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.