Walter Battiss: The last orgy

An undated self-portrait of Walter Battiss in watercolour

It’s not that the art world doesn’t know how to have a good laugh, it’s just that it doesn’t do it often enough. Not typically. Take as an example the 2004 Brett Kebble Art Awards, held in Cape Town. While you couldn’t fault Clive van den Berg’s efforts as chief curator, the dour formality of the awards’ party had all the charm of a gathering of church elders.

Which is not to say that there are not those dissident moments when a broad smile replaces the art world’s constant frown. This was one of those nights.

The date: late October 2005. The scene: downtown Johannesburg, the orange sun sagging west over the scurvy mine dumps, long evening shadows drowning Standard Bank’s newly revamped gallery in a distinctive inner city murk. The occasion: a retrospective exhibition celebrating the life of Walter Battiss, that famous son of Somerset East notorious for his art, good humour, occasional bouts of nudity and – according to my grandmother – habit of driving his Rolls Royce wearing shorts.

The chocolate fountain set up adjacent the entrance was apt. Inside the gallery, it was a sweetshop of colours. Barring William Kentridge’s absence, everyone was there, from artist Sam Nhlengethwa and collector Lucia Burger to Giles, Battiss’s son.

Rubbing shoulders with these insiders from the South African art world was a weathered gaggle of posh ladies whose expensive surgical habits couldn’t hide the sag from all those years spent lying on Clifton Beach. Flitting around like the butterflies they once were.

“Doddering old souls emerged from the grave one last time,” someone disparagingly remarked next to me.

“But who the hell are they?” I asked, referring to the octogenarians in the crowd.

“The old guard.” He meant this quite literally.

Upstairs in the bustling main gallery, an elegantly attired lady, dressed in flowing kaftan, stood quietly in a corner, a pipe coiling from her nose to a portable oxygen tank parked next to her.

“There’s Marianne Fassler,” someone next to me pointed out – not meaning the breathless old biddy.

It was more than appropriate that this doyen of local fashion should be in attendance. Celebrated for her “exuberant Africanism” and vibrant combinations of colour and pattern, you could pretty much say that what Adam Levin observed of Fassler is true of Battiss as well. But this is also probably a gross simplification of Battiss’s artistic legacy, which is vast, profound, irregular and unpredictable.

“In conforming I am wasting a hell of a lot of time,” he said in his own defence during a SABC interview in 1981. “This ritual of conforming often gives people a certain security … And I like living in insecurity.”

Of course, compared to the lived insecurity of fellow modernist painter Gerard Sekoto, this is all artistic hokum. Battiss, before he retired to Port Shepstone, lived in Menlo Park, which in the 1970s was idyllic neighbourhood on the eastern outskirts of Pretoria. He also earned his day-to-day keep, as many artists still do, teaching, first at Pretoria Boys High, then later at Unisa, where he retired as a professor in 1971. He died in 1982.

Artist Braam Kruger first met Battiss in his later years, when he was a professor of art. Flamboyantly dressed in a scarlet Chinese silk gown for the opening, his nails painted red, Kruger was not much impressed with aspects of his mentor’s art. "Mostly kak," the artist and food writer whispered to me.

“In the final analysis, I realised Battiss was actually a fucking bad painter,” he soberly expanded the day following the opening. “All those early Maurice van Esche cribs.” (Esche was a well-known teacher in Cape Town and former pupil of Matisse.) “And his oils had none of the luminosity they should have had.”

Not so responds Johannesburg dealer Warren Siebrits. A big fan of Battiss’s Orgy screenprints, he also made an appearance at the opening, albeit dressed in more sober attire – he was on his way to a dinner engagement.

“Critics say he had a conservative palette – that’s harsh. He might have been limited but he certainly wasn’t conservative. I think some of Battiss’s best paintings from the 1970s easily rival those of Keith Haring, particularly in his Neo-Geo, graffiti-esque aesthetic.”

It is worth bearing in mind that Haring, a New Yorker, was himself dismissed for producing, what one critic labelled, “pleasant downtown wallpaper, evanescent Bobby McFerrinism”.
McFerrin, in case you forget, penned the immortal lyrics to that song, Don't Worry, Be Happy.
Which, to all intents and purposes, was exactly what the assembled crowd of mothball bohemians and perplexed art school graduates were doing, having fun, and being happy.

None more so than painter Robert Hodgins, another Pretoria reprobate whom Kendell Geers once described as “a guru for four generations of artist”.

Nattily dressed in white shirt, black tie and striped Lacoste windbreaker, Hodgins could teach scruffy Long Street hipsters a thing or two about style.

“Doctor Hodgins!” I greeted the 85-year-old artist. He recently received an honorary doctorate from Tshwane University of Technology.

“Ba humbug,” he grumbled, his blue eyes grinning.

Busting suddenly through the crowd near us, a greying man, also in caftan, his grey head topped off with a straw hat, swept by -- light as a breeze. The perfumed scent he left in his wake was unmistakably alcoholic.

“That's Walter Saunders,” Siebrits remarked as the perfumed bird strutted onto the makeshift stage. As it turns out, Saunders, an influential figure in the literary underground of the 1960s and 70s, was the evening’s praise singer.

For a generation milk fed on hip hop’s machine-driven lyricism, the incomprehensible gobbledygook, or Fook speak, coming out of Saunder’s mouth while on stage was, well, kinda weird.

Doubtlessly influenced by the literary culture of its time, particularly the poetry appearing in Ophir (a poetry magazine Saunder’s co-founded), Fook’s insular language was a way of not being a part of the mainstream, of speaking past the Censorship Board, and its head, Jannie Kruger, not coincidentally Battiss’s archenemy.

Fook, as artist Norman Catherine explains in the exhibition catalogue, was

Battiss’s “user-friendly and fun for everyone” idea for art, his reaction to the deeply serious conceptual art he saw while on his numerous travels abroad.

“Basically, Battiss invented Fook Island because he wanted everybody, children as well as people his own age, to enjoy the freedom to create art, especially at a time in South Africa when there was serious censorship,” adds Catherine, who looked strikingly sober with short cropped hair and white T-shirt -- even though he wasn’t quite that, sober.

Then came the formal speeches, even this otherworldly event obeying art world decorum by displaying a small frown in between all the frivolity.

The day was saved by Queen Asteroa, Linda the Only, which in plain English translates as the not just plan Linda Givon. South Africa’s foremost gallerist, Givon was a close acquaintance of Battiss, or King Ferd the Third.

Looking ever the hippy child, she heaped praise on all in Fook’s talismanic language. A formal version is reprinted in the exhibition catalogue, and reads: “King would have loved what Queen Illuminata (alias Professor Karin Skawran) and the Royal Bank of Standard (alias Standard Bank) have done to remember him and I join in the thanks and appoint them Fookians.”

“She’s calling you,” someone said jabbing my ribs.

“Who is?”

“Queen Asteroa!”

Which, more or less, leads the climax -- me getting Fooked.

I had to, of course, stand in line for the privilege. Artist Kathryn Smith, whose catalogue essay on Battiss offers a wonderful insight into the artist’s provocative yet still funny public performances -- she was Fooked. Melissa Mboweni too.

“The opening gave me an inkling into what Battiss openings must have been like,” remarked Mboweni, who works for Givon and is a budding writer.

Where she received an ornate red flower, I received a stone, albeit with a painted motif courtesy of Norman King Norman (aka Norman Catherine).

“I suppose being Fooked means you’re an honorary citizen of an island in which anyone is royalty,” explained Smith to me afterwards. “The original hand-painted certificates given to previous Fookees by Walter, declared that being Fooked meant you were a ‘complete human being, the highest form of life on earth’."

For someone who himself has perfected the fine art of brow creasing, it was an unexpected privilege. While I may have dashed the honour in this writing, in my defence I should say: Mothballs or not, I want to be that cool at 80.