Michael Armitage: Dandora (Xala, Musicians)
Part of the show Amongst the Living at White Cube Bermondsey 21 September - 30 October 2022
Dandora, Nairobi. A huge rubbish dump on the outskirts of the city, scoured by people and animals in search of things to sell or eat. A row of brightly-dressed musicians sit in a row, strumming guitars, hitting tambourines and singing. In Michael Armitage's monumental painting, Dandora (Xala, Musicians), this wasteland is a place where everything is in doubt: identities shift, figures metamorphose, the pictorial space itself is unfixed. But with indeterminacy as its theme, it risks drifting into vagueness. Can it grip us?
The cow's prominent anus is a reminder of the unsanitary conditions of the dump. Running vertically beneath it, like droppings, are some of the thick stitches of the cloth, made from tree bark, that Armitage paints on. Far from being a by-product, these stitches contribute enormously to the picture's structure. To the left a man pulls a dog away by its foreleg. The stitches run contrary to his sharp cheekbone, an interplay between media and image that fixes both more securely in place. Stitches also correspond with the painted forms, like those along the branch of the tree, deftly working the incidentals of the support into the picture.
In contrast with the strength of the left edge and the tree branches at the top, large areas of the centre feel untethered. Many of the painterly dabs of paint in the greenish middle-ground feel arbitrary, their relationship with the forms around them not in any kind of tension. In and of themselves they are hesitant. The same goes for the dark area at the right edge, which looks as if it's a careful copy of an indistinct photograph, somewhat awkward.
The indistinctness of the figures appears to signal their uncertain social status. While they are separated from each other by outlines and blocks of garish colour, they are all deeply enmeshed within the environment. A murky, purplish tone, tending to orange at the bottom, pervades everything, body and land. The distant hills adjust their forms around the human and animal figures, between whom there is not always a clear separation: a pig springs from the head of the central figure in blue, thereby introducing doubts about the otherwise conventional spatial relationship between foreground and middle ground.
The painting tends to obscure the boundaries between things. Need everything be so imprecise? For all its uncertainties, Dandora shows a place with a busy economic life: buskers, scavengers, workers. The use of the Ugandan Lubugo cloth also binds the picture to the cultural and economic specificity of the region. There are systems at work here. Our access to the musicians' lives, however, is limited to generalisations. There is very little sense of the people as individuals. Apart from Cheekbones on the left, they are types, vague and out of focus, flat and insubstantial.
The dreaminess of the style transforms the image from social account to fable. But the lack of specificity of the figures dampens the drama, and the overall imprecision allows the audience to float in relative indifference, few demands being made of us. For example, there is a strange, worm-like creature in the tree above the musicians. It seems to have a face at one end. For whom is this worm real? Not the viewer, since the facticity of everything is in question. Not for the figures, either, since they're oblivious to it. With nothing staked on its presence, it seems simply fanciful: it doesn't matter.