third of the Lost Men projects seen in this exhibit, is Lost Men France from 2014. Installed near the Thiepval Memorial at the start of the centennial memorials of World War I, his counter memorial offered an alternative narrative to the Circuit of Remembrance pilgrimages that year. In northern France, the harsh winds tore his delicate silk voile banners to shreds, an apt metaphor for the desecration of the bodies of 38 million men from Europe and its colonies in Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand.

Paul will have to provide an answer to the question of why he has exhaustively pursued the issue of the loss of men’s lives through war, despite the fact that he personally has not endured such loss. There are many ideas and concepts his work asks us to examine: the construction of masculinity through concepts of aggression and war, the vulnerability of the masculine body itself, and the pathos of the impermanence of memory. The images on the delicate silk banners ask us to suspend our ideas about masculinity, and to contemplate the violence inflicted on male bodies not simply through war’s conflicts, but through the imposition of an identity that denies gentleness and sensitivity, qualities that like the images themselves, simply fade away.

_____________
II. The Masculine, Confined

Mark Auslander:  Reflecting on Pam's framing remarks, I'm struck how Paul's work reminds us that masculinity has long been centrally concerned with dominating the public square, with fleeing from the feminine-coded domestic, with flinging body after body into the maw of the battlefield, and then marching the survivors, as shattered as they may be, back home in massed triumph, or the simulacrum thereof. The male Dead are recruited, in one way or another, into the National and Imperial project, amalgamated into towering monuments that dominate other public spaces, ostensibly for all time, to inspire new generations of boys to follow in their father's footsteps, out of the household, into the battlefield and the public realm.

Paul’s work, in its brilliant explorations of the interconnected traces of male bodies and their afterlives after trajectories of violence, asks us to ponder what happens after the roar of the massed crowd has passed, and the quiet descends once more, on the empty battlefield or in more interior spaces and places.

That is what the world is now facing, in the shadow of the virus: the Quiet, the contemplative, back within the house, under conditions of the shutdown and the lockdown.  What place is there now, for the patriarch, when there is no public square to dominate, where all is turned inward? What now? What next?

Paul Emmanuel, Rough Collar, 2018
Hand incised, perforated carbon paper, carbon thread, carbon residue
45 x 40 x 40 cm
Courtesy of Art Source South Africa

It seems to me that Paul's work, "Rough Collar," (2018) created for the future exhibition project, "Substance of Shadows," may speak to these difficult questions.  Composed of painstakingly hand incised and perforated carbon paper, carbon thread, and carbon residue, within a perspex display case, the work presents a ruff-like black collar, reminiscent of Dutch formal neckwear of the 17th century, with a permanent circular black shadow underneath. (Please see the artist's statement at the conclusion of this post.)

Although conceived and fabricated before the pandemic, the work speaks to our present predicament, in which we find much of humanity locked down within the highly confined space of the household. The ruff collar is a uniform of the Dutch financial and mercantile elite, evocative of the enormous power of Capital that forged the Dutch colonial system from Batavia to Surinam to the Cape. It is equally evocative of the iron "rough collars" within which millions of enslaved people were bound. Now, confined within the miniature house of the display case, it becomes difficult to disentangle who precisely is the Master, who the Slave.  The men whose histories Paul has excavated remain yoked together in complex dances of power and subjection.  Rough Collar is a haunting miniature monument to (ultimately fragile) masculine claims to domination, now confined in the closest of quarters. None can escape the shadows of the master-slave dialectic,  even as our mortal remains, all made of carbon, return to the dust from which we were born.

As a highly focused counter-memorial, Rough Collar poses important, urgent questions for us in the age of the pandemic. Will we allow the global shutdown to exacerbate and intensify long-term inequities? Will those who are heirs to the ruff-wearing Dutch bankers of old, celebrated in Rembrandt's portraits, be allowed to shelter in place in well-stocked luxury, while those in townships and settlements face slow starvation and ever-deepening daily deprivation, confined to the shadows? Or will the shared crisis call forth our better angels, inspiring profound restructurings of society, a compassionate sharing of the national patrimony, and a renewed covenant that honors the bonds of common humanity? Will the enforced Quiet of the lockdown allow for a collective intake of breath, a period of reflection, a new resolve to lift all of us, together, out of the shadows and into the light?  Emerging from the shadows, may we all put on a collar that is neither a signifier of total victory or complete submission, but rather an enveloping circle of shared, human substance?
________

III. Paul Emmanuel's Artist's Statement  

Paul Emmanuel, Rough Collar, 2018
Hand incised, perforated carbon paper, carbon thread, carbon residue
45 x 40 x 40 cm

Paul Emmanuel: Created in the hearts of stars, the element of carbon continues, unlike any other
element, to be re-purposed into new forms.

Paul Emmanuel, Rough Collar, 2018
Hand incised, perforated carbon paper, carbon thread, carbon residue
45 x 40 x 40 cm
Courtesy of Art Source South Africa

In 2016 I had a dream, in which I saw my skin being peeled away from my body,
as if I was discarding a burnt and charred membrane. This stimulated the idea of
scratching away at the thin black film of carbon covering a piece of diaphanous,
skin-like carbon paper.

To create Rough Collar I spent three months scratching away at the black carbon paper to create 7,6 metres of delicate lace pattern. The lace pattern was emblazoned with mantling borrowed from the Union of South Africa’s 1932
‘embellished’ coat of arms. I then hand stitched this lace into a 16th Century
Elizabethan-era ruff collar. The collar is presented as either rising out of, or
disintegrating into, the carbon residue – the element that gives it substance.
The resulting work is a rarefied object created out of the throw-away medium of
carbon paper. It speaks to me of the generations whose symbols continue to be a weight around our necks, signalling identity, perpetuating difference. Even as they are increasingly less valid, these

Paul Emmanuel, Rough Collar, 2018
Hand incised, perforated carbon paper, carbon thread, carbon residue
45 x 40 x 40 cm
Courtesy of Art Source South Africa

symbols continue to exert an influence into our democratic and digital age. They imprint our image of ourselves with inheritance – carbon copies in the cycle of life.



 This conversation continues with our discussion of Paul Emmanuel's "carbon dad 2017." and his "Veil 1954"