Rat Western: Prologue

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate  the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.”
— Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)

Installation view of the Colour Exhibition

Some stuff happened. It involved many things: several discussions, multiple emails, epic travel arrangements and rearrangements, and an entire exhibition of Eastern Cape artists. It included comments, references and quests for such abstracts within contemporary artistic practice such as ‘The Now’, human experience, authenticity and sincerity vs. visually neat, theoretical illustration. It incorporated how we might, and do package our pathologies and spilt over into matters of national identity and nation building.But that’s not the beginning of the story.

THE BEGINNING:
Vodka. A conversation. One of those late night, state-of-the-nation grizzles between friends about what we think is wrong with the particular, parochial, jargonized system in which we invest so much of our time and passion. The dialogue dominated by questions verging on the petulant: Why is so much of the art written about in this country and canonised for school level so monochromatic? Why is so much art criticism written in such a desaturated way? Why in this current context, does the word colour still persistently more often mean race, (a skin tone and no more of its complexities) than a hue denoting a chromatic representation of emotion or experience?

A conversation, which later, may have simply been a whinge with a hangover tinge.  But then we thought that other people should join this conversation, from other places and that they should come here, to the middle of nowhere to discuss our provocation. Colour.

Ashraf Jamal: Colours of Wakefulness

“It is necessary to strain one’s ears, bending down toward the muttering world, trying to perceive the many images that have never reached the colours of wakefulness.” — Michel Foucault

Brent Meistre, Blind, 2001, colour print, 40 x 40cm

A curious slippage occurs between ear and eye in Foucault’s reflection. One strains the ear to source an inchoate muttering the better to perceive a menagerie of images. The effect is synesthesic, folding sense within sense, to arrive upon a consciousness ablaze with colour. This moment of consciousness is also a moment of sensation,reminding us that acts of listening and acts of seeing require that we upend what seems obvious, divert logic, run rings around the order of representation,the better to listen and see again. The wakefulness which Foucault asks of us is what Nietzsche terms the wakefulness of being. For South Africans, who traffic in somnambulism, or in received sense, this wakefulness is not easily sourced. Sleepwalkers in our own stories – there is never one, though dogma would have us believe that we are one – South Africans have had a vested interest in sustaining this big sleep. We may walk the walk, talk the talk, and yet at every instant of this showboating and brouhaha we have remained actors, as if our bodies and minds were already snatched, preordained. As a consequence it is the secreted mutterings of our world, the hidden images that could explain ourselves to ourselves, which has remained not only beyond our ken but also beyond our grasp.

Mark Hipper: A Shifting Discolour: Chromatic Grey

Luc Tuymans, Der diagnostische
Blick IV, 1992, oil on canvas, 57 x 38cm

Luc Tuymans is well known for his reduced, greyed and etiolated palette. In his 1992 painting Der diagnostische Blick 4 the immediate focus of our gaze are the intense blue eyes that gaze back at us. The blue of these eyes is incongruous for being chromatically purer and more intense than the rest of this face, elaborated in subdued and broken greys. This blue is disturbing, even disconcerting. The chromatic relations established by this dissonance are deliberately ambiguated and complex. Here,blue, that most calming and pacific of colours, has become creepy, cold, mineral, inhuman amongst the wan chromatic greys surrounding it.

Matthew Partridge: The Digital Taboo: The De-saturation of the Common Place

David Goldblatt, Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, in the time of Aids. 13 October 2004, 2004, archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper, 99 x 127cm

Fishing with my father off the coast of Durban,just outside the entrance to the harbour on a 4.5m inflatable, semi-rigid rubber duck. Royal blue with yellow trim. A Dorado on the line, a streaking flash of brilliant colours through the water, golden green, azure, a rounded nose, a Winston you would call it on a person. Landed, the 8kg beast thrashes on deck as its gills find themselves unaccustomed to the oxygen that human lungs so readily enjoy. With a cruel blow to the back of its head to relieve this breathless anguish, the colours fade as the life drains. South African photography is not known for its particularly striking or even daring colours. Rather it is the banal, abject and quotidian that has come to characterise photographic representation under our new democratic dispensation. And this is murder. Not murder in the instant, life-ending way. But murder in the sense that one would murder a fish. Beat it over the back of the head and watch as the life drains, as the colour fades.

Michael Smith:In a Sea of Possibilities

Georgina Gratrix, Untitled, 2008,
monotype with Intaglio ink and oil paint
on 250g Zerkall litho paper, 77.6 x 55.5cm

Patti Smith builds her epic 1975 track ‘Land’ to a culmination with a recurrence of the word “possibilities”. Smith’s lyrical style here, one of free association, with one sound and idea building on and expanding the previous, is perhaps a useful metaphor for colour’s function in visual art at this juncture in South Africa’s history. The suggestibility of colour, and particularly coloured paint, lends art a value beyond empirical reportage. The chief intellectual barbarism of apartheid was to shut down possibility, rendering various forms of image making (and thus image thinking) undesirable,ill-advised or even illegal. Yet during this period colour remained transgressive in its suggestion of conceptual and emotional complexity. Similarly, in the post-apartheid cultural context, blighted for the bulk of the post-liberation period by conservative delineations of identity, most often through photography, painting in colour seems to hold special possibilities for expression that sidesteps the predictable and the coagulating.

Emma Taggart: Detached: Colour in Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta’s Paintings

Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta, 20turn, 2009, acrylic on board, 90 x 90cm

Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta’s subject matter comes from his immediate environment, the city of Port Elizabeth, in particular his home, the township of New Brighton. Sapeta captures in his work the alienation and confusion often symptomatic of city life. In particular, he is interested in the power relations that exist in the city environs between people that appear to have everything and people that exist on the fringes of society. His work was selected for discussion because of the manner in which he uses colour to represent this dichotomy: the powerful and corrupt are marked by bright primary colours that burst with violent energy while the destitute shrink into muted backgrounds of faded green and purple.

Mary Corrigall: Re-imagining the Self through Colour

Lawrence Lemaoana, Last Line of Defence, 2008, pigment inks on cotton paper, 77.5 x 125cm

It is unthinkable to conceive of Lawrence Lemaoana’s oeuvre or the artwork Last Line of Defence (2008)1 without the colour pink. The pastel and garish pinks present in this work activate its ideological content as he exploits the social values attached to this colour. Commonly aligned to femininity and evocative of stylised renditions of white flesh, in western society pink operates as an index of race and gender thus engendering the illusion that pink has fixed meanings. Of course, in philosophical terms, colour is deemed nameless. As deconstructivist theorist Stephen Melville observes, colour is “bottomlessly resistant to nomination, attaching itself absolutely to its own specificity and the surfaces on which it has or finds visibility”.2 So while pink might appear physically fixed it is also endlessly subject to reconfiguration, not just visibly but ideologically too: the semiotics of colour are historically and socially contingent.3 In Last Line of Defence Lemaoana harnesses culturally determined values attached to pink as a means of re-imaging and reinventing himself, but in so doing he similarly destabilises those values, challenging taxonomies of colour, gender and race and the interrelationship between them.

Jenette Unite: Terra: Sands and Detritus Soiled with History

Jeanette Unite, cobalt and copper mine industrial waste in molten glass

Ten years ago I started spending time on mines. My shock response to the 40-year old diamond prospecting pits on the paleaolithic West Coast beach deposits resulted in the first body of work I exhibited, Earthscars: A Visual Mining Exploration (2004). This show has travelled in different forms to site significant cities and galleries in southern Africa. Mining has defined African cultural and socio-political identity and the impact of colonialism and globalisation affects how we occupy our current landscape.

The work expanded from Earthscars to explore rehabilitation plants and environmental relationships. Conversations around visual interpretation of the extractive industry with geologists, engineers, metallurgists and industrialists have further expanded my understanding of mining. I have developed paint, pastel and glass recipes from the advice of earth scientists, geo-chemists, paint-chemists and a ceramicist to develop this ‘eco-alchemic’ work.

Virginia Mackenny: Blue: A Shifting Horizon

Virginia MacKenny, Event Horizon II, 2009, oil paint on canvas, 200 x 160cm

Blue planet, bluetooth, Big Blue, blue sky thinking, blue screen, blue movies… the list is long, so long that when Annie Mollard-Desfour, a linguist with the French national research agency and president of the French Centre of Colour in Paris produced a Dictionnaire des Mots et Expressions de Couleur (Dictionary of Words and Expressions of Colour), the first volume was Le Bleu (blue) (1998). Reinforcing the importance of the colour, a recent edition of New Scientist (September 2009), dedicated to the origins of things, included blue – not once, but twice. No mention of any other colour occurs in the issue. On Wikipedia’s page on pigment (all pigments) blue is the colour they visually represent.

Vaughn Sadie: Arguments for Light

Gas lighting was first installed in the streets of Europe in 1807, fundamentally shifting the conception and experience of urban environments. According to an article entitled ‘Arguments against Light’ published in the Cologne Zeitung (1816), this new street lighting was deemed objectionable on a number of theological, judicial, medical, moral and socio-economic standpoints. From a contemporary viewpoint, it is difficult to imagine lightless cities, let alone a delegation of those against it. The fear was that lighting the city would lead to illness, depravity, and economic loss and would tamper with “the divine plan of the world”.

Vaughn Sadie, untitled (passive separation), 2007, 2D 16watt two-pin compact fluorescent and 4m of 0.5 mm/sq x 2 co-white twin flex, dimensions variable. Photo: Andrew Griffin

Almost 200 years later, artificial light not only permeates our public and private spaces but also shapes the ways in which we experience the world. So ever-present are these forms of lighting that they have become banal and imperceptible. The only time artificial light is considered is when it fails or is absent. It is only in its absence that consideration is given to the impact it has on the spaces we occupy and ourselves.

Maureen De Jager: Aberrant Light and Colour (After the Rainbow)

TOP Graphic showing Isaac Newton’s splitting of white light into a rainbow
of colours using a prism
BOTTOM “Youth makes a difference” sticker

This paper considers the intersection of three definitions of the word colour: firstly, colour as a visual phenomenon which depends on the wavelengths of light; secondly, colour as a marker of racial identity – what we refer to as skin colour; and thirdly, colour as a verb relating to influence, as in “anger coloured her judgement”. I attempt to map overlaps between these definitions by invoking rainbows, in particular the well-worn motif of the “rainbow nation” which defines the post-apartheid dream of democratic South Africa. Made famous by Nelson Mandela’s inauguration speech as president of South Africa in 1994, the rainbow nation metaphor performs a neat operation in terms of the colour definitions listed above. As a colourful visual spectacle (first definition), the rainbow signals – in principle – the peaceful coexistence of South Africans of all colours and races (second definition), and an end to prejudice coloured by apartheid practices (third definition).

Map indicating Bantustan territories
in South Africa during the apartheid era. Courtesy Encyclopædia Britannica

James Sey: The South African Question and the Aesthetics of Disappearance

Twenty years ago the ANC was officially unbanned by South Africa’s apartheid government, removing one of the final political obstacles to a transition to a democratically elected government. At around the same time, in early 1991, Albie Sachs, the struggle veteran who would later serve in the Constitutional Court, and play an active role in establishing the Art Collection at Constitution Hill, published a position paper entitled ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’.

The paper generated much debate, and put forward the view that South African art and literature had been homogenised and to some extent eviscerated by the perceived need to reflect the social ills of apartheid, and to establish political opposition to it. Sachs’ liberal viewpoint was that art and literature should embody diversity in subject matter and technique, and should not be constrained by a reflectionist agenda.

 Zanele Muholi, Being (right triptych), 2007,
silver gelatin prints and a Lambda print, 30 x 22.5cm each

Two decades on, and the most recent burning debate in arts and culture circles in the country concerns the rejection of the work of award-winning photographer Zanele Muholi – specifically her socialrealist fine art portraits of black lesbian couples – by the presiding minister of arts and culture Lulama Xingwana. Ironically, the minister’s walkout from an exhibition she deemed “pornographic” was staged at Constitution Hill, built to embody the new South Africa’s right to freedoms of expression, association, creed and sexual orientation. 

Sean O' Toole: Black Landscape: An Argument in Three Parts

 [1] 

The parking lot, a sloping, uneven plot of land on the Forrest Town side of the Johannesburg Zoo, is empty. I steer my car across its paved surface, the loosened bricks humming an unvarying constructivist dirge. A man wearing a yellow bib conducts the regimented choir; his flailing arms also guide me to a standstill. I’m late. I pay the zoo’s entry fee, R41, drop the change (nine R1 coins) into my satchel, and jog (coins jingling) to the open-air restaurant. James Webb is already seated. He is much taller than I anticipated, his wan complexion and stiff shock of grey hair contradicting my mental picture of him. He looks a bit like David Byrne, I think, or possibly Jim Jarmusch. I pant an apology.