Tea, scones and murder
Menu: Old fashioned milk tart - crustless (Mrs Murray); Cheese scones with cream and jam - optional (JH); Maids of honour; (A Paxton); Koeksisters (a gift from Jessica Brown)
Beverages: Bridesmaid's hope (WCTU); Coffee; Ceylon tea
Guests: Kathryn Smith, Christian Nerf, Michael Chandler, Kabelo Malatsie, Phillip Johnson, Gabi Alberts, Darren van der Merwe, George Mahashe, Andrew Putter, Jessica Brown.
Music: Bing Crosby and Friends - a compilation from the late 1940s (brought by Kathryn).
Setting: To connect the tea discussion directly with my research around the British Council-initiated Exhibition of Contemporary British Paintings and Drawings of 1947 and 1948 which toured all around the Union, a number of enlarged, black and white photocopies of the artworks shown and press clippings from South African newspapers at the time, were displayed in the studio.
Beginning with the tenuous temporal and spatial link of Johannesburg in 1948, I wished to draw attention to other similarities between the material social inscriptions and gender politics at work in 'Bubbles' Schroeder's murder case (Kathryn Smith's research topic) and the British exhibition. Additionally, I felt that Kathryn Smith's working method would be of particular relevance to my project as well as many of my colleagues currently building or reconstituting certain 'open' archives from within recent South African history. 'Open' in the sense that they were never 'closed cases', and Kathryn's forensic approach specialises in picking apart the inconsistencies, gaps and overlaps within the narratives with which she chooses to work. How to resolve these elements as artistic projects which operate within a socio-historical vein, is a key concern of not only my, but our work in the Centre for Curating the Archive.
As usual, we spent the first five minutes of the session discussing what was actually on the table. Pastries with almond and marmalade, scones with whipped cream, etc. And, of course, whether or not one should bake crustless milktart?
I then introduced the guests around the table, and why this topic might be of interest for them, as well as providing a description of the Ouma Lunch/Tea concept itself. I outlined why Kathryn Smith and I had chosen to make a tea based on the 'unholy alliance' of two events: one being the British Council's Exhibition of Contemporary British Art which toured South Africa from 1947-8 and the other being, the murder of 'Bubbles' Schroeder in Johannesburg in 1948. As seen in Kathryn Smith's approach to the latter, these topics require a strategy of immersion into the social and cultural politics of the time as well as a great deal of speculation and investigation with the lack of comprehensive or consistent archives.
Kathryn's words towards the end of the session seem to sum up this motivation - of why we should look into history from the position of idiosynchratic detective: 'This story is a lens to understand the social milieu... and all the cultural products that the story has generated - myth, film, letters from the public - all of this stuff is really the interesting part about it.
'We're never going to actually reconstruct the event itself - the event is gone - but, to quote Michael Ward: "All societies inscribe their secrets and apparent natures on the objects of their material existence. The variety of acts of inscription is overwhelming in quantity and in kind. Some kinds of inscription are more formal and intentional than others. The more formal, the more susceptable to distortions and encoding. The more intentional, the more perhaps they lie. But these conceptions of formality and intentionality conceal and eagerness to surrender certain kinds of truths if they are approached with the right degree of cunning."'
With such a murky lens of a story, Kathryn was faced with the problem of what form it should take. Should it be a social history? How does one deal with the visual material? And what of Michael Ward's social milieu - as reflected by the press, the level of consent with readers and the contractual nature, according to Ward, between readers and writers around the truth: the repression of facts for the good of social cohesion amongst a white population - this is complex stuff! Kathryn advocated that we look for the absences via a 'history of efforts' to reinscribe certain versions of the story within public discourse. How can we move away from binaries of whodunnit? Rather look for the players and points of correlation.
Tracing these players and points of correlation has indeed required a degree of cunning in Kathryn's research over the last years. She began with discussing the 'problems' or rather creative differences arriving in the form of 'heresay' and anachronistic euphemisms running throughout witness and press reports after the mysterious murder of young 'glamour girl' 'Bubbles' Schroeder in 1948. The subsequent 'cultural products' of film and paperback fiction have designated the lower class German-South African 18 year-old girl's story as something similar to that of the American 'Black Dahlia' case.
These cultural inscriptions over 'Bubbles's' death and, of course, the inconsistencies between versions of the actual story keep us, said Kathryn, from ever being able to claim the act of fully reconstructing events of the time. The tremendous overwriting of the supposed perpetrator boys never actually charged and the total lack of imaging of 'Bubbles' herself as an actual victim, opens up the space for an artist to work. The only possible reconstruction is a dramatic one.
Setting that reconstruction in motion, Kathryn's presentation was particularly visual, including maps tracing Bubbles's final walk from a party late one night down Oxford Road on what had been the edge of Johannesburg; newspaper articles; soft-hued black-and-white portraits; crime-scene shots (in Bird Haven where Bubbles was found handbagless, with clean stockinged feet); book covers and magazine features. Of course, the bureaucratic paper trail in police archives is the bulk remainder of Bubbles's material inscription (as well as non-accessioned files discovered by Kathryn in the course of her research).
Kathryn used these images to track the varied and mingling lines making up the unweildy history of that fateful night-drive, as well as the subsequent 'hushing up' activities by the boys' well-connected families.
Kathryn detailed her quest, step by step in the perfect continuous tense of a real detective novel - steps which included conversations with a writer who'd contacted Bubbles's spirit through a medium, and contracting a freelance researcher who scoured the police and court archives looking for a postmortem and court transcript. None of what they found, down to the very material qualities of the letters, the natural bleaching which had occurred on the pages of those official files, is lost on Kathryn.
Bringing us to the present, Kathryn finished her presentation with images of the current development around the crime site - Bird Haven - and the state of Bubbles's gravestone. Kathryn had found one of the accused, now elderly, and had also identified a doctor who had known Bubbles. Her fantasy, she said, was to put these two characters into conversation with one another. But 'I am questioning the form of art as we know it - in relation to the form that this project should take. These images fit into another system of information...'
She then related her decisions about captioning in particular projects, and the reticence to label or classify images because of the kinds of default/fragmentory effects this might have on a viewer. How do we conjure a holistic environment? Perhaps it's in developing visual rather than textual codes. Also, how do you avoid the nostalgia and romance of the grainy newspaper image from that so typically 'Noir' period in 20th century history?
'It's about turning it,' said Kathryn, while still perhaps relying on that 'aesthetic base', as Andrew Putter called it. How could we play upon visual registers and the presumptions they bring about - letting the viewer engage in some of that dramatic reconstruction and thus continuing that 'history of efforts' with 'the right degree of cunning'?
For more background on the Ouma Lunch series and Clare Butcher's current research with the Centre for Curating the Archive, please see the ARC Ouma Lunch webpage.