Tracey Rose, White Girl Fart Factory, 2015, mixed media installation
dimensions variable, courtesy Dan Gunn
What does it take to have “white girls” break wind? How many industrial processes are set in motion before their cheeks are gently parted by the gassy intestinal pressure so they can parp? South African artist Tracey Rose has considered this and lays these “production” processes and some bum cracks bare.
At the start of the installation “White Girl Fart Factory” at Dan Gunn we encounter a series of South African peanut butter jars from the brand Black Cat and a framed sketch of George Washington Carver, the American inventor born into slavery. Peanut butter was just one small offshoot of his intellectual legacy in botany, farming and governmental policy. His portrait, sketched by Rose, is accompanied by a plate of peanut butter, placed in such a way as to obscure his name. We see him only once. As we move along the series, a black cat similar to the brand’s logo is featured again and again on the jar, eventually taking a 3D form to guard the final jar which contains the “white girl’s fart”.
Tracey Rose, White Girl Fart Factory, 2015, mixed media installation dimensions variable, courtesy Dan Gunn
Tracey Rose, White Girl Fart Factory, 2015, mixed media installation dimensions variable, courtesy Dan Gunn
Rose presses “white girls” into labour, adding them to the end of a long and sometimes bitter chain of production, and this is their jarred and “pointless” product. This work stands in stark contrast to one of Rose’s earlier performances, “For King and Cunt”, comprising the artist pissing on the Members Room table at Tate Modern wearing the Union Jack – thus signalling Rose’s versatility in dealing with the abject. Her act at the Tate was one of disgust, perhaps with the institution’s association with the exploitative sugar production industry. Here, the “white girls’” effortless final product is simply an unremarkable, slightly distasteful act out of indigestion. Could the blood red gallery walls (selected by the artist) also suggest other vital bodily fluids have been shed in the production process?
Tracey Rose, White Girl Fart Factory, 2015, mixed media installation dimensions variable, courtesy Dan Gunn
Tracey Rose, White Girl Fart Factory, 2015, mixed media installation dimensions variable, courtesy Dan Gunn
In the 1980s (before the end of Apartheid) the peanut butter brand advertised the spread as if its consumption would perform miracles eliminating the need to train a white body in order to fight. With the rallying call, “Black Cat not black belt!” they advertised a food (invented by a black man) to give (yet more) strength to white men. The white girl featured as a passive unproductive figure, contrasting with the lack of people of colour. Even in more recent multiracial adverts the white boy is still mostly the focus of the body building qualities of Black Cat. Rose, whilst not a black belt, is certainly a boxer and the female artist who memorably punched the colonial surveying gaze in the eye with her performance “TKO” (2000). Moreover, despite the fact this exhibition resonates more with the South African experience, by adding the Carver reference, Rose exemplifies that local incidents have a global implication; that exploitation is systematic, but also that symbolism is fabricated. For instance, black cat could also refer to the Black Panthers and peanut symbolises prosperity in China and insignificant people elsewhere.
Tracey Rose, White Girl Fart Factory, 2015, mixed media installation dimensions variable, courtesy Dan Gunn
As we stand and contemplate one of the plinths, we are invited to take a peanut butter cookie, perhaps an opportunity to get our own guts in the show. “But doesn’t peanut butter make you gassy?” asks the person standing next to me. We ponder and smirk, and pose the question to the first white girl we see.
Text by Sonia Barrett
Tracey Rose, “Lassooing with the Post Colonial Pirates” is at Dan Gunn, Berlin, until 7 November 2015
More: Frieze Projects: Lutz Bacher Invites Fair-goers to Purgatory
More: Frieze Projects: Asad Raza Creates Intimacy Through Mythology