Streetwalkers: Phantom Monuments of the Post-Apartheid City

(거리의) 창부들: 흑인격리정책 폐지 후 도시의 환영적 기념물

This essay examines how the figure of Liberty has been refashioned in the streets of post-apartheid South Africa, addressing three public art works installed in Johannesburg over the past decade: Reshada Crouse's oil painting Passive Resistance, Marlene Dumas' tapestry The Benefit of the Doubt and William Kentridge's and Gerhard Marx's sculpture Firewalker. Even as these monumental works all reprise Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades-an icon of the city street and its revolutionary barricades-so too this trio of Liberties have become mere phantoms of their vaunted archetype. Haunted specters, they quarrel with the mythologized chimera of Liberty, taking issue with the fraught tradition of pinning regime change onto the body of the female nude. Drawing instead on South African histories of women's resistance, in which female nudity has been repeatedly marshaled as a form of dissent, the Liberties circling Johannesburg hybridize their European template with local traditions of female political opposition to colonial and postcolonial male authority.