A Story of Where We Came From & Where We Are Going

This article was first published in the Mail & Guardian, March 2011

On the cover of the catalogue of the survey exhibition South African Photography 1950-2010, on show at the Pretoria Art Museum, is an image that is by now familiar and dear to South Africans.

Bob Gosani’s Treason Trial: End of Round One 1957 shows Nelson Mandela in his boxing trunks with hands bandaged, sparring with professional featherweight Jerry Moloi on the rooftop of a newspaper building in downtown Jo’burg.

After long days of sitting in the dock during the preliminary hearings of the treason trial, Mandela would keep himself fit and focused by boxing at Moloi’s gym in Orlando every day.


Curated by the Seippel Gallery, in conjunction with the Bailey African History Archive, this exhibition charts a visual history of South Africa through three distinct periods: apartheid 1950 to 1976, ­struggle 1976 to 1994, and freedom 1994 to 2010.

A repository of memory
In the past 60 years the lens of South African photography has had a lot to look at, with apartheid and the struggle looming large in the country’s visual imagination. Yet the virtue of the medium is that it serves as a repository of memory; a reminder of who we once were, where we have come from and where we are going. In this way it not only records the bad but also reveals the resilience of the human spirit.

When looking at such a collection one is immediately struck by the sensation of gazing back through time, of looking at the faces of our predecessors. What is most striking about the exhibition is this human presence it gives to such a politically charged past.

Coupled with the fraught ambiguity being faced in the present, it provides a show that encapsulates the depth and breadth of the contemporary South African experience.

Alf Kumalo’s portrait of a sprightly Hugh Masekela doing a star jump with trumpet in hand in Sofiatown 1956 celebrates the vitality of the urban jazz culture of the time. Ranjith Kally’s image of Miriam Makeba with two women (1957) portrays the stylish sophistication of an era that was soon to end.

Impending dislocation
This undertone is emphasised in Peter Magubane and Bob Gosani’s two images, both titled What Will Happen in the Western Areas, which address the question of impending dislocation that was soon to end this jubilant time as the residents of Sophiatown were relocated to Meadowlands.

Viewing the section about the struggle, one is struck by the heightening prevalence of violence that was to characterise South African society during this period. Appropriately beginning this grouping is Sam Nzima’s now ubiqutous series of a fatally wounded Hector Pieterson being carried through the streets of Soweto by Mbuyiswa Makhubu after the student uprisings in 1976.

Silent reflection
Yet these representations of extreme violence are offset by other, quieter images such as Gideon Mendel’s portrait of a teenage boy in the back of a police van. During the states of emergency in the 1980s it was illegal to photograph political gatherings, leading to Mendel’s incarceration with the boy. As he grips the bars along the windows, the nameless boy’s still gaze almost challenges the photographer, issuing a helpless plea and providing a moment for pause and reflection.

This theme of silent reflection seems to carry through to the next section titled Freedom. As Wiebeke Ratzburg observes, South African photography draws its significance from a political dimension. Yet the politics of this dimension have changed. The struggle is over and a new democratic dispensation has begun. With this momentous shift, so too has the visual language of photography also found itself adapting to the challenges of representing an era in the wake of the human tragedy we call apartheid.


George Hallet’s portrait of Jann Turner standing behind Eugene de Kok at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a chilling representation of Turner coming face to face with the man the media dubbed “Prime Evil”. She asked De Kok at his trial if he knew who killed her father, anti-apartheid activist Rick Turner, who was murdered by an unidentified policeman in front of her. In the image a seated De Kok stares blankly ahead with an ­expression empty of remorse as Turner gazes at him.

Meditative approach
But the documentary tradition itself seems to have taken on a quieter, more meditative approach as the task of portraying the country has sought new avenues. Notable in this section is where the first traces of colour are seen, albeit in different guises.


David Goldblatt’s empty Northern Cape landscapes seem to stretch forever, showing the vast expanse of countryside ignored by the straight documentary characterised by earlier eras.

Mikhael Subotzky’s image of a prison voter in the 2004 national election holding up his ballot appeals to the inalienable right to participate in a democracy paid for by the lives of so many. In the visual narrative of the exhibition, this image captures the course South Africa has run to arrive at freedom. Looked at in context, the ballot paper held by the prisoner reminds us of our past, speaks of our present and beckons to our future.

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-03-18-story-of-where-we-came-from-are-going/

Jo Ractliffe: Photographer In Focus

This article was first published in the Mail & Guardian, March, 2011

When I arrive at Jo Ractliffe’s home nestled away in Bez Valley, she is getting a new cupboard installed. Perhaps “new cupboard” isn’t really an appropriate description of the gargantuan piece of furniture that is slowly finding its way in pieces through the front door. It is an antique she picked up down the road that has been taken apart to fit through the front door. The thing is massive, stretching from wall to wall in her bedroom.

Mr Pilgerman and Jo Ractliffe. (photo credit: Lisa Skinner)

The bustle throughout the house gives me time to take in her space, to marvel at what she has on her walls and, more importantly, to investigate her music collection. An almost-kept secret is her self-made mixtapes music compilation, titled My Killer Country. The series stretches to volumes and has also inspired a book of the same title by her close friend, the author Mike Nicol.

With titles like Driving the Dark Heart and Love, Madness and Murder, these mixtapes are renowned for their mythical abilities to inspire and narrate the surreal and the macabre, albeit with a distinctive sense of humour. Photographer and friend Dave Southwood describes them as “Jo’s boozy calling cards. They are like a business card dipped in whisky and given to the wrong clients”.

Speaking of her love of music, Ractliffe recounts how once on a trip with veteran photographer David Goldblatt she put on Johnny Cash. The crooning dismayed Goldblatt, but he confided later that he was now listening to Cash while on the treadmill at the gym.

Goldblatt’s relationship with Ractliffe has been a significant part of her photographic career, one that she describes as an almost adversarial performance that they act out both in public and in private. They have travelled together and he has become a mentor.

Ractliffe says that, although their work might take different forms, their understanding of photography is aligned.

Speaking of this understanding, Ractliffe glances at the digital camera perched cumbersomely on the table in front of her, which belongs to Mail & Guardian photographer Lisa Skinner. “I would not even know what to do with that,” she says.

Sense of ghostliness
We stroll through the garden to her studio, where she shows me around her workspace, equipped with a darkroom. The beauty of her photographs lies hidden in their analogue quality, in the materiality of the print itself. When I remark about a favourite work, Microlite from the reShooting Diana series taken in the early Nineties, Ractliffe offers to show it to me again, from her portfolio printed by the late master printer Andrew Meintjes. The photograph is of the back of a woman’s head and shoulders and there is an indistinct image of a microlite above. It is remarkable for its tonal gradients of black and grey, for the sense of ghostliness it inspires.


Not wanting to get too close I admire the velvet textures at a safe distance. It’s just as well because Ractliffe tells me the picture’s surface can lift with the mere brush of a finger.

Back in the house, safely away from the clinical serenity of the studio, the colossal cupboard is safely installed.

The topic of conversation drifts away from photography and Ractliffe speculates about how she plans to fill her new addition. She points to a pile of shoeboxes waiting dutifully in the passage. “I love shoes,” she says, beaming. Glancing under the table at mine she pulls a face -- “Dock-siders!” she says, laughing. “I prefer boots.”

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-03-14-photographer-in-focus/

In the Wake of a Passage of Rites

This was first published in the Mail & Guardian in February, 2011

Contemporary South African art is full of mythological beasts with a long and increasingly involved and complicated history. One of those pre-eminent beasts is undeniably the mythological character of Wayne Barker.

photo credit: Oupa Nkosi, M&G

Yet labels and categories are awkward things -- for one they tend to be radically reductive and often dismissive, with mythological status being as much a burden as it is a veneration.

So often Barker has been referred to as the "bad boy" or "black sheep" of South African art, with his own gallerist, Baylon Sandri, describing him as "rebellious, belligerent, agitative and confrontational". But this oversight, which can be attributed to Barker's quintessentially "antic disposition", fails to address the sensitivity of his production in terms of the significance of his historical relevance.

Barker's retrospective exhibition, Super Boring, which debuted at the Smac Gallery in Stellenbosch last year and opened at the Standard Bank Gallery in downtown Jo'burg last week, charts a mammoth career that spans more than two decades, beginning in the late 1980s during the era of resistance art.

Since those early days, the agenda of contemporary South African art has nevertheless shifted. But the direction of this shift still today goes unrealised. The shadow of our tarnished history continues to present a burden of literalism -- a preoccupation with the past that limits the scope of addressing where we are now and what lies beyond.

Though Barker's work is historically situated, it manages to avoid this trap. Rather, what is presented is a type of visual diary of Barker's self-described "rights of passage" through such a traumatic history. Attesting to this is the two-part installation, Memory/Erasure, in the main foyer on the bottom floor of the gallery, which consists of a certificate of discharge from the South African Defence Force dated 1985.

'Good neighbourliness'
Barker, once a competent footballer by his own admittance, was rendered unfit for military service because of his penchant for marching like Charlie Chaplin, an act he maintained for two weeks.

The other component of this work is a sculptural multimedia installation that consists of a modified washing line draped with sheets of Fabriano. As the washing line spins, two projections from either side of the darkened room beam images on to the makeshift screen, which is perforated by cut out shapes of skulls.

On the right, archival footage of SADF soldiers carrying out the brutalities of the apartheid state is interspersed with the notorious "good neighbourliness" speech by HF Verwoerd. In juxtaposition, serene ocean-scapes taken from Robben Island beam from the opposite side of the room, creating an ambivalent expression of the triumph of the human spirit.

The final and perhaps most stirring element of this work is the musical score of Bob Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door, which encapsulates the tumultuous conditions of change South Africa has experienced.

Walking up the stairs of the gallery one is then struck by the sheer enormity and range of Barker's work. In the centre atrium hang four monumental canvasses that on closer inspection are in fact beaded. Working with local crafters, Barker has managed to translate his painterly interpretations of Pierneef into strung glass beads that give a unique incandescence to the surface of the image.

Speaking of his relationship and use of Pierneef's images, Barker says that he has finally made peace with the painter's legacy. Early examples of his interpretations of Pierneef's landscapes present eroded and destroyed surfaces in which Barker inserts an active presence on the otherwise absent and passive terrains.

Much of his work is characterised by a distinct element of pop iconography which is put to use to express the intangibilities of capitalism and colonialism on the African continent. The Coca-Cola motif is a ubiquitous example of this and appears in many of the works from the mid-1990s. Describing its presence Barker tells of the incongruity he experienced on a trip to Mozambique where hospitals were full of vending machines yet doctors were absent.

Thus the pop-inspired origins of Barker's work tell a very different tale to that of the American movement born in the era of high modernism. His appropriation speaks of a neo-colonial experience of capitalism on the African continent, telling a tale of complicity and negotiating his own role in such a cycle.

Yet what would one mythological beast be without any others and without a fantastical landscape in which to inhabit and live out this jaded task of searching for where we are now? Barker's work is a testament to such a fantasy, it speaks of the consequence of being South African, and longing to know what and where exactly that is.

http://mg.co.za/article/2011-02-14-in-the-wake-of-a-passage-rites/

Arting Against Thunder

This article first appeared in the Mail & Guardian, December 2010

It’s a sweaty and humid 32°C on Roeland Street, just down the road from Parliament in Cape Town. Stuart Bird is thinly veiled in sweat -- Kirsty Cockerill, his significant other, looks on in concern as he wrestles a jackhammer unforgivingly on the floor of the YOUNGBLACKMAN.


The YOUNGBLACKMAN, a collaboration between enfant terrible Ed Young and novelist Matthew Blackman, is conveniently situated next to Roeland Liquors and the Book Lounge. It has been open since September last year and has made a significant impact on the local art scene -- providing an alternative, non-commercial gallery space for artists to realise projects that would otherwise be untenable in their ­commercial counterparts.

Vex and Siolence, a three-part collaboration by Bird, Belinda Blignaut and Linda Stupart, is possibly their most radical show to date that goes to extreme lengths to address the function of the white cube. Conceived as a performance, the gallery is closed to the public with the results being visible only through the windows from the street.

This is not an unfamiliar trend at the YOUNGBLACKMAN. Some months ago in a similar performance the infamous agent provocateur of South African art, Kendell Geers, re-enacted a work, Untitled 1993, originally made nearly two decades ago when he exhibited several bricks on the gallery floor. The only difference this time is that the bricks have found their way through the windows, leaving their shattered remains as testament to the event.

In many ways Vex and Siolence is similar in its attempts to question the limits of the gallery space, although its collaborative nature presents a richer viewing experience that extends and develops the various artists’ concerns. Viewed through a thin film of water running down the windows, resembling a sheet of tears, the heaps of rubble left inside by Bird’s relentless jackhammering are coated with sticky globules of a waxy looking substance that is actually boiled-down Chappies chewing gum.

There is something physical about this collaboration, attesting to the corporeal fragility of the architecture of the white cube. The ripped- up floor seems to expose the pinky fragments of the internal innards of what lies beneath. The weeping windows attest to a kind of pain, an agony betraying the rupture that this expression attempts to represent.

Yet this type of work, with its origins in conceptualism, is sometimes difficult to grasp, as could be seen by the landlord’s startled and bemused reaction during the show. The day before the show was due to open Mr M arrived on a routine visit to drop off the lease agreement to one of his neighbouring properties, Osmans, a small café owned by Mr Osman. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” exclaimed a clearly distressed Mr M. Clearly the precedent established by the gallery hasn’t left a favourable taste in his mouth. “First the windows, now this!”

Young ducks for cover into Osmans as the semi-toothless grin of Bird is left to defend art in the face of the growing rage of Mr M while a crowd of spectators gathers.

The ability of art to question the environment of its mediation is one that separates it from advertising. Although it might be genuinely unintelligible to the public, this mystique promises to keep art fresh and unadulterated by the guises of capitalism that demand reproducibility.

Yet the gnawing question of the spectacle remains -- in a society in which sex and violence have become so quotidian that shock has become the norm, what can be made of this intervention? One wonders whether the destructive energy of ripping apart the white cube, tempered by the sticky-sweet surface of the molten chewing gum and viewed through a veil of tears, can be seen as a metaphor for the consumptive impulse of a society driven by its primal urges.

On the other hand, and perhaps more pressingly, what is of concern is the packaging of such performance. The containment of such a gesture threatens to nullify the critical impact that the work proposes, giving it a characteristic conceptual austerity. But what rescues the show is its material tangibility. There is no veneer. Rather, the works communicate systematically with one another in a seductive interplay that entices curiosity and reinvigorates looking.

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-12-16-arting-against-thunder

Context Woven into a History of Dislocation

This article first appeared in the Mail & Guardian, November, 2010

"Whereabouts are you from?" is an increasingly common question in today's shrinking globalised world. But in Dufftown, in the northeast of Scotland, the accent makes the question sound more like "furry boots ye fae?"


And it is this peculiarity that is at the core of artist Dan Halter's recent work produced for the Glenfiddich artists residency programme.

Selected with artists from the United States, Canada, India, Taiwan, South Korea and China, Halter has spent three months with that unlikely backdrop creating work that speaks about severed roots and belonging to nowhere while being a citizen of the world at the same time. Whereabouts are you from indeed.

Clad proudly in what looks unmistakeably like traditional Scottish tartan, complete with sporran and furry boots, Halter poses next to the source of his inspiration -- the ubiquitous plastic mesh "refugee" bag. Known locally as "Zimbabwe bags", they too have an international flavour.

In Nigeria they are called "Ghana must go bags", in the US "Chinatown totes" and in the United Kingdom "Bangledeshi bags".

There is even a German equivalent that translates as "Turkish suitcase".

Translation of myths
In Halter's work they embody the essence of how to question and translate the myths of such origins. Halter (33), born in Zimbabwe and now living and working in Cape Town, is no stranger to such issues of displacement and his work deals with issues of territory and immigration.

Being in Scotland presented him with the opportunity of further exploring these themes by geographically localising their context.

The similarity of the red, black and white checked pattern of the bag, which bears a striking resemblance to Scottish tartan, led Halter to the famous Johnstons of Elgin, where he commissioned the pattern to be woven out of wool into a kilt, which he plans to have registered as his very own brand of tartan.

Besides the local regalia, he made a Scottish version of the bag with tartan, transforming it into a luxurious piece of luggage.

This tartan was also the object of another installation in which Halter used more than 1 000 barrels from the distillery's cask compound as pixels to make up the pattern, which is visible from Google Earth. The title is simply the geographic co-ordinates of the installation, 57°27'55.24"N 3°07'45.33"W.



On the surface, what is an almost childish exercise in join-the-dots has a deeper significance -- none of the barrels has a generic, homogenous history.

The imprint
Each one is different. Some are white oak from North America and used only once for the distilling of bourbon. Others are a darker variety, from Spain, for example, used for sherry.

Halter's tartan imprint speaks of a fleeting belonging in a global world filled with the transience that consumption demands. These wooden vessels, from far away, are used to brew liquor for export, to be sent, almost ironically, away again.

Like the refugee bags, which are used to transport people's worldly possessions across borders, the now-discarded barrels, arranged into Halter's now signature pattern, address the trauma of a very real condition of forced migration and exile.

Halter was recently lambasted by some sectors of the art world cognoscenti for "fiddling like Nero while Rome burned" in his recent show, Double Entry, at Whatiftheworld in Cape Town, but his recent work nevertheless displays a subtle observation of the intricacies of not belonging.

Halter admits that "the country I grew up in no longer exists". Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. But with the problematic history that has come to characterise Zimbabwe's recent turbulent political economy, it seems that such a situation could lead only to a form of detached reflection.

Having suffered, like Nero's victims, at the hands of Zanu-PF agents in Zimbabwe earlier this year during his participation at the Harare International Festival of Arts, where he was, like so many Zimbabweans, detained and beaten, could possibly account for Halter's calculated and somewhat detached meditation.

'The commodification of pain and suffering'
The visual arts today, most noticeably in South Africa, have become characterised by the commodification of pain and suffering. Burdened by history, it seems doomed to perpetuate debates about where we have come from, not where we are going to. Halter's work, which could easily slip into the former category, nevertheless resists such easy conscriptions.

It is surprising how such a simple pattern can communicate so much, to speak of lives altered and histories lost through the movement of people from one country to the next.

Yet there is something surprisingly regenerative about this recycled imprint that appeals to the vitality of the human spirit in its capacity to transcend the tyrannical circumstance of place.

The simple everyday nature of these bags, which represent entire communities of people displaced, forced into exile, makes Halter's work immediately accessible and conceptually rich.

This imprint of the barrels, visible from Google's all-seeing satellites, speaks of a marked landscape in which region is no longer disconnected and isolated but rather is intrinsic to the notion of being a citizen of the world at large.

As much as the bags, Halter's presence is now ubiquitous, reinvigorating the question, "furry boots ye fae?"

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-11-17-context-woven-into-a-history-of-dislocation

Charles Maggs at the AVA

This post first appeared on Artthrob, October, 2008

Trading in the currency of the 'other' has become a common motif in much of contemporary South African art, bordering on rapacious. This tactic, employed by artists to highlight the fraught position of South African identity, in many instances functions as a deferred alibi, merely reinstating the awkward power relations which the work(s) aim to critique. Occasionally however, something arises that transcends the hegemonic status of the self and other, moving beyond the trite pluralism of contemporary production. One such instance of this is Charles Maggs' recent show at the AVA entitled 'Zombie'.

The narrative of 'Zombie' reads as an investigation into the liminal condition of dislocation that power serves to perpetuate. The choice of title, taken from a Fela Kuti song, points to the precarious nature of such a threshold; neither living nor dead, Maggs' characters operate between worlds, between the disenfranchised and the privileged, in a trade of incommensurable vulnerability. In Protection, a video work, we see edited samplings from the American television series CHiPS in which two highway patrolmen cruise aimlessly through a montage of landscapes. The menacing soundtrack suggests a darker side to this perpetual banality, where the cyclical nature of this routine is severed by Maggs' use of cuts. As he suggests, in a world of 'globalised fear', the work serves to function as 'a reflection of a symptom rather than the condition itself'.

Here Maggs subverts the notion of protection to comment on the way power perversely and invisibly shapes and influences society. This system is however revealed as essentially fragile and self-destructive. As the video draws to a close one of the policemen crashes into a parked car. The repetitive looping of the shot in slow motion reinforces the fragility of what Maggs terms 'the potential of the accident'.

This theme is explored further in the series of digital photographic prints entitled Victim/Suspect. Here Maggs investigates a case of mistaken identity that resulted in the accidental shooting of Brazilian ex-patriot Jean Charles de Menezes in a London tube station. As his point of departure Maggs takes the composite image of de Menezes mistaken by the English police for terrorist suspect Osman Hussain and then 'finishes' what he describes as a 'frankly shoddy piece of photoshopping'.The result is four portraits of an amalgamated identity, each varying in specific and individual nuanced ways. Victim 1 and 2 feature a black rectangle over the mouth effectively serving to gag, thereby creating the 'silenced other'. The Suspect series conversely features faces blinded by a rectangle across the eyes that Maggs terms the 'obliterated other'.

In this investigation of 'amplified otherness' Maggs speaks of how such an exercise 'obliterates the historic or specific identity of de Menezes after he has been physically killed'. By completing the cycle and articulating the fear and paranoia expressed through the presence of the now hyperreal other, Maggs attempts to assert an albeit now displaced agency. This eulogy thus gives a literal and somewhat perverse face to this paranoia, exposing a level of discomfort in the ease with which it is continuously accepted.

The final work, Monologue #8, can be read as a meta-narrative on the concerns Maggs raises. Here the viewer is confronted with Maggs effectively talking to himself. Two video screens side by side present opposing profiles of the artist communicating in a form of frequently incomprehensible rambling. Shot in two scenes, Monologue #8 interrogates the interiority of the self, which sees an almost schizophrenic interaction that resists literal interpretation.

Cut into two scenes, the video ends with a deflated 'I hardly know you anymore', suggesting an unresolved surrender to the polemics raised by the other works. Each scene opens with the question: 'Have you been here before?' indicating a reminiscent and dislocated self. The disjunctive conversation never seems to run in cogniscent trajectory and thus seems partially disconnected. This irresolution is illustrated at the end of the first scene when character B posits, 'If these realms could resolve themselves we would no longer be at the mercy of temporal shifts.'

The mercy of temporal shifts is exactly what this exhibition captures. In exposing the ephemeral position of the self which, at the mercy of mechanisms of control and power from an invisible and reticent master, becomes permanently at odds with its own conception, 'Zombie' gives form to this condition of absence. In so doing the impetus of this exhibition is, at least, in attempting to forge a process of disambiguation from a seemingly benign field of inquiry.

http://www.artthrob.co.za/08oct/reviews/ava.html

One Night, On My Way Out of Woodstock

This post first appeared on Art Heat, Monday, July 06, 2009

With a feint painterly breath sitting next to me I drive out of Woodstock, along Lower Main road. As I approach The House of Rasputins I glance into the rear-view mirror and, in the roaring din of headlights, I notice an old white golf being driven by the silhouetted outline of Matthew Blackman. Driving cautiously I sense his imminent impatience, he belts past into oncoming traffic, the engine of his stoic VW speeding him to his fateful destination. He is a syndrome of our times, intoxicated by the glory of our absent pursuits.

Like the Zombie of Sloon standing at the bottom of Commercial Street, in front of a misty Telkom, just short of the now dead Studio 2666, Blackman approaches a seemingly liminal end, and so too, a beginning. Like the end of his night at Whatiftheworld, a new, untold beginning awaits him, at the Kimberly Hotel.


I never ventured that far on this fate-fuelled night. Before the highway bridge I turn up, and instead of driving past the castle, opt for the gentler route, through District Six. I always take this route coming out of Woodstock. For starters the traffic is better towards the end of the day. And at night, the barren landscape of District Six, haunted by Cape Town’s disenfranchised ghosts gives me some comfort, reminding me that all is not well in the province of the Western Cape.


Now we are a fishing village. A town perched at the Southernest tip of Africa, hemmed in by the Atlantic winds that fan us with their bitter gusts. This winter Maggs must have felt that breeze, and cringed at that the cold waters that tide us by. Watching his edited version of The Shipping News I felt these icy gales, and shivered at the drowning Coyle, gasping for air, losing his way to the surface, along the shore of that isolated rock, Newfoundland.

As Maggs’ figures seemed trapped in their own incomprehensibility, Sloon’s find themselves enclosed in their own fictive constructions. They are shrouded by their own axiomatic reliance’s. Similar to the jaded James Bond, tormented by his own inner melancholic apprehension, Sloon’s aim is to exorcise his own ghosts. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Darth Vader stand as spectres, ominously guarding the soul of Sloon in the world beyond, the world before and the world yet to come.

What then will finally keep us together? The bomb, as Alien and Predator suggest? Perhaps here is the living presents link with that other fictive world. That thing that reminds us of our final mortality, of our own making that has the absolute and dreadful power to undo.

On the edge of town now I feel a foreign, desolate sensation. A fire blazes beneath the bridge, huddled figures gathered in its warmth. The buildings slowly dissipate as the streetlights now illuminate only piles of rubble in amongst the empty grassland; the mosque that guards over the east city precinct, turning its reticent shoulder.

We never were really there. The landscape will remain. We people it only briefly with the promise to occupy it later as those ghosts Maggs and Sloon conjure. This is our responsibility. How we people such a terrain, in our transient time, is as much our doing as it is our undoing. Such are the opportunities between life and death. To learn to live then, and to do it, finally. Nothing could be more, nothing could be less.

The Dust On My Feet

This post first appeared on Art Heat, February 04, 2009

For a while, just a little while, the dust in-between my toes belonged to me. For just that little while that dust caked in-between my toes was home, my only home. It was my sanctuary, the deluge of my existence.

Humanity is, has and will always be a fragile thing. Maybe that is humanity’s ultimate status: fragility. How corrupt we can be and ultimately are, is perhaps what makes us most human. The good is defined only by the bad. I battle to see any good in humanity anymore, let alone in art. Turn on the news, turn the leaves of the daily paper, turn the corner of the gallery and what you’ll find is decay. Decay of the human condition.

Art has become an unwitting vehicle for this decay. It has become the metaphorical mirror that artists hold up to the world. Yet there is something sinister about the reflections we see before us. The metaphors are jaded; jaded by our own narcassitic compulsions to look and see and finally to be seen.

Artists, at the same time as they show us our humanity, our failings, they also issue something of themselves into the frame. That’s the drive of art. Why do people create? Perhaps it is to externalise some feeling, some thought, or just to externalise the self. A desperate plea to some kind of identity other to the ‘I’. Some ‘thing’ beyond the trifling being, some kind of memorialised sentiment that, once created, will have a life independent of its master.

Yet this life will never be independent of its referent. Even when art takes as its subject matter itself, it is never free of its shadow; the object that it creates.

I came across this shadow, this object, twice during the past week. Lets call it the other for convenience. I was confronted, explicitly, with the other at the VANSA 20/20 during Dan Halters presentation. Rather than speaking himself Halter chose to present some twenty Zimbabwean refugees to tell their tales of coming to South Africa. As the tales of rape, extortion and death followed I was emotionally bewildered at the desperation of humanity on display.



This too bothered me. Humanity on display. What is the everyday reality usually circumvented by the present audience was suddenly inescapable. It was glaring in its actuality. Feeling uncomfortably like spectacle, I questioned the ethics of listening, wondering on the effect of these testimonies, finally questioning Halters intentions. The applause after each account sending shivers down my spine.

But here there where no objects. Each tale was imbued with personality. As some read and others joked about the ‘easy way through’, some told of leaving behind mothers and sisters who packed the last foodstuffs in the house for the journey. Here the everyday was the haunting shadow of the subject. The object resigned to the bitter human experience being conveyed.

This stood in sharp contradistinction to Ashleigh McLean’s presentation on the new show ‘The Status of Greatness’ at Whatiftheworld by muso fashion photographer extraordinaire Xander Ferreira. Embodying the persona of Gazelle, Ferreira inserts himself into the frame as a mock Mobutu wannabe, clad in the ‘recourse to ethnicity’ regalia of the former dictator. Glancing at the images and then to the faces of the previous presentees I shuddered at the twist of the knife that this satire presented.



There was nothing of the benevolent testimonies before. They had been replaced by a mocking assertion of the self, which addressed the other only through direct appropriation. The narrative of power in Ferreira’s project became glaring apparent in all its brutality. Suddenly satire here was revealed to be a cruel weapon, a double edged sword on which it’s easy to fall.

Getting home I washed the dust off my feet, wondering if I ever truly possessed it or if maybe I was just borrowing it.

A Literature of the Eye

This post first appeared on Art Heat, Thursday, January 29, 2009

Actually Sloon, it’s the University of KZN, Pietermaritzburg. From one small town to another it seems. And yes it’s true, I do have long ear hair. It’s how I get through doors, like a radar. And I do like Jameson, with ice – that’s entropy.

I’m in the heart of the labyrinth, stalking the minotaur; it’s Pieter Hugo’s ‘Nollywood’ at Michael Stevenson.

Photographers are the worst breed. Notorious liars the lot of them. Photography is a medium literally invented for lying, for telling half truths, for presenting tiny parts of the world in all their empirical grandeur. It’s the ‘truth’ factor of photography – that inherent representational realism – that really helps to confuse matters. We see what was once actually there, what once really occurred. Like that writing in light Sontag loves to talk about.

And here is where the perversity comes in. Writing with light is an awesome responsibility. It occurs twofold, both to the thing you're taking a picture of and to the viewer that will later glance over your image. That’s photography’s fidelity.

But that was the days when writing in light meant just that, actually burning an image onto film and then to paper, when little silver particles exposed to light would yield a recognisable image, one filled with all the corporeality of the event. For a little while time stood still.

But then again, photographs are only a very tiny part of the world, slices of time particular to where the lens was pointed. I suppose that’s the real joy of looking at a picture; seeing a different time and ultimately, a different world.

So, back in the heaving labyrinth I’m trying to get a drink. The Stevenson, with it’s flagrant capitalistic orientations demands that you pay for your grog. I suppose they have every right to but, as a student, it kind of kills the fun of an opening, glugging the wine and scoffing the chow. But when you have a labyrinth filled to capacity you’d have to sell a bunch of Pierneef’s just to bankroll the minotaur’s appetite.


Anyway, I digress. Outside I bump into Justin Rhodes from recent Whatiftheworld fame. He has very long legs. Looking at the Darth Vader picture through the glass of the courtyard I remark ‘so the rumours are true’, in a rather witless quip. Justin in his New Yawk drawl responds quickly ‘Yeah, some fags gonna probably buy it, hang it above their bed’.


I chuckle at this self-referential joke. Different worlds indeed. With all the horrors of Hugo’s images I realise that any type of writing is fiction even if it is with light. There is no truth anymore. His images speak of worlds removed from immediate experience, of fictions designed to spark the imagination and rouse the soul. We are not looking at reality but beyond to a projected literature of the eye.

The clock stops once again and I am confronted with the brutality of imagination. And the vocabulary of this imagination is grim. Maybe that’s the pull, maybe that’s why we keep on looking. It also begs the question of our fascination with that brutality. How the gaze is sanitized by such literature and how it finds itself perpetuated sends me reeling. I stare at the eyes of the assumed characters, glance at the other and finally see the horror and the ultimate violence of the viewer.