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| Woman Totem, 2024. Acrylic and oil on board. |
The woman totem is one of five oil paintings that I started in 2020. They were part of a project I was given in university about the purpose of painting in a world of technology. My goal was to combine old art, iconic images that shaped art, specifically that of women and those who experience being in a woman-body, with the visual language I associate with my home computer that I grew up using in the 2000s.
I’m white and I attended a private Catholic school in South Africa in a previously segregated, whites-only community called Edenvale, Johannesburg. It remains a majority white suburb. This painting is an examination of white beauty, “purity” and the idealization of a certain kind of womanhood above any others. Whiteness was an unspoken but dominant force in my school. The school was started by missionaries who moved into Africa to bring what they saw as the “civilising” message of Jesus to the Black population, whose varied spiritual practices were seen as backward. This is the racism that underlies the expansion of the church. In an article for the Daily Maverick, Anthony Egen defines racism within the context of cultures and their differences, explaining that “Europeans had (possibly still have) the assumption that they are the centre of history and culture and that this culture should be spread (diffused) to the non-European Other”. It is this hierarchy of good to bad that creates an acceptable kind of woman and an unacceptable one: the closer to god, the closer to righteousness.
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At home, I used Windows 95 and Windows XP. I was able to find a manual on home computers for the family which used 95 as its base. I was inspired by the now archaic idea of a published book explaining how to use computers. A book, being so solid and unchanging, becomes an obsolete instruction manual in a matter of months to the computer which constantly changes and rapidly grows. There was something about this which felt related to the systems we still use to understand human beings. It felt like a manual on gender, written so many years ago, still dictating and shaping human bodies, which grow and change so rapidly so as to make the manual obsolete. Thus the comparisons of art made about the human, feminized body, and the rigid reductions of the vastness of the computer, were born.
To bring the two visual languages together, and to allow myself to come up with new shapes and compositions, I printed out pages and pages of artworks, internet personalities, and photographs of post-post-modern importance (eg. Kim Kardashian’s paper magazine cover, American Apparel advertisements etc.). I also cut up my aforementioned computer manual, as well as a guide I had been gifted to the Louvre from 2014. To tie everything together, I printed pictures of myself. I have photos of myself in strange poses for other artworks and I used them to bring my own identity back into the paintings. The hope was to reflect on my experiences within this weave of visual history, sort of adding a fly into the spiders web of information.
The internet is a place where bodies become little pieces. Every image of someone you know, socially or parasocially, isn’t even enough to be a piece of them. They’re more like symbols that stand in for that person. The internet feels like a foundry where symbols of yourself can become real in that virtual world through curating collections of related symbols that say: This is me. I’ll touch on that again later in the another part of this series, but for now I wanted to point out that a) images of people are symbols and b) “someone” can be created from a Frankenstein recombination of many images.
I made four collages simultaneously, but for the sake of making anything make sense, I have separated them into the compositions I eventually used as references.
This one turned out far more religious than expected, but I guess that’s where totems or idols tend to lean. I also forget how instructional Catholicism was for me. It’s like racism, a poisonous mold that lives in your walls and only shows up in chest scans thirty years later but keeps you coughing all that time. I had created an angry, angry assortment of versions of womanhood that I saw myself being “allowed” to undertake. I guess it always ends up being the Madonna/whore paradigm and nothing new is ever invented, but it was cathartic none the less.
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Catholics are one of the few Christian groups which pray to Mary as they would to Jesus. Mary is addressed in the Hail Mary as follows:
Hail Mary
Full of Grace
The Lord is with thee
Blessed art though amongst women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us, Sinners
Now and at the hour of our death
Amen
Mary never had much of a personality to me. I guess none of the bible characters did, but Mary was immaculately conceived, which means she was literally born without sin. Even Jesus had some ups and downs, some moments of disturbia and emotional volatility, but she had no storming the temple and condemning the merchants, she had no terrible moments of righteous anger, and she didn’t fall apart when she was told she was going to have a baby she didn’t choose to have. She did cry, however. When she was told her son was going to die, when she watched Jesus drag the cross to his death - There are actually seven famous moments of heartache for Mary, known as The Seven Sorrows. There are statues which depict her crying great, tragic tears. It’s an important part of her iconography. She cries for Jesus and the protection of her child, and because her sorrow is selfless and all-consuming, it is beautiful.
Mary’s identity then becomes, at least in part, shaped by her relationships with the men around her. She is pushed and pulled by the prophecies that dictate her life and she behaves in the most devastatingly sympathetic manner. She’s always sad, always mournful. When she is not, she is being good. She is a good mother and a good wife. She’s untouchable, her image is perfect, even in sadness. It’s inhuman, her grace and her capacity to love, even when she is told the child she loves will die, because he must die for the sins of the earth, and thus her role is to bare the grief of this loss and the despair of everyone on earth.
And I guess I’ve never been able to let her go. I learned who Mary was while I learned geography and what verbs and nouns were. And so this idea of a woman, the most self-sacrificing person alive, melted in between my brain cells and won’t leave. And she has contributed to making it difficult for me to see myself, my woman self, as anything besides a martyr, a mother, a wife. I’ll always be more selfish, crueler, more hateful, and I will never be able to bare it with the same grace as this frozen woman.
“Even in her crone years as she weeps at the Cross, images of the Virgin Mary are still depicted as pristine, unwrinkled, virtuous and eternally youthful. Her complexion mirrors her salvation — no moles, pimples or sunspots will keep her out of heaven. The Virgin Mary sets the standards for all women to be whiter than snow in body and soul. This religious purity is a perversion of God’s creation of humanity and sexuality.” Erica Whittaker, Pantyhose, Purity and the theological
Whiteness is part of Mary’s depiction. To be perfect, in these visions of Mary, is to be white. Whiteness and holiness are aligned in the racist ideology which weaves itself through the art historical canon of Europe, which is where my images were drawn from. Mary was most certainly not white, historically. I am white, and made this painting in response to my own sense of womanhood as a white person. I don’t believe that when I first conceptualised the work that I considered race as an element. But it’s so obvious looking at it four years later. It’s a totem of white womanhood, and in some ways I believe I missed the mark in making a distinct statement about this. It’s too ambiguous, racially coded but not saying anything substantial.
She appears in my painting three times: as a sort of second head for the totem (a more stable stomach-head), at the base, headless and solid gold, and in fragments of the pieta.
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I feel this woman in my stomach, in my gut. She is my uselessness, my inability to love hard enough to heal the world. I feel her like a spine, like roots. She is the dirt within which I grow into anything else I may wish to become. It’s like I feed off of her to survive.
The Rape of Proserpina, 1621-1622. Gian Lorenzo Bernini and The Pieta, 1498-1499. Michelangelo.
Another figure I used was Persephone.
I chose to replace the image from the collage with another sculpture that felt more relevant to the rest of the totem, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Rape of Proserpina, sculpted in the 1620s. I have merged the limp arm of Jesus from the Pieta with the scratching limb of Persephone as she twists under Hades’ grasp. The story goes that Persephone was kidnapped by Hades to be his wife in the underworld but she returns to bring spring to the surface world once a year. The violence of her life being chosen for her, and the insinuation of rape (which also means ‘to take’ and is likely used that way in this context) is dark and abrasive, especially when depicted so elegantly and fluidly as is in Bernini’s sculpture. In the same way that Mary could cry demurely, there is a horror to Persephone’s capture being so divine.
She is crushed beneath the Pietà by Michelangelo. I feel the weight of losing the perfect person in my life. For Mary it was Jesus, but for me it was whatever fool I had chosen to torment over, or perhaps a masculine family member or a father. When I see that tragic statue, I think of all the men my love couldn’t save. The statue depicts his love being a sagging, painful experience.. It felt like Persephone’s anger and writhing was a counterpoint to Mary’s passivity, but it is fruitless all the same. She too will become the mother of a god because she was “blessed amongst women”, whether she wanted to be or not.
Kim and Me
Finally, the modern world. The line that connects these images of women to the images of women famous today. It feels overwrought to use the Kardashians, but I started these paintings in 2020 and their faces were still the zeitgeist. It’s foolish to pretend they don’t still affect aesthetics of femininity today, just maybe less holistically. Now they’re in little pieces, an eyebrow here and an ass cheek there, verses the attempts to copy and copy and copy them that were customary in the late 2010s.
kardashian_kolloquium,2020 kardashian_kolloquium,2018
I have used a piece of Kim Kardashian’s torso from an image I screenshotted from her Instagram. I remember choosing the picture because it had signs of photo manipulation whereby she had morphed and shaped her body to form her desired curves and shapes. I find these images so sad. She is the enviable purveyor of a standard of beauty gleamed from her own image, but even she is not applicable to the standard. MJ Cory, creator of the Kardashian Kolloquium Instagram page, often uses Jean
Baudrillard’s framework of the Simulacra and Simulation in discussing any of the Kardashian sisters. They aren’t themselves anymore, they aren’t real, they’re copies of copies of copies of a version of themselves that don’t exist anymore.
Kim Kardashian felt like the perfect figure to occupy the role of the desirable, sexual woman. She juggles desirability both from being wanted and from wanting to be her. She would be the ‘whore’ in the madonna'/whore dichotomy. This isn’t to say I would call her that, what I mean is while Mary becomes the epitome of motherly love and virtue, Kim Kardashian becomes the embodiment of sexual desire. They both are distilled into singular ideas, despite being humans, despite one being dead and the other very much alive. Kim Kardashian doesn’t feel like a real person anymore, but she’s as ubiquitous as Jesus. Her image, though changing, expands within a limited purview of what makes a woman beautiful in a sexual way. She turns into the projection of desire and envy, and not a person with envy and desire projected onto her.
Somewhere in the world, she cries and shits and gets pimples, and I am none the wiser.
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While her face became the standard, she was never really in control of her desirability. The extent to which her face became objectified and her image repeated was just a part of how celebrity faces are proliferated online, she just happened to do it very well. She made choices that expertly drew the public in, but, in the age of the internet and the meme, it happened with a frequency so beyond post-modern that it could be parody. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych could never.
I didn’t use her face, because her face would turn the painting into an artwork about her face, that is how strong it’s symbolic resonance is. Instead I used her upper torso. Her body reminds me of the Venus Di Milo. She is recognisable from silhouette alone, and it’s not really the silhouette of a “complete” body. She wears her own brand of shapewear, has undergone cosmetic procedures to modify her shape, everything is constructed meticulously, like a sculpture. But there is a certain choicelessness to it. In the way that gender makes choices for us before we’ve realised we have made them, a certain thoughtlessness in all the artifice.
I am not saying Kim Kardashian has not made choices in her appearance, I am simply saying that the popular choice is not always the choice which aligns with our souls, and she is first and foremost a business woman. In a similar vein, I’m not sure if the Venus De Milo would be so famous or considered so beautiful if she had arms. It is her bareness, the lean into despair that comes of vulnerability that makes her even more desirable. To be beautiful, in the white, European sense of the word, is a sacrificial act. We offer up our dignity, our anger, our imperfection, our smoke, upon the alter of fragility and hotness.
Venus de Milo and Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala, 2021
The Kardashian family’s relationship to race is complicated in short. I’ll refer you to a better resource on the subject, Tee Noir, who created a two-part video essay on the subject and provides a more comprehensive analysis of the family. When it comes to the madonna/whore complex, black women have a long history of being fetishized. Kim Kardashian famously appropriated typically black, feminine features to enhance her desirability in the male gaze. Using her in the white woman totem creates a dynamic between white feminine purity and the idea that the closer to sexual a woman becomes, the closer the comparison can be drawn between her and blackness. It’s a disturbing element which I don’t think I adequately expressed in the painting. The ‘copy’ label was a part of my attempt to address this. Where bodies are shopped and cut up from other bodies to create the ‘best’ body. That body is ultimately still white, not matter how much it takes from black women.
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All of this, the shopping of the body, brings to mind the concept of the avatar. When I was a kid and as I became a teenager, I used to spend hundreds of hours in online virtual worlds. I would create a persona and interact with others online under the guise of my new face and identity. This construction allowed me to try on new identities and roles whilst keeping me from changing myself in the real world. I am a trans nonbinary person, and have read many accounts from other trans people who used websites like these to explore their real gender identities whilst in hostile home environments that made physical transition impossible.
I relate to this, but still found myself running into the invisible wall of binarism, even within these seemingly broad spaces.
For example, the website Stardoll had to be my favourite for many years. The point of the game was to customise a paperdoll-like person, do their hair and make up, and to shop for clothes to dress them up. I currently express my gender quite androgynously, and made attempts to do that at the time despite not being aware of my transness. What frustrated me was the limits in body shape. They had two doll styles, one male and one female. I’m not expecting a website I used in 2009 to have a nonbinary doll, but the rigidity of the dichotomy was obvious. The body shapes could be varied slightly, but I mean it when I say slightly. What you had really was a clear division of boy and girl, and you had only one boy body shape or girl body shape you could pick. The ‘female’ clothes also could not be used on the male dolls and vice versa, and so the boy dolls were dull and barely used because very few clothes were made for them.
The male doll in 2009, The Product Guy The male doll in January 2025 and the female doll, taken by me in 2025
I bring all of this up because small things like this made me certain that the binaries of the world, the black and white, the male and female, the madonna and whore, that I saw in art, both modern and old, told me that there was always meant to be a clear distinction between the natural beauty of things. That women were meant to be a few simple things. I know this is a small, silly example, but there are hundreds of these, thousands, they fall around us and tell us what to be and how to feel good, safe and real.
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So I think that’s everything I can say about the woman totem. I will write more about my personal experiences across these four years of painting (and not painting) in the next post which will be about a painting called the gay beacon. If you have made it this far, thank you for listening to me rattle on.
Further Reading
The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino
Kim Kardashian Has Body Dysmorphia by Lauren Valenti
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
The Systemic Abuse of Celebrities by Brooey Deschanel
Virtual Avatars: Trans Experiences of Ideal Selves Through Gaming by Kai Baldwin
The Role of the Avatar in Gaming for Trans and Gender Diverse Young People by Helen Morgan
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