Spectres of the Original and the Liberties of Repetition

Contemporary art is rife with images that reprise the icons of the European canon. Such rereadings, often understood in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s metaphysics of repetition as difference—as dynamic reinscriptions that parley with one another rather than inert copies of a stable original—have provided fertile ground for practices as diverse as those of Yinka Shonibare, Kehinde Wiley, Johannes Phokela, and Hassan Musa (Deleuze 1994).1 Certainly, the twin legacies of postmodernist appropriation and postcolonial refashioning have accustomed us to squaring up the work of contemporary African artists against their canonical, trans-Atlantic prototypes. And we have become equally accustomed to the inflated critical claims made for such refashionings: that they not only ironize, reread, or subvert their prototypes, but even (via Lacan) that these “returns” revive their weary originals (Felman 1987:55). But do they really? Or are some prototypes too depleted to be revivified? What happens when the originating work simply collapses under the weight of its reprisals? Or withers into a spectral image, milked dry and rendered nearly meaningless by an onslaught of repetitions? At a certain point—as Andy Warhol knew all too well—repetition kills pictures. It is one such ghostly image, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Fig. 1), that I want to address here, considering less the 1830 painting itself than several of the countless afterimages it has spawned. For, as an enduring symbol of nation, Liberty has been called upon in recent decades to embody both the euphoria and the violence of political transition. From instances of hostile regime change such as the 1968 Soviet takeover of the Czech capital to the independence movements of the postcolonies, a legion of images attest to what Kaja Silverman calls Liberty’s continual “re-authoring” (1988:84).2 Liberty has equally resonated through post-independence states across Africa.3 Most recently, artists in post-apartheid South Africa have laid claim to this controversial figure, as three public art works installed in Johannesburg over the past decade affirm: Marlene Dumas’s 1998 tapestry The Benefit of the Doubt in the Constitutional Court (Figs. 2a–c), Reshada Crouse’s 1999 oil painting Passive Resistance, which graces the Johannesburg Civic Theater (Figs. 3a–b), and William Kentridge’s and Gerhard Marx’s 2009 sculpture Firewalker, which marches resolutely towards Queen Elizabeth Bridge from a traffic island near the downtown taxi ranks (Fig. 4). Each of these artworks was commissioned by, or donated to, the city of Johannesburg and its civic organizations over the past decade; all seize public space in the southern megalopolis that philosopher Achille Mbembe has called “the classic location ... of African metropolitan modernity” (2004:373). But even as these monumental works call to Delacroix’s Liberty, this trio has 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.4 Liberty’s appeal in South Africa circa 1994, just as the country was emerging from four decades of apartheid and refashioning itself into a new democracy, hardly needs dwelling on. Certainly the gathering of monumental females in the downtown melee of Johannesburg testifies to the elastic appeal of Delacroix’s image as a template for creating readable public art. Nonetheless, I want to pause at the strangeness of Liberty’s presence and to question