Gogol's Coat: Notes on a Vagrant Life

A subtle, restrained, deadpan, allusive wink

2010-07-15T08:39:00.004+02:00

In the Company of, 2008, Single-channel video shot on HD, 10-channel audio
Duration 32 min 27 sec Stills photography: Marie Snauwaer

“Have you looked at Simon Gush’s work?” I ask the man seated next to me. It is late, nearly midnight. A dozen or so mismatched people sit huddled around a drinks table in a bar. The man next to me is slumped on a chair, drunk but undefeated by the march of the clock.

“No,” he replies, shaking his head. “What does he do?”

I think about this for a moment. How should I reply? More importantly, why am I even thinking about Simon’s deft, subtle art now, so late at night? Partly, it is his doing, the man seated next to me. It is because of him that I am here in this tiny university town; it was his idea to bring us – a group of would-be art historians, freelance theorists and art-interested writers – from all over the place to talk about new paradigms and other possibilities in art. That we all happen to live and work on the southern tip of the African continent gives our banter a particular inflection: imagine a conversation in English spoken with an unfamiliar accent.

Earlier in the day this tall, lean provocateur goaded us with an assertion: “A moral seriousness has retarded art making in this country.” He was neither bitter nor contemptuous. It was just how this frustrated “transnational citizen” had diagnosed the state of things in “post-post-apartheid” South Africa. We’re constipated, he added. Cowed by our history and disabled by a global lapse into irony, rather than being a free people, as we are so often reminded on radio and television, South Africans have become blocked up. Worse still, the country’s artists have forgotten how to imagine, also how to wink, smile, and, tellingly, perhaps even laugh through their art. (I am, of course, improvising from memory here. It’s late, nearing midnight. I don’t have a notebook in front of me to verify these things.)

“Have you looked at Simon Gush’s work?” I suddenly asked him, thinking of the imaginative wink and unaffected smile that distinguishes Simon’s work.

“What does he do?” the man repeats. His interested eyes tell me that I am taking too long to reason through my response.

“Um, he organises soccer matches,” I state.

Eight Hours, 2009, Paint on wall, Dimensions variable

In 2007, shortly after he took up a residency at the Hoger Instituut van Schone Kunsten in Ghent, Simon Gush devised an action in which two teams of largely immigrant men played the beautiful game on an unlovely stretch of Belgian railway track. When he first told me about his plans to make In the Company of, I was sceptical. Having both played and watched football since my early youth, I am cynical of outsiders – artists and intellectuals particularly – taking positions or making pronouncements on the game. I am not alone in this.

Writing about English literature’s failure to credibly speak for or about football, author and critic DJ Taylor has commented: “Novels about soccer tend to be written by educated gentlefolk who have observed the game from afar, while the cast of such works will necessarily be thick herberts, and [so] a certain amount of patronage, or rather distance between writer and raw material, is inevitable.” Substitute the word “novels” with “art” and Taylor’s statement retains an internal logic and truth.
Of course, this is not a watertight argument. For starters, Simon can credibly argue distance is not an issue in his work. He is, after all, a fervent supporter of the legendary Soweto football club, Orlando Pirates. Furthermore, as a mark of his allegiance to his other favourite team, the city of Manchester’s Red Devils, Simon is a paid-up member of the Manchester United Supporters Trust, a fan-based activist group that aims to secure a meaningful ownership stake in this world-famous football club. Fandom aside, Simon was also once a player. “I was a right back for most of my not very promising career although I made a few appearances in the midfield and at right wing,” he once told me. “Soccer is a great game to watch. It is incredibly tactical and physiological but one piece of luck or skill by an individual can change a whole game instantly. I always find it fascinating.”

There is a counter-argument. For the most part, football is an unfulfilled exercise in futility: 22 sweaty men run around a geometrically codified area of play chasing after a ball for 90 minutes, sometimes longer. The pantomime can often become dull. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parenno understood this, which is why their meditative, singular observation of footballer Zinedine Zidane struck such a chord, even amongst football fans. Zidane, a 21st century portrait (2006) is obviously a reference point for In the Company of, concedes Simon, but then so too, albeit less apparently, is Marina Abramović.

“Although I would never call myself a performance artist, performance is a major part of my thinking around all of my work and always has been,” he stated in 2007. “My experience of working with Marina Abramović during her show at the Johannesburg Art Gallery [in 2005] was perhaps a turning point for me. It was probably the most singularly influential show in terms of my practice that I have worked on and certainly after that performance took on a more explicit position in my work.”

But it is football that is at issue here, at least for now. Similar to the Mexican artist Gustavo Artigas, whose action The Rules of the Game (2000-1) involved two San Diego basketball teams and two Tijuana football teams playing their respective ballgames, simultaneously, on the same playing field, In the Company of offers the sporting field as a terrain of difficulty. But why a railway line particularly? Early into the production of In the Company of, Simon remarked: “Since arriving in Gent, I have found Belgium society very welcoming, although I am very aware of my own foreignness. As a result I have been drawn to areas largely inhabited by immigrants.”

Before leaving his birth country for Europe, Simon founded and managed a project space in Johannesburg’s inner city. Known simply as the Parking Gallery, this tiny basement venue hosted 12 experimental exhibitions over the course of its six-month lifespan. Not long after it closed, the area in which the gallery had operated became a central flashpoint in the xenophobic violence that swept across the country in May 2008. These horrific events, in which local mobs attacked and murdered African immigrants, revealed just how much South Africans were struggling to embrace a newfound worldliness.

“My experience in inner city Johannesburg is crucial to how I relate to the world,” Simon remarked of this loaded context in our 2007 interview. “It is an incredible place to live. On the other hand, I am a white African and foreign everywhere. However, I think these kinds of discussions are not central to my work in that I feel much of the debate around immigrants in South Africa needs to be placed in a more global context of growing xenophobia worldwide.”

For an artist searching out “ways to rephrase political questions in ways that simulate a different discussion”, football offers a supple means to get to this pointed end. Contemporary professional football embodies many of the central contradictions of twenty-first century capitalism. Highly reliant on a skilled labour market, it demands labour fluidity and mobility, this in the face of increasingly stringent national immigration laws. Football is also propped by a system of speculative financing and is marked by a high degree of indebtedness. What was once referred to as team loyalty has in recent years been commoditised and redefined as brand loyalty. To simplify, football has come a long way since a group of coachbuilders and railway men from the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company decided to found a football club that, over time, would morph into the transnational football giant Manchester United.

It is a similarly big leap from the football pitch to the concert hall, from Ryan Giggs (Simon’s favourite footballer as a youth) to the composer Sergei Prokofiev. Perhaps less discontinuous is Simon’s interest in the creative output of Russia’s post-revolution avant-garde. Although geographically distant, Russian creativity has loomed large in the mind of South African artists and writers. Author JM Coetzee is perhaps the most explicit in his admiration of Russia’s great tradition, having written critical essays on Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. William Kentridge meanwhile has been guided and influenced by the work of avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov and nineteenth century absurdist writer Nikolai Gogol, recently presenting an adaptation of Shostakovich’s The Nose (1930) in New York. Shostakovich disliked Prokofiev, who is still remembered as too much in tow of Stalin. Not so, argues the literary essayist Algis Valiunas: “Prokofiev could wield an irony so delicate and unobtrusive it breezed right past the inspectorate.” Delicate and unobtrusive – these are useful words for appreciating Simon’s provocative situation-based performances and installations. To which I would also add the following: subtle, restrained, deadpan, allusive and, yes, winking.

In his quest to determine and shape a “contemporary language for politics in art”, one that isn’t indebted to old orthodoxies and rote practices, Simon has managed to draw high praise from a notoriously laconic commentator. The conceptual artist Joachim Schonfeldt has repeatedly told me that Simon’s work offers a lone beacon of hope for new South African art. Simon is however by no means sui generis. Like Cape Town artist James Webb and French-Moroccan artist Latifa Echakhch, both highly mobile artists, Simon’s work exhibits an acute sense of what it means to think and act politically. In Simon’s case, he achieves this by devising absurd visuals conundrums that hint at how the ostensibly apolitical – football, dancing, even composing – are shaped by larger, contextual political concerns.

It is the morning after our big night out. The man I’d been seated next to at the bar has bloodshot eyes and dishevelled hair. As he ushers us into the hall for round two, he pulls me aside. “What was the name of that artist you mentioned last night?”

Topologies and Archaeology

2010-07-13T19:11:00.004+02:00

– 1 –

“I’m here to meet Lindiwe Mthethwa,” I say, pulling up the handbrake. “She’s a driver.”

The uniformed man at the entrance to the Church Street bus depot mutely hands me a wooden clipboard, a geometrically sectioned-off page held in place by the greasy metal clip. Visitor Record – City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality. I fill in the blank spaces next to the already penned-in date (“22/3/2010”), listing my name (“SEAN O’TOOLE”, a journalistic pseudonym), identity number (“6811292076073”, largely fictitious), employer (“SELF”, true), and phone number (012 9910946, my mother’s home number, which I still use as an emergency contact number whenever I enter cycling races). Upper case is the preferred style of all four the previous visitors, respectively G. RAMOKGOPA, ANTON, LUCKY, and ANTON (again!). I take a further cue from these earlier visitors, repeating the word “BUSINESS” in the field enquiring of the purpose of my visit. Not work, not toil, not labour, simply business.

I return the clipboard to the security guard. He retreats indoors. The red and white boom momentarily stutters before tracing a vertical arc. I steer my car to a parking bay adjacent the lone building, a squat post-war structure with red brick walls and a tin roof. I reach for my phone.

“Hi, are you Lindiwe Mthethwa?” I ask the large woman emerging from the building. She holds a pale blue mobile phone in her left hand.

“Yes,” she answers.

Her straightened hair is parted down the middle; the opened curtain reveals two thick black lines, an imagined set of eyebrows. Her dress covers her knees. She wears formal shoes, healed. Perhaps she was anticipating a photographer too.

I offer my hand, repeating my reason for having tracked her down. Her grip is slight, shy; her smile is nonetheless curious, vaguely bemused.

“What do you want to know about that story?” she asks, her tone matter of fact.

“Why don’t we walk over to the cemetery?” I suggest.

– 2 –

On July 3, 2008, the Afrikaans-language newspaper, Beeld, reported that a Tshwane metro bus crashed into Pretoria’s historical Church Street Cemetery, destroying 25 graves belonging the city’s earliest residents. Established in 1867, the cemetery, which is located directly adjacent a large bus depot, includes a section known as Heroes Acre where a number of prominent Afrikaner statesmen were laid to rest.

The bus crashed through the steel-coloured palisade fencing shortly after six in the morning, veering slightly right on its destructive path through Heroes Acre. It abruptly came to a halt at a tree planted adjacent the grave of celebrated landscape painter and Pretoria resident, Jacob Hendrik Pierneef (1886 – 1957). Had the bus veered left, it would have collided with the gravestones of, amongst others, Andries Wilhelmus Jacobus Pretorius (1798 – 1853), a Boer leader and prominent combatant at the 1838 Battle of Blood River; Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom (1893 – 1958), a former prime minister and arch nationalist; and Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd (1901 – 1966), a former prime minister who is often described as the “architect of apartheid”.

The unnamed female driver of the empty bus was reportedly treated for shock at a nearby hospital. Faulty brakes were cited as the reason for the accident.

Two months after the accident a tree again featured in Pierneef’s posthumous biography. On September 10, day two of London auction house Bonhams’ South African Sale, lot number 329, a 112 x 142.5cm oil on canvas featuring an enormous baobab tree with five tiny figures seated beneath it sold to an anonymous buyer for £826,400, including buyer’s premium. The price established a new world record for Pierneef, whose work once decorated Johannesburg’s central train station but in recent years has been criticised for its ideologically suspect depiction of rural South Africa as a vast, un-peopled place. Notwithstanding a now rote liberal-left disdain for Pierneef, a prominent (black) art dealer in Johannesburg has spoken of the marked interest amongst his wealthy (black) clients in owning a Pierneef landscape.

– 3 –

It is a short walk to the cemetery. In the time it takes us to pass the security guard at the entrance, cross north over Church Street, and walk east to the entrance of the cemetery on DF Malan Drive, I learn the following:

Lindiwe’s second name is Lucille, from her mother;

Her favourite singer is Rebecca Malope, Dolly Parton registering a close second;

She has never been married;

Her salary is just over R5,000;

News reports of a whites-only toilet at the depot are true; and

She has never seen a painting by Pierneef, nor heard of him.

Clack, clack, clack, clack. Her heals beat a rhythmic beat as we walk.

“Is it open?” she asks, looking at the green sliding gate used by both vehicles and pedestrians entering the cemetery.

I walk to the tall, multi-panelled signboard next to the gate. The san-serif notice wants to say something, that visiting hours are seasonal, perhaps. It is hard to say. April – August 7am – 5pm, September – March 7am – 5pm. We are here during the latter season: summer, perhaps. It is Monday, this much is certain, nearly four hours after opening time. The cemetery is empty.

Burial times, I notice, are listed using an alternative 24-hour clock format: Mon – Thurs 08h00 – 14h30, Fri 08h00 – 13h30. The schedule for tombstone erections is governed by the same format and precise allocation of times. It is nonetheless given its own panel. A final statement, placed at eye-level, cautions that we “Enter at own risk”. Appended beneath, like footnotes, a series of graphic icons, four in total, each enclosed in a box. The first box houses a pistol, the second a hawkers stall, both struck through with lines. The fifth box offers a visual request to use the waste bins. The fourth box is empty. I point at the third.

“That one was made for you.”

Lindiwe snorts, half in laughter, but also with a measure of slight disgust. The icon depicts a bus with a line through it.

– 4 –

In 2006, three then relatively unknown Gauteng-based artists – Michael MacGarry and Zander Blom from Johannesburg, and Jan-Henri Booyens from Pretoria – released a staple-bound, softcover catalogue in a limited edition of 500 ½ copies. Collaboratively designed and edited by the three artists, the packaging for the catalogue mimicked the look and feel of classic vinyl records. Titled Avant Car Guard Volume 1, the catalogue included 19 original photographs (excluding the cover), four biographical portraits and a preface, the title and words of the text meticulously blacked-out, line by line.

The second photograph appearing inside the catalogue aroused great interest when the South African art media circulated it. Captioned “AVANT CAR GUARD at J.H. Pierneef’s grave. 1954”, it showed Booyens placing yellow flowers in front of the painter’s gravestone, Blom cart wheeling over the top the grave, and MacGarry leaping in the air next to him. The mood is celebratory. Stylistically, the colour photograph adhered to the bleached aesthetic and de-saturated tonalities of the documentary photography committed by David Goldblatt and Pieter Hugo.

In an interview on June 5, 2007, MacGarry explained that the photograph was taken using a tripod and the camera’s self-timer function. Only the artists had been in attendance. Asked if the photograph had prompted any reactions, MacGarry said, no. “Nobody says anything,” offered Blom, to which MacGarry added, “If we were jumping on Chris Hani’s grave, we would have a lot more currency. But because Pierneef is such an icon of a particular moment, who is going to get upset about it?” After a pause, MacGarry further stated: “We thought of jumping on [painter Gerard] Sekoto’s grave, but he is buried in Paris.”

Visible in the upper right-hand corner of the photograph is Kruger Park, an apartheid-era tower block designed to accommodate low-income white occupants. On July 22, 2008, nearly three weeks after the bus accident at the nearby graveyard, disgruntled occupants of this stern Pretoria approximation of Johannesburg’s Ponte City – incidentally the subject of an essay by Mikhael Subotzky – started a fire on the 20th floor. Five people died in the blaze, some from smoke inhalation, others when they leapt from the roof of the 30-floor concrete structure. An eviction notice issued to the residents of Kruger Park sparked the incident. Alongside Subotzky, photographer Guy Tillim has also recently essayed post-apartheid South Africa’s vertical slums.

– 5 –

An imprecise scar at the base of the tree’s trunk is the only evidence of the accident.

“What was the first thing you thought when it happened?”

“I don’t remember. Nothing. I opened the door; it was cold as I left the bus, that’s all. I could smell the diesel from the engine. They were already running from over to me from there.” She points at the bus depot. “So many people. I have never seen this place so full.”

“Had you ever been inside here before the crash?”

“Never.” Her answer is emphatic.

“Why?”

“Why?” she responds. She snorts.

We walk away from the tree to a cluster of headstones. Two obelisks, one black marble, the other sandstone, jut out above the arrangement. A bunch of mismatched flowers – gladiolas, carnations, some green filler – lie on the polished black surface of the largest grave, an austere mausoleum decorated with a small circular relief of Verwoerd’s bust. We don’t pause long, a gravestone nearby catching Lindiwe’s eye.

“Who is this?” she asks, stopping in front of a raw, oval-shaped piece of granite placed on a low marble base.

The gravestone reads Eugene N. Marais.

“Poet, writer, naturalist,” I translate the three solitary Afrikaans words that accompany his name

“Is he famous?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“How?”

“He wrote about baboons and ants.”

Lindiwe laughs. Perhaps she thinks I’m joking. As we exit the gate, I point north, at the traffic approaching along DF Malan Drive.

“He grew up on a farm, on the other side of those hills over there. Do you know where the cement factory is?”

Her eyes, framed by two black-pencilled arches, look in the direction of my pointed finger.

“There,” I say.

– 6 –

South Africa has countless roads named Church Street. What distinguishes Church Street in the nation’s capital city, Pretoria, is its length: it is the country’s longest urban street and one of the longest straight roads in the world. Running east to west, following the contour of a number of small koppies, it links a host of architectural showpieces, amongst them the Union Buildings on Muckleneuk Ridge, east of the city centre. On the day of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as the first democratically elected president in May 1994, many of the flats and apartments opposite this Imperial-style showpiece where the inauguration took place were vacated by their tenants, perhaps out of fear of a deluge. It was not uncommon at the time to hear of Pretoria residents filling their baths with drinkable water, just in case. At the Pretoria West branch of retailer Makro, candles and tinned food were in short supply before the inauguration. In the event, nothing happened. Not immediately.

On April 25, 1982, two months shy of a decade since the controlled demolition of the award-winning Pruitt-Igoe social housing project in St. Louis, photographer David Goldblatt travelled to Church Street and focussed his large-format camera on Strijdom Square. The resulting photograph offers a stark, geometric portrayal of apartheid’s fin de siècle moment. The photograph, which images two monuments celebrating the Republic of South Africa former president JG Strijdom, is now a historical record of what was, rather than what is. The scene doesn’t exist anymore. In a distant echo of architectural critic Charles Jencks’ famous assertion that “modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts),” the monumental ensemble of horses and 3.6-metre sculpted head unexpectedly auto-destructed.

It happened early morning (or thereabouts) on May 31, 2001, a date formerly celebrated as the founding date of the white republic in 1961. Concrete reinforcements in the parking garage beneath Strijdom Square gave way. The Strijdom head, sculpted by artist Coert Steynberg, fell five floors and broke into five pieces. Although reassembled and currently on loan to the Strijdom House Museum in Modimolle (formerly Nylstroom), the head is still missing an ear. A privately owned company forming part of the Voortrekker Monument, a heritage site located on a hill a short distance south of Church Street and redolent in its design of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig, legally owns the head.

In 2004, in a moment of frank and insightful exasperation, Pallo Jordan, then minister of Arts and Culture, remarked: “If you came from Mars and you went on the evidence of what is there in these public spaces, you’d come away with the impression that whites were the original inhabitants and Africans were the immigrants.”

– 7 –

Clack, clack, clack, clack. An indifferent silence marks our conversation as we walk back. Clack, clack, clack, clack. The security guard nods but says nothing as we enter the depot. As we near the building where my car is parked I ask Lindiwe to show me the bus she drove into the cemetery. It is a last ditch attempt to wrest something from this futile attempt at journalism, this Monday morning dalliance with no outcome. She sighs, audibly.

Like the tree across the road, the Mercedes bus she leads me to has healed itself, its dents unevenly pressed out and painted over.

“We don’t use these old busses too much anymore,” she says. “Mostly, I drive a Marcopolo now.” A Brazilian make of bus, she clarifies.

Running my hand along a section of retouched paintwork, I remember a question I once asked a Malian trucker lazing in a hammock suspended beneath his exhausted vehicle, its petrol tank decorated with an idealised landscape scene.

“Do you remember your first kiss?” I ask.

The question comes out unedited. It is received in silence. Clack, clack, clack, clack. Lindiwe walks to the red brick building, sits on a shaded bench beneath an eave, and reaches into her bag. It is not the blue phone retrieves. Her tan wallet is enormous. I count ten, maybe a dozen cards – Edgars, JET, Foschini… – when she opens it. Carefully, she extricates a piece of folded paper from this ordered display of debt. She unfolds it and holds it up to me.

The photocopied page, its design elements hand-coloured in pencil, is titled The Ten Commandments of Love. It reads:

1. I am your best choice

2. Accept me as I am

3. Respect me

4. Do not criticise

5. Do not shout

6. Forgive me

7. Do not blame me

8. Settle our problems

9. Accept your mistakes

10. Remember to pray to God, he will solve all our problems

“Did that man of the stone over there, how’s his name, Marais, did he write poetry like this?” she asks after I return the saccharine devotional.

“In a manner of speaking,” I say, repeating myself.

– 8 –

The particularities and grit of South Africa’s interregnum have to a large extent dissipated. The nation has comfortably settled into its postcolonial identity, an identity variously marked by fitful moods of collective jubilation and somnambulant gloom, optimistic outreach and xenophobic retreat, an identity characterised by its inclination towards pathos and bathos in the same instant. Ashraf Jamal refers to it as “post-post-apartheid South Africa”. South Africa now seems far simpler. Given the assaults of the everyday – where eruptions of civic discontent are as likely to be inflamed by the lack of municipal services as the singing of political songs about machineguns and Boers, where the bodies of trespassers and shoplifters are painted silver and white, the body of a Mozambican national burned – what space is their for the art object (as the expression of a radically imaginative will) in the popular consciousness. Not much, let’s be honest. Which is fine too. Art is a residual vestige of the time out of which it emerges; it is not an explanation of that time. Perhaps therein lies its latent potential. Although it may not always intend it, art can sometimes be the bus that mistakenly intrudes on sacred ground, rupturing the palisade fences that section off the past, making us see the now.

This story originally appeared in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Ampersand: A Dialogue of Contemporary Art from South Africa & the Daimler Art Collection, on view at Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (June 10 – October 10, 2010).

Fishing for eels

2010-04-09T12:32:00.000+02:00

David Goldblatt, Robert Mugabe. Harare, 1986

Courtesy Michael Stevenson

Collection Michael Graham-Stewart

The word “subtle” does not appear in the Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, a satirical book of alphabetised entries conceived and ordered by a gun-totting journalist working out of San Francisco in the latter half of the 1800s. This is only fitting.

Subtlety, the art of pillow fighting in front of an audience of boxing fans, has no place in the world of politics. And politics, as Bierce writes in his self-styled “comic dictionary” – which grew from a series of infrequent newspaper columns – is both “a means of livelihood affected by the more degraded portion of our criminal classes” and “a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles”.

Photography, which in Bierce’s time was an infant medium practiced by quixotic men who lumbered across the landscape with cumbersome equipment and hid under black clothes, fares little better. He describes it as a “picture painted by the sun without instruction in art”.

Politics and photography: it is a love affair that entertains no third parties.

In a week of abrupt burps (Julius Malema) and fatal sighs (Eugene Terreblanche), photo editors around the country have all been faced with a simple predicament: finding a decent picture of these eels. (Bierce on politicians: “an eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organised society is reared.”) It is, of course, a perpetual dilemma: the more degraded portion of our criminal classes is always at work. The feedback loop this creates is endless. Photographers will always be asked to go fishing.

It’s time to reflect. In January 2005, I asked David Goldblatt a simple question in response to a 1986 photograph he took of Robert Mugabe for the magazine Leadership, of which he was photo editor at the time. What was it like photographing men of stature? I quote his response in full.

“I was quite ruthless, ruthless in the sense that my brief was to get a strong portrait of the subject, possibly for the cover and certainly for the inside pages of the magazine. In order to do this knew I had to have certain prerequisites met. I could, for example, not allow them to bully me into accepting the furniture that they regarded as their best from a public relations point of view – Gomma Gomma deep armchairs – unless I wanted to do a hatchet job. If I wanted to do a hatchet job that was the best thing they could offer me because you put someone into a deep armchair and they sink down. When you see them from the front you see their knees and a bit of their face.

David Goldblatt, Kenneth Kaunda, Lusaka, 1986
Courtesy Michael Stevenson

Collection Michael Graham-Stewart

“I would insist… sometimes it became quite tense because they had their public relations press people and their G-men and security people. All of them were absolutely outraged that I would want to photograph Kenneth Kaunda, for example, on a chair I found in the recesses of the kitchen. And the same with Mandela. Karl Niehaus was his press secretary at the time. We came there at five o’clock in the morning and I immediately rejected all the deep armchairs and couches and said I want to look around in the kitchen. I found one in the kitchen.

“I said, ‘This one will do very nicely thank you.’ Karl Niehaus was outraged. He said, ‘You can’t photograph Mr. Mandela in that.’ I replied, ‘But yes I can. I have to photograph him and not the furniture.’ This used to lead to quite strong confrontations. He eventually conceded to my wish and eventually apologised to me. But it took some convincing. I had the same trouble with Joaquin Chisano in Mozambique.

David Goldblatt, Joachim Chissano, president of Mozambique, in his office in Maputo. 1987
Courtesy Michael Stevenson

Collection Michael Graham-Stewart

“I also had trouble with lighting because I never as a matter of principle but really to throw myself into the deep, I never took lights with me. At the most I would have a reflector or space blanket. And so I would come into, for example, Mugabe’s office or PW Botha, the same thing, and it was heavily curtained right round for security. I would tell the incumbents that I wanted to open some curtains and they would say, ‘No you can’t.’ I would say, ‘I am sorry but I am going to have to.’ [Laughs] Very reluctantly they would allow me to open one or two curtains, but that was all I needed.”

Marc Shoul, Eugene Terreblanche, 2009

That was 1986. What about now? I emailed Marc Shoul. He is routinely asked to go fishing for eels. In the last year he has photographed Jacob Zuma for the Financial Times, Eugene Terreblanche and Julius Malema for Time, and so on. Given the news value of such portraits, timing is always crucial. The Terreblanche portrait, he says, was made “after he did his fire and brimstone thing to a crowd”. The photographer requested permission to shoot one picture. After the third click of his camera’s shutter, Terreblanche stated: “You said one photo, you bastard.”

“Zuma was cool,” he says “I was supposed to shoot him the next day and got a call from his PA on a Sunday afternoon, asking me to do it in an hours time. I was in Brackpan at the time so moved out of there quickly. It was the day before he was let off for one of the crimes he allegedly did. He was cool and calm; he gave me about 20 minutes. I tried to get him to go outside and he tuned me something to the extent that he can’t have a white guy take him outside and photograph him in front of his guards. He also didn’t want to put on formal shoes so I had to shoot him without his feet in the frame.”

What is the hardest part of photographing especially politicians?

“Time is short, you can’t chew the fat with them and get to know what makes them tick. There is no time to mess around or for your camera mess with you. It’s a rush in and out, and always a little disappointing because you don’t have the time to craft the image much. And you can’t really go to a location that may be better. Some of them are better in front of a crowd. When its one on one, they are just people who don’t really have a clue on how important it is to work with the photographer.”

Sol Lewitt's system

2010-04-08T22:17:00.004+02:00

Sol Lewitt died today three years ago. I only encountered his work twice, first at New York's Andrea Rosen Gallery in 2003, again at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Both times they were wall drawings, the first a spare grid, the latter a paired set of wall drawings made up of whorls of lines that gained/lessened in tonal intensity. The austerity mesmerised.

The drawings in Venice were made around two months after Lewitt's death. The drawings exist and function independent of Lewitt's hand. In fact, there existence is prescribed, or rather, are predicated on a determined set of rules, the implications of which the artist discussed with Saul Ostrow in a 2003 issue of Bomb magazine:

SO: Once you start working serially, a certain amount of decision-making is being deferred. Say in the case of your wall drawings, which existed as a set of instructions. Giving the script over to someone else is adding another variable to the formula and has been interpreted as an attempt either to de-aestheticize the work or at least to distance the artist from the results so that it wouldn’t be about the artist’s taste. I once did one of your wall drawings myself. You sent me a set of instructions that read, “Using pencil, draw 1,000 random straight lines 10 inches long each day for 10 days, in a 10-by-10-foot square.” The distribution of the lines in the square was totally up to me. I didn’t know what you wanted it to look like.

SL: What it looked like wasn’t important. It didn’t matter what you did as long as the lines were distributed randomly throughout the area. In many of the wall pieces there is very little latitude for the draftsman or draftswoman to make changes, but it is evident anyway, visually, that different people make different works. I have done other pieces that give the draftsperson a great liberty in interpreting an action. In this way the appearance of the work is secondary to the idea of the work, which makes the idea of primary importance. The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system. The visual aspect can’t be understood without understanding the system. It isn’t what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.

Two things strike me a germane, as possibilities for future exploration:

1. By working serially a certain amount of decision-making is deferred. Is it, though, possible to translate this statement into imaginative fiction?
2. To what extent is it possible to systematise the process of writing fiction? Perhaps, as an option, a modular set of characters that migrate from story to story? Or, as an alternative, a plot that remains constant but is populated by new characters? Even in writing this I realise that these are merely experimental probabilities, not viable solutions in and of themselves.

Kapuscinski and tape-recorded memory

2010-04-08T21:52:00.002+02:00

Ryszard Kapuscinski and friends, date and photographer unknown

The Lede, the news blog for The New York Times, reports that recent press coverage on a new biography devoted to Ryszard Kapuscinski got it all wrong, especially when they said the book accused the masterful Polish journalist and essayist of lying. Responding to questions from the NYT, the book's author, Artur Domoslawski, dismissed these reports as "completely wrong".

One statement in the ensuing interview intrigues:

"He never recorded interviews, but he did write notes – though usually he wrote them at night after a whole day’s work. He often said: if you don’t remember a detail or a fact, it means that it is not really important, it doesn’t matter.

So, all that relation between facts and fiction in his work is quite complicated. One of the reviewers of my book had an interesting observation: the picture of the forest that Kapuscinski shows us is generally correct and true, but in order to create that picture – true in its essence – Kapuscinski changed sometimes the position of some trees inside the forest.

Maybe there should be a separate category: neither fiction, nor nonfiction, but just shelf called “Kapuscinski.” I hope he would like the idea."

This last point seems a bit fanciful, but I do like the fact that Kapuscinski never recorded anything. The statement reminds me of a fragment from a 1974 Paris Review interview with WH Auden: "I think if there's anything worth retaining, the reporter ought to be able to remember it."

I must be a lazy journalist, reporter, hack, since I record most of my interviews. What I like about this strategy is the way it demystifies an encounter. Last year I interviewed a prominent photographer and left awed. "He is so eloquent," I told friends. When I transcribed the interview a month or so later – I had a long lead on this one – I was surprised at how, well, halting and ordinary his speech was. Count the conjunctions and repeated "you know" in this small fragment from the interview:

"You know, we all know what a refugee looks like: they cut the horizon at the waist and they’re bent over and they look hungry. You know, you can do that, and I’ve done that over the years and it’s repetitive, and I think photojournalism in general may suffer from that."

Perhaps this isn't germane to what Kapuscinski or Auden were talking about, but I like the fact that when you read verbatim transcripts of interviews with Miss Verb and Mister Person – a riff I have stolen from Sudanese-Ugandan poet Taban Lo Liyong – there is still this residue of the oral. Writing from memory often papers over this very basic fact.

On Takashi Miike

2010-04-08T20:40:00.001+02:00

"I don't think about genre at all. My films are categorised as being in a certain type of genre. But myself, I don't make the movie thinking about which category the film belongs in." Takashi Miike, interview 2001

Deadpan, surreal, misogynist, funny, brutal, imaginative: Takashi Miike's films are anti-bourgeois excursions into hard-boiled fantasy. In less hyperbolic terms, they're offbeat gangster flics.

One is tempted to explain them by invoking the names of other filmmakers, Takeshi Kitano, the two Davids – Lynch and Cronenberg–- Jean-Pierre Melville. Also JG Ballard, and perhaps – and this is a big perhaps – Franz Kaka. Diffident characters, surreal normalcy, uncertain resolutions.

Where is Booboo?

2010-02-22T16:49:00.001+02:00

Sentences on Art Criticism

2010-02-21T16:40:00.005+02:00

Criticism is swimming endless lengths, thinking

In 1969, Sol Lewitt published his now famous tract, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’. I often return to these sentences, because they encapsulate everything the critic is not.

Lewitt: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”

Me: Art critics are rationalists not mystics. They do not leap.

Lewitt: “Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.”

Me: Rational judgements repeat rational judgements. This is why we have come to despise criticism.

Lewitt: “Irrational judgements lead to new experience.”

Me: The critic rarely braves irrationality.

And so on…

In the spirit of Lewitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, I would like to propose my own, self-styled ‘Sentences on Art Criticism’:

1. Criticism is not a constitutional right; freedom of speech is.

2. Criticism is not an entitlement – it is a response.

3. Criticism does not arrive dressed in a bow tie or pressed suit.

4. Criticism is misunderstood. The role of criticism is overstated and undervalued. This can be the source of productive tensions for the writer, or simply induce depression.

5. Criticism can be a sharp blade, Occam’s razor. Mostly, though, we are made to believe that criticism is a traditional weapon – a gnarled knobkerrie, perhaps.

6. Criticism is not a period or a full stop; it is not the end of a sentence, statement, thought or idea. In this regard, read Ian Buruma’s The Wages of Guilt (1994): “To catch truth there must be conflict, debate, interpretation, and reinterpretation – in short, a discourse without end.”

7. Criticism is a love letter to someone you don’t know.

8. Criticism is reading other critics.

9. Criticism is Simon Njami consciously setting himself up for failure when he travelled to Senegal to interview the filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety about photography.

10. Criticism is not a liturgy: it need not be churchly or have a spiritual purpose; laughter is allowed.

11. Criticism is reverence.

12. Criticism is, as JG Ballard said of science fiction, “wholeheartedly speculative”.

13. Criticism is a position; it has no true north.

14. Criticism is Jean-Loup Pivin writing in the editorial to the launch issue of Revue Noire: “Revue Noire should be savoured on a shady terrace like a glass of ginger.” In other words, criticism is the rattle of ice in a glass on a hot day.

15. Criticism in not ventriloquism: it cannot make a thing or an experience speak for itself.

16. Criticism is not the noose that hangs the thought. If the thought’s dead already… the critic merely operates as an obituarist.

17. Criticism is a contest, a Rumble in the Jumble: Ali is the verb, George Foreman the adjective.

18. Criticism is a clutch of spurious synonyms: bad press, brickbats, censure, critical remarks, disapproval, disparagement, fault-finding, flak, knocking, panning, slam, slating, stricture

19. Criticism can also offer analysis, appraisal, appreciation, assessment, comment, commentary, critique, elucidation, evaluation, judgement… a notice, a review.

20. Criticism is the sweat in the palm of your hand when an annoyed artist, piqued by a review, demands: “What right do you have to shit in my garden?”

21. Criticism is Gore Vidal, floored by Norman Mailer’s punch, retorting: “Norman Mailer, at a loss for words again!”

22. Criticism is the startling sound of thunder.

23. Criticism wants to be a veld fire. Typically, however, it is a stompie jettisoned from a car window.

24. Criticism is responsibility. In this, it is an ethical pursuit, for as the unpopular poet Ezra Pound reminds: “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one sole morality of writing.”

25. Criticism is journalism.

26. Criticism is for sale.

27. Criticism has no section in Exclusive Books.

28. Criticism is the lightning bolt that flashes in the pages of The War Against Cliché (2000). In the foreword, Martin Amis offers: “Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, how long they remember.”

29. Criticism is literature.

30. Criticism is always remaining fascinated, intrigued and obliquely curious. Otherwise you’re just news gathering. In this, criticism implies a partisan spirit.

31. Criticism is not collaboration.

32. Criticism is a retreat into silence. It demands knowing when to simply look with the eyes, laugh with the mind, and bite the tongue.

33. Criticism is none of the above. These are merely sentences on art criticism.

“Here, the time in which one lives, is glorious”

2010-02-16T19:41:00.001+02:00

Berlin's Landwehr Canal

Following a second revolutionary uprising in January 1919, left-wing revolutionary figures like Rosa Luxemburg were captured in Berlin by the Freikorps' Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision. Knocked down with a rifle butt, then shot in the head; Luxemburg's body was flung into Berlin's Landwehr Canal at roughly this spot.

Some years before, Luxemburg wrote in a letter: “Here, the time in which one lives, is glorious.”

Random #4 - Magazine lists

2010-02-05T16:44:00.000+02:00

Working proofs for Art South Africa, March 2010

I've long been fascinated by magazines. They are the stupid man's literature. Synoptic. Easily transportable. Essentially throwaway. Sometimes anthologised by writers who don't have the time, guts or good sense to write an original book.

1. Roots: Car and Scope, on my dad's side of the bed, Fair Lady on the other end

2. Afrikaans second language: Huis Genoot

3. Grandmother Ramona's influence: Harpers & Queen

4. Standard seven, 1983, New Romantics: Smash Hits and No.1

5. Standard eight onwards: New Musical Express - the 1984 Fleet Street strikes in the UK were strangely real in Pretoria

6. Wits, 1987: at a Wits Student seminar at some posh house in Saxonwold, a Weekly Mail journalist sent to teach us young greenhorns a thing or two about writing said we should read New Musical Express. My first ever piece of journalism was about Gary Rathbone from The Spectres

7. 1989: The Face, yes, but also Blitz. The gold Warhol cover is still gorgeous

8. i-D, Arena, Raygun, Bikini, Interview, Details... The Idler, which showcased poetry by Mickey Rourke

9. Discovering The Baffler, in 1996 or so, was a revelation. Thomas Frank, one its editors, went on to write The Conquest of Cool - it presaged Naomi Klein's No Logo by four years. Frank now writes for the likes of Harpers and is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

10. Kyoto Journal, Kansai Time Out... Relax, Burst, Tokion... Dune

11. Colors magazine, 2001. It seems liek such a long time ago being asked to fly to Los Angeles by Adam and Olly. Leisure World. What a trip. The best moment: sitting in the hot tub with two "tub" salesmen - the best along the west coats, they said. Later in Treviso, where the magazine is pieced together, I realised that a baroque, adjectivally opaque writing will get you nowhere. A steep learning curve. "Who is Tibor Kalman?"

12. Lab, Exit, Playground, Soma... early freelance gigs. Most of these magazine titles are now defunct

13. SL, being sued, hanging out with Andy Davis

14. Lewis Lapham's editorials in Harpers. A few years later author Richard Rodriguez tried to burst my admiring bubble by telling me Lapham was a boring grump. Manhattan literary wars. Boring.

15. NEST... a case study in what a magazine ought to be: eccentric, individual, unexpected. R.I.P.

16. Vanity Fair. I have about six issues. AA Gill's piece on Kate Moss was an exercise in restraint. Martin Amis would have been so much more carnivorous. A society magazine for flunkies.

17. Cabinet, Artforum, frieze... NOT ArtReview, Modern Painters, Art Monthly

18. Rouleur. A recent discovery. A British magazine which proves that a niche idea - cycling - need not be treated in the same old way. Literate, insightful, made for fans. Perfect.

19. Eye, Domus, Blueprint, Adbusters, Foam, Damn, Dazed & Confused, BBC Focus, ID... Elle Decor, Visi, House & Leisure, GQ... I guess I am a magazine hack

20. I started buying frieze magazine in 1994. I tried reading it. The features were obscure, insular commentaries on a sealed world. I kept buying it, mostly for the pieces by writers like Jon Savage and Simon Reynolds. Also the pictures. In 2007, I got my first commission. I read the magazine nowadays. I wonder if anyone found my feature on Amar Kanwar obscure and insular. Like most magazine writing, the words never speak back at you. They travel into a great silence and fall apart.

21. Art South Africa...

Random #3 - Lists

2010-02-04T15:44:00.004+02:00

Alan Fletcher (designer) and Jamie Jauncey (writer)

The list. Concise. Precise. Dissonant.

1. Contributors to Art South Africa's March 2010 issue: Siemon Allen, Peter Anders, Esmé Berman, Rory Bester, Belinda Blignaut, Anthea Buys, Fred de Vries, Alexandra Dodd, Kendell Geers, Catherine Green, Kerryn Greenberg, Randolph Hartzenberg, Leon Krige, Marilyn Martin, Achille Mbembe, Kyle Morland, John Nankin, Alexander Opper, Malcolm Payne, Mario Pissarra, Lloyd Pollak, Ivor Powell, Tracey Rose, Robert Sloon, Robyn Sassen, Kathryn Smith, Roger van Wyk, Jasper Walgrave, Pam Warne

2. Some well-known Ukrainian internet porn stars: Veronika Fasterova, Nella Miartusova, Snejana Onopka, Luba Shumeyko and Elena Berkov.

3. Excerpt from Tracey Rose's forthcoming column: " White white white white white white white white white white white white white white white..."

4. Lunch: Monday, cheese roll from Raith; Tuesday, salami roll from Raith; Wednesday, chicken roll from The Kitchen; Thursday, cheese roll from Raith.

5. Requests for transcript of writing prior to publication: one.

6. Requests for PDF of layout prior to publication: two.

7. Number of artists who came into studio to check colour proofs: one.

8. Likelihood of finding cover image's caption on the internet: none.

9. Time before publisher flies to Johannesburg to hand over completed magazine: 15 hours.

10. Price paid for Alberto Giacometti's L'homme qui marche I (Walking Man I) at a London auction house last night: £65,001,250 (or R775,000,000).

11. Cups of tea today: four.

12. Cappuccino: one.

13. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on the links between economic capital and culture: “So it has to be posited simultaneously that economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital and that these transformed, disguised forms of economic capital [including cultural capital] … produce their most specific effects only to the extent that they conceal (not least from their possessors) the fact that economic capital is at their root, in other words – but only in the last analysis – at the root of their effects.” (from essay The Forms of Capital, 1983)

14. Number of times Bourdieu is cited in the forthcoming issue of Art South Africa: zero.

15: "A list, especially one that ranks or categorises, can be a salve for the anxiety of living in an era of information overload. But the relief is short-lived. Listing the options is not the same as selecting one of them to stand by. Unless you have something to say with your list, the experience of both its creation and use ends up being hollow..." Alice Twemlow, 'From the (a) trivial to the (b) deadly serious, lists dominate visual culture' in Eye magazine (Issue 47, 2001)

Random #2

2010-02-03T15:35:00.000+02:00

Zoo Lake Public Bath, a glorious place to work

More of the same. I woke up early, 6am, to go to a meeting that was only scheduled for next week. I swore at a taxi just as someone exited, a waiter at a coffee shop I sometimes go to. The server is down. I had to write a "bright young thing" profile, not as an afterthought but as a serious and attentive consideration of career about to take shape. In the background, a jackhammer. Renovations next door.
And so on.

Driving to the office, for a second time, Big Black started playing. A song from 1987, I think, although I only heard about them a year later, in a park in Garsfontein, via Mark Pretorius who had a copy of their Racer X EP. The song this morning was from Songs About Fucking. I've always loved, advisedly, Steve Albini's trenchant humour and abrasive manner. He was a journalist, so the story goes. Perhaps that's why he wrote:

"... He's a whore - I'll do anything for money
He's a whore - With the things you like to eat
He's a whore - Well, the stories I could tell
He's a whore - And I'm a moron as well
I'm a whore - He'll do anything for money
I'm a whore - Because he goes anywhere
I'm a whore - He'll do anything for money..."

I listened to it twice on the way to work.

Funny. At some point you realise, I am what I listen to. On which, Beck, from Stereopathetic Soulmanure, bought the year it came out, 1994:

"... Today has been a fucked-up day
Today has been a fucked-up day
Today has been a fucked-up day
Looks like tomorrow'll be the same old day..."

As a postscript: I'm not sure this entry contains much factual accuracy, but for the the authenticity of the song lyrics.

Servers going. Back to work.

Random #1

2010-02-02T17:57:00.003+02:00

I love this photo by Guy Tillim: Oupa's geraniums, Yeoville, 2004

I was peddling up Table Mountain yesterday, it was sometime after six in the evening, when I remembered something. I forgot whatever it was soon after. Late last night, just before midnight, I picked up where I'd left off the night before with On the Natural History of Destruction. A brief passage in Sebald's book made me pause, something about the accuracy of diary kept by a Japanese physician after the atomic bombing. Factual accuracy.

Over the past two weeks I've been slaving away - there is no other way of putting it - on the next issue of Art South Africa. So much happens during this process. Very little of it is ever recorded. Today's entry is a record of the things I forget about producing Art South Africa. Some might be factual.

1. For this new issue, I decided to interview artists rather than commission boring discursive essays. Listening is such an embodied experience. I say this because while interviewing Guy Tillim, Malcolm Payne and Stephen Hobbs, I was struck by their eloquence. Reading the transcripts of these interviews, well, I'm not so sure anymore. About my own proficiency as a speaker too. So many of the peculiarities of South African speech come through: "I mean", "just" "sort of" and so on. What I also thought would be a simpler solution to editing an essay turned into a large-scale exercise in cutting, cutting, cutting... Gardening, that's what I do.

2. So much time is spent emailing people, requesting this, asking for that. Pictures mostly. I watched that movie September. What I do exists far down the evolutionary chain from what happens in Ms Wintour's office. It's like woodwork compared to steel making. Sometimes, I think carpentry is a better pursuit. Other times not.

3. Writing about art is really a process of rationalizing, after the fact, a visual experience that, for the most part, is immediate and fleeting. There is a contradiction here. I suppose the task of the art critic, arguably, is to make the contradiction more, rather than less palatable. Otherwise it's just writing about things that don't exist.

4. Deciding on a cover image is a bit like walking into a bar and looking for a face that impresses. It's a stupid way to fall in love.

5. This blog entry was inspired by peddling. Malcolm Payne: "...critics are bottom feeders like art peddlers."

6. Despite the caffeine tone, I was prompted to write this because of the joy of possibility. Malcolm Payne, again: "There are very few art critics that write pure art criticism for the sheer joy of it. I think Greenberg possibly was one of those kinds of mavericks that decided he was going to do it and damn everybody else."

Monsieur Yves' garden

2009-11-25T15:21:00.007+02:00

I recently wrote a piece on the fire sale – read auction – of Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection. Then, a few weeks later, all quite unexpectedly, I ended up visiting the Majorelle Garden in Marrakech, where the late fashion designer’s ashes were scattered following his death in 2008.

Located a short walk out the old city, along the wide boulevards of the French colonial district, the Majorelle Garden is prickly place. Literally. It is filled with hardy shrubs and cacti. Established by the French painter Jacques Majorelle in 1924, the garden has been open to the public since 1947. Monsieur Yves and his partner Pierre Bergé acquired the garden, which includes a defiantly blue modernist villa amidst the greenery, in 1980.

Walking around the raked garden, pausing to look at the graffiti on the thick bamboo stems, listening to Mark Coetzee speak of his encounters with Monsieur Yves at a breakfast deli in Paris in the 1990s, smiling too at the remembered recollection of Bergé describing his lover as “a man of exceptional intelligence practicing the trade of an imbecile", I found my mind wandering off elsewhere.

Earlier this year, over lunch in Kloof Street, Lin Sampson complained to me that a lot of newspaper journalism nowadays is shorthand for what already exists on the internet. There was little if any personal experience or insight contained in these cut ‘n’ paste pieces. Perhaps the piece I wrote on Monsieur Yves for the Sunday Times was a case in point.

Sitting in the garden, looking at the unembellished memorial column erected in his honour, I was reminded of the unavoidable honesty attached to a personal encounter. I never met Monsieur Yves.

Anyway, here is the piece I wrote:

It’s his myopic blue eyes I want to see, nothing else. Trawling the vast image archive online that responds to the entry “Yves Saint Laurent”, I find myself oddly frustrated. It’s those thick-framed glasses: they feature in almost every picture of the Algerian-born Frenchman, a shield to the enquiring gaze of the world.

There they are, framing his coy reserve as he faces the world, fresh faced, 21, the newly appointed head of the House of Dior. And there they are again, behind the scenes at a 1970 Paris catwalk show, Monsieur Yves further sporting a raffish silk scarf and tight-fitting safari jacket.

And so it continues, my ambition thwarted by the endless pictures of the sartorially composed couturier in, you guessed it, glasses. The more frantically I search, the more I find myself getting lost in the smoky after burn of a life well lived – one in which he always seemed to be wearing glasses. Then suddenly, yes, no, could it be?

It is a Polaroid portrait of Monsieur Yves by Mister Warhol. It was taken in June 1972. He is wearing a dinner jacket, yellow polka dot bowtie and vertically striped shirt. More importantly, he is barefaced, without glasses. But, for all their nakedness, his eyes remain obscure, lost in the imperfection of an aging Polaroid. Damn.

Of course, I know that Monsieur Yves had shockingly blue eyes. Why all this fuss? Call me foolish, but I want to study them for clues. After all, these were the eyes that helped put together one of the twentieth century’s great art collections.

In an art world prone to hype, where tags like “highly important” are used to puff second-rate collections, Monsieur Yves’s collection truly deserved the accolade important. Amassed without the aid of an advisor, his only confidante his lifelong business partner and lover, Pierre Bergé, the pair’s Paris residences were the stuff of legend.

Paintings by Picasso and Matisse hung in close proximity to collectable crystals and silver decorative ware, also an armchair by Eileen Gray, the later an audacious Art Deco masterpiece. So jam-packed were the pair’s separate residences, they hung a Monet painting in the toilet of one.

The collection, which included a rare African inspired sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, was the outcome of half century’s activity. Started in the late 1950s, when Monsieur Yves first met the older Bergé, it gained manic fervour in the 1970s when Opium become the biggest selling perfume brand in the world.

More than mere trophies, the pieces in the collection held together their tumultuous personal relationship while also giving Monsieur Yves great creative inspiration. Take his 1965 Fall collection, its shift dresses inspired by the minimalist grids of his Mondrian canvases.

Fashion observer Suzy Menkes, writing in the New York Times shortly after the inimitable couturier’s death from cancer in June 2008, summed up the audacity of Monsieur Yves’ collection at his Rue de Babylone apartment as follows: “It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. Incredible art on the wall and you had to resist the urge to gape.”

For decades, however, it was only an elite few who gaped. Death changed all this, Bergé opting to sell the pair’s collection shortly after his lover’s passing.

“The second I knew that Yves was ill, condemned, I knew I would sell everything,” Bergé told the London Telegraph newspaper in January, a few weeks before auction house Christie’s hosted a three-day, 733-lot sale of the pair’s collection of rare art and unusual antiquities.

The collecting world gasped.

“One of the most remarkable ensembles of fine and decorative arts created in the twentieth century,” gushed the Financial Times at the time of the collection’s display at the Grand Palais in Paris. “This happens once every 100 years,” offered Japanese collector Misako Takuku to Agence France-Press. “It’s like a dream.”

2009 has been a terrible year for the art world, even locally. Drought and famine are the more commonly used metaphors, not dreams. All of which made the outcome of the Paris sale that much more dizzying. Records, records, records.

Monsieur Yves’ two beloved Mondrians, one an austere composition in grey, the other a geometrical symphony of blue, yellow and white, fetched R242 million and R162-million respectively (all prices include buyer’s premium). The early Brancusi wood sculpture sold for R328 million. Gray’s unusual “dragon” chair collected a whopping R246 million. All prices that make paupers of the Tretchikoff adoring bidders turned out at the Kebble auction in May.

The headline grabbing final tally for the sale, R4.2 billion (373,935,500 Euro), the biggest-grossing auction of a private collection ever, wasn’t achieved without some effort. Seating had to be arranged for more than 1,000 buyers, 100 telephone lines had to be installed, and eight auctioneers prepped for their marathon shifts. According to one report, a small airport north of Paris witnessed a 35% increase in traffic as bidders arrived in private jets.

The great dispersal of Monsieur Yves’ things is not over yet. Over four days in November, Christie’s, in association with Bergé’s auction house, will be hosting a second sale of personal effects. Almost 1200 items (jewelled pendants, lamps, candle holders, a leather Eames chair, black 2007 Mercedes Benz S Class 350L and Tiffany Studios lamp, to name but a few) will go under the hammer. The sale is expected to achieve a moderate R45 million. (The four day sale eventually netted €8,990,212, including buyer’s premium.)

Perhaps the most striking feature of the auction is the photographic record of the late designers Normandy getaway, Château Gabriel à Bénerville. Built on 74 acre estate by an American family in 1874, the home was styled to evoke the aura of French novelist Marcel Proust’s classic book, À la recherche du temps perdu (translated both as In Search of Lost Time and Remembrance of Things Past.)

“This is my haven between two storms,” said Monsieur Yves of his opulent hideaway, the bricks and mortar of which now belong to a Russian. “I come here to rebuild my strength.” Which no doubt involved taking off those character-defining glasses.

Monday morning coffee in Marrakech

2009-11-23T11:39:00.002+02:00

Writing a review of Alf Kumalo’s photobook, Through my Lens, an uneven collection of historical photographs, it suddenly struck me. Tenses matter in photography. Photography, it would seem to me, is about a perennial past tense. It can never articulate a future tense, and only tenuously claim to speak of a present tense. Thinking this, I found myself wondering to what extent photography is, unavoidably, about denying death. Death exists in the perpetual future tense – it will happen, until it does happen. It’s a muddled thought, admittedly. Needs refinement.

Incidentally, I write this while sitting in a riad in Marrakech. My visit here prompted a colleague to send me a note about Paul Bowles: “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

To extend on Bowles, how many times will I get to sip the dark coffee served by shy cook in a Marrakechi riad on a Monday morning? Not many. I’m going to enjoy the limitless finality of this morning’s coffee.

“Who is ever quite without his landscape?”

2009-11-12T23:10:00.001+02:00

An old man, his bottom jaw clenched and slightly proud, is seated in a chair beneath a leafless tree. His pale blue eyes are focussed on a book, a novel. A cup of tea steams on a table next to him. It is a clear Highveld afternoon, winter but warm. But for the occasional whir of a helicopter, the intermittent cooing of doves, it is quiet. Then a familiar noise, followed by a feminine voice: “Rob, telephone.” The voice becomes a figure as it emerges from a single-storey residence. Wearing a pastel apron, the woman pads across the tawny lawns and hands the old painter a telephone handset.

“Sean, oh god yes, no I’m a very bad bastard. I’m sorry, I was supposed to ring you at least three hours ago.”

“It’s not a problem,” I tell Robert Hodgins.

“Well it is a problem because I hate breaking my word. Um, I know it’s quite sentimental and Boy Scout-ish, but never mind. Listen dear boy, when would you like to come?”

“I can’t come through because I’m in Cape Town,” I respond.

“Oh I see. Well, ask Business Day if they are willing to fly me down to the Cape.”

“I know what their answer will be.”

“I have a feeling I know too,” he chuckles. “Alright, perhaps you could go ahead with the interview now. What’s this piece about?”

“Um, its basically about you being South Africa’s preeminent living painter,” I offer coyly. The painter chuckles again.

Of course, I share the old man’s cynical disregard for these sort of glib one-liners but I’m trying to set the scene here, bear with me. This is a story about painter Robert Hodgins, a man working in a practice increasingly given over to self-doubt and worry, never mind the headline grabbing billionaire art collectors and their lust for oil on canvas. Over the last hundred or so years, painting’s prominence has steadily been eroded, to the point where it now struggles to define its place in the dispersed field of contemporary art production.

For some, this necessarily casts doubts on the place and status of Hodgins. What, to put it crassly, makes this old boy and his abstracted figurative paintings of stifled executives, clenched old molls, tight-lipped warhorses and sun-drenched rakes so special? What indeed. The short answer: his laconic brevity and acuity as a painter, added to which there is his simple goodness and grace as a human. None of which was a given at the start of it all. Some biography.

“I was born in England, 27 June 1920 – the illegitimate son of a working woman, by a Canadian who lingered in London from Wold War One, was a married parent back home, and wasn’t interested in further fatherhood,” Hodgins pithily introduces himself in his eponymous monograph from 2002. Soon banished to an orphanage, he found a modicum of under-age happiness in the countryside, with a family that wanted to adopt him. At age ten, Mother Hodgins interceded, so it was back to London. Four years later, this sensitive, literate youth was again uprooted, yanked out of school – because learning was an affectation and cash paid the shared bills.

“I had a very lonely childhood with few friends and a completely philistine background,” Hodgins succinctly described his youth to me during a 2007 interview. Books, he added, were his only refuge. “I quite early on at school discovered literature, which was my first form of discovery of art, something which entranced me, that was quite pointless, quite useless.”

His first job was as a delivery boy for a newsagent in Soho. Two and half years later he found a job answering phones. At age 18 his great-uncle in South Africa offered him a means of escape. Once in Cape Town, the London youth worked as an insurance clerk. It was a brief reprieve. In late 1940, Hodgins, now a matriculant, joined the army transport division. He didn’t have it all that hard during the war. In the deserts of Egypt, he was introduced to modern English poetry, Auden in particular.

“Who is ever quite without his landscape?” wrote Auden in 1937. It is a rhetorical question, perhaps, but one that helpfully explains why Hodgins opted to stay in England after the war. London, after all, was home, and home, as Auden wrote, is “the centre where the three or four things/ that happen to a man do happen”. Back in the “grey block”, as Hodgins has described London, he took up a job teaching art at an East End school.

For many years Hodgins buttered his bread, sugared his tea and paid his rent with the help of teaching cheques. First in London, then later, after studying painting at Goldsmiths, followed by another boat trip to South Africa, in Pretoria, at the old technical college. He joined the staff there in 1954, Pretoria introducing the immigrant painter to cheap good food, clothes, cigarettes and wine. Immigrant painter? Well yes. Hodgins’ art is all about that awkward sense of a frail, receding cultural memory encountering and engaging, in an excitedly cautious manner, the nuances and complexities of an adopted culture. But I’m jumping far ahead of myself here.

In 1966, having established himself as a painter on the scene, Hodgins putting on his first show at Johannesburg’s Lidchi Gallery in 1956, he took up a position at Wits teaching life drawing. This little distraction would keep him busy for 17 years. I ask Hodgins, the man seated in the warm winter sunlight, if teaching ever stifled his ambitions and abilities as a painter

“No, no, no,” he blurts out emphatically. “I said at my doctorate at Wits that I owe a great deal to the students. One ex-student said, ‘So tell me what?’ I couldn’t pin it down, but I think the fact is that you’re surrounded by people who are taking art seriously. It is not a reinforcement, but it allows an interplay, like two rugby fans who take rugby seriously. No I mean it. I don’t scorn rugby fans, although I can’t see what all the fuss is, but I can see that to really, really love rugby you have to know what rugby is about. Well, to really love art, you’ve got to be serious about it.

“Teaching art is a very interesting experience. I loved it, I must say. I am very glad that Wits was so nasty to me, well not Wits but the head of the department, Alan Crump. He was so nasty to me that he made me leave. I am very glad he did, he didn’t realise what a favour he did to me.” A favour? Well, in hindsight yes, but when Hodgins left Wits in the early 1980s he was a retiree with a paintbrush and a modest track record. Hardly a promising prospect, really.

I ask the painter about the big holes in his CV. After an intense burst of activity in the late 1950s when, for example, he showed alongside Alexis Preller at the Pretoria Art Museum, he seemed to go nowhere before announcing himself as a serious proposition with a roguish gallery of military figures, in the mid-1980s.
“Ja but you know, one thing that perhaps you don’t remember or don’t even know is that up to I suppose the middle or late 1980s, there was quite a lot of small galleries, in particular the gallery attached to the Market Theatre, where one was always in a big group show with people who have now become very interesting, like Paul Stopforth, William Kentridge, you know, and you popped in and out of those.

“One was constantly showing, and because it wasn’t terribly remunerative, you didn’t make much money out of it, you had to earn your living doing teaching or something else. Because of all that one went on painting, but first you didn’t have all the time to paint and secondly there wasn’t that big excitement about South African art there is now, even in South Africa. You were painter, you exhibited; you were a sculptor, you exhibited, bada-bada-bada.”

I wonder out loud if this slower working pace, particularly when compared with his routine now of almost one solo exhibition a year, had an adverse effect on his evolution as a painter. After all, repetition breads rigour, and rigour is the measure of a practicing artist.

“I’m not sure about that, Sean,” he muses. “No I must say I think you are right. I think in those early days I was making paintings, now I am a painter.”
One bit of biography that has always intrigued me about Hodgins, and perhaps stems naturally from his affinity for writing, is his not so brief detour into art criticism. In the late 1950s Hodgins ditched his Pretoria teaching job, working for four years as an arts journalist for a magazine called Newscheck.

“I was perfectly willing to see whether I could perform as a writer, as I wasn’t bad,” he says without any sense of immodesty. The mood of the times also played its part in this decision.

“In the sixties and even in the seventies, there were about three people earning their living as painters. I mean three reputable people, not people who were churning out comforting little pictures of the Malay quarter, I’m not talking about them, I am talking about people who were trying to advance themselves and advance their work,” he says, mentioning the names Walter Battiss and Alexis Preller. When he did paint, it was almost as a hobbyist. “So in the sixties, I don’t think I was yet a professional artist, I was a professional amateur.”

One person who witnessed firsthand Hodgins transformation from hesitant amateur into unstoppable professional is Neil Dundas, a curator at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery.
“I first met Rob in the old Goodman Gallery at Hyde Park, around May 1983 when I was still rather new to the art world and the gallery,” says Dundas, whose insights into the painter are illuminating, notwithstanding the commercial relationship.

“I worked quite closely with him from 1984 onward, for his own solo exhibitions as well as Wits group shows, and collaborations with printers, ceramists and, of course, Deborah Bell and William Kentridge,” he explains. “I was always particularly struck by the way in which he was able to deal with social horrors, ugly aspects of human frailty, random violence and political venality without a judgmental stance. Rather he enjoyed the actual process of painting onto the canvas, teasing shapes out of clay, experimenting with effects on a plate, and allowed that evident skill and pleasure to add the humane touch to the subject.”

The result of all this spry activity is an oeuvre that, in the view of dealer Warren Siebrits, rarely disappoints. “There’s almost no such thing as a bad Hodgins,” Siebrits is quoted in Art South Africa. “And he’s probably the most important living South African painter.”

Not everyone necessarily agrees with this assessment. A rival Cape Town dealer once told me that Stanley Pinker, a contemporary of Hodgins, is far more adroit as a painter. And then there’s the matter of Nigerian curator and tastemaker Okwui Enwezor’s stinging aside in a 1996 Frieze magazine review: “I cannot imagine that paintings such as Hodgins’ – which look like Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon on a very bad day – represent the best of what could be seen in Johannesburg during 1995. These pictures… are formalism gone awry. They snuggle into a psychic space no larger than a one rand coin.”

Funnily enough, the novel Hodgins was reading when I called anticipated this part of our conversation.

“I am just reading a book by Julian Barnes, who quotes Sibelius: ‘You will notice there are no statues of critics in any town of France.’ Don’t you like that?” He laughs raucously. But, truthfully, what does the old man make of his critics?
“Sweetie,” he says, injecting a bit of camp into his occasional routine of speaking epigrammatically, “I have hardly ever been criticised by somebody terribly intelligent.”

The book on his lap also anticipates another, slightly less frivolous concern: “It is quite a long book. The author is only 60 and he is thinking about death. Here I am knocking 90, shouldn’t I be adjusting myself to this thought?”

“Then again you have rather more prosaic concerns about 90 because you have deadlines to deliver for next year’s big exhibition,” I respond.

“Yes, theoretically, but if I fall down dead in that deadline, tough. The gallery will have to make do with what they’ve got, won’t they. I hope it is not happening. I have this great ambition to be 100, and be the first South African 100-year-old painter who starts a new painting in their centenary year.”

But that is next year.

“I am now going to get off my butt, the shadows are coming in, the sunset is coming on slowly,” says Hodgins. “I am now going to my studio to put some Windsor red on a new painting.”

An abandoned spark of the world’s lusty fires

2009-11-11T11:04:00.008+02:00

In the early 1970s Prakash Jadhav, then a baggage handler at Mumbai airport, wrote a poem that startled filmmaker Amar Kanwar when he read it many years later, in 2001. Taking its name from a well-known and congested Mumbai landmark, Under Dadar Bridge is a poem of mourning, notionally at least. A fatherless son recalls his dead mother, a prostitute. ‘The three bricks of the sacrificial fire she used to light have sooty ornamental marks,’ it begins. ‘She has left the ruined sculpture of her relics under Dadar Bridge.’ Written in the Marathi idiom, spoken by Mumbai’s homeless Dalit underclass, Jadhav’s poem is more than just an elegiac record of absence. Like Kanwar’s films, it is fired by incendiary need to interrogate an impoverished reality.

‘Poison-drunk and restless,’ the son at one point demands of his mother: ‘Hey ma, tell me my religion. Who am I? What am I? Hindu or Muslim?’ It is not an idle question in India. Her response is blunt: ‘You are an abandoned spark of the world’s lusty fires.’ Unsatisfied, the son impetuously pushes for more. ‘Who was he? Who’s my father?’ In a moment of observational grace, Jadhav records in words – much in the way Kanwar does in moving images – the intimate gestures that mark the unsaid: ‘Scraping and scratching at the VD sores that traced the world’s map on her flower-like breasts, shrivelled during the malaria epidemic, she would answer: ‘He was some swine or other!’’

Under Dadar Bridge directly inspired Kanwar to make A Night of Prophecy (2002), an episodic visual compendium of Indian protest poetry that premiered at documenta 11 in 2002. Kanwar however only briefly images Jadhav in his film, which, to borrow from the eccentrically brilliant Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, proposes the griot as ‘a messenger of one’s time, a visionary and the creator of the future’. In his typically dissociative style Kanwar shows Jadhav seated in his home, hair neatly combed, blue work shirt open to the belly. The edit suddenly cuts to the famous bridge. A young man is walking, his passage marked by the streaking lights of passing cars. Kanwar slows and rewinds the scene, a technique repeated throughout his oeuvre. Back again to Jadhav, who exhibits his handwriting to the camera. It is a cryptic moment. According to Kanwar, Jadhav was promoted to a clerical position after strike placards featuring his verse caught the eye of an alert boss. But you are not expected to know this.

In a film that uses poetry and song to elliptically trace the fault lines of contemporary India, defined by Kanwar as caste, class, religion and nationality, Jadhav’s brief appearance is without fanfare. There is no voiceover to locate his significance within the emerging Dalit literary tradition, no exegesis of a life. Eschewing the didactic literalism so much a part of contemporary documentary filmmaking, Kanwar chooses only to show the poet as he wearily cups his hand around his neck. That’s it, no cant, just an elderly man seated in the quiet half-light of his slum dwelling. The film then cuts to a quotidian scene around the bridge, a translation of Jadhav’s poem scrolling vertically across the screen. This miniscule sequence, in many ways, distils Kanwar’s style; it describes in précis form his approach to archiving the intimate moods, complex shades and fragmented gestures underlying the conflicts marring the Indian subcontinent. ‘Speaking in multiplicity,’ he concisely defines it.

Seated in Kanwar’s tiny studio, a retrofitted servant’s quarter located up a narrow flight of stairs in a Saket, a residential colony in South Delhi, I ask the heavily bearded filmmaker how he found Jadhav. Kanwar’s answer is uncomplicated: it took time, three trips to Mumbai, and some footwork with a literature activist. The negotiations that followed were equally complex, involving Jadhav’s wife and sons, Kanwar having to explain who he was, what he did, and why. The why was easy: ‘I told them I can’t get over his poem, that I am a public school kid from another world. I couldn’t explain what the poem did to me, just that it had never left me, which is why I was there.’

An unpretentious and oftentimes self-reflexive conversationalist, Kanwar is also a cigarette smoking contrarian, his allusive thinking modulated by an unapologetic laugh. ‘How much detail do you want?’ he asks when it becomes clear that my interest in his biography predates his art world debut in 2002, in Basel.

Born into a family that carries with it the scar of India’s seismic delineation in 1947, the year his mother and father separately fled Punjab during the Partition, Kanwar grew up in a military home, his father a naval officer. (The uniformed military figure is a distinctive presence throughout his films, although this has less to do with personal biography than the subject matter of his work: social and political conflict.) The lesser achieving younger brother, academically at least, after finishing school he enrolled in a history degree at Delhi University (1982-4). The small-scale conflicts in the politically engaged history department energised the South Delhi suburbanite: ‘I got absolutely and completely socially, publically, politically aware and involved.’

Two events in 1984 sharpened the focus of Kanwar’s activism, which is ongoing. On October 31 Indira Ghandi was assassinated. Kanwar witnessed firsthand the retaliatory violence. With the history department shut down in protest, he spent most of his time doing relief work with affected families. In a manner that would later inform his filmmaking process, he simply ‘hung out’ with victims, listening. During this brief hiatus, on December 3, the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal leaked toxic fumes into the atmosphere, killing over 2000 people. ‘In many ways a lot of things happened for me that turned things around in those two months,’ he says.

I ask if he was aligned to any political organisations at the time. His answer is terse and immediate: ‘No… I just kept getting involved in various civil rights–, environmental–, political–, or anti-violence groups, as an individual.’ He describes his ideological position as having been ‘outside established left traditions but politically liberal and left leaning’. It is a space he continues to occupy, both as a human rights activist and filmmaker: in many senses Kanwar is radical humanist, first and foremost a libertarian, then left.

After completing his studies, he travelled to central India, to research alcoholism in a coal mining region. ‘It opened up a whole country beyond my existence.’ This is not a frivolous statement. In his subsequent quests to describe the histories of Indian conflict, the prophetic possibilities of poetry, the suffering of woman, even the grotesquery of the Burmese junta, Kanwar has succeeded in retrieving marginal, dispossessed and exiled subjects from a totalising image oblivion. In the compelling, interwoven narratives that comprise his 19-channel projection The Torn First Pages (2004-8), dedicated to a Mandaly book dealer imprisoned for sedition and shown for the first time in full at Munich’s Haus der Kunst last year, he achieves this by focussing, minutely, on Burma’s forgotten people. The three-part installation introduces the viewer to Sitt Nyein Aye, an exiled Burmese painter, Tin Moe, a dissident Burmese poet, also Ma Win Maw Oo, a Burmese high school student shot dead by soldiers in the 1988 uprising.

But film came later. If nothing else, Kanwar’s stint as a researcher made him realise he had no attraction to becoming ‘a university type of intellectual guy, which I found distasteful and tiresome’. With ironic detachment, he says he decided on film because it offered a study pursuit with ‘peaceful examinations’. Perhaps, but his choice of film school was anything but arbitrary or neutral. Founded by renowned Canadian documentary filmmaker James Beveridge, the Mass Communications Research Centre at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University was a hotbed of activist filmmaking. Beveridge, however, was old and nearing retirement when Kanwar entered film school in 1985; Kanwar also had no interest in the becoming a ‘film buff’. After graduating in 1987, he made two documentary films then promptly decided to quit film. ‘I found filmmaking to be a very absurd profession,’ he offers. Partly, it was the expense, a one-hour videocassette tape costing as much as a month’s salary. He returned to the research project in the coal-mining region.

‘It is tiresome to talk about myself,’ sighs Kanwar. Tiresome because he knows there is a tacit expectation that this talk will offer insight into the nature of his work, its methodology; that it will flesh out irrelevant details, like his influences. The latter issue, he says, has increasingly become a point of irritation, particularly as his work gets travelled to global art destinations: Basel, in 2002 and 2007, the Whitney Museum, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Paris, Stockholm, the list grows. ‘I find it very difficult to answer, and I also resist categorisation.’ He tentatively offers Andrei Tarkovsky’s name, then pulls back. ‘There are several filmmakers that I like, but there is a lot of 15^th and 16^th century Indian poetry that has been totally fascinating and inspiring and an influence.’

Kanwar’s biography might not be a reliable guide through his work, but it is not without relevance. During a long and ‘demoralising’ period spent making the sort of documentary films his current practice shuns, Kanwar produced a film for the Tibetan government in exile, Earth as Witness (1994). It was different from anything he had done before, the total control he had negotiated allowing him to experiment with narrative techniques. He describes the film as ‘an important turning point.’ Three years later he released A Season Outside (1997).

Episodic and journeying, A Season Outside records his attempt to make sense of Punjab’s violent history, and by extension India’s. Kanwar overlays onto his raw images of exaggerated military pageantry, recorded at the Wagah border, a near continuous narration. Early on, he highlights his biographical interest in the story. Seen in the context of his later work, this probing, argumentative film is a remarkable statement of intent: ‘I have a compass which keeps spinning me into zones of conflict,’ he declares at one point.

Narrative construction aside, A Season Outside was important in other ways. An immersive filmmaker, Kanwar extensively travelled his film, A Season Outside shown at schools and in villages, to rich and poor alike. Why? ‘It is easy to get appreciated, but it is not easy to extract criticism. I went around pushing and looking for it. For me, that journey was hugely rewarding. I met a lot of audiences who argued, explained, criticised and appreciated, who told me what they felt and why they felt.’

Years later, this activist cum indie filmmaking ethic would allow him to broker the trust of a rural community while making The Lightning Testimonies (2007), an exploration of India’s history of sexual violence, available both as a continuous film and eight-channel projected installation. Initially sceptical of his intentions, Kanwar responded by hosting a screening of his work. ‘I ended up showing silent films, abstract films, single shot films, some of my films that I show in parts of installations, as well as old work, in an open field at night, on a television with people sitting on the ground. They saw all of it: my early Burma work, A Season Outside. Nobody said anything. The next morning I was asked, simply, ‘What do I want to do?’’

This statement contains more than just quaint anecdote. ‘If you are not politically or socially engaged or connected with a community or a process, with some degree of depth and calmness, you cannot produce work,’ argues Kanwar. The filmmaker’s ethical stance, which he says is based on ‘comprehension and compassion’, is not the only reason I have highlighted his story of the screening in the field. A metonymic image-maker, Kanwar’s films are driven by an internal logic that aims to connect with audiences experientially, rather than bludgeon them intellectually, as is so often the case with socially engaged documentary films. Editing and narrative construction are central to this process.

Particularly in his projected installations, where his narratives are displayed as a constellation of auditory and visual fragments, Kanwar’s aim is to fashion an experiential space that might prompt ‘revelations, of different kinds, for different individuals’. He achieves by acknowledging multiplicity – ‘the need for multiple vocabularies to be able represent, tell, reflect, understand, communicate or even explore reality’. Elsewhere during our day-long conversation, he rationalises this need for multiplicity as follows: ‘Life is so full of so many layers and so many concurrent, simultaneously existing trajectories that at times you run into a situation where you want to tell a story that becomes infinitely richer if you are able to reveal its multiplicity.’

Form, despite its centrality to his idiosyncratic visual language, turns out to be another frustrating topic of conversation for Kanwar. ‘My motivation for doing this is the content of the film, not the methodology of its form,’ he humphs. Kanwar’s contrarian manner and, at times, allusive positions remind of Allan Sekula, whose notion of ‘poly-seriality’ is not that far off Kanwar’s aesthetic/formalist principle of ‘multiplicity’. More fundamentally, both practitioners share an ideologically engaged vision that pits itself against the ‘indifference, callousness and mendacity’ of the neo-liberal state, to quote Sekula. In his short film The Face (2005), later incorporated into The Torn First Pages, Kanwar achieves this by contextually capturing the image of General Than Shwe, the secretive head of the Burmese junta. Kanwar secretly filmed ‘this creep’ at Ghandi’s burial place, Than Shwe shown scattering flowers across the non-violence advocate’s grave. Tellingly, the general was on an official, state sanctioned visit to India, Burma an expedient proxy for political manoeuvring by India as it turns east and faces down China.

The totalising and often essentialist senses in which we (the west) understand these two emerging superpowers, be it politically, economically and/or culturally, plays right into Kanwar’s hand. ‘The great Indian growth – and the great Chinese growth – has been accompanied by severe destruction within these countries: destruction of natural resources, cultural traditions, music, food, habitat, species, a whole range of things that have had to be destroyed for this boom to ever have existed.’ For any artist to feel flattered in this context, Kanwar empathically states, is ridiculous, absurd, silly. It is point sorely missed in most long-distance appraisals of India’s art boom, highlighting why Kanwar’s politically poetical films are essential viewing.

The Cowboys of Kayes

2009-11-10T14:19:00.002+02:00

It is about half after five, the relentless sun finally yielding. A ragtag grouping of men, most of them in their early twenties, one with a big scar on his neck, chat amiably amongst themselves as they wait for things to get started.

On the other side of the dusty enclosure, also languidly congregated in a group, are their opponents, a brutish lot by all accounts. They have a habit of scarring their adversaries.

Standing amongst the group nearest me is the Ivorian footballer Didier Drogba. Other big names include Thierry Henry and Argentine Lionel Messi, both from FC Barcelona, also the Fredi Kanouté, the French-born Malian striker. The genius Brazilian midfielder Ronaldinho is here too; he is in high spirits.

But it is not soccer these Malian youths, all residents of Kayes, reputedly Africa’s hottest town, are set to play. Wearing cheap plastic sandals and sports jerseys announcing their football heroes, they are misiminena, cowboys in the local Bambara language.

Football and cows might not quite define all that there is to know about Kayes, but each is central to this rather forgettable market town crowded along the banks of the Senegal River. By day, every other youth transporting vegetables, selling hay bales or fixing truck tyres wears a football shirt. At night, the brightest lights in town radiate from the local soccer stadium.

Named after the Wolof command for “come here”, which used to be how locals beckoned the ferryman before the French and their bridges made it easier to cross the river, cows are also central to Kayes’ largely agrarian economy.

Approaching town from the Malian capital of Bamako in the east, vast herds of cattle can be seen grazing the fenceless landscapes. Amongst the breeds there is the humpless N’Dama, brought to West Africa by migrating pastoralists 9000 years ago. But it is the heavier, meatier White Fulani and Gobra, distinguished by their impressive lyre-shaped horns and bulging humps, that keep the cowboys busy.

Every afternoon at about six thirty, when the barometer dips just below thirty, Drogba, Henry and a whole phalanx of attacking footballers will accompany these impressive cattle, tethered by heel and horn, two-by-two down the national road. Coaxed with guttural chants, the cattle will be goaded, beaten, sometimes even wheeled in carts across the old iron bridge spanning the Senegal River.

“Where are they taking them?” I curiously asked my interpreter when I first saw them pass the hotel. I was in Kayes for a week without much to do, which perhaps explains my curiosity.

“To pasture,” he replied. In a manner of speaking he was right. The square, cement-clad building where the cows are guided is not so much menacing as obvious: it is an abattoir.

Disappointed by this grim endpoint, I resolved to find out where the cows came from, rather than linger on where they are gutted, filleted and shipped off in parts.

The next evening, after another all-day siesta, Kayes grinding to a halt when the sun is at its highest and meanest, I trace the route walked by the cowboys, in reverse.

I walk past the sprawling eastern market where Cheick Coulibaly, 52, a trucker and fan of James Brown told of how he had stowed away illegally on a ship bound for France, three times. “The French are racists,” he quipped in fluent English, drawing on his cigarette. “There will be more riots.”

As the ramshackle buildings and market stalls thin out east of town, near the cemetery, I see a man herding a group of goats down a side street. I follow him.

It is about four thirty when I arrive at the market, the cement wall surrounding the cattle enclosure marked with graffiti reading “Long live the playboys”. Slowly the playboys in football gear begin to arrive. I chat with two of them.

Sadio Traore, 23, wears a shirt with the name of Egyptian footballer Mido emblazoned on its back. He shows me the thick welt in his neck. Seated next to him is Marye Dembele, 32. He holds out his right arm: it has a long scar running up its length. Old war wounds, they explain, occupational risks.

A passerby laughs and says something in Bambara: “They do this job because they are poor,” my interpreter translates.

There is little to doubt this unsolicited bit of wisdom. The cowboys work two shifts, the first starting at five and ending around midnight. It involves getting the cows to the abattoir for slaughter. The average wage is R45 per day.

The job of slaughtering the cattle on the late shift, from midnight to morning, is more lucrative, paying R90 per day.

Sometime after the call to afternoon prayers, the action around the cattle enclosure begins to ratchet up. Seydou Lah, 67, and Kalidouh Kaleluyatasai, 69, arrive. They are to the Kaidi market what Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan are to English football, the big guns. Lah, a former cowboy himself, is cattle trader, Kaleluyatasai president of the local cattle dealers association. Both wear the flowing robes, known locally known as boubous.

“A good cow is a fat cow,” explains Lah after dispensing a handful of grubby, cellotaped notes amongst the cowboys. Weight, he says, not necessarily region or breed determines value.

Some of the cows have come as far as 250km, from neighbouring Mauritania, to be sold at the market, founded in 1988. A cosmopolitan trader who identifies himself only as an “intellectual” and “storyteller” (in English) explains the economics. He will pay cattle farmers between R350-R450 per cow, selling them on at the market for anywhere between R1700-R4450.

As I gather these statistics, a young girl selling three bruised mangoes and tiny packets of peanuts threads her way through the traders, cowboys and spectators. To the great delight of the would-be cowboys seated on the walls, who whoop and cheer, Ronaldinho kicks off the the day's round-up by riding an incensed cow.

Wielding thick blue ropes, his teammates get to work. The cows kick and grunt. Even when roped around a rear heel, they are hard to subdue. A mottled bull is corned, and then escapes. What was, minutes before, a scene of Islamic restraint and composure is now a vast dust cloud of serious intent and circumspection. Great horns are wielded like spears and Ronaldinho is no longer smiling.

For a brief few minutes, man and beats are equal again.

Paradox Security Systems

2009-11-10T13:34:00.002+02:00

The old neighbourhood, Pretoria, down a dusty road in the very new ‘burbs out east. A stop sign. Below it, attached to the slanted pole that holds the stop sign falteringly in place, two advertising banners. “TAR SURFACE 072 1509616” reads the one, its crummy hand lettering now almost a generic species of type that one day soon will appear in your MS Word font list as “Africa New Bold”.

But it is not this banner that catches my eye. It's the other one. It reads: “Two White Guys Life Protection Systems”.

Bullet point declarations aside, the banner includes a name, a telephone number, a website reference and a cryptic logo that reads “Paradox Security Systems”. Mindful of Terry Eagleton’s not entirely unfunny warning about cultural theory’s decline into banality and triviality, this in his 2003 book After Theory, I am not going to exercise too much effort on decoding the significance of the advertising banner way out east and north of everywhere.

But, and I suppose this is important, would that hoarding strike you as more or less strange were it not plastic cable tied to stop sign along an untarred road in an area where bushveld is tenuously holding out against suburban kikuyu? How would it look staple gunned to a tree along William Nicol Drive? Tied to a palisade fence in Greenside? Attached to a lamppost in Claremont? And what if the “two white guys” decided to become “two Indian gentlemen”, “four Coloured women”, “eight Tsonga teenagers”, “thirteen lucky Zimbabweans”, “lots of Chinese”, or simply “one angry Samoan”, how would that change things?

Later, at home, I ask the internet to tell me more.

“As a young, Pretoria-based start-up company, and operating in a highly competitive environment, we must differentiate ourselves.”

I click through to another page.

“We are independent Security Solution providers. Not being affiliated to any given armed response means that we can offer a bespoke security solution to match your exact requirements, circumstances and risk profile. We will not push you into ‘whatever system we happen to be selling this month.’ You have the freedom to negotiate your own armed response contract, should you so desire.”

Desire? I desire an answer.

When did a security solution become a proper noun? Security Solution. The only other “solution” I know that is routinely transcribed in capital letters is prefixed by the word “final” and narrated through place names like Belsen. To my mind, there is no equivalence between the insecurity of living in a criminally hazardous country and inhabiting a state that has criminalised your very life because of your religious persuasions. None.

In Praise of Public Amenities

2009-11-10T13:03:00.004+02:00

“Is it kya-old?” asks the fat girl with dark hair. She has a tummy like a veteran beer drinker.

“No,” says her friend, already in the pool.

After a bit of dilly-dallying, the big girl with the stomach lurches towards the edge of the rectangular expanse, her toes curling over the rim. She stares at its rippled surface.

“1-2-3!” the girl in the pool counts. Splash.

“Look at my hair!” the fat girl screeches as she emerges through the meniscus of wet.

I am watching this. So too is the twentysomething lifesaver with a tribal tattoo on his right arm. Difference between him and me is that he has to, I simply want to. Sit and stare. People watch.

Like many of the people who routinely congregate at Zoo Lake Swimming Bath – the car guard in pink fake Italian T-shirt, that guy with a gammy leg, the dude on the grassy knoll who always wears a white Speedo – I don’t know the lifesaver’s name. He’s just the lifesaver, that’s all. Which is enough for me. I come here to get lost. He reminds me of Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, the lifesaver. It’s the combination of ripped body and messy tattoos.

“Are you here everyday?” I ask him.

“Everyday!” he sighs. “Well, not everyday. I do relief between here and Sydenham. Chows my petrol.”

For a moment I wonder if he thinks me noticing him like this means I’m cruising him. It’s why some people, usually larnies with Vitality points and gym memberships, avoid the pool. The only person to ever have cruised me here is the guy in the pink shirt, and he’s always pretty upfront about his intentions: a few coins for keeping an eye on my car.

“Hey! What are you doing?” shouts a schoolgirl in blue and white uniform standing near the entrance to the pool, beneath the clock that mostly never works. The question is lobbed over the head of the lifesaver, past me. I watch its ambitious arc, which like a cricket ball is aiming, reaching, hoping for the boundary. It is here that three adolescent boys stand staring at an oversize chessboard.

“They’re playing checkers,” shouts the non-combatant in the trio. A spectator to the game, he wears swimming trunks three sizes too big for him. They remind me of the school blazer my mom bought me at the start of high school, the one meant to travel the distance between 13 and 18, which it eventually did.

With a mixture of curiosity and self-conscious awareness, the schoolgirl in blue walks briskly along the edge of the pool to join the three boys at the chessboard. She arrives as a black boy, towel wrapped around his waist, picks up a white pawn and jumps a series of opposing pawns in a cunning checker move.

I imagine what it must be like being the Egyptian Goose looking down from its perch on the tall light. Boys playing chess and a guy in fins swimming lengths. Boring. Perhaps.

I lie back on my towel, stare blankly up at an ocean of lightly speckled blue. A plane drifts in from the corner of the frame, glides effortlessly across it, purposefully headed somewhere. It’s Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, just after lunchtime. I should be writing about more earnest things. Instead I’m here, at my favourite pool.

I smile.

The art of trucking, Malian style

2009-07-21T18:42:00.005+02:00

“This truck is older than me,” laughs Mamadou Seye. The 25-yeard-old Senegalese trucker is standing in front of a dilapidated yellow lorry parked in a dusty plot of land near the central train station in Kayes, a bustling market town in western Mali. Ornately decorated with strange motifs – pineapples, lions, a Cobra sticker (remember that awful Stallone movie?), long-stemmed flowers, the Senegalese flag – Seye’s truck is attention grabbing, and yet also unremarkable. The lot, which sometimes doubles as a soccer field, is filled with many similarly decorated wrecks, all of them quietly baking in the early morning heat.

To say that Kayes is hot is an understatement: the Rough Guide lists it as Africa’s hottest town. The barometer pushes well over 40 degrees Celsius everyday, and it is not uncommon to see groups of people, especially the truckers, sleeping by the roadside as the sun follows its conveyor-belt arc across the sky. Some lie in groups, others alone, some on the floor; luckier ones rest in customised hammocks attached to the underside of their large articulated vehicles.

Although populated by Bambara-speaking Malians, the name Kayes is pure Senegalese; it means “come here” in Wolof. Legend has it the town got its name from impatient travellers standing on the banks of the river calling out to the ferryman. Despite the urgency its name implies, Kayes has always been a place of pause. Situated on the Senegal River, Kayes is (more or less) the halfway mark between the Malian capital of Bamako and the port of Dakar, in neighbouring Senegal.

If you ignore the whistle-blowing traffic police and slow-paced customs officials, the town offers the attraction of entertainment, porn movies at an outdoor cinema and cheap roadside grub. Mariam Barry’s saga-saga-nan, a meaty stew of cooked entrails served with Thai-style rice, is typical.

I meet Lassine Sanogo, a 38-year-old trucker and fan of footballer Didier Drogba, a short distance from where Barry’s ramshackle eatery stands. He is delivering cotton, he says. So too is 53-year-old Drissa Diarra, whom I meet further down the main road, which is backed-up with parked trucks. Point being: trucks deliver almost everything in the region. While Mali has an airport, also a functioning railway line, as is the case in South Africa, and indeed most other places in the world, trucks do it faster, quicker, now, now, now.

Their ubiquity, both in Mali as elsewhere, hints at an idiosyncratic lifestyle, one that is often approached (rather than understood) by its cosmetic adornments.

In Japan, for instance, truckers there add impossible chrome and metal extensions to their vehicles, also bright flashing lights and visually excessive paint motifs. The net effect is something intriguingly futuristic, never mind the fact that the interior cabins of these Japanese trucks tend, typically, to be filled with fluffy toy dolls. It’s the same in Kayes, just different. One obvious difference is the condition of the trucks. To use a great English expression, they’re shagged, completely.

Still, these trucks, for better or worse, are home. Drissa Diarra knows as much. He has been driving since 1979. Although married with four children, he is rarely with his family. “I see them maybe once a month,” he says. On most nights he sleeps in front of his truck, on a stretcher, covered by a blanket and a mosquito net.

It is perhaps because of this simple reality, of never being home, of always being elsewhere, on the road, that these Senegalese and Malian workingmen, much like their Japanese counterparts, take such great pride in their trucks. Instead of driving around in featureless mobile homes, as tends to be the case in South Africa, their vehicles are richly decorated.

Where some West African trucks are full of stickers bearing the faces of influential Islamic teachers, or vinyl-cut lettering announcing a terse Koranic admonition, other truckers find their spiritual sustenance elsewhere, Bob Marley, for example. Senegal being such a proud football nation, it is not uncommon to see trucks featuring prominent images of lions, the symbol of the national team.

Of the many animal motifs I encountered, a naff bunny painted onto the front of 25-year-old Sekouba Kone’s truck was the most peculiar. “I used to breed rabbits before I became a driver,” explains the demure trucker. That was 1994; he was still a teenager living with his parents in a village outside Bamako.

“I had six rabbits. One day a thief stole all of them.” He says he paid a local sign writer (R61) to paint the bunny. Given that the average monthly income of a trucker is (R770), such decorative adornments are by no means cheap indulgences.

Perhaps a kernel of wisdom, rather than a literal explanation of why drivers indulge in such seemingly unnecessary expenses, is offered by 62-year-old Coulbaly Tahirou. “A good driver does three things,” he asserts. “You look out for your own truck, the one in front, and the one behind.” Ironically, in looking out for their own exhausted trucks, however whimsically, these West African truckers have managed something unexpected. They make others look too, appreciatively, in amazed wonder.

Walter Battiss: The last orgy

2009-07-04T18:03:00.003+02:00

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.

Moshekwa Langa: A painter's muse

2009-07-04T13:33:00.005+02:00

Moshekwa Langa's installation Temporal Distance (with a criminal intent) …

“Don’t be so nervous,” remarks Moshekwa Langa. We have been chatting for close on two hours, I’m late for another appointment, but here I am, still hoping for an insight into a portrait of Langa by his long-time friend, Marlene Dumas.

“Do you see a shrink?” he continues, pointing to my knotted fingers.

“No.”

“Better you don’t. That is very unhealthy. I have never seen one.”

We are seated in an empty bar at his Cape Town hotel. In a chronology defying narration of his professional biography, Langa recalls his first encounter with Candice Breitz in mid-1990s Yeoville, a 2007 visit to Venice with Linda Givon, a wild night out in Germany in 1997 with Dumas, also his first meeting with the expatriate painter two years before.

It happened shortly after his explosion onto the art scene in 1995, Langa on an artist residency at the Thami Mnyele Studios in Amsterdam. Dumas, an active member of the studio’s board, visited one day.

“Someone said I should meet that girl,” says Langa.

The pair traded polite introductory greetings. Later, while walking home, he bumped into Dumas again and struck up a more casual conversation.

“We exchanged addresses – I was living in Yeoville at the time – and she and I started writing letters to each other. She sent me stuff. She writes very nicely, you know, sweet nothings.”
The correspondence, which is ongoing, continued even when Langa was in Amsterdam again, in 1997, for a stint at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten.

“We didn’t really have a connection because I was doing my stuff and she was doing hers. We would write each other postcards across town. And that, actually, is still how we really communicate.”

On a day three years ago, Dumas finished a large portrait she had been working on. When she presented it to Langa, he replied that the painting was too big for his home in Amsterdam. So Dumas did the next best thing: she promptly despatched his likeness on a world tour instead.
Exhibited locally on Dumas’ travelling retrospective Intimate Relations (2007-8), Langa’s portrait is now travelling across the United States on another Dumas retrospective, cheerfully titled Measuring Your Own Grave (2008-9).

Rendered in dark hues and perfunctory brushstrokes, Langa’s portrait includes a marked purple blemish on his brow and right cheek, also a smattering of bright blue around his nose and mouth. The outcome is an arresting study of a mercurial individual: Langa.

Born Moshekwa Mokwena Aron [sic] Langa in Bakenberg, Mpumalanga, in 1975, Langa is the only South African artist who made the official selection for this year’s Venice Biennale. Two years ago it was Dumas.

Fans of Langa’s shape-shifting work, which demonstrates a remarkable fluency across a range of media, might be disappointed to learn that he will be restaging an old work. Originally shown in Cape Town in 1997 as part of the second Johannesburg Biennale, his quirkily titled Temporal Distance (with a criminal intent) you will find us in the best places… is a mixed-media installation comprising bottles and spools connected by a vast weave of thread, interspersed with toy cars and plastic animals.

Like his photographs, video work, drawings and paintings, the installation forms part of an evolving body of work that collectively reads as a sort of visual biography, not just singularly of the artist but of his birth country too.

I ask Langa how many times he sat for Dumas to enable her to make the now famous portrait of him. (The painting has appeared on the cover of two art magazines.) He didn’t, he responds. The portrait was created entirely from a photograph.

The back-story to the making of this photograph offers a concise insight into Langa’s life, which since his debut exhibition at Newtown’s now defunct Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery in 1995 has involved ceaseless travel, constant exhibiting and partying.

A couple of years ago Langa was in Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean Sea, for an exhibition. While out socialising one evening he struck up a conversation with another visiting artist, a woman who had caught the eye of a couple of locals, resulting in a late-night shouting match involving Langa.

The next morning, hung-over and glum, he had his picture taken by artist Marlon Griffith. Langa promptly used the photograph for a “wanted poster” he created as his contribution to the Martinique art event. When he returned to Amsterdam, he gave Dumas a copy. Inadvertently the elusive Langa presented Dumas with an unwavering and always present sitter for her painting.

(This article originally appeared in the June 2009 edition of the Business Day art supplement.)

A message to Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave

2009-07-04T13:20:00.008+02:00

"No-one is illegal," reads the graffiti on a wall facing the N1 at Evaton West

At first, there wasn’t a wall. Then, it happened sometime after 2001, they built this thing, a wall. I don’t know who “they” are, but I do know this: it measures about five kilometres, or thereabouts, hasn’t been painted, but for this lonely piece of graffiti, and principally serves to section off the community of Evaton West, located about 50km south of Johannesburg, from motorists using the N1.

I also know that the wall wasn’t there in March 2001, which was when I met Zakes “Satch” Motswane, a resident of Evaton West. Satch was 53 then. Born on the farm Wembley in the Free State, his eyes glowed when I asked him about his first kiss. “Jesus… bliksem… 1968… Lydia, in the Free State.”

Officially, Satch was unemployed. This didn’t mean he was unable, Satch helping his wife to run a crèche used by the working moms and dads who call Evaton West home. According to the old timer, he’d been laid off from a job as a managerial assistant on some mine in Welkom. Before that, during the 1980s, he’d worked as an organizer for the Transport & Allied Workers Union, and before that he’d been a driver. These details didn’t really interest me.

Instead I asked Satch how many cars he’d personally owned in his life. “Many, many,” he responded, mentioning a Vauxhall, a Beetle, a Valiant, a Chev 4.1, a station wagon, also a Toyota 15-seater.

“When I was a driver I sometimes drove to Cape Town,” he added. “When I saw Robben Island it caused me great pain. No one can stomach that kind of pain.”

Satch moved to Evaton West in 1998: “It was a new lease on life.”

At some point during our conversation, we spoke about the highway that passes his neighbourhood’s western boundary.

“Some white and black people that pass here have guns and they shoot at the people who live near the highway,” Satch stated. “The people here get angry and innocent people who pass can get injured if people here decide to close the road and take matters into their own hands.”

Perhaps, and I am only speculating here, this might be why “they” put up this wall, to stop any nonsense. But the wall is only half the story. I first spotted this graffiti last September. When I passed by Satch’s neighbourhood in May, it was still there, albeit now re-written over the spot where it had originally appeared and been erased.

As a piece of art, which is how most graffitiests tend to speak of their creations nowadays, it is perhaps forgettable. Faith 47, Falco and Mak1 make prettier art. But that isn’t why I want you to pause on it. Put aside aesthetics. Concentrate on ethics. Think about the implications of something Satch told me.

“Nigerians are dangerous. If a Nigerian looks at you while you are sitting at a restaurant, he will be able to draw you the same as you see yourself. Those Nigerians! Angolans are only after diamonds, and Kenyans after emeralds. Mozambicans… phew… everything. That place where the Portuguese people learnt those peoples everything. If you give a Mozambican a chance, he can do anything. Weld, fix things. Let’s not talk about cars. A car is a very minor thing for a Mozambican. Those people [immigrants] are dangerous. Myself, I would like to take all of them in one ship back home, finished and over.”

Seven years later, pissed-off South Africans attempted to broker this final solution. I can’t honestly say if Satch was one of them. I don’t think so. I could be wrong though.

Stephen Hobbs: Recording a city in flux

2009-07-04T13:06:00.005+02:00

Installation view of High Voltage / Low Voltage (2007) by Stephen Hobbs

In the mid to late 1990s, around time artist Stephen Hobbs was making a name for himself with a series of gritty, low-grade video recordings of inner city Johannesburg, actor Burt Reynolds was staging a comeback.

As audiences were marvelling at PT Anderson’s wayward masterpiece, Boogie Nights (1997), which stars Reynolds playing a caddish porn director, a doubtlessly embellished story started doing the rounds. It had to do with the cruel discourse of media success: asked how it felt to be back, Reynolds replied that he had never been gone.

The same is true of Hobbs. Since making 54 Stories (1999), a short video piece recorded by parachuting a camera down the centre of Ponte Tower, he has continued to live and work in Johannesburg. Like Reynolds, however, there was a time when the former Wits graduate was said to be lost in the woods, or to abbreviate things, gone. Many blamed it on his move from video to photography.

Hobbs retort: “The definitions around photography in this country are very limited.”

Rather than defer to these conservative definitions, Hobbs has over the past few years railed against them. A finalist for the 2003 DaimlerChrysler Award, Hobbs, whose ease into fatherhood hasn't seen him grow his perpetually clean-shaven head, used the opportunity to construct a vast camouflaged wall display. Unlike Guy Tillim, who eventually won the award, Hobbs’ photos were anti-iconic and sometimes downright hard to even see.

“Rarely will one photograph serve as an essay,” he says of his approach to making pictures.

Equally significant is Hobbs’ argument that he is not a photographer.

“Photography is just one of the modes of expression I employ as an artist. It is not the definitive language that I’m interested in – it is part of an assemblage of languages.”

In September 2007, at Wits University’s makeshift Substation art gallery, Hobbs revealed just how adroit he is at moving between media – or, as he would put it, speaking in a new language. Titled High Voltage/ Low Voltage, this strikingly mature exhibition included small sculptural models made from dowel sticks, tie-straps and various found elements. It even included a homage, in the form a toy model, to his yellow VW Golf. Sat on plinths, these models suggested speculative architectural possibilities while offering wry commentary of urban utopianism.

The standout work, however, was also the largest. Two walls of mirrors, each decorated with grid-like tape designs, were held in place by rudimentary pine frames in the main exhibition area. Spotlights created a mesmerising display of reflected light and shadow. The optical experiments of contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson came to mind, as too a host of high Modernist ideas.

An elegant paean to Hobbs’ abiding muse, the city, this work also underscored a key point: “What I do in the free space of my artistic practice is to objectify, criticise, elevate, celebrate and pay homage to a city in flux.”

Finding Little Switzerland

2009-07-03T09:48:00.009+02:00

Still from Week End (1967), written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

It is a love affair. I want to end it. It is an affair without love. After all, the thing I love is just a thing, a handful of stones. A landscape.

Predictably, it all ends with a photo. Actually, there are two of them. One – not the one I love (small “l”) – shows a view from inside a moving car. The car is travelling along a dusty Free State road. It is somewhere near Onverwacht/Botshabelo, 1997. It will always be 1997 for the fucked-up taxi approaching Santu Mofokeng. But this is not the photo; there is another, a photograph that will take me to Little Switzerland, the end of the journey, my journey. It was taken in 1996, at a place called Little Switzerland. Santu Mofokeng was driving a U-Drive Rent-A-Car. At some point he stopped. He was nearing New Switzerland, a resort somewhere in the KwaZulu Natal Drakensberg. He took out his camera and made something I would tentatively call a photograph. It doesn’t offer much, just a car door, half ajar, and beyond it an imprecise landscape. That's pretty much all. Except for the door, everything is out of focus, present yet somehow also missing.

How to find this present but missing place, this landscape?

There are some obvious possibilities: a car key and music player, time and a library card, ritual and tradition. The last of these is perhaps the most revealing. Tradition dictates the route.

1. Church Street Cemetery: my inheritance lies here. Stand at the grave of J.H. Pierneef and look east, as he did 80 years ago. Touch the tree close by. Feel the scar from the Tshwane metro bus that smashed through countless graves to get here. It happened on July 7, 2008. The bus didn’t kill the father.

2. Drive the Ben Schoeman to Joburg. Do it again, ad infinitum. Make notes – unqualified, observational sketches – preferably by SMS, while driving: “Two pieces of pine planking, tapered, like large splinters; bits of plastic bumper; cigarette butts; a crumpled piece of paper; more cigarette butts; glass from a shattered window; other things less easily described, all fleetingly observed from the car at stationary intervals. You look at them; their placement and location is random, determined by accident – an unfortunate word. They say nothing about the congested frustration, the waiting.” (June 5, 2006)

3. Read JM Coetzee’s White Writing (1988) at the Star Stop in Midrand. Ask yourself, “Am I just a victim of sentiment?”

4. Phone Clive Chipkin. (I have his telephone number.) Ask him about Bridge 6, better yet, ask him if you can drive him to the south end of Joburg’s city centre, End Street, so he can narrate its story. (Optional reading here is Chipkin’s book Johannesburg Transition (2009): “The new peripheral elevated road system took an amorphous spread-eagled city on the plains, tied it together in an urban package and provided a sense of recognition for visitors and locals alike.”)

5. Get stuck in traffic, again. SMS yourself, again: “A fat woman in a red shirt, next to her a skinny man, both seated in fold-up chairs at the Buccleuch interchange. Are they studying the traffic? What do their clipboards prompt them to look out for? Nearby, the new electronic sign reads “NO INCIDENTS AHEAD”. Less than a 100 metres on, in the fast lane, a pulverised Honda is parked near a dump truck angled into the concrete barrier. “FUCK DA POLICE” reads graffiti on the rear of the truck. An orange Metro Police car, a Mercedes, pulls up to the scene.” (October 4, 2006)

6. Read William Kentridge’s 1988 essay ‘Landscape in a State of Siege’.

7. Watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967): it pre-empts the obvious, JG Ballard’s Crash (1973). Time Godard’s accident scene. Mourn Ballard’s absence: “Joseph Conrad once said that it’s necessary to immerse yourself in the most destructive elements of the times, and then attempt to swim…” (Ballard, 1976).

8. Look at other photographs of highways and industrial landscapes. Edward Burtynsky. Toshio Shibata. Catherine Opie. In 1994, Opie, best known for her large-format colour portraits of Los Angeles’ gay and lesbian community, ditched her clunky camera and made small, intimate little photographs of Los Angeles highway overpasses. The work is unpretentiously titled Freeway. It is an archaeological record of now. So too are Jo Ractliffe’s photographs of the N1, photographed at every hundred kilometres. Made in 1999, Ractliffe calls her nothing scenes of straight lines and featureless veldt “blandscapes”, which is not her being urbane. The camera describes surface, not feeling.

8. Google “S’busiso Leope” and “257km/h”.

9. Make a road mix (or playlist), limiting yourself only to songs that offer place names. (Big Black: Jordan, Minnesota. Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto: Berlin. Kalahari Surfers: Free State Fence. And so on.)

10. Locale, locality, location, locus, point, position, site, spot: all synonyms for place.

11. Revisit the archive. Find that letter William Plomer wrote to the editor of The Natal Mercury in 1925: “We are in danger of too many veld-yearnings, too much Karoo-urge, too frequent sunsets on the Drakensberg, and moonrisings on Groot Constantia. A little less landscape and a little more portraiture would be highly stimulating.”

12. Look at Santu Mofokeng’s photo again and dissolve into the landscape.

Naoya Hatakeyama: Journey through the residual world

2009-06-27T10:07:00.009+02:00

Naoya Hatakeyama 畠山直哉, from the Blast series, 1995

I arrive early for my interview with Naoya Hatakeyama. Punctuality is one thing in Japan, but arriving early, similar to being late, is an imposition; so I opt to simply linger along the concrete promenade adjoining the Shinkawa River. I sit on a bench. It is mid summer, my shirt clings to my back. Cicadas sing. Joyous. This bounded profusion. Having grown up and lived much of my adult life in South Africa, the ordered symmetry of the Japanese landscape has always impressed me greatly, particularly the greying tones in which the country has so willingly cloaked itself. Order and abundance, wildness and constraint.

It was while living in the rural backwater of Tokushima that I first encountered Mr. Hatakeyama’s photographs, images that quietly confront viewers with the complex beauty and unavoidable character of our modern existence, images that make strange the mundane: mountains excavated for their lime deposits, rivers notable only for their perfect symmetry and sameness, blast sites, machinery, the intractable mystery of the underworld. More than simply make strange the mundane edifices of Japan’s consumptive progress, Mr. Hatakeyama’s photographs impressed upon me a different way of looking at how progress is measured in a photograph.

Having palpably been influenced by Mr. Hatakeyama’s worldview, it is not surprising then that I wanted to meet him. On my four-year journey to achieve this simple ambition I was afforded much time, to sweeten my appreciation, which is how I came across Edward Burtynsky. Like Mr. Hatakeyama, this Canadian landscape photographer also photographs from a viewpoint that is “anthropological rather than critical”, to quote John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the father of cultural landscape studies.

And like Mr. Hatakeyama, Mr. Burtynsky is articulate in describing his interest in the theme of ruined modern landscapes. “I remember the first time I came to Toronto alone,” Mr. Burtynsky once tellingly digressed during an interview. “I found myself looking up at skyscrapers sixty and seventy stories high. I was bowled over by the scale at which we operate, the kinds of things we can create.” Looking at these edifices Mr. Burtynsky realized that for things to be on this scale, “there has to be something equally monumental in the landscape where we have taken all this material from. I felt that Newtonian law implied a reciprocal action in nature – a hole in the ground that meets the scale of the rising of the skyscraper – and my task was to go in search of the evidence of that reciprocal action, to see what the residual world looked like.”

Mr. Hatakeyama’s photographs are very much concerned with this residual world; a world sometimes obvious in its photographic exegesis yet implacably sly in delivering neatly encapsulated meanings. His photographs are not simply images of Japan’s ruined splendor, or mere activist refrains. I realize this when I finally meet with the photographer, who arrives at the gallery on a battered off-road motorcycle. More so than his habit of vigorously scratching the underside of his chin when I propose a difficult question, I am most charmed by Mr. Hatakeyama’s redoubtable grin. He is not a somber man. Indeed, as Mr. Hatakeyama guides me through his photographic landscapes, I am struck by his remarkable thoughtfulness and levity. His elegant pathos.

The following interview was conducted on July 21, 2004 at the Taka Ishii Gallery.

Youth and Early Influences

Born in provincial town of Rikuzentakata, in Iwate Prefecture, Mr. Hatakeyama recalls the “vast empty space in front of our house”, which overlooked the Kesenagawa River. “I was always looking at the emptiness,” he says. “My favorite place, though, was near the a train tunnel. It had this huge cutting that was covered in concrete. I was about five when I discovered it.” Fourteen years later, in 1977, he entered Tsukuba University’s School of Art and Design.

How did your interest in photography begin?

I met Kiyoji Otsuji, a professor of photography, at Tsukuba University in 1978. Before that I had no interest in photography. Meeting him was really inspiring, particularly hearing what he had to say about the art of photography. It is quite difficult to express how great he was. [Pauses] Do you know much about the circumstance and atmosphere of Japanese art schools at the time?

No.

In 1977 Japanese art schools offered many courses, including painting and sculpture. Many of the teachers were very conservative and advocated the salon style of teaching art. I found it very boring. Mr. Otsuji, however, was fantastic. He knew a lot about avant-garde art in the twentieth century. He was a member of Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), an art movement founded by a number of artists after the war, which included the sculptor and video artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and composer Toru Takemitsu. The group’s theoretical axis was Shuzo Takiguchi, a very famous poet who died in 1979. Mr. Takiguchi was personally very close to the French Surrealists and Dadaists, men such as Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Everyone in the Jikken Kobo coalesced around Takiguchi. He had a great influence on many people, including Mr. Otsuji. It was very exciting to listen to him speak. Mr. Otsuji would often talk about photographers such as Eugene Atget, the great documenter of Paris life.

How would you say Mr. Otsuji’s teachings influenced your first body of work, Contour Lines?

Do you know the work of Takuma Nakahira? Along with the philosopher and critic Koji Taki, he co-founded the photography quarterly Provoke, in 1968. During the 1970s Mr. Nakahira wrote many important essays, which I thought were good. He had a fantastic sense for words and writing. I particularly liked his collection of essays, titled Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? (1973). In it, Mr. Nakahira renounced all his previous lyrical works, and declared his aim to create materialist photographs in the form of an album or pictorial compendium. He even burned all of his negatives. His position was in many senses typical of 1970s thought, which doubted the subject. You can create something, but is it true. Mr. Nakahira’s essays were very important in relation to this.

To answer your question, though, Contour Lines represented an attempt to avoid any explanatory elements in my photographs. Very often when we take pictures, we do it to express something to someone, to tell them something, as in press, advertising and family photographs. We are all used to seeing these kinds of images. Following on Mr. Otsuji’s advice, I removed all explanatory elements from my images. Admittedly, this style of looking that has become very popular in photography nowadays.

In 1984 you moved to Tokyo. I read that you were overwhelmed by the city? Has this sense changed?

I’m still overwhelmed by this place. [Laughs] I hate this city. After completing my postgraduate studies at Tsukuba University in 1984, I worked for the Seibu Group. I had a part-time job with them for one year. I was a salaryman. But, during this time, I also directed a video documentary on the German artist Joseph Beuys, who was visiting Japan. About a year later, I started photographing Japan’s limestone quarries.

Lime Works

Limestone is one of the few natural resources in which Japan is totally self-sufficient. A sedimentary rock comprised mainly of calcium carbonate, limestone is an essential ingredient in the production of cement. It is also used as an aggregate for asphalt, iron, and glass, even medicine. Every year over 200 million tons of limestone is extracted from various sites across the country. Photographed over eight years, between 1986 and 1994, at 30 sites from Hokkaido to Okinawa, Lime Works (1996) presents an instructive document of Japan’s limestone industry. With scientific detachment, Mr. Hatakeyama pictures everything from the ducts and conveyor belts of huge lime processing factories, to vast, opencast quarries and concentrically mined hills. Amidst the splendor of these industrial landscapes, none of which are named or captioned, Mr. Hatakeyama sneaks in a picture of a bird’s nest. It contains two, chocolate brown speckled eggs.

Where did your interest in photographing these lime quarries derive from?

I suppose in high school, in 1975, when I painted the local lime works. I also took my first photograph in Iwate, in my hometown. I simply went to the nearby quarry and rattled the gate. The people who worked there were very kind and welcoming. They allowed me to photograph as I pleased. Although I didn’t talk much with the men who worked there, I did, however, find out that there was an office in Tokyo that possessed a lot of information on limestone quarries. After visiting this office I made a pilgrimage to as many of the quarries as possible.

Did you ever doubt your commitment to the project?

[Laughs] It took me eight years to complete this project, which should answer your question.

The images in the book strike me as remarkably declaratory, or explanatory, to borrow a word you mentioned earlier. Were they meant to be explanatory given what you had been taught?

You’re right; they are explanatory. When I started this work, many friends were dismayed and stopped speaking to me. They felt that this way of imaging was too literal. They loved Contour Lines but thought this was just so different. But it was this project that made me realize the city I was living in was not separated from the countryside. As I wrote in the introduction to the book, we live in cities that have tossed away the sea, the mountains, the rivers, yet receive their fruits for our consumption through a vast distribution system. Nature is already so distant from us that you might say it has become a fantasy.

Your comment cues with a question I want to ask about the political subtext of your work. In a recent interview, the photographer Michael Light stated: “In my opinion, serious contemporary artistic production dealing with landscape must deal with politics and violence in some way, whether explicit or implied. Otherwise its just fluff, decoration for those wanting false comfort and a delusionary ahistorical and apolitical world” Would you say that, in the context of contemporary Japan, that your is political?

No, no, no. But, landscape images can be political when people demand only beauty. That is when landscape becomes political. Generally speaking, traditional landscape photography has a tendency to make people stop thinking about political issues. I don’t personally think the events shown in these images, the destruction of beautiful mountain landscapes, is bad. I don’t think that specific action is bad.

Those people who protest or feel outraged by these works, people who want to preserve beautiful landscapes, are victims of aestheticism. They are living in the tradition of the romantic landscape. In my introduction, I speak of this as the desire, quite unrelated to our lives in the city, for a healthy ecological system. It is a desire that is gradually developing into an obsession, while its object recedes even farther into the distance.

This seems like quite a provocative statement, can you elaborate a bit more on what you mean?

I can understand that this is a big issue. Let me explain it this way. When I go to Europe, for instance, I see many beautiful fields. They look like soft pieces of cloth. But you have to remember that those fields have been cultivated over centuries, by humans. Before the fields there was a large forest. Yet when we look at images depicting those fields we see nature, not a cultured nature. I think the romantic, or aesthetic way of viewing what is nature constitutes a different thing entirely from what it means to conserve or preserve nature. However, many people confuse these two issues.

I am interested in understanding your intention in this work. The Hungarian-born photographer Brassai (born Gyula Halasz) openly argued that the camera is a crudely fashioned sociological tool. “It is not sociologists who provide insights,” Brassai remarked, “but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very centre of their time.” Would you agree?

I don’t think many photographers look at themselves as sociologists, although I suppose they can do sociological work with their cameras. It is probably better to say that sociologists find things that interest them in photographs. But, I must add that if more photographers possessed the consciousness of sociologists, the world of photography would be much better.

Nocturnes

The book Underground (2000) is a collection of photographs of Tokyo’s underground culverts, and takes as its subject the abstracted beauty of an atrophied urban environment. The character of the work, while highly original, has precedents in the work of Shomei Tomatsu, specifically his images Aftermath of a Typhoon, Nagoya (1959) and Asphalt, Tokyo (1961), from his book Nippon (1967). Underground won the photographer the 16th Annual Higashikawa Prize for Domestic Photography, in 2000, as well as the 42nd Mainichi Award for Art, in 2001.

I know your decision to explore the underground recesses of Shibuya was prompted by a particular image in your River Series, from 1993-4, which showed a large, gaping blackness. How did it feel heading into that nothingness?

Creepy. [Laughs] I entered all by myself. But I must correct you somewhat. Have you ever visited the catacombs in Paris? It is located at the edge of an underground quarry. Basically Paris was built from stone quarried beneath the surface of the city. This fascinated me when I first found out, as it seemed to mirror my idea that quarries and cities are like negative and positive images of a single photograph.

The Paris catacombs, however, exhausted me, the large number of tourists and human bones. [Laughs] While I was experiencing this in Paris, it struck me that Tokyo had similar underground spaces, which I recalled from the photograph you mention. Two days after returning from Paris I visited Shibuya’s underground culverts.

Can you speak a bit about the process?

I worked for almost a year of this series. The photos of the illuminated tunnels were taken last, right at the end of the project. For the first ten months of the project I took detailed images of the surfaces of the water underground, as well as the animals that inhabit it. While I was doing this, I suddenly realized that, despite the incredible colors and form of the images, there was no explanation as to where I was. It was then that I thought to photograph the interior spaces as a whole.

Shibuya is such a notoriously busy place. Did you ever meet anybody underground?

Never. You must remember that these are natural riverbeds that have been covered over. It is not habitable like the railway tunnels in New York. About 50 years ago there was open sky above these rivers. If you look carefully at image of one particular tunnel, you can see the remains of an old bridge. The city needed more land, so they covered over the river.

You said friends stopped speaking to you after Lime Works. Did they at least start speaking to you again after Underground?

No, but after this series I made many new friends. [Laughs] I’m okay.

Venice

In the summer of 2001, Mr. Hatakeyama was invited to represent Japan in its pavilion at the 49th Venice biennale. He showed an unusual pair of images, aerial views of an Osaka baseball stadium. In the one image it has been retrofitted with domestic housing elements and a parking space, on what would have been the pitch. In the latter, it is being demolished in its entirety. The work claims a lineage with an earlier series of Tokyo aerial views, started in 1989.

What was it like exhibiting in Venice?

A wonderful thing happened to me at the opening of my exhibition. Just before the opening, at the press reception, the curator asked how she should introduce me. As an artist, or a photographer? I told her to simply introduce me as a photographer. She duly did. ‘This is Mr. Hatakeyama, a photographer,’ she said. Afterwards, the journalists asked, ‘Where is the artist?’ It seems that most people consider photographers to be photojournalist – with the Nikon slung around their neck.

The debate does tend to get heated over whether photography is art. What are your thoughts?

I think it is an interesting debate. Over the past twenty years art has changed. It was once almost impossible to think of Henri Cartier-Bresson as a great artist. Twenty years ago, a good photographer was simply a good photographer, not an artist. But then, twenty years ago, sociological research wasn’t art, which it can now sometimes be.

Slow Glass

In 2001, Mr. Hatakeyama was a resident artist, on the Light Xchange, in Milton Keynes, England. Aside from photographing his host nation’s distinctive suburban landscape, he also produced a new body of work, titled Slow Glass, images of half-discernable landscapes photographed from behind rain-soaked glass. The abstract pattern of these images, as well as their interest in repetition hint at an earlier project, titled Maquettes/ Light, from 1995-8, which pictured the geometric order of Tokyo’s high-rise apartment blocks, their night-time corridors lit in precise rows.

What attracted you to do a suburban study?

Milton Keynes is such a funny place. In Tokyo suburbia, there is still quite a lot of diversity. There are at least shops – and pachinko parlors. In Milton Keynes, however, there are only houses. Everything looks completely the same but always slightly different. It’s crazy. People want to live their lives in certain specific contexts but they don’t want to be the same as other people. They want to be different, but only slightly. This intrigued me.

Contemporaries and Future Work

Few of your works show people. Do you find it difficult to photograph human subjects?

Well, sometimes photographs of people, portraits, make me very sad, very tired, exhausted. I hate that feeling, so I don’t want to repeat it. I appreciate that some people have no interest in architectural and landscape photography, and prefer portraits. Personally, though, portraits make me sad because people in photographs look dead.
But bear in mind that I work in very isolated places with few people. [Chuckling, he picks up a copy of Lime Works and points out a miniscule figure in one of his images.]

As a matter of interest, do you own photographs by any other photographers?

Yes, I have one print by the American photographer Gary Winogrand, his famous image of the elephant nose. Recently, I also bought an image by the Los Angeles-based photographic artist James Welling.

Speaking of architectural photography, what about Lewis Balz?

Lewis Balz is cool. He was always cool, always apocalyptic, always conceptually interesting and extreme, which is why he is still alive.

What about Japanese photographers?

I love Toshio Shibata’s work. Remember that place by the train tunnel I was telling you about, when I first saw Mr. Shibata’s photographs, I said ‘Aaah! That is my place.’ I also admire Hiroshi Sugimoto, the expatriate Japanese artist and photographer based in New York. Sugimoto is a very special artist. I have never known an artist before who is also an architect. He built a shrine on an island two years ago. His photography extends beyond photography.

Last question, what new projects are you working on?

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in Montreal, has commissioned me to make black and white photographs on the subject of architectural photography. This is not about photographing architecture, but rather photographs about architectural photographs. The CCA has an extensive collection of architectural photographs, around 20 thousand items dating from the 1800s. They asked me to revive their collection; I have to create new works inspired by the old works in their collection. I am also working on a project in the Swiss Alps, and also completing a series of photographs of a museum on Naoshima Island, designed by the architect Tadao Ando. Lime Works took me eight years, but this year alone I have plans to release three books.

Thank you to Tomoko Fujibayashi of the Taka Ishii Gallery for her invaluable assistance.

(This article originally appeared in a 2005 edition of the Kyoto Journal, one of my favourite magazines. It introduced me to Donald Richie and Pico Iyer. Thank you John and Ken.)

Anyway: Santu Mofokeng's laughter

2009-06-23T16:31:00.002+02:00

Santu Mofokeng, Buddhist Retreat near Pietermaritzburg, Kwa-Zulu Natal, 2003

If the SPCA ever needed a photographer I would recommend Santu Mofokeng. Then again, I’m not sure the SPCA would want him. Not that the Johannesburg-born photographer is cruel to animals or anything, it’s just that the chickens and goats in his austere black and white photographs don’t posses what you might call sentimentality, that essential mushiness needed for selling the SPCA to the general public.

Mofokeng is not one for soppy pictures. His photographs are calculated and precise, even if they’re about things that are not that easy to photograph. Things like history, memory, magic and spirituality.

Take, for example, his photo of a horse foraging in a wood. Taken in 2003 at a Buddhist retreat he visited near Pietermaritzburg, I found the photo tucked away in a corner of Johannesburg’s Standard Bank Gallery, where the photographer recently showed (July 31 – September 1, 2007).

The work is spellbinding, never mind Happy from Hillbrow’s observation in the visitor’s book that Mofokeng’s work is “depressing and dull”. The picture is also strangely macabre. Photographed in semi-shade, the contrasting light tricks one into believing the horse is without a head.

The photographer is leading a walkabout of his Johannesburg show, and is surrounded by a group of young hipsters who nervously titter when the photographer cracks a joke, which is often. Mofokeng tells us that what we are seeing is “magic”. Standing just askance his earliest body of work, a series on religious worshippers catching the Soweto train in the late 1980s, he directs us to look at a large picture of two goats. On the flat picture plane the one goat appears to be standing on the other.

“It is an optical illusion,” he says, his slender frame fitted into a pair of jeans, the chest pocket of his button shirt showing the contours of a box of smokes. He suddenly swivels around and points to the horse, the first in a trilogy of oversized magic pictures.

“Have you ever seen a horse with three legs and no head?”

Before anyone can answer, he turns again, this time to face a giant-sized portrait of a middle-aged man. It is not just any man: he is a holy man, a sangoma, Ishmael Mofokeng, the photographer’s brother. He died of Aids-related complications in 2004.

“I don’t know if his eyes are open and shut,” he says, pointing to pair of ghostly eyes that seem to be both open and shut at the same time. Magic.

The picture becomes the source of a story. In matter of fact language Mofokeng tells how, on his brother’s insistence, he drove him to Salpeterkraans, a sandstone overhang near Fouriesburg in the hills of the southeastern Free State. The area is a place of ancestral worship. Mofokeng explains how his brother, severely disabled by his sickness, had to be pushed in a wheelbarrow to the cave.

“They gave him water and holy ash. He felt better and said thank you.” It was during this moment of respite that Mofokeng took his picture. Afterwards, they both walked back to the car. “It didn’t take him long and he was dead.” He pauses. “Anyway.”

Mofokeng turns and walks off in the direction of an unrelated series of photographs, landscape photographs of unholy places like Birkenau, Krakow and Aushwitz. Trailing behind him, I chew on that final word of his. Anyway.

If there is any truth to be got from a journalistic profile, and many would dispute that there is, I think it is to be found in the fragment, a moment sectioned off from the whole and spotlighted, a moment exaggerated. In Mofokeng’s case, that moment arrives when he blithely says, “anyway”.

Two years ago, when I met him at his Bez Valley home to talk about his portrait of Ishmael, I found the photographer slumped in his driveway. He looked forlorn, lost – not at all dissimilar the picture of his deceased brother.

“I think about my family,” he mumbled. “I think about my kids. I think about what I try to do. I get pissed off. It is really hard. I live in a time when relationships are defined by who has and who doesn’t have money. I don’t like that. I feel very depressed. I hate the time in which I live. It is depressing. I am divorced, and have kids who do not live with me. I was crying just before you came. I was asking myself, Who am I? What am I doing? Why do I do what I do? It hurts. I was crying all day. I am not in good shape.”

Two years later and this raconteur photographer who began his professional career in a newspaper darkroom is in much better shape. “Anyway,” he says.

Of course this is how he is: charismatic and contradictory, comical and sometimes just plain callous. A few years ago I travelled to Tokyo with a bunch of South African photographers, Mofokeng included. One evening, the bunch of us squeezed into an impossibly small booth at a Shinjuku restaurant, he drunkenly told Zwelethu Mthethwa that Chris Ledochowski took better pictures of townships than he did. Mthethwa choked, Mofokeng laughed. He often laughs.

A few months prior to our Tokyo trip, at a public talk in Rosebank, I was also at the receiving end of his scorn. Midway through some or other point I was trying to make a voice started mumbling in the crowd. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was Mofokeng, a man whose soft-spoken telephone voice is quieter than that of Guy Tillim, which is quite something.

He is not immune his biting criticism. In his 2001 monograph, perhaps the best book in David Krut’s ongoing TAXI Art Books series, Mofokeng concludes a fragmentary essay, equal parts autobiography and artist statement, by recalling a moment from his divorce.

“I listen to the proceedings, quietly, waiting for my turn at the stand. An unflattering portrait of me is being painted in words. I am hoping for a kind word, a refrain, or a ‘but’, even. The picture of me that emerges is that of a drunk and violent man.” The divorce is granted. “I walk her to her place of work. I don’t know what I am feeling at the time. I go home and make a few calls to friends and relatives. They tell me how to feel.”

Anyway. Well no, not anyway. When Mofokeng says anyway, when he walks away from Ishmael to the haunted landscapes of modern history, it is hard to believe that it is without a sense of deep-seated emotion buried somewhere in his chest. But then again this is just an exhibition, right? And anyway, we’re done with animals and stuff.

A young Soweto hipster asks the impish figure leading the session what Vlakplaas is. Mofokeng laughs. He often laughs.

(This article appeared in a September 2007 edition of Sunday Time's Lifestyle supplement. The photographer called me afterwards to thank me for the "nice obituary".)

Fiction: Strange weather

2009-06-23T12:24:00.004+02:00

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.)

Clive Chipkin: Lover of the unloved

2009-06-23T12:05:00.003+02:00

The N1 motorway at New Canada, southwest of Johannesburg, May 2009

“Joseph Conrad once said that it’s necessary to immerse yourself in the most destructive elements of the times, and then attempt to swim . . .” JG Ballard, from a 1976 interview

The quest: to find a language to fit the mood, shape and intractable silence of an uncommonly ordinary thing, although saying that, I wonder if it – this thing – can ever be described in the singular. Is it not really a collection of things? Gauteng’s heart attack highways. Appropriately, or is it stupidly, I attach myself to a language not my own for comfort, solace, or is it simply help. Somehow Afrikaans, this home-grown bastard, so blunt yet lyrical at the same time, is far more evocative when it comes to describing Johannesburg’s fatal inner-city landscapes, in particular the tangle of roads, flyovers, veld and human aftermath on its southern periphery.

To call the landscape surrounding the Heidelberg interchange rude is simply polite. It is far truer of things to say that the scene at the corner of End Street and Heidelburg Road, in the unlovely and in-between neighbourhood of City and Suburban, is onbeskof. It is an affront, although even this loose translation bleaches all colour from the word. So onbeskof it is, a contrived mess, one that I invited Clive Chipkin, a self-described “reluctant architect” and Johannesburg city historian, to explain.

Car parked up against the pavement, the two of us head for an open patch of veld. Our intention: to look at a bridge, actually the bridge – “Bridge 6”. For as long as I’ve known this anonymous piece of civil engineering floating over the Heidelberg interchange, I’ve associated it with traffic fines, the 80km/h speed limit here plainly onbeskof. In Chipkin’s eyes, however, this “steel viaduct,” as he describes it, is far more than just a useful place to install a traffic camera. It is, as he told me last year when we first met, “one of the greatest pieces of sculptural achievement”.

Approaching it is quite a trick. Which is how we ended up parked outside a grey building marked No. 1 End Street. Across the road, we find a footpath. It ducks beneath a blackened underpass. Not to sound all fancy, but the scene here recalls something painter Francis Bacon said of one of his paintings: “It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.” Bacon could just as easily have been describing the fetid little patch of land near the Heidelberg interchange. Here a burnt out fire, there a suitcase mysteriously wedged into a cement crevice. Splayed across the footpath, a fleshing little something, food perhaps. If Johannesburg’s outdoors are a free art gallery, as Chipkin (and many others) would suggest, it bears mentioning that its treasures are brutal and unromantic.

“It is terribly elegant,” counters Chipkin as Bridge 6 comes into full view. “It curves, rises, does a hundred pieces of geometrical movement, all very, very …” He gets sidetracked by a detail in the construction. “It is not concrete, it is box-framed plate,” he says of the metal bridge. The riveting, perhaps equally benign in the eyes of many, is also lovingly singled out. Still, it’s only a bridge and there is only so much you can say about it, rainy Wednesday morning or not, which prompts our next decision.

“You see how it drives,” enthuses Chipkin as the car follows the bridge’s south-westerly curve. “It is beautifully cambered, and it is rising to get the right levels, and it’s turning, and it’s steel, and it’s on loose ground, so it has to be mobile.” Mobility, it turns out, is key to understanding Bridge 6’s eccentric design. In his forthcoming book, Johannesburg Transition (2009), a dispassionate account of Johannesburg’s “promiscuous nature and the endless parodies of other cities”, Chipkin dedicates a brief few lines to this bridge. Straddling unstable mining ground, the bridge, he explains, was designed by German consulting engineers Baubro Grassl. It was completed in 1972.

“And that’s it,” he concludes as we clear the bridge and connect with traffic on the M2. The experience of crossing it lasts less than half a minute, if that. “It’s as short and small as that but it’s one of those pieces of engineering that successfully linked up things.”

Linking things up. Connecting the dots. Making sense of Gauteng’s highways. Now there’s a plan.

Fifty years ago traffic volumes between Johannesburg and Pretoria averaged about 4,800 vehicles per day; nowadays the three-lane highway between these two landlocked cities conveys more than 180,000 vehicles daily – that’s 60,000 more than the total number of cars licensed in Johannesburg in 1957. Recognising that something needs to be done about the mad crush, cabinet recently approved plans to pump R20 billion into alleviating Gauteng’s congestion problems. But that’s the future. It is the crowded now that holds us, often very literally.

Two unrelated events led me to Chipkin, in my search for something beyond the usual commentary on Gauteng’s roads. Usual commentary? Aside from the familiar themes – functionality (frustrating), size (gargantuan) and safety (perilous) – the province’s heart attack highways remain a mystery. Very little is written in the popular press about their rich history. It took a middle finger to stumblingly lead me to this realisation.

The middle finger belonged to the driver – black if you must ask – of an old Merc. This jennelman, to borrow from ee cummings, was adamant about getting to Pretoria a few seconds ahead of everyone else. Weaving through traffic, he saw a gap in the fast lane: me. Without fuss, he as nudged into the emergency lane on my motorcycle. I hooted. His response: up yours. Eish. Then, a couple more experiences with wayward drivers later, a Sunday Times profile on Rob Byrne, a traffic announcer, in the Insight & Opinion pages no less. My interest was sparked. I started keeping notes on this thing, this highway so much a part of negotiating Johannesburg.

The earliest note, dated June 5, 2006, reads: “Two pieces of pine planking, tapered, like large splinters; bits of plastic bumper; cigarette butts; a crumpled piece of paper; more cigarette butts; glass from a shattered window; other things less easily described, all fleetingly observed from the car at stationary intervals. You look at them; their placement and location is random, determined by accident – an unfortunate word in some cases. They say nothing about the congested frustration, the waiting.”

My favourite ‘observation’ is dated October 4, 2006: “A fat woman in a red shirt, next to her a skinny man, both seated in fold-up chairs at the Buccleuch interchange. Are they studying the traffic? What do their clipboards prompt them to look out for? Nearby, the new electronic sign reads “NO INCIDENTS AHEAD”. Less than a 100 metres on, in the fast lane, a pulverised Honda is parked near a dump truck angled into the concrete barrier. “FUCK DA POLICE” reads graffiti on the rear of the truck. An orange Metro Police car, a Mercedes, pulls up to the scene.”

It was however the Zimbabweans, a people so easily ring fenced by a nationalist pejorative, a people endlessly seen washing up and down the highway, who delivered the most telling insight. Telling because the scene encompassed so much – without yielding anything.

December 9, 2007: “The busses ferrying Zimbabweans from Braamfontein to the north are oil-perfumed wrecks. Two of them have broken down today: one at Buccleuch, the other beneath the bridge where Brett Kebble was shot, the spot marked by a pot plant and kink in the protective railing.” It was a Sunday when I made this note. The latter of the two breakdowns remains particularly memorable. A few feet below where Brett Kebble died, a young man lay on a pink leather sofa. Retrieved from the roof of the broken bus, he had parked it in the emergency lane.

It was with this jumble of experiences, observations and half-arsed insights that I knocked on Chipkin’s office door, situated in the bucolic suburb of Parkview. He proved remarkably courteous. “You’re exploring a situation which is only latent,” he said of my whimsical interest in highways and their connectedness to Johannesburg. “You might find an architect who is terribly articulate but I, as quite a middle-ground architect, haven’t got all your answers. But it is terrific to explore such an unnoticed thing. It is also very important.”

The conversation could have ended there. It didn’t. In part, I suspect, it is because the elevated highways piercing through central Johannesburg cue an important theme in Chipkin’s own writings: Johannesburg’s perplexing identity as a city.

A Wits graduate, Chipkin first started writing about architecture in the late 1950s, after returning to Johannesburg from England – via India – in 1957. His first article, published in the South African Architectural Record, was on Indian architecture. A fitting subject: Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens, two signal figures in Johannesburg’s early architectural history and indeed Chipkin’s writings generally, left South Africa to work in India, the crown jewel of the imperial project.

Although prolific, co-authoring along the way a book on Parktown, it was only in 1993 that Chipkin announced himself as something more than an itinerant voice. His book Johannesburg Style is a classic, offering an incisive history of this city’s uneven and often garish built environment. Of the writing itself, it is interested, witty, empirical, and very often concerned with detail, but not bogged down by it. Ivan Vladislavic, an admirer of Chipkin’s knowledge of Johannesburg, says he predates theory, as in his writing shuns trendy –isms and –ologies. In this he recalls Hemingway, if not stylistically then at least philosophically. Wrote the boozy old newsman: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over…”

Of his interest in writing, Chipkin is modest: “I always felt a need to find what I am thinking; I don’t know what I’m thinking until I have expressed it somehow.”

Unlike some architectural writers, he allows his thinking to be influenced my more than just an appreciative eye. Chipkin is also a good listener.

“A well-heeled conversationalist on the upper deck of the Parktown North bus once-declared with a flourish, ‘Johannesburg has no style’,” Chipkin records in the preface to Johannesburg Style (1993). “On another occasion I overheard a snippet of street conversation: ‘Johannesburg is net deurmekaar’.” He wanted to title his first book as much. Stern advisors warned him off it. People would get mixed-up.

To an extent, the M1, which follows a north-south axis, and the M2, an east-west axis, represented an attempted to untangle the mess Chipkin’s forsaken title alludes to. Conceived in 1955-56 by urban planner Maurice Rotival – in conjunction with American consultants – and completed in phases, starting in 1966, the highways acted as a much-needed gateway to the city. Their impact was enormous.

“The new peripheral elevated road system took an amorphous spreadeagled city on the plains, tied it together in an urban package and provided a sense of recognition for visitors and locals alike,” writes Chipkin in Johannesburg Transition.

Driving along the M2, to see these words made manifest, Chipkin neatly paraphrased his own writing. “Johannesburg was a very vague city. You weren’t quite sure what it was. You had to travel all over it to know it. But this [the highway] gave it comprehension, I think.”

Of course, comprehension wasn’t the only intended outcome.

“But, as always, with Johannesburg’s modernisation we must pause to observe deep-seated anxieties,” writes Chipkin in his new book. “All the advantages and betterment of the huge capital expenditure accrued to the white areas. The motorways, conspicuously, did not connect into the vast Black ghetto locations. In part, they acted as a visual and movement barrier to reinforce segregation.”

Driving back from our brief urban expedition, I ask Chipkin about the contradictions so much a part of twentieth century architecture, contradictions that extend to the seemingly dull practice of urban planning. In particular, I mean the idealism and the hubris that defines modern architecture. The widening gulf between the promise and the outcome.

“I am not sure whether my generation’s work was liked,” concedes Chipkin, whose ideological progenitor is the French modernist architect Le Corbusier. “I think a lot of it was disliked. I would be sufficiently objective to say that mine might have been a bad generation for architecture.”

“Isn’t that partly to do with the utopian impulses?” I propose.

“Yes, although I don’t know how you see it but I interpret utopianism as something very positive.”

Which takes us back to Bacon and that thing of piling one continuous accident on top of another. It is a trait common to all cities, something that is both necessary and inevitable. Although in Joburg, at the moment, it just seems a little more pronounced, the city’s highways simply a part – rather than apart – from the compounded mess. But this is just a thought, not a definitive proposition. If the process by which a city grows is evolutionary, gradual, so too must all thought be on it.

The evolutionary metaphor here is intentional. While driving to see Bridge 6, we encountered another piece of sculptural art. Situated on the corner of Eloff and Stott, next to the Faraday Market, at an onramp onto the M2, this grubby little office building, now a low-income residence, teasingly popped into view every so often. Its defining feature: the plant life cling to, and sometimes growing out of the brickwork.

“Gee, that building was quite a landmark,” remarks Chipkin the first time we pass it. “I wonder why it went like that. I suppose the owners abandoned it.”

The second time: “Look at that building! Phew. Look at the moss. There can’t be too many cities outside Africa that allow that.”

“You know, that is becoming one of the greatest buildings in Johannesburg,” he says on our final encounter, as we join the highway and speed off west. “It’s utterly amazing, how the decay and the shutters have fallen in the most wonderful sort of vague pattern. Ah, you have got to come back with me here.”

(This article appeared in Empire, July 2008, Vol 1.6)

Peter Saville: Life after the flicker of greatness

2009-06-23T11:26:00.008+02:00

Skateboard designs inspired by Peter Saville's sleeve design for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures (1979)
and New Order's Blue Monday (1983). All boards by Supreme, New York

Peter Saville. The name says it all. In an interview with Sleazenation, New Order’s Peter Hook offered this on the Manchester-born graphic designer turned record label entrepreneur turned art director turned artist turned, well, whatever: “[He’s] an artist and a piss artist who never turns up on time and makes you months late… we’d have the record ready to go and it would be delayed cos of the sleeve. And where was he? He was fuckin’ walking around Paris with some model looking at perfume bottle shapes, the twat.”

There are many versions of this story: Peter Saville the elegant wastrel, the penniless Lord, the directionless savant who scuppered a sure thing with Pentagram, Peter Saville the twat. Which one is true?

There is a wonderful moment in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002), a film that incidentally features a bit part dedicated to Saville. Tony Wilson, played with aplomb by Steve Coogan, is in the toilet of the Russel Club, the legendary nightclub that launched some of Factory Record’s earliest acts. In this moment of apocryphal storytelling, Wilson pipes-in as a voice over: if it comes to choosing between truth and myth, he says, he would always choose the myth.

Which, for way too many years, is how I regarded Saville, as something rare and mythical, an exotic insect pinned under glass, stuck. The truth about this boho icon is a lot more commonplace, and twice as compelling for it.

In 2004 I was asked by Design Indaba magazine to interview Saville, due to speak at their annual conference. Being a no-budget publication, I had to phone him in London on my own account, which at the time involved top-up cards bought at the corner café. Thinking he’d be a surly bastard, I bought two R50 cards, the second just in case. After all, mythical men don’t say much, at least this is what I reckoned. How wrong I was.

Peter Saville is simply a businessman, at least this is how he put it to me. More pointedly, he is an interpreter, someone with the capability to distil contemporary culture into a meaningful visual format. Rather than revisit the overly familiar narrative of his years with Factory Records, where his sleeve design for New Order’s Blue Monday 12-inch single, lost the company somewhere between 10p and 50p on every single sold, I engaged Saville on life after the first flicker of greatness.

As an interview subject Saville proved surprisingly loquacious, pausing every so often to thoughtfully mull over his choice of words. Of course there was also something of a well-practiced narrative to the conversation, a falling back on habit and convention. But then my R50 credit ran out, cutting him short, and we had to pick things up afresh again. (I blamed the unreliability of our line on South Africa’s telephone infrastructure.) When the credit ran out on my second voucher, it was all over. Well, sort of. I took a long shot and called again the next day. Saville, unperturbed or inconvenienced, simply glided back into the narrative, picking up where we had left off…

You’ve just completed work on the new book, Designed by Peter Saville (by Rick Poynor, Frieze, 2003), as well as been involved in putting together a retrospective exhibition that features much of your design work to date. This must have occasioned its own fair share of contemplation, right?

From a work point of view I’ve been in a very contemplative frame of mind for the last few years. I gave myself the 1990s to find the conclusive part of my career. I did something in the 1980s that took me somewhere, created a profile for me, created a body of work that I was pleased with. At the end of the 1980s my first incarnation as a studio, Peter Saville Associates, was insolvent. My method of working was anything but guided by profitably, which I managed to get away from for a while but as I employed more people and the recession kicked in, I couldn’t get away with it any longer. Peter Saville Associated came to a conclusion in late 1990, when I joined Pentagram. I was happy with what we had done, proud in fact.

What was it like joining Pentagram?

Pentagram was an introduction to the grown up world of having a design studio. It was company with an integrity, but it was also a different generation to me, philosophically a different generation. Colin Forbes had imbued Pentagram with a very disciplined operational structure. Pentagram had a spirit of designers cooperative, but it was run in a very disciplined way. By the time I joined in 1990, 18 years after the founding of Pentagram, the senior partners, I think, were more engaged in the business of being Pentagram than with innovation.

There is an innovation sensibility to graphics which is quite hobbyist actually, and you tend to grow out of it. Many senior designers evolve into business people, be it running their own businesses, or in their interaction with business and clients. That’s where you end up. And that was the culture of the Pentagram I joined in 1990, with the one exception being Alan Fletcher. Alan was still more interested in getting his brushes out than he was in courting the Financial Times. It was a fantastic experience, almost like a post-graduate course for me.

Would you say your career has been one of resisting growing up and maturing into the roles you outlined?

No, not wilfully. A quick look at my history can suggest that, and I get that from a lot of journalists who do a quick look in, as if I am just some 15-year-old teenager who doesn’t want to listen. It’s little bit more complex than that. I was very happy for a year or so at Pentagram, to simply learn. When I started out I set up on my own; I had never worked for anybody. I’d had to gather the wisdom of experience myself. I hadn’t leant it from anybody.

At Pentagram I found myself in the midst of a diverse and cumulative knowledge base. I had seven successful design partners, some of them working in the latter stages of their careers, and another ten partners at various places around the world. I appreciated it, and I have continued to appreciate it. I must say that all through the 1990s, when I found myself on my own again, almost in every working situation that came up, something that I learnt at Pentagram was there as a resource to call upon. It was fantastic.

What went wrong then?

The problem at Pentagram was that they didn’t actually understand me. I particularly had a problem at Pentagram with the older generation. The younger partners were simply filled with petty envy, which I didn’t care for. I experienced the same problem after leaving Pentagram, for the next ten years in fact, certain clients and marketing directors of corporations not understanding me. They don’t understand anything about me, and they don’t attempt to learn. I appreciate that in them not understanding me I have to take some responsibility to find the language to make myself understood. But I’ll only take half the responsibility. The other half of the responsibility lies with the partner or client to try to understand the person they are working with.

In the years after Pentagram I got particularly frustrated with myself, by my inability to find the language to bridge my instinctive sense of vision about things with business. That frustrated me. In recent years I have come to appreciate advertising agencies. They have managed to find the language, to translate what you see and feel, to translate that into terms that somebody else can appreciate and understand.

But the senior partners at Pentagram didn’t understand where I was coming from. They didn’t like the work I was doing. They told me it wasn’t design. They didn’t see the point in it, nor could they see any value in me nurturing fashion clients or luxury brands. Even Alan Fletcher told me while I was at Pentagram that the design for New Order’s Republic (1992) album was not graphic design. The problem was compounded, at the time, by the fact that I didn’t find a way to help them to get it. I didn’t do myself any favours either going in late, and not wanting to be a part of the team and so forth.

And it seems Pentagram now values the work I did there, which in retrospect I find upsetting and ironic. David Hillman, in particular, takes a distinctly hypocritical position towards me. I was put forward to be a Royal Designer for Industry this year, and David had it stopped. He lodged a personal objection, which didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was when I then heard that Pentagram now includes my work in presentations. The value of those fashion projects with Nick Knight for Jil Sander and Yoji Yamamoto, and Nick’s own book were questioned when I was there. The work was resented because it wasn’t profitable. They doubted the value of it then, but it would seem they don’t now.

I suppose some of this is reflected in the fact that you are variously credited as being a designer, art director and creative director. Which title, if any, are you most comfortable with?

If you want to get a bit of insight into what I do, there is one piece of press worth reading. Andrew O’Hagan wrote a piece for the London Review of Books. I have never met him, nor spoken to him, yet after reading his piece I was astonished. As I read it, I thought, finally someone actually fucking gets it. He quotes me on my influences, on “film noir meets yellow Daytona. O’Hagan actually understands what I do. The guys at Pentagram didn’t get it, only latterly, resentfully. Most of the companies I worked for, that I failed to strike a successful relationship with, were the same. For the most part all of them have subsequently gone the way I had suggested. When I advised them they weren’t ready to hear it and for the most part they only found out later.

Following you departure from Pentagram you went to Los Angeles. What was that like?

While I was at Pentagram in 1991 I went to Los Angeles for a six-week period, to work on an identity for a television station. I have to say it was the most forceful impact on my visual sensibility in some years. Being there for six weeks, driving along Sunset, taking a call next to the pool on a cordless phone whilst having breakfast, it is a very different experience to Northern Europe. It is very different to being in London. It had quite an effect, the fabulousness of it, and also the truly awfulness of it. There is something I find fascinating about it, and that I quite like.

After I was asked to leave Pentagram, I went to Los Angeles. After six months I knew in my heart that I couldn’t project a future in that place. I remember distinctly driving one Saturday afternoon, through Beverly Hills to Rodeo Drive, to go shopping – again. I remember thinking, I really don’t care. I was driving past these big houses asking myself, ‘is that what you want one day?’ I said no. Once I knew there was nothing there that I wanted, I knew I have to get back – very quickly.

Did your time in Los Angeles help you find the language to bridge the translation barrier, or did it remain a problem into the latter half of the 1990s?

For the most part I learnt the hard way, moving from one nearly successful corporate liaison to another. For example, I fell out with the president of Mandarina Duck, the Italian luggage company, by insisting that the communications programme for the company would have to penetrate the fashion media. I redid the identity in a way that would be acceptable to him, and suggested myself as a positioning consultant for the company. But the president of the company and I just agreed to disagree.

In 1996, he absolutely swore to me that it would be over his dead body that the company be positioned in the fashion media. We had these ongoing debates for a month or so. It was really an Italian generational thing. Fashion to him was la moda, and that if he associated his product with la moda, then it would be out of fashion the next month and that would be the end of Mandarina Duck. I tried to get him to understand that wasn’t the case, that the fashion media is the canvass of lifestyle, that that was where the product had defined itself, within the context of lifestyle. It wasn’t really about fashion but a way of life, which is completely what Mandarina Duck are about.

The sensible, suit version of myself would have just gritted their teeth and persevered. Okay, we can’t quite get what we want but we’ll compromise. We’ll hold on to the client because it’s foolish and rash to say bye-bye, we’ll compromise and do what the client wants and maybe they’ll get it eventually. That’s where I disagree. From a business point of view I am my own worst enemy, because I am not motivated by holding onto somebody’s bank account. I am motivated by doing something good, part and parcel of which is doing the right thing. I’ll be honest and say that there is a high degree of ego in there.

You mean in satisfying yourself?

Yeah. I am motivated by pride. I want to do the right thing, I want to do something great and I want to be associated with doing something great. For me doing something great it doing the right thing – in all ways of understanding the right thing. Timely right, prestigiously right, conceptually right, intellectually right and culturally right. More often than not I can see the right thing. These days, at 48 years of age, if an 18-year-old band are brought tome by some record company, I do not know what the right thing is. I have no idea.

I recently had to do an interview with a magazine the other day about my show opening in Manchester. They asked what my favourite album covers were. I don’t have any favourite album covers. Sure, I have some from when I was a teenager but I am not interested in album covers at the age of 48. I am not interested in them at all. And I don’t know whether the album cover for The Darkness is right, or if The Darkness is any good or not – I don’t really care.

When it comes to questions about what to do with Jaguar, what to do with Fortnum & Mason, what to do with Mandarina Duck or the Aramis division of Este Lauder, I have a pretty good idea what a company should be doing. Very rarely, however, do I meet anybody in the corporate world who senses that I might know, that I might be able to help them. And I don’t court it. I don’t go through the act of nurturing that kind of business.

In London in particular, it is a very high energy, high profile competitive market place for design, brand positioning and marketing. There are a bunch of guys out there with agency backgrounds who really do that stuff, the Power Point presentations and all that. It is kind of grubby and it doesn’t interest me. It doesn’t motivate me. I am motivated by the situation when someone sits down and discusses it with me. I don’t need to go off and research for six weeks.

As I have got the hang of things over the last ten years, and also got to the right age to be able to do it, because that’s crucial, being of equal age or older than the CEOs, the balance is right. I remember John McConnell saying to me at Pentagram, ‘Peter, one of the problems is that you don’t have any grey hair.’

This intuitive sense you speak of, this ability to instinctively know the positioning of a fashion brand or luxury goods item, where does that knowledge derive from?

If you read the press, you always read about what time I get up and so on. In the O’Hagan article, he turns it on its head. He asks if I ever go to sleep. If we call what I do work, if we can call it that, I work very hard. That is all I do. I don’t go on holidays, I don’t go to parties, I go out at night, but to eat, that’s it. My entire life is orientated around a sense of what I am in the midst of.

Do you mean that culturally speaking?

Yes, I am in the midst of my times, and not strictly culturally now. It was cultural when I was young, but now it is more social and political. I am far more political now than ever before. And, for me, it is how these factors influence popular culture. This last year or so, to my feeling, something awful has happened to design, it has got what it wanted. During the 1980s I was part of the last wave of designers who had to coerce industry. Since the last recession, since the mid 1990s, the situation has been entirely different.

The new generation of business doesn’t need any help wanting design. They want it big time. I know that my own work in the 1980s played a part in bringing this about, actually quite an interesting part because I got to them young, with something they loved. The New Order covers achieved something that Knoll and IBM never did, they insinuated themselves into the sensibility of young people.

It is very interesting how it happened, it is something I worked out in this reflective period of the book and exhibition. Traditionally design had one or two big clients and museums as patrons. In general, design didn’t really affect the mainstream. It was pleasing the converted. By injecting a sense of design into teen pop culture, myself and one or two other people set some benchmarks for a generation or two that they were able to take into their adult lives.

This is unusual for pop culture because, normally, when you return from university at age 22, the Grateful Dead posters and Guns ‘n Roses T-shirts had to go. Until the 1980s, you had to shed the ephemera of teen culture like a skin for your adult life, but not if you had a cupboard full of Factory Records. In fact, you wanted your business card to look like that New Order cover, and you wanted your first business to have an identity and a look of a logo.

Are you not somewhat cynical about your achievements then?

Factory endorsed and supported me doing it because we wanted to do something well. We didn’t see the people who bought the records as punters or victims, we saw them as an audience, as collectors. I didn’t see why pop culture had to be so banal and immature, so tawdry. I thought, why can’t this music, which is basically a soundtrack to life, why couldn’t it look good. Why cant it look as good as a BMW looks? Why can’t it have a cultural content that is comparable to what we have in a gallery or museum. Why not?

It is quite questionable how I went about doing it, but the principle was meant well. It was not done to seduce people into buying the product; that was not the intent. It was more one of respect. We said, we can do this badly or we can do this well. We choose to do it well. But business doesn’t operate like that, business is mercenary and ruthless. Business is motivated by profitability. It is not driven by good intent. So, design has become the servant of profitability. And designers are now corporate Casanovas. That’s their job, to seduce and coerce the consumer.

You make Factory Records sounds as if it was founded on some very utopian, idealistic principles.

I spoke to someone recently who is preparing a book on Factory, and I said I couldn’t think of one decision that was ever taken on the basis of profitability, in 14 years. Nobody ever made a decision at Factory based on profitability, that’s why it’s a legend. That’s why it’s a brand. This is what frustrates me the most about many of these brands being rolled out now. At some point in the past all these brands were founded on a belief, on somebody actually doing something they believed in, and in doing it well. That is what is at the heart of BMW or Porsche, somebody wanting to make a good car. Those brands are being shagged to death at the moment. If it was just about survival it wouldn’t be a bad thing, but for the most part it’s to hang on to an unrealistic 20% growth target. I see a big problem in this, and I don’t believe in it. It’s kind of like melting down the family silver each season to make it go a little bit further.

(This interview originally appeared in a 2004 issue of Design Indaba magazine. Only the introduction has been edited.)

Roger Ballen: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness

2009-06-22T18:47:00.003+02:00

Roger Ballen's photo of Selma Blair in a Givency Haute Couture hand-felted-wool jacket
with Vulture feathers and trapped-feather-embroidered Georgette dress.

There is something of The Addams Family about Roger Ballen’s photographs, a grotesquery that is also darkly funny. The comparison doesn’t end there. The Addams Family is only a family by default. Before Hollywood, which press-fitted Gomez, Morticia and the rest of the freakish family into a suburban straightjacket, they were simply anonymous cartoon characters.

Dreamt into life by Charles Addams, they first appeared in The New Yorker, in 1938 Over the 50 years that Addams drew for the magazine he continually returned to his impromptu family to articulate his macabre vision. Which is not dissimilar to how Roger Ballen does things.

Over the past decade this geologist cum photographer has often worked with the same people, a cast of downtrodden figures from South Africa’s colourless underclass. Many of them live in Pretoria, others in his native Johannesburg. Collectively they have offered the socially awkward photographer the necessary intimacy to make his unsettling pictures.

Remarking on his process to the Village Voice, Ballen likened his method to that of a well-known Swedish filmmaker: “I consider myself like Ingmar Bergman in some ways, working with the same crew and the same actors year after year.”

His cinematic metaphor was given an uncanny literalness recently when The New York Times asked him to do a Ballen fashion shoot for their T Magazine supplement. The offer, which required Ballen to substitute his usual photographic habitats for a New York location, came with an inducement: the actress Selma Blair would model for him.

“Trish, what movies did that woman I photographed appear in?” the photographer shouts to his secretary.

Ballen is in his Parktown office, which he uses to both run his geology company and warehouse the black and white photographs he makes.

“Legally Blonde and The Fog,” his secretary shouts back. I can tell from his expression that he has seen neither.

After replying in the affirmative to the newspaper’s request, Ballen was emailed a selection of pictures – potential locations for the fashion shoot.

“I really wasn’t that excited by any of them,” he says; this segues into an explanation of how he eventually found the right location.

“My cousin, who lives in upstate New York, told me about this place, an abandoned insane asylum, that might contain the type of spirits I would be interested in.”

On a visit to New York in July 2004, Ballen accompanied his cousin to the asylum, located near the city of Poughkeepsie. The place was locked up. A couple of phone calls later and he made contact with its caretaker.

Ballen explained his request, the derelict precinct’s minder finally agreeing to show the photographer through the 80 or so abandoned buildings the following day. The visit yielded an outcome, Ballen finding a space containing the appropriate mix of psychic malevolence, deteriorated texture and available light.

Location sorted, he then rushed back to New York – the photographer needed props to give his shoot that essential Ballen feel, being bits of wire, charcoal (to draw on the wall with), masks, children’s toys and a cast of cute and not-so-cute animals. Just how he was going to use the rat, lizard and hairless Sphynx cat remained a mystery, even to Ballen.

“I never really have a total preconception of what I am going to do. I have to rely on my own sense of imagination to feel out things and decide what I am going to do next.”

The shoot lasted three days. On the first, he took still photographs. These included a picture of a $60-thousand diamond necklace placed alongside a dead goldfish.

The Hollywood model proved much livelier by comparison. Ballen describes Blair as “very professional” and eager to engage with his prompts.

“She had the right kind of personality, wasn’t scared of putting a rat in her mouth or picking up a snake. She felt the nature of the place.”

Not so the entourage of fashion stylists and photographic assistants.

“Most of the people I worked with on the shoot had headaches, and were feeling sick from the place. It was claustrophobic and had a lot of dust. I always said I was quite immune to the place because I normally work in crowded, very difficult conditions.” The explanation is delivered with Ballen’s typically droll New York twang.

Looking back on the experience, his first ever fashion editorial, Ballen is ponderous.

“I had never done a fashion shoot in my life. I never even considered it, to be honest. My photographs are so far from being romantic and sentimental that I think most people would probably run away from me.” He titters at the admission.

A glance through any fashion glossy will bear out his statement. For the most part, fashion photography is about the seduction of the unattainable, thin bodies, abstract hairdos, maximum bling. Ballen’s photographs, however, plunge one into a world of Gucci gone horribly wrong.

Turns out though that T Magazine was “absolutely delighted” with the gothic horror of his shoot. Less so a reader who complained about the photographs and their relationship to prison abuse in Iraq. Ballen bemusedly shakes his head.

“There is humour in them, like all my pictures. And then there is something disturbing and dark in the pictures.”

I forsake the Addams family analogy and ask him to explain the humour element, in his own words. After all, these are not pictures that scream out obvious funny.

“If I had to say what these pictures are about I would call them tragic comedy or dark humour. I would say they are half disturbing and half funny. It is an interesting tension.”

He mentions Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophical musings included the assertion, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

Ballen’s choice of quote is equally loaded: “When you laugh, you cry.” When I check to verify the quote afterwards, I find that the quote is repeatedly credited to the actor Roberto Benigni.

To be fair, the quote’s attribution is really unimportant. What Ballen is trying to explain is his existential worldview. Also how this impacts on his photography, which in equal measures evoke a world of laughter and sorrow, horror and delight.

The playwright Samuel Beckett neatly summarised this contradiction when he said, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

Ghoulish laughter aside, where do these pictures fit into Ballen’s overall catalogue? Are they just a cute indulgence or do they dialogue with his local photographs?

“It is really hard for me to get to the bottom of these pictures,” he responds. The admission is prefaced by a lengthy attempt to speak in words what he prefers to say in pictures. His explanation is, by turns, obscure and definitive.

“It is conglomeration of 55 years of travelling through time, developing a way of being and seeing through photography that incorporates all sorts of aspects of my life.”

Interview concluded we chitchat for a while. I mention an abandoned leprosy mission on the outskirts of Pretoria. I add that it is very close to where some of the people he regularly photographs stay. His eyes light up.

“How do I get there,” he asks excitedly.

(This piece ran pretty much as you read it in the Lifestyle supplement of the Sunday Times, sometime early in 2006, I think.)

A Japanese weekend

2009-06-22T18:08:00.003+02:00

Architect Tadao Ando, photographed at Punta della Dogana,
the Venetian customs house he retrofitted for collector
Francois Pinault, June 2009. Photo: Sean O'Toole

The bus station outside is a purposeful swirl of activity, despite the early morning hour. The man next to me yawns and rubs his sleepy eyes. He works in a bank. He told me this the night before, as the bus from Tokyo to Tokushima City crawled west through Japan’s muggy summer dark. He is visiting his wife. She is a teacher, bureaucratically assigned to Tokushima, a non-descript provincial town on Japan’s western island of Shikoku. She is pregnant; he is visiting for the long weekend. So am I.

Exiting the bus I spot Misako. She waves. Deep-set dimples hint at the intensity of her smile. A former work colleague, I notice that her neat, shoulder-length crop of hair has hints of grey. We shake hands, awkwardly embrace. Bag in hand I follow Misako to her car. It has been four years since I last visited this vaguely melancholic landscape. I am eager to explore it again.

Oddly enough, it is a South African writer who has most helped me make sense of Japan, my experience on that lonely archipelago at the rising of the morning sun. He is William Plomer. In October 1926, Plomer accompanied his friend Laurens van der Post aboard the steamer Canada Maru for a fortnight tour of Japan. The tour was a thank you of sorts, sponsored by an Osaka-based shipping company, allegedly in gratitude for assistance Van der Post had given two Japanese journalists subjected to racist insults in Pretoria.

When the Canada Maru eventually returned for Durban, 25-year-old Plomer was not aboard. In his autobiography, Yet Being Someone Other (1982), Van der Post would later recall that Plomer, standing forlornly on the Kobe quayside, looked “disturbingly” like a “Dickensian… orphan seeking food and asylum in the slums of a great city”. Plomer went on to find sustenance in Japan: by the time he left the country, in March 1929, Plomer had completed his first collection of short stories, Paper Houses (1929), and his second novel, Sado (1931), both set in Japan.

I first read Plomer’s writings on Japan while on a bus journey to Tokushima, many years before the current one. I was returning from a weekend in Osaka, Japan’s ribald capital of comedy, to Tokushima, where I had been assigned to teach English. Tokushima is a small port town on the east of Shikoku, an island renowned for little more than its astringent limes, strenuous thousand-year-old Buddhist pilgrimage, and odd collection of famous writers, Kenzaburo Oe included. Mostly, though, Shikoku is known for its crumbling rusticity, Japanese-style.

Once you exit the freeway, the main road into Tokushima City, Route 55, is lined with used car dealerships, beauty salons, bookstores, even the odd MacDonalds. Journeying through this landscape again, first on the bus, then again in the Misako’s car headed for her home, I was again compelled by how strikingly prosaic it all is. Ordinary.

Occidentals, South Africans included, have long been participants in the construction of a fantastical Japan that has little bearing on reality. Plomer’s collection, Paper Houses, runs counter this narrative, offering a “rather ramshackle collection of Japanese stories and impressions,” to quote one reviewer. Such honesty, though, is not always appreciated.

“[Plomer] makes the mistake of not writing as a Westerner interpreting the East”, remarked the Saturday Review of Literature (November 9, 1929), adding that he “resolutely excludes not only all glamour, but all sense of exoticism and novelty as well.” In other words, to denude Japan of its apparent exoticism is to expose the west’s craving for the fictional succor of an east that barely exists.

One small part of this lingering fiction defines the Japanese as inveterate Spartans and innately aesthetic. Misako’s pre-fabricated modern home defies all sense of this. Like the irregular urban planning and messy clutter of overhead electrical wiring that outwardly characterises domestic Japan, Misako’s stock-standard house is a chaotic mix of imported styles and old world inheritances.

A large western-style leather sofa sits inelegantly on the tatami, tightly bound rectangular reed mats that over time have become units of measure in house building. In modern Japan, however, tradition is no longer inviolate. Misako’s tokonoma, that small, symbolically significant alcove built into the living room of most Japanese homes, and typically used for ornate flower displays and traditional calligraphy, is decorated with an jumble of telephone directories and school sweaters.

Misako is married. Similar to the man who sat next to me on the bus, Misako understands the word family to mean love in a dispersed form. Two years ago her husband, Hiroshi, a policeman, was transferred into the mountains that rise steeply from the outskirts of Tokushima City. Traditionally, Misako and her youngest, school-going daughter would have accompanied him. The old ways are, however, no longer inviolate. Misako still lives in town, alone.

Driving into the mountains to visit Hiroshi, Misako tells me how the education ministry has incrementally scaled-down what used to be a luxurious twice-yearly bonus. Fifteen years of persistent recession is affecting all aspects of daily life in Japan, she sighs. In Tokyo, this has manifested itself in the increasing number of homeless, their cardboard and blue tarpaulin homes colonising quiet backstreets and inner city parks. On Shikoku, along the winding mountain road that leads to Hiroshi’s village, Japan’s economic malaise is defined slightly differently.

Alongside absorbing rustic charms – bamboo groves, rice terraces and single-lane tracks – Shikoku also offers the visitor views of concrete rivers, each patterned in a manner resembling Zen gardens, and mountains made static with strikingly visual symmetrical retainer walls. “The Utopia Song,” penned for the Ministry of Construction’s Road Bureau, sums up the character of this visual assault: “asphalt blanketing the mountains and the valleys… a splendid utopia”.

Remarking on this rather troubling aspect of modern-day Japan, journalist Patrick Smith, in his informative history, Japan: A Reinterpretation (1998), observes: “Throughout Japan today there are countless highways to nowhere special, useless bridges, unneeded sea breaks, ruthless land reclamation projects, half-built resort schemes, and deserted ‘technopolis’ centres intended to make rustics familiar with high technology devices.”

Adds Smith writes: “These projects have done little for the decentralization of Japan but everything for Japanese contractors – the frenzy for building has had little to do with the Japanese need to improve their lives, or how they want to live. The building has continued, needed or not, to keep the postwar machine in motion.” Their is a shorthand for all this: pork barrel politics. It has been a defining feature of Japan’s post-boom economy.

A simple tabulation of facts bears this out. Japan’s total production of cement in 1970, in what is generally considered a boom period, was 57,190,000 metric tons. Production in 1994, early into during the ruinous “lost decade,” reached 91,620,000 tons, far exceeding total US production in the same year (77,900,000 tons). In 1996, 311,210 public construction projects used a total of 94,490,000 tons of cement.

All of this has helped create a bizarre dependency among inefficient corporations and moribund economic sectors, much of it centred on construction. “Japan never built up a huge public welfare system, but it has instituted safety nets and subsidies to create a welfare state for companies and towns and declining industries,” summarised Nicholas Kristof in a 1999 New York Times article. While pervasive, this sort of “welfare dependency” has its opponents. In 1999, Tokushima Prefecture’s conservative residents controversially upset the status quo when they vetoed the proposed construction of an unnecessary flood control dam. Their vote made national news.

Arriving in Wajiki, where Hiroshi is second in command, Japan’s troubled economic system is notionally a distant thing. The rural farming hamlet is, at face value, still attuned to the rhythm of an older Japan. Hiroshi suggests we visit a bathhouse, that genial place of repose and amiable chatter.

In the afternoon, we visit nearby Kakurinji, the Crane Forest Temple; it is hidden high on a mountaintop, and accessible only by foot or cable car. The temple forms part of Shikoku’s famous 88-temple pilgrimage route. Established in 807 by Kukai (774-835), a student of Esoteric Buddhism in ninth century China, the route links remote mountain and seaside temples across Shikoku. Originally monks faithful to Kukai (also known as Kobo Daishi) followed the route; commoners only embarked on the 1500-kilometre journey during the late Edo period (1603-1867). It is now equally popular with pensioners and students looking for an alternative summer break.

I completed the pilgrimage for teh first time in 2000, again in 2006, this time by bicycle. It is somewhat unusual activity in that the pilgrimage has no definitive destination, nor does it have any real goal. Unlike the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, for example, or the Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Shikoku pilgrimage posits no holy endpoint; the circular passage of the route is its essence, the circle assuming both a literal and figurative importance – no beginning, no end.

The sober grandeur and religiosity of Wajiki’s temple, with its 800-year-old cedars, proves to be a stark counterpoint to the bawdy fun of the fireworks festival held later in the valley bellow. Old men get drunk. Teenage girls dressed in summer kimonos coquettishly engage with flirtatious boys wearing oversized hip hop clothing. A man wearing a white helmet, blue overall and red flashing stick guides the traffic.

Fireworks done with, their fragrant aftermath long blown down the valley, we retire to Hiroshi’s dilapidated two-bedroom apartment, an outwardly grubby structure that is the complete antithesis to the venue of our next day’s travels, architect Tadao Ando’s sublime Hompukuji, otherwise known as the Lotus Temple.

Located on Awaji Island, between Shikoku and neighbouring Honshu, this temple utterly unlike any other of Japan’s numerous religious buildings. Situated in a typical fishing village, on an elevated position overlooking Osaka Bay, one enters the temple through a freestanding concrete wall with a doorway cut through it. (Non-loadbearing walls are a common feature in Ando's repertoire.) The Lotus Temple’s chief feature, however, is a staircase that pierces through a lotus pond, the ash-grey concrete stairs leading to a hall of worship beneath.

Commissioned on the strength of a powerful congregation member who championed Ando’s austere work, the smoothly textured finish and sleek concrete grain are, ironically perhaps, a testament to Japan’s masterly tradition of wood carpentry. The wooden forms into which Ando’s concrete is poured are reputed to be less prone to leaking, the watertight shuttering producing perfectly formed concrete structures.

Commenting on the temple, architectural critic Cheryl Kent writes: “Few of Ando’s projects better represent the challenges and comforts this architect offers to Japanese culture than [the Lotus Temple]… Less a building than a series of shaped sensual experiences, the Lotus Temple is a radical challenge to centuries-old conventions governing temple design in Japan”.

There is no refuting this insight, although Ando’s structure also stands as the apotheosis of a culture that now worships concrete, not wood, the material over the insubstantial. More prosaically, its show-off quality is also a tad dangerous.

Bored and in need of smoke, Hiroshi tramples across the temple’s pebbled landscape to a small verge. The white stones introduced to the site to compliment its aesthetics give way under the gauche policeman’s feet – he slips and lies spreadeagled on his back. Laughing, Misako and I run up to him. Hiroshi grumbles disconsolately as he stands up, then nonchalantly pats his polyester pants and back.

Later, in a ramshackle little restaurant near the Lotus Temple, while brooding over a beer and snacking on a starter of takoyaki, a fried octopus dish particular to the Kansai region, Hiroshi indulges in the Japanese cultural inclination to speak epigrammatically. During this clipped exchange Misako reminds him of the time, five years before, when he sulkily sat in the car, refusing to visit Kyoto’s famed Ginkakuji, or Silver Pavilion. Hiroshi frowns, becomes even more sullen.

“These buildings don’t mean anything to me,” I distinctly remember him saying back then.

Was he just being morose? I couldn’t quite figure him out at the time, still can’t as he sits quietly opposite me munching on his okonomiyaka, pausing only to take a sip of beer. Most likely yes, but I also like to think that in his sullen defiance Hiroshi was staking a claim to a Japan that has little to do with exotic buildings and far-flung places. Objects and habitats that evoke a Japan ever out of reach.

(This article originally appeared in the Mail & Guardian's monthly Leisure supplement, sometime late in 2004.)