Fiction: Strange weather

From Olafur Eliasson's exhibition 'A laboratory of mediating space'
held at Aedes am Pfefferberg, Berlin, June 2006. Photo: Sean O'Toole

It was only the wind that seemed to be in any hurry. It ripped and tore and gusted; it perplexed. Sprawled across his sofa, Ivan P. languidly fingered his blond curls as he waited for the kettle to come to a boil. The wind had been blowing near constantly for three days. Particularly at night, it gusted with such fury that the electrical cables across the road from his house would occasionally touch, fabulous green explosions illuminating the night. But it was not yet that time of day. In the windowsill, a frozen chicken – deboned and filleted – lay sweating in the afternoon sun. Ivan P., immobile and morose, listened to the wind.

It had been a week, perhaps more, since his suspension from the newspaper where, 15 years earlier, he had kick-started his career in journalism as an art critic. He had eventually admitted to fabricating some contextual detail in a prominent news article alleging graft in the public works ministry. Adamant that his “purplish prose,” as he described it, didn’t alter the veracity of his allegations, his paper nevertheless decided to retract the story. There was even talk of a reconciliatory luncheon with the enraged Minister, whom Ivan P. had described, in a draft version of the article, as “a fragile and pompous child-man, uncannily similar De Heem’s portrait of William III of Orange, a man obsessed with the empty symbolism of power and statehood”. (A sub-editor had struck the statement, leaving only the description “fragile and pompous” to describe the Minister.)

Despite the routine excision of these allusions from his articles, Ivan P. would still try scuttle them in. He once almost got away with describing a prominent banker as looking like “George Dyer after Francis Bacon and Mike Tyson had each had a turn correcting the other’s niceties”. Although retired from criticism proper – he hadn’t written a formal review in over a decade – Ivan P. still dabbled in a bit of “lyrical hysteria”, which was how he once described the well-paying catalogue essays he infrequently wrote, this in a conversation with Dave.

“So how would you define yourself then?” Dave, a news journalist friend, had drunkenly asked. “As a lapsed– or a retired critic?”

“Neither,” Ivan P. had responded, stealing a line from an architect he interviewed once: “Dave, my man, I’m what you might call a reluctant critic.”

“A reluctant critic? What sort of bull is that?” laughed Dave.

“Let me put it this way. I no longer have to play the part of the idiot savant.”

“You mean like Mr. Bean?”

“Yes, something like that although I was thinking more along the lines of Basil Fawlty, or maybe Buster Keaton.”

“I doubt any of them cared much for art. Anyway, I don’t really get what you’re saying.”

“Nothing, Dave, I’m saying nothing, just that I’m not up for that old game anymore.”

“What game?”

“Suspending disbelief.”

“You once told me doubt is the critics most powerful weapon. That hardly seems like a position that would allow for suspended disbelief.”

“Dave, like I said, I’m not an art critic anymore… What I said then doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Right, you’re just a reluctant investigative journalist now, I take it. So does the fact that you no longer write art criticism mean that people don’t call you Snowy anymore?”

“Fuck you Dave.”

Snowy. The nickname had come early in his career as a critic. It followed on a series of sharp reviews, one based singularly around a visiting Nigerian curator’s shoe collection, another an investigative piece of sorts involving interviews with the impoverished, often anonymous subjects appearing in the work of two South African photographers exhibiting in New York at the time. Not quite hack jobs, but enough to cause one alert wit to liken his curly hair to that of a Wirehaired Fox Terrier, the same breed as Tintin’s trusty companion. For years afterwards Ivan P. had kept his hair closely cropped, only allowing it to grow out again as time and distance grew between him and the art world. These curls were now speckled with traces of grey.

The kettle, which seemed as lethargic as Ivan P., was lazily coming to life. It made him think about the wind. To be exact, a kettle steamed, but saying this in no way really accounted for the aural sensation of hearing it do this. There were no words that could faithfully substitute for sounds like boiling water, or the wind. Words here were really just surrogates, conveniences that substituted for experience. Ivan P. had encountered the same frustration writing about art. The closer he looked, the more he realised art criticism as a dubious process of reducing visible forms into words of comparative value. Something always got lost, the act of writing mired by its own idiosyncrasies, by the small negotiations and compromises that a writer must often make. Inevitably, the thing being described became secondary, got lost. Of course, art criticism had a whole history, which at least allowed for the standardisation of this impoverishment.

Ivan P. rounded his lips and exhaled:

Whoooossssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

He laughed at the noise that came out. Wind, it all of a sudden made sense to him, was little more than a collection of exaggerated consonants and stretched vowels. Hardly “a literary specialty” as Mark Twain had once described it. The wind slacked off, quietened down. It now sounded like a warbling drunk with lockjaw:

Ssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

But the more he listened, the more this thing he was trying to imitate proved itself as unknowable, elusive, a trickster; it was capable of changing speed, direction, intonation and purpose seemingly at random, without logic.

Wwwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The wind outside now lacked any vowels, but then suddenly flared up again, gaining a familiar tempo.

Whoooossssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The kettle pulled Ivan P. out of his daydream. It signalled its climax with an abrupt mechanical click. Ivan P. sat up.

Tea steaming, he sat down at his work desk. He looked at the laptop, closed but still blinking. For two days now he had thought about venturing online, reconnecting with the world, however tentatively. The deluge of questions awaiting him was, of course, obvious, the inevitable recriminations too. It was why he had switched off his phone, tossing it in a drawer. But his laptop, with its voyeuristic remove, it was different. He didn’t have to reconnect, not fully. He would ignore his emails.

Opening his browser, Ivan P. stared blankly at the empty subject line in Google. At length, he typed in the word “wind”. It seemed obvious, also the perfect diversion from everything that awaited him. The first entry to appear beneath the list of news results was a Wikipedia entry.

“Wind is the flow of air or other gases that compose an atmosphere (including, but not limited to, the Earth’s). In abbreviated terms, wind is air molecules in motion.”

He scrolled down through the various entries listed below this definition, stopping at a one-line paragraph titled “Named winds”. The link took him to a page displaying, in alphabetical order, the names of various winds across the globe. Abroholos was the first entry and referred to a wind that occurs from May through August on the coast of Brazil. Next, Alize, which described a northeasterly wind across central Africa, and so on. He considered reading more about the Harmattan, a famed, dry northerly wind that blew across central Africa but hesitated. Would it lead him to Sembene Ousmane? Likely not. Ivan P. clicked on a news website listed in his bookmark folder, scrolled through the muddle of headlines. He clicked on a headline, recognised the photograph accompanying it immediately.

Acclaimed photographer dies in freak accident
By David Motsamayi

Well-known South African photographer Thomas Wall was fatally injured yesterday in a bizarre accident at a historic Tshwane cemetery.

It was just like any other morning for Tshwane bus driver Gwen Mabitsi when she started the engine of her Marcopolo bus at 6am. After allowing the bus to idle for five minutes, as regulations require, Mabitsi, a mother of two, engaged first gear and headed for the exit.

“I am still suffering from what happened next,” explained Mabitsi, who is being treated for mild concussion and shock at Steve Biko Academic Hospital. According to Mabitsi, who has been driving busses since 2003, she lost control of the empty passenger transport as she exited the depot.

“Turning right into Church Street, the recently procured bus experienced brake failure,” explained Tshwane Metro spokesperson Mike Kekana in a press statement.

The out-of-control bus skidded across the road, ploughing through the cast iron fence surrounding Church Street Cemetery, which lies opposite the depot. Although no longer in use, this heritage site contains the graves of many prominent Afrikaners, including poet Eugene Marais and statesmen Paul Kruger and Hendrik Verwoerd. Prince Christian, a grandson of British monarch Queen Victoria, is also buried here.

The bus, which destroyed a number of headstones of early Pretoria residents, collided with Wall, who according to eyewitnesses was facing the opposite direction, a dark hood over his head. Paramedics rushed to the scene but were unable to revive the photographer, who had been dragged some distance by the bus.

In what a bizarre turn of events, the bus came to a standstill a short distance from the grave of renowned landscape painter JH Pierneef. Wall, who came to public prominence in the early 1990s for his unconventional large-format landscape photographs of violent aftermath in Angola and Rwanda, had been working on a series of photographs recording current-day realities at the various sites depicted in Pierneef’s original railway panel paintings.

Commissioned by Spoornet’s predecessor and originally installed in the old Johannesburg train station in 1929, Wall’s interpretations of Pierneef’s paintings were due to be displayed as posters at various railway stations, including the Gautrain, during the country’s 2010 festivities.

It is uncertain how many of Pierneef’s bucolic scenes Wall had successfully photographed before he was struck down, allegedly facing east towards Meintjes Kop, as Pierneef would have done when he painted his Apies River panel.

Wall, who was born Thabazimbi north of Gauteng, attended Pretoria Boys High School and completed his photographic studies in Durban. The 41-year-old photographer, who received numerous awards during his career, was unmarried.


Ivan P. read the article again, taking in each sentence slowly, precisely. He hastily made another cup of tea, spilling the milk as he shakily decanted it into his cup. He sat down and read the article a third time.

He had always doubted Pierneef. As a painter he exhibited a fundamental flaw: his work lacked narrative. Nothing seemingly happened in his paintings, not even that most primary variable, weather. Ivan P. had once seen a relatively late career painting by the artist, Naderende Storm in the Die Veld, painted in 1956, a year before his death. The billowing clouds and swathes of indigo blue filling this canvas failed to describe the elemental beauty of a Highveld storm, the voice-drowning assertiveness of its thunder, the strange half-light that often accompanied it. Weather, it seemed, undid Pierneef. In his station panels, it was used as mere effect. In his two industrial scenes showing Premier Mine and Rand Gold Mine, the wind blows from left to right, causing his smoke to drift horizontally. It looks cheap and shows up Pierneef’s deficiencies. How much more engaging would his panels have been had he, like Hokusai for instance, shown peeling papers fluttering in a wind, men clutching at their hats, a tree twisted in deference to a strange, invisible force.

“Dave, howzit. It’s Ivan.”

“Ivan! Man, whatsup? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for over a week now. What happened? Everyone’s talking about your suspension.”

“Long story.”

“Hey, isn’t it always.”

“What’s this shit you wrote about Tom?”

“Jeez dude, can you believe it.”

“No, David, I can’t.”

“Did you read my story?”

“I told you I did, that’s why I’m phoning. It reads like a bad Edgar Allen Poe melodrama. It’s an imaginative, Dave, I’ll give you that. It really worked. So, here I am, the joke’s over. You got me.”
Dave was silent. Outside, an agitated gust of wind ripped through the afternoon street, whipping up stray community newspapers, pizza menus and glossy leaflets listing unsellable properties. One of these bits of printed junk flipped and flapped over Ivan P.’s yard, eventually settling on the spikes crowning his perimeter wall.

“No dude, this isn’t about you,” whispered Dave. “He’s really dead.”

(This short story was originally read at the Iziko Summer School symposium held at the South African Museum's TH Barry Lecture Theatre, Cape Town, February 21, 2009.)