The following interview was first published in Boot Print, which is available for download here. Other highlights in the magazine include an interview with the Guerilla Girls by Virginia McKenny and an with Tom Friedman. The following is an unedited version of the interview:

Robert Sloon: What interests me more than what you produce is how you work, and why you decided as individual artists to work under this umbrella. I think the best place to start is to ask how Doing It For Daddy started. Who initiated it? Where did you come from?

Linda Stupart: It’s quite a well-established mythology, I suppose. We read an article in Art South Africa called Doing it for Daddy (which is a bell hooks quotation) by Sharlene Kahn, which implied that there were all these evil white women that were continuing the hegemony of white maleness in the South African art world and they named all these people. Some of whom we really like. And seemed a bit ridiculous and very confrontational. And quite offensive.

Renee Holleman: And a little simplistic.

LS: And very simplistic. Especially when you at the way that quotation was taken very much out of the context of which bell hooks wrote it. And so we thought of writing an article, and then we thought of shouting, and then we thought it would be better to maybe just work together and make work.

RH: I think the important thing is we didn’t feel what was being said was overtly incorrect, but the way it was being articulated was overly simplistic. Essentially it was setting up a whole load of stereotypes around this idea of what white South African women were doing in the art world, as artists and as curators and in various different positions. It was representing a set of stereotypes. Part of what we thought of doing was to take on that stereotype with a degree of irony but also seriousness, and explore and expose another way of talking about the kinds of issues that had been brought up.

RS: And where did ‘we’ come from, though? Did we read the article together?

Bettina Malcolmess: It was at Michaelis School of Fine Art where we all were working and studying at the time. Linda, Renee and me.

RH: Sitting having a coffee one morning.

BM: Linda suggested the name. She said, “Well. Let’s start a collective called Doing It For Daddy.” Which was a really good name and seemed to hit the right tone, in terms of people not taking themselves too seriously in the South Africa art world, not talking about identity too much. It seemed the right time to play against those discourses.

LS: It was before Cape 06, which never happened. And it seemed like a good time to be working towards proposals because there was this big event.

BM: Which then set up our method as a working group, we work together within and against a bigger structure. It was the same for Spier Contemporary when we did that. It was a big art competition.

RH: It largely has informed the work subsequently, we’ve tended to maintain that working methodology.

LS: It’s site and event specific. We wouldn’t go and make a work and then look for somewhere to show it. It’s always been in reaction to a system that already exists.

RH: Which has made it end up largely performative.

RS: Does that differ from your working methodologies, generally, as individuals? Or does a collective lend itself to working in that way?

RH: Definitely, our individual praxes are within degrees similar, but also quite different. Obviously there are things that overlap. With the work Bettina is doing at the moment it is more explicit

BM: My work is more within that framework. Intervensionist, site specific performance

LS: I’ve always liked that with the collective I can make the kind of work I would never make on my own. In terms of playing with the art world, I’ve always enjoyed that kind of work that is political on some level, but never felt capable of making it myself. With the collective I can go into that.

RS: Why do you think a collective lends itself more to that though? Other South African collectives as well, like Avant Car Guard and Gugulective, find it easier to challenge, or play within the systems as a collective.

LS: You always have people backing you up.

BM: What do you mean?

LS: There’s two of them.

BM: (laughs) Safety in numbers.

RH: It is safety in numbers, but it also taking on issues bigger than one’s self… not that one doesn’t take on issues that are larger than oneself in one’s own work all the time anyway.

LS: I think between us we also have a lot more experience in theory and literature and all these things. I wouldn’t know enough to make the kind of work on my own. Bettina brings those things, Renee brings different things, so together you feel more comfortable doing it.

BM: It’s an interesting mix of, I guess, my theoretical background and then Renee’s really meticulous attention to materiality, which is great, and then Linda’s off-beat, very critical point of view on everything.

RS: Do you think you can identify those styles in the work?

LS: I think you can always see bits of us in each work that we make.

BM: I think sometimes what we’ve done is to play off against each other. So what we did for a work at the AVA [Association of Visual Arts] was to curate these three bands to perform a song, Sweet Virginia, for the curator, Virginia McKenny, who chose us. We each chose a performance group, and there were three different identities around those performances. You got a sense of each of our separate identities within the collective.

RH: I also think it is an enormously generative space. You bring three different people’s energy into a collaboration. I mean you’ve worked collaboratively?

RS: Umm. No. I hate collaborating. This is about as close as I get.

LS: I think that the work for the AVA was really nice because you could have these three different performances, and it was very obvious how I had my boyfriend, like a cute boy in this band, and then this person speaking, which was like Bettina.

RH: I always thought I should’ve probably curated a jazz band.

BM: You should have. Or a choir.

RH: That would have been more appropriate.

LS: But the angry girls were pretty rad.

RH: Not entirely inappropriate either.

RS: Do you find there is tension working together because you have three very different personalities? Is there a leadership structure?

RH: (laughs) They all listen to me.

RS: I mean how does the collaborative work on an effective level?

LS: We decided we should start driving more places, so we’re stuck in a small, enclosed environment.

BM: We’ve driven a lot to Stellenbosch. Our time on the N2.

RS: So ideas just come out of conversation?

RH: It is very conversational. Very much working through something, critiquing it, and then going away and thinking about it. What works and what doesn’t work.

LS: Our standard thing is we’d have a meeting and then we’d come up with all these ideas and be really excited. And then two days later someone would phone up say, “Well, that idea. It was kind of silly.” And I’d be, “I’ve been thinking that too,” and then we’d come back and do it again.

BM: It’s very democratic I think. I think we’re all good at different things, we bring different things to the process. It does sometimes take a while to agree.

RH: Some projects are easier than others.

BM: And we all do other work so we’re often busy doing other things at the same time.

RH: They invariably require more time and effort than one thinks.

LS: We’re not very good at making easy works.

BM: (laughs)No.

RH: No.

RS: With the success of Doing it for Daddy, winning the Spier Contemporary competition and now getting the Goodman Gallery to invite you onto shows, how does that effect your careers individually?

RH: I think we don’t we know yet.

LS: It’s tricky. I find it tricky, personally. I’ve been a critic and a writer, and an artist with Doing It For Daddy. No-one knows that I’ve made work on my own ever, which is depressing. It can be a bit difficult, especially when the work is so different from the Doing it for Daddy stuff. It’s like, “Hi, I also make this really angsty stuff about me.” It can be tricky. But it’s also nice because people do care sometimes.

RS: Has it been a bit of a launching pad?

BM: For me I have developed this mode of collaborative practise. I collaborate with a lot of people now.

RS: Doing it for Daddy was the first?

BM: Yes. I don’t think I would have done that otherwise. Renee and Linda finished their Masters degrees from the prize money. And I’ve been working on another project because of it. It’s enabling.

LS: I couldn’t have made any of my Masters work without that prize money from Spier. Ever.

RH: I think for me I’ve realized I’d like to carry on working collaboratively. In different scenarios perhaps as well. I enjoy the process. I suppose it’s a question I ask myself quite frequently, what is the relation between the two? What does it enable and what does it speak to? Where does the investment lie in terms of a practise that is different to the processes that we go through, which have been largely studio-based. I think there’s a recursive feedback, in some kind of way, engaging in a terrain that you are a part of on some other level. I make a particular kind of work that I’m engaged in by virtue of being a practitioner within this country and this environment. There’s other things that I’m engaged with that are outside of my own individual practice. There’s a kind of feedback between those two by virtue of the fact that I think some of the things we work with are pertinent to me as a practitioner, as a female practioner, as a white practitioner. It’s something that challenges and re-establishes that position more broadly, than my own practice does. It’s indirect but there’s definitely a conversation. I think it’s been interesting, and this is something Linda and I have been speaking about recently, having, being engaged in dealing with a political forum essentially. Looking at the dynamics and politics of institutions that I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing alone, because its not the predominant thrust of my interests. But I am interested in it. And it’s an opportunity for me to investigate those things.

LS: I’ve always separated practice and theory, in a very big kind of way. I write politically and critically, and then I make work that is completely different. It’s quite nice to have this collective that bridges those things. It allows me to engage with those other interests.

RS: You talk quite a lot about theory in regards to Doing it for Daddy, and you say now it’s a more direct relationship between theory and practice. What do you see as Doing It For Daddy’s theoretical standing?

BM: I think it’s a critical practice. It’s a praxis in the sense that it is a practice that applies critique to whatever structure it’s working within. So at Spier, when we did the tour of the Spier Estate. instead of making work that worked in the gallery space, we take people outside of the gallery into the context of the estate, and we try to evoke invisible histories and narratives within that space. Which were actually fictional. Essentially what we do is disturb a particular point of view and the idea of a contained gallery space and edge outside and bring the outside inside. It’s about exposing the structure within which we work, whatever that may be, social, political or an art structure. It’s the same thing as writing a critique or writing an article which is critical. It’s a practice which is critical. That’s very much the way I have been working generally and it pretty much is born out of Doing It For Daddy in many ways. Instead of just being a writer and a teacher, I suddenly found a space in which I could be something else.

LS: A way of applying it.

BM: For me, I’ve worked more and more in performance because of it. But it’s kind of by mistake. When Linda says she writes, sees herself as a writer, that’s separate from her own practice. You can see why that can come together in a practice like Doing It For Daddy’s.

RS: Doing it for Daddy also implies, not a certain amount feminism but that it is a all female collective. How important is that? The collective started off as a reaction to this article, which was about femaleness. But now it’s not necessarily, the work is not necessarily following those lines. The critical part of it isn’t a feminist critique.

RH: I think it’s an interesting thing, because it is implicit in a sense. We’re constantly reassessing and both reforming that idea and distancing ourselves from it in some way. What is maintained from that original idea, is a continual re-engagement. We were having conversations at the time around post-feminist artists. Were we having those conversation?

LS: I’m always having conversations about post-feminist artists. I think we had that exact conversation. What you have to realize is that being actors in the art world, in this art world, as female artists in the Cape Town art world you are taking a feminist stand point if you want to or not.

BM: You think so?

LS: Totally, look at everyone else. Look at the people who engage with this kind of work, like the critical stance, like Avant Car Guard, they’re all these boys that engage with it in a particular kind of way. I think just being this collective, that is visible, that is all women, and acting in a way that isn’t scared, without being confrontational, I think that takes quite a standpoint in itself.

BM: Why is that a feminist standpoint?

LS: No, I just mean a standpoint of being women, and being noticeably women. Because we are and there aren’t that many about. Look at the Bright Young Things, how many of many of them are boys, and they are all the same: these cool boys. And just existing I think people will notice we are women and how womenlike we are, because we are there. I think the art world here is very male still.

RH: I wouldn’t think that’s a particularly South African thing.

BM: But I don’t think we have taken a feminist stand explicitly.

RH: But I think that was exactly the point.

BM: It implies a certain complicity when you call yourself Doing it For Daddy.

RS: That you get more attention as well, being all female?

BM: What was funny, at the end of our Spier tour, I overheard the judges, Jay Pather speaking to the judges, and I overheard him saying, “Yes they’re all lesbians.” Which is obviously in our favour, that you are the sub-group of the sub-group. That they declare us that.

RH: Which is not entirely true, for the record.

BM: It’s not that we are entirely anti-feminist, or feminist but we are under-feminist.

LS: We’re sub-feminists. We don’t feel the need to take a feminist stance with every work that we are doing. You can make meaningful work that deals with identity without having to push specific stereotypes, prescribed ideals of what your identity should be. Instead of saying, “Yes we are three women and we’re going to bleed a lot, and be angry.”

BM: And work with water.

LS: “And work with water.”

RH: Not that we don’t want to.

LS: Not that there is anything wrong with angry feminists who bleed. That we can make that kind of work without resorting to the stereotypes.

RH: It’s an engaged but occasional practice too. We are so involved in doing other things, but we do come together and find these interesting spaces, that enable us to explore things. It’s a new thing everytime, we don’t, like Avant Car Guard, have this clear identity of ourselves; this post-punk…

LS:… hot boys.

BM: We don’t have a brand.

RH: We are a bit more low-key, looser. Bettina described it as rugged conceptualism. It’s a very distinct conceptual and theoretical framework, which is applied loosely. Not that it’s unfocussed, but it doesn’t have that clear identity to it.

LS: It follows site and event specific models.

BM: And it has a very specific materiality to it.

LS: We like things.

BM: We like objects, and building things. And scaffolding.

LS: We love scaffolding.

BM: And we’re very fond of high trees.

RH: And water, you forgot to mention water.

LS: Just like the elements really.

RS: Do you feel like have a loose membership?

BM: We’re looking for a man.

LS: We need a daddy.

RS: I’ll be your daddy

BM: Virginia McKenny is our daddy. Sorry.

LS: I think when we started working, we surprised ourselves with our capacity for making
things. These things just worked and it was quite amazing.

RH: They don’t just work!

LS: I don’t know, I mean that people were so ready to engage. Just is a bad word. Would we take new members?

BM: Yes. We were actually thinking of working a bit with Marilyn Martin, who is now clearly dispossessed and wander around Cape Town aimlessly.

LS: Wandering the streets.

RH: I think we should just drink tea a lot.

BM: We should drink tea with Marilyn.

LS: We’re nice white women, that’s what we do.

BM: Making cutouts

LS: Scrapbooking, we could totally scrapbook with Marilyn Martin.

RH: “My happy days at the National Gallery”, with the little scissors with the zig zags.

RS: What’s up ahead, what works are you making, where are you going?

LS: Well, we’re on this show at Goodman. A group show called Nation State.

RH: But we don’t really know after that.

LS: It’s not like we wait around, but we do a little. There has to be an event for us to work with.

BM: In that sense that is why it is a critical practice. Not a practice which perpetuates itself, one that can be commodified. We’re not going to make any money out of Doing It For Daddy. It works to undo the structures which it works within.

LS: We need a context always.

RH: Not that we couldn’t do it without it, we’ve never really tried.