Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts

by Marlene Dumas

This book is a substantial collection of writings from Marlene Dumas’ entire career. Includes personal commentary on a number of Dumas’ best-known works in her distinctive and engaging voice .

Marlene Dumas is an artist for whom the written word has always been paramount, a preoccupation revealed in her use of text and language in her paintings, and in the huge volume of writings she has produced and published since the very beginning of her career. Her texts echo the concerns of her paintings, interrogating questions of interpretation and meaning, sexuality, love and death. The artist has a unique voice, writing philosophically but playfully on art, painting, and language itself. She quotes from pop culture, art history, philosophy and literature with a light touch, referencing Dolly Parton and Picasso in the same breath.

This revised and expanded edition of Sweet Nothings (first published in 1997) brings the selection of texts up to date (drawing on Dumas’ writings for catalogues, magazines, journals). It also includes a new collection of Dumas’ writing on artists, including personal responses to van Gogh, Frank Stella and Alice Neel. A detailed and comprehensive annotations and sources section makes the book a valuable reference tool for Dumas scholarship.

Marlene Dumas (born in 1953 in Capetown, South Africa) is one of the most prominent and influential painters working today. In an era dominated by the mass media and a proliferation of images, her work is a testament to the meaning and potency of painting.

This book is available at the special exhibition price of 12.99 for the duration of the exhibition.

255 pages, Paperback

First published December 14, 2014

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I write about art because I am a believer.” In her book of notes and texts, Sweet Nothings, artist Marlene Dumas shows not only her steadfast engagement with questions over love and hate, the body, its temporal + spatial places, its conceptual looseness — questions that permeate her art as well as her writing — but also the very nature of art and art-writing itself: “Is commentary useful? I say yes. / Is not all the necessary information / contained in the work itself? I say no.” Dumas is a believer, as she states, not only in art but in context, in not relying on a single mode or medium to capture life + ideas in their manifold natures. As early as 1992 — merely a decade into her career — Dumas was writing exquisitely meta-artistic, meta-poetic poetry, opening the book with the above “believer” declaration, before going on to say: “I have seen the glory and the power of the word. / I have experienced the power of repetition, / the intoxication of rhythmic rhetorical arousal.” That power, that arousal, is palpable time and again, in poems proclaiming “Love is not blind, no / The past will never die, no / Everything that glitters is blood”, in her relatable certainty that “Art may lie / love may die / but hatred remains / a lasting sentiment.” From these writings, to her art-politics pieces, to the writings on other artists that close off the collection, she lives by her sardonic, detached self-assessment: “She has said: ‘Give the people what they want’.”

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an unusual book for me to read. It contains a variety of written material from the artist Marlene Dumas - short aphorisms, poems, discussions on art and other artists written between 1982 and 2014. I bought it after going to her exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, and being struck both by her art but more so by the names, short texts and commentaries that she attached to the works.

I wanted to like the book, although initially I was a little sceptical - a collection of writings by an artist, often about her work which I am not over familiar with and which is largely absent from the book. But Dumas's writing is strong enough and intriguing enough to stand alone and I really enjoyed the book. To a large extent I ignored the fact that I did not always know what Dumas was referring to in the texts, and just used it as a basis to create my own inspiration from. Definitely not my normal reading matter, but no worse for that.

If you are a fan of Dumas's work then definitely worth reading. If like me you came across her on the normal meandering through life without any deep knowledge, and like something unusual, why not try?