Editorial: Synthetic Dirt

by Rat Western

In Phillip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials, the reader is introduced to a concept known as ‘dust’. This fall-out or static is varyingly attracted to beings and objects. With people, it is those past puberty who are more magnetic for this ‘dust’ and so in this fictional universe, whose authority structure is strongly linked to Christian Dogma, the ‘dust’ is attributed to sin. Children are more innocent of ‘dust’. Those who have been in the world longer carry a stronger taint. The age of an inanimate object, in this narrative, may also be determined by this ‘dust’. However, man-made objects - and more strongly those of an artistic nature – attract more ‘dust’ than natural ones. The synthetic is therefore more dirty.
Synthetic Dirt is, from many angles, an oxymoron. The synthetic is generally perceived to be clean and clinical, manufactured and therefore, perhaps, more sterile. ‘Dirt is Good’ may be the tagline of a certain brand of washing powder but only because said company can prove how we get things clean again. Dirt, if we think of Kristeva’s abject is pollution, is taboo, when out of place. And how much more out of place can one get than to manufacture dirt?

Living in a quake

by Ashraf Jamal

I

Published 22 years ago, Michel Serres’ Le Contrat Naturel – The Natural Contract – prophetically reminds us of the dark consequences of urban densification and the interior life, a life sound-proofed, locked in chat rooms, the better to affirm our blithe yet catastrophic separation from the world all about us. Trapped within the yeah-saying language of science, the normative language of bureaucracy, and the sensational language of the media, we, today, “communicate irrepressibly,” notes Serres. “We busy ourselves only with our own networks. We have lost the world. We’ve transformed things into fetishes or commodities, the stakes of our stratagems; and our a-cosmic philosophies, for almost half a century now, have been holding forth only on language or politics, writing or logic.”

Sounds dirty: earth/water/wind in Lindi Arbi’s Last One Standing

by Maureen de Jager

Frustrated by the bureaucracy impeding her South Korean residency, 2010 Spier Award-winner Lindi Arbi threw her materials down the stairs. Picture it: 40kg of expanding polyurethane bubbling and puffing, filling out the negative spaces like an abject Rachel Whiteread. Then she took this inverted staircase to the beach for her altogether uncanny performance, Last One Standing. In the resulting video – a collaboration between Arbi and Korean film-maker, Junebum Park – we see Arbi and her assistants tethering and securing the ominous wrapped staircase. The tide comes in and the parcel is adrift. The tide goes out and the parcel is beached in glutinous mud.

Don’t think, look!

by Josh Ginsburg & Francis Burger

1.

Click to enlarge

2.1.
‘Don’t think, Look!’ is an experimental text produced collaboratively through a series of conversations. The primary aim of the exercise was to map out a region of intersection between our respective artistic practices, where each of us attempt to create structures that facilitate the dynamic play of an excess of ideas. Marked by a shared interest in complexity, language, and the activity of thought, a mutual territory was generated through the creation and performance of such a structure as an emergent strategy. On a technical level, emergent strategies are processes that stage and manage systems within states of free play, harnessing the creative capacity of contingency through the use of reflexive feedback mechanisms. In this way, emergent processes are inherently circular: the mechanism as a whole is refined as a result of the activities it propagates within. Every action contributes not only to its independent end, but also to the development of the system at large.

Distorted Echo

by Charles Maggs

 

In our ultra-mediated societies today, constructed behaviours and actions from popular culture are increasingly reflected in day to day reality, like a powerful feedback loop between the synthetic, processed or constructed world and that of the analogue, human or ‘real’ world. The medium may be the message, but the question is what happens when you hold up a giant mirror to this signal.

This paper is concerned with the politics of imitation, real-world mash-ups and other accidents of ultra mediation in contemporary society. It is less about Elvis impersonators or people who act out scenes from Star Wars in their back gardens, and more about how these imitations and coded behaviours have began to invade the mechanisms of state.

Photography’s Disaster: Reproducibility and Ruined Origin(al)s in Andy Warhol, Guy Tillim, Richard Misrach, and Christo Doherty

by Gerhard Schoeman

Let me begin with a story about fame. An Andy Warhol screen-print of Mao Zedong, which the late actor Dennis Hopper shot up during a wild night in the 1970s, sold for R2.137 million at Christies in January of 2011. According to Christies, Hopper, who directed the cult film Easy Rider (1969), shot the print twice when he mistook it for the actual Chinese leader. Once ruined by the infamous film star, the print increased dramatically in value. Hopper’s aura augmented Chairman Mao’s as well as Warhol’s aura. In contemporary vernacular this is called remixing.

(Not) Everything counts in large amounts: Dusty Realism and the productive ‘archive’ of the in between

by Alexander Opper

 

This paper addresses two recent conceptually linked works by the author, employing dust as vehicle and metaphor for the challenging of established values and meanings attached to the museum archive. The horizontal cornice surfaces of the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s (JAG) exhibition halls bear testimony to the fact that dust – in its cumulative, undisturbed presence – physically and conceptually bridges and deconstructs the constructed divides between colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid space. Dust is unsettling in its main characteristic, its invariable tendency to settle. The settled state of dust is deceptive though, as it implies an ongoing, quiet and thick mobility of infinite settling. In its stubborn omnipresence it prefers the horizontal position of rest to the vertical surface of display. The non-linear and Dusty Realism, as I refer to it here, of this fugitive and permanent museum ‘resident’ overrides and overwrites the futile attempts of museum curators to neatly and chronologically categorise the contents of any museum archive. It embodies the Deriddean notions of margin and centre and reversal and doubling: in the two works discussed here, the ostensibly residual nature of dust is catapulted onto the museum’s centre stage. Here it operates simultaneously as a destabilising catalyst for new readings – and as an unsettling mirror – of the archive as we know it. Although museum dust remains relatively dry, due to the strict rules of control around temperature and humidity in such buildings, it retains an inherently sticky quality. Like glue, it clings to, binds, and is itself a constituent element of the synthetic archive it tenuously holds together.

am I a victim of this wicked game: synthetic dirt vs. aesthetic clean

by Bettina Malcomess

 This paper begins with a series of images. The first is of Julius Malema walking with Winnie Mandela in front of Johannesburg high court, escorted by his bodyguards wearing black suits and red ties and carrying Dashprod SAR M14 rifles (used for urban street combat). The second is from the music video of New Wave Kwaito-Elecontronica musician, Spoek Mathambo. Directed by Pieter Hugo, the image is of Mathambo lying on his side on the ground, his head and most of his torso covered in a white, chalky powder, his knees drawn up close to his body, being beaten with what appear to be tyre inner tubings by children covered in a shiny black liquid. The third is a photograph, in the catalogue for ‘Endgame’ by Michael McGarry, of a figure in a ‘wooden mask of Hu Jintao (President of China), a ghillie suit (US military camoflauge) and an ‘AK47’ (an adapted toy gun). The caption reads: ‘The person in the photograph is my girlfriend’s parents gardener…I paid him R100 for a three hour shoot’. The last is an image by artist Gerald Machona, a still from a film shot in Harare, which shows Machona dancing on a rooftop ledge, wearing a mask made out of Zimbabwean dollars, some of which he throws into the air.

The Paranoia of Ron T Beck

by Chad Rossouw

 Ron T Beck is corrupt, international and invisible. Ron is the doer, the producer, the enabler. Moving from dodgy mining deals in Russia, to dealing arms in Iran, Beck is multi-talented, nonchalant, and enormously immoral. He embodies the filthy underbelly and maneuvering that enable gross corporate profits. He is also an artwork, an invention of artist Charles Maggs, and probably your friend on Facebook. Beck only exists through images and abrupt statements on social networks and blogs, making him seem autonomous and self-generating.

Spatial tourism: ‘Interspatial Commerce’ within Contemporary South African Art

by Mary Corrigall 

“A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch,”
 - Deleuze and Guattari

“You could tell your mother you were going on a package holiday to Kabul, with a stopover in Haiti and Detroit, and she wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But tell her you’re going to Joburg and she’ll be absolutely convinced that you’ll come home with no wallet, no watch and no head,” observed TV personality and journalist Jeremy Clarkson . After a short stay in this notorious South African conurbation Clarkson discovered it wasn’t quite the “lawless Wild West frontier town paralysed by corruption and disease”. This prompted him to amend his attitude and declare that Joburg was in fact a city “for softies.”

Digital sh1t: Mobile website Outoilet, the mobile phone and the marking of space

,by Alette Schoon

In November last year the mobile phone website Outoilet (Old toilet) shot to notoriety as it was associated with the distribution of an amateur video of a statutory rape at Jules High School in Jeppestown. Since then mobile phone networks have blocked access to the site, and the Film and Publication Board has attempted to persuade its Russian hosts to close it down. Outoilet responded by urging  users to bypass the blockages by using the unmonitored mobile browser Opera Mini, took down their school chatrooms, displayed an age restriction and cheekily added ‘as seen on TV’ to their header.  However, despite its links to various porn video and photography sites, Outoilet itself is text based, a low bandwidth free-for-all bulletin board, which boasts in its header ‘the only place where you can gossip without anyone knowing who you are’. 

SPORT THEATRE AND “PLAYING DIRTY”: A performance experiment on soccer

by Athina Vahla

Images courtesy Mark Wilby

This paper aims to introduce a hybrid form of performance named Sport Theatre. The first part of the document is about defining Sport Theatre as a concept through discussing its constituent elements, purpose and potential, while the second part discusses a performance experiment called Playing Dirty, part of the Synthetic Dirt Colloquium which aimed to test the practical application of Sport Theatre in performance.

Infospherics and a new South African psychogeography.

by James Sey

Alongside the readable structure of the city, the mappable territory which organises and arranges, lies the other structure of contingency – the structure of the city produced by its users, its inhabitants. This one evokes, determines and produces behaviours, styles, attitudes, values, pathologies. Each city therefore has at least a double character, and a double narrative, and its inhabitants play many roles within them.

The surfaces and depths of the city’s structure, its being – from the towering replications of its skyscrapers, to the hollow aortas of its undercover car parks, to the secret somatics of its circulatory systems of tar, wire, cable and pipe – all form a paradigmatic sign system, a primary cybernetic machine. Seen as such a sign system, the city should be the true locus of modern media – and aesthetic - philosophy.

Dirty hands or hands-off? – the printmatrix in a mediated milieu.

by Dominic Thorburn

Since the very first images were made by dipping hands in natural pigment and pressing them on cave walls in Lascaux and Altamira artists have been getting their hands dirty to make their mark. These simple images have to be some of the most economical, powerful and evocative symbols known to us. I believe it helpful to revisit visual images of this nature, to regain perspective and seek solace in them - especially at times when contemporary questions abound such as those being asked at this colloquium.

Dirty Alien Shadow-selves: Synthetic Dirt in District 9

by Cheryl Stobie

Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world:

today it is modelling possible universes. (Bourriaud 2002: 13)

In this paper I triangulate three theoretical strands, using Nicolas Bourriaud on aesthetics, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay on science fiction, specifically representations of aliens, and Mary Douglas on anthropology. Although Bourriaud privileges the art exhibition, many of his comments on contemporary artistic practice and its cultural potential are suggestively applicable to the film District 9 (Blomkamp 2009). Bourriaud refers to a contemporary trend in the art world of “learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution” (2002: 13). He elaborates that “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real” (13). Further pertinent concepts of Bourriaud’s include the city model of cultural forms (14), and the shift from art as a space to be traversed to “a period of time to be lived through” (15), like a film narrative. Bourriaud also notes the semiotic power of the image to generate empathy and connection. He places contemporary art in the zone of the interstitial, and within this zone he emphasises the significance of human gestures of connection in representations, in dialogic relationships with prior formations, in ethics and as expressions of desire.

The Dirt is Real – The Rest is Synthetic: The Rough Works of Aryan Kaganof

by Anton Krueger


Aryan Kaganof, was born Ian Kerkhof in 1964. He grew up in Durban and left for Amsterdam in 1984, because, in his own words he didn’t feel like “running around in a uniform shooting at blacks”. He moved back to South Africa in ‘99 to meet – for the first time – his biological father, who was terminally ill. Aryan lived with him during the last months of his life, an experience recounted in Uselessly (Jacana, 2006). His father was a Jewish man called Caganoff. Kagan is a Russian equivalent of Cohen, and the “off” means “descended from”, so Kaganof is the son of Cohen. And then Ian renamed himself Aryan, (from the Sanskrit arya, meaning “noble”), because Hitler said that no Jew would ever be an Aryan, and he thought that might be kind of funny. So that’s where Aryan Kaganof’s peculiar name comes from.

SYNTHETIC DIRT Programme
Rhodes Fine Art Colloquium
St Peter’s Building, Room 34 &35, St Peter’s Campus, Rhodes University, Somerset Street
Saturday & Sunday, April 16 & 17

Saturday
8:45 – 9:00 Welcome, Rat Western
9:00 – 10:00: Bettina Malcolmess & Alette Schoon
10:00 – 11:00: Rael Salley & Maureen de Jager

11:00 – 11:15: TEA

11:15 – 12:15: Francis Burger & James Webb
12:15 – 1:15: Anton Krueger &Josh Ginsburg

1:15 – 2:00: LUNCH

2:00 – 3:00: Paulette Coetzee & Cheryl Stobie
3:00 – 4:00: Gavin Krastin & Athina Vahla

6:00 Exhibition Opening, Albany History Museum, Somerset Street

Sunday
9:00 – 10:00: Ashraf Jamal & James Sey
10:00 – 11:00: Matthew Partridge & Mary Corrigall

11:00 – 11:15: TEA

11:15 – 12:15: Alex Opper & Dominic Thorburn
12:15 – 1:15: Chad Rossouw & Charles Maggs

1:15 – 2:00: LUNCH

2:00 – 3:00: Imraan Coovadia & Sean O’Toole
3:00 – 3:30: Wrap-Up Rat Western

Athina Vahla: Playing Dirty - An Arena Project

A practice - led experiment in collaboration with Rhodes women’s soccer team for the ‘Synthetic Dirt’ Colloquium (Rhodes University Fine Arts Department, 16-17 April 2011). 

This presentation will be preceded by a workshop performance on 15 April at 8pm at the Rhodes Theatre.  All Welcome.

Arenas are performance case studies based on the notion of agon [Greek meaning conflict, struggle]. Taking place in spaces configured for contest Arenas raise a fundamental question, namely, whether the space defines the contest or whether the contest dictates the space.

The women soccer event is one case study within the broader Arenas project, the aims of which include:
1. The development of Sport Theatre a new hybrid form of performance which uses the language of sports in theatre.
2. The value of sport theatre for the local and broader cultural, social and political arenas.
3. Audiences’ development; bringing sport fans and art audience together.

Project goals
- To challenge the liminal space between sport and art performance, the functional and the aesthetic
- To create a ‘distinct’ artistic voice by ‘mixing’ two different physical practices performed by sportsmen and women rather than athletically trained actors.
- To promote collaborative exchanges between different academic disciplines in order to observe what emerges from this synergy.
- To ‘dirty’ sports, arts, science, and possibly ‘dirty’ the ways we tend to view structures of different types of systems and models.
- To define new territories…

Audiences at the colloquium will be part of a ‘staged experiment’ which will include the following aspects:
A pre-performance routine which ‘pushes’ the mental and physical skills of each player prior to the game .
Subtle ‘interventions’ to subvert the game rules and ethos. The dislocation of the playground, the shifting of goal posts, the reduced number of players, the use of text, all challenge the team’s training as well as the performance experiment.

The ‘dirtying’ of the game becomes apparent in that expressed human effort is revealed rather than concealed. The safe terrain of a highly structured sport is deliberately ‘sabotaged ’. A number of idiosyncrasies is highlighted; the playing field becomes an enclosed theatre, and, perhaps most importantly, the borderland between the private (training) and the public (game) is challenged and exposed. The conference as a hosting structure becomes an arena in which these interventions are played out.

Alex Opper: (Not) Everything counts in large amounts: Dusty Realism and the productive ‘archive’ of the in between

Alexander Opper

Accumulation #1 (2010), Detail (photo by Leon Krige)

(Found dust on paper)

Two recent conceptually linked works by the author, employing dust as vehicle and metaphor for the challenging of established values and meanings attached to the archive, form the basis of this paper. The horizontal cornice surfaces of the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s (JAG) exhibition halls bear testimony to the fact that dust – in its cumulative undisturbed presence – effortlessly bridges the constructed divides between colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid space. The first work (Accumulation #1, 2010) was made for the 2010 show, Time’s Arrow: Live Readings of the JAG Collection.1 It uses the pervasive ‘apolitical’ nature of dust – specifically the more or less 100 year old accumulation of dust on the above-mentioned museum cornices – to interrogate and undermine the traditionally measured and ascribed notions of value attached to the contents of the museum archive. Further the work embodies a response to the exhibition curator’s interest in notions of ‘excavation, doubling and reversal.’
The second work discussed here (Accumulation #2, 2010), unpacks the initial work and continues an ongoing engagement with alternative readings and probings of conventional definitions of the archive situated within the author’s current and broader interest, of a critical-spatial pursuit of the ‘undoing’ of site-specific architectural spaces. Dust is not selected or selective – it is uninvited and invasive and forces its way into every nook and cranny of the recognisable and recognised archive. It is uncannily unsettling in its main characteristic – its tendency to settle. In its stubborn omnipresence it prefers the horizontal position of rest to the vertical surface of display. It is in and of the world and, in the Bourriaudian sense, relational to the core. Ironically, its unstoppable, accumulating and viral presence is the most alive aspect of the dead museum and dead archive. In a sense, it represents a permanently persistent homage to Kasimir Malevich’s 1919 call (in On the Museum) for the reduction of museums and their collections to space-saving powder (via his suggested burning of everything old and outdated, to make way for the new). Dust is ambiguously and simultaneously peripheral and central. It is not to be underestimated: its mostly marginal connotations recently slipped into a radically central position – in its ashen Icelandic form – inflicting prolonged global paralysis on the world’s transport systems. Dust ‘reminds’ the increasingly synthetic world that it is real, and longs to make the virtual world more real – perhaps, through its particle nature, it could ‘learn’, through the ultimate nth degree of pulverisation, to infiltrate the virtual and in so doing, at last, alchemically link the two realms.

1 For an overview of the exhibition, visit: http://www.timesarrowatjag.blogspot.com/

Francis Burger: Squaring the magic circle

Willem Boshoff, Nothing is Obvious

How do spaces of play become delineated?

How does one draw on weak logic to erect a flexible line that allows for rather than inhibits emergent thoughts, ideas, objects and inventions?

How does one cultivate and harvest spaces of emergence, of freedom? Spaces like Archimedes’ bathtub and Jean Philippe Toussaint’s bathroom, where eureka’s, both loud and soft, fast and slow, mark the arrival of the truth as an event, effervescing all at once across tight networks of people, things and places.1
How does one solicit the unsolicitable, say the unspeakable, fix, formalize, or commission the impossible?

Focusing on experimental artistic research strategies the proposed paper will investigate the above questions through a discussion of merging the estranged bedfellows of quantitative and qualitative research. Taking advantage of the intersection of post-structuralism and complexity studies within contemporary critical theory, the theoretical base of the investigation will extend to include samples from an orphan genealogy of abstract engineers.2 The paper will pivot around the illustration of practical strategies evidenced by artists and other practitioners within a localised community.3 Functioning as a performance, the paper will be presented in conjunction with video and sculptural works from two or more of the above-mentioned artists (See Notes).

Backed by previous attempts at researching the quiet histories of lesser-known South African artists and other intellectuals or eccentrics, the discussion will aim at the articulation of a shareable, ‘sayable’ method that interrogates and intervenes in the writing of current histories via a combination of actions that are simultaneously radical and responsible, independent and gregarious.
________________________________


notes
1. The ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes is known anecdotally for screeching ‘Eureka!’ and running down the street naked after solving a problem of volume and weight in his bathtub. Toussaint’s (2008) The Bathroom narrates the story of a man who moves into his bathroom in an attempt to secure the ‘quietude of [his] abstract life’.

2. Taken from a comment on Deleuze’s philosophical family tree by Brian Massumi (1987), the idea of my own ‘orphan’ genealogy could emerge here to include anyone from Diogenes to Nietzsche, from Chief Bambatha kaMancinza to Eugene Marais to Enoch Mgijima to Krzysztof Wodiczko, Stacy Hardy or Bp Nichol.

3. Namely Josh and Jared Ginsburg, Anja de Klerk, Christian Nerf, Willem Boshoff and Doung Anwaar Jahangeer as well as practitioners from conservation (Paula Hathorn and Tanya Lane) and complexity studies (André Zaaiman).
sources cited within this proposal:

Massumi, B. 1987. ‘Pleasures of Philosophy’ in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota. (p. x)
Jean-Philippe Toussaint, 2008. The Bathroom. Translated by Nancy Amphoux. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press. (p. 7.)

Ashraf Jamal: … living in a quake …

I
The most commonly used phrase in Japanese, expressed in moments of parting, is ganbatte kudasai – “please endure it.” Testimony to a human condition at once gritty and staggeringly inconsolable ganbatte kudasai nevertheless clings to a collective empathy and connectedness in the instant of a rupture. Despite its austerity, therefore, the endurance which the phrase appeals to reminds us that life is nothing without mutual care. That this care is at once human, cultural, industrial, and technological is both fitting and strange given the complex interconnectivity that informs and defines contemporary global life. In the case of Japan, a society, culture, and current catastrophe, we find an in-road into our debate on matters technological and mortal. While this essay turns on the current disaster that afflicts Japan, it is the global impact which this disaster invokes which, primarily, informs this rumination. To live in a quake one need not suffer the specifics of that world; nevertheless it is that world, which is also our world, which allows for the empathy, connectivity, in short the experience which accounts for a radical unsettlement experienced worldwide. Japan functions, therefore, as a coda for the sheer gravity that informs this discussion: a discussion that happens after, because of, and within the trauma that exists as I speak.

Matthew Partridge: The Everyday and The Extraordinary Dave Southwood’s ‘Milnerton Market’

Dave Southwood – Black & Decker, 2003

Milnerton Market, on the periphery of Cape Town is a virtual treasure trove of the discarded, the no longer wanted, the second-hand object. Erected every Sunday this zone becomes a site of economic trade peopled by a mass huddled among green balustrade fences, searching for paths of existence cast in the junk of others.
The photographer Dave Southwood has explored the characters that filter through such a trade in his artist editioned book titled simply ‘Milnerton Market’. Launched at the AVA in November 2010 with a photographic series of works contained in the book Southwood has explored the aesthetic relation of people to objects.

As Ivan Vladislavić describes in his text:
Wittingly or not, in setting out their stalls the sellers create small tableaux of domestic life. These scenes evoke the absent worlds from which the objects have been banished. They are as moving as photographs of forced removals or evictions, where household effects standing out in a field or on a street corner, stripped of their privacy and exposed to the elements, call to mind the walls and roof of a lost home.

If supermarkets are orderly suburbs of commodities within the gated communities of the malls, then flea markets are informal settlements on the margins of exchange.
What this paper intends to discuss is the indexical relation of photography to the typology of people that Southwood explores. The banal and the quotidian, rendered in the visible in the photographs of objects and stalls, serve as intricate traces of the extended lives of their sellers.

In this sphere of lasped commodification nestled in the margins of exchange, emerges portraits that celebrate the everyday, the dirty and the synthetic, whilst at the same revealing the raw humanity that finds its definition in such objects.

Sean O' Toole: Death of a Critic: the who, when, where and how of Ivor Powell

In his slender but influential 2003 volume, What happened to art criticism?, James Elkins offers that, “Art criticism is not considered as part of the brief of art history: it is not an historical discipline, but something akin to creative writing.” The evidence of contemporary criticism does not entirely bear out this statement. In the context of the wholesale disassembling or dematerialisation of art practice across the span of the twentieth century, it is surprising, at least to me, that much of what is understood as art criticism remains Catholic, hidebound and formally conservative. I think in particular of the review, a standard editorial device that functions as a sort of eye away from.

In a 2010 lecture, curator Tirdad Zolghadr remarked: “The review is by now the most musty of master forms, the oil painting of art writing.” However, unlike painting, which has brokered an understanding with its anachronisms, art criticism has, for the most part, refused to inhabit art’s “expanded field”, to repurpose Rosalind Krauss’s famous phrase. And so the review remains the prevailing mode of engagement, a rhetorical device that defuses the "creative writing" latent in art criticism in favour of something approaching a bland, descriptively inclined interpretive text. This is particularly pronounced in South Africa where art criticism's ontological fuzziness has only been tentatively been engaged by a handful of writers.

This paper will focus on the work of art critic Ivor Powell, an influential if furtive critic whose writings chart an epochal shift in South African art and its critical reception. Literate, argumentative, undisciplined, Powell was closely associated with Possession Arts, an early 1980s neo-Dadaist group of artists, dramatists and writers. In the late 1980s he was appointed as art critic for the newly launched Weekly Mail, a position he held until the mid-1990s. After the failure of Ventilator, a short-lived post-apartheid art magazine launched in September 1994 and edited by Powell, he started concentrating on investigative journalism, which eventually led to his appointment as a senior investigator with the now defunct Scorpions, an arm of the National Prosecuting Authority. His arrest on January 22, 2008, on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol and resisting arrest after he sped away from police attempting to arrest Igshaan Davids, leader of the infamous Americans street gang, then wanted for car theft, forms an interesting sidebar to a career that, at least in writing, is marked by its commitment to a critical eroticism, to borrow from Sontag.

Sean O’Toole is a culture journalist, art critic and writer. A PhD candidate at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, he formerly served as editor of the magazine Art South Africa (2004-10), writes regularly on photography for the Sunday Times and contributes a bi-monthly art column to frieze magazine.

James Sey: Infospherics and a new South African psychogeography.

The relationship between place, memory and representation has become an increasingly contested one in the digital age. The processes of globalisation and its consequent displacement of populations have meant that the intervention of technologies of representation into the everyday experience of a culture have become ubiquitous, thus problematising the representation of culture per se. Google Earth is a prime example, but a generalised knowledge, through various infospheric channels, of global geography gives rise to the impression that the infonaut is in possession of knowledge of the world, and is thus transcultural, or somehow outside anthropology.
This attenuated relationship between experience, technology and place gives rise to interesting new imaginative and aesthetic possibilities, in particular that of a more developed ‘psychogeography’ than that imagined by Baudelaire, Benjamin and Debord. While more recent psychogeographers like Sinclair and Moore have explored these possibilities in mostly literary art forms, it is in ironically more technologised aesthetic forms that some of the dirt of lived anthropological knowledge and experience might be reintroduced to the infosphere.

South African art provides an excellent example of this. For decades now the country’s imagination has been concerned with excavation – not only of new forms and new aesthetic possibilities, but either with literal digging up of dirt, or with the metaphorical excavation of an imaginary geography itself. This paper argues a case for such a new aesthetic in SA, adducing various examples.

Cheryl Stobie: Synthetic Dirt in District 9

Beginning with a contextualisation based on pertinent ideas of Nicolas Bourriaud about the function of and effects associated with contemporary art, I move on to an analysis of the representation of literal and synthetic dirt within the film District 9 (2009), directed by Neill Blomkamp. The film mixes genres, but is mainly to be viewed as science fiction. Its gritty grounding in the realities of the South African cityscape acts to reintroduce the element of pressing social reality which has retreated to the background in much recent science fiction film, which has emphasised clean and clinical special effects. I use Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s critical work on the implications of the significance of the encounter with the alien as the ultimate contact zone between self and other to analyse District 9, quoting his suggestive observation, “Aliens are our shadows, and we are theirs.” Ways in which entry can be made into the consciousness of the other include the perceptual, sympathetic and symbolic.

Using this starting point, I concentrate on the physical, emotional and aesthetic effects achieved as the main protagonist of District 9 moves from a human to an alien embodiment. I chart the progress of the body-horror and ethical development entailed in this change of state, making reference to ideas first developed by Mary Douglas in her anthropological work, Purity and Danger. The viewer’s responses are shown to be complex and muddy, composed of warring impulses of revulsion and admiration. This is appropriate as aliens are ambiguously depicted in the film as technologically advanced but consumers of human flesh.

As the central character, Wikus, becomes an alien his body becomes a rich symbolic ground. His ingestion of cat food and his increasingly leaky, abject body reflect ideas which can be interpreted universally, but more specifically within the South African context reveal anxieties about the cohesion of a minority group. I conclude by analysing the end of the film, which is moving, future-directed and insistent on the significance of art in society.

James Webb: Yumei na wa ju-go pun

I would like to present a critical overview of my project, “Wa,” an interventionist performance at a large, public art event at the Castle of Good Hope in 2003. The performance was billed as a concert by famous, female Japanese noise musician, Wa. The event was attended by just under 8’000-people and the gig’s highlights were broadcast on E-TV news. Being the first Japanese DJ to play in South Africa, and what with the local audience’s limited experience of harsh noise music, the concert was received with a mixture of chaos, exoticism and awe.

Unbeknownst to the audience, Wa was a fictitious character invented by James Webb. Webb hired a Korean tourist, taught her basic DJ skills and had her “perform” his noise music to the hyped-up crowd.

Biography: James Webb (b. 1975, Kimberley) has been working on both large-scale installations in galleries and museums as well as unannounced interventions in public spaces since 2001. His work explores the nature of belief in our contemporary world, often using exoticism, displacement and humour to achieve these aims. He has participated in exhibitions including the 3rd Marrakech Biennale, the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival and the 9th Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon.

Notable recent projects include “Scream,” wherein the artist invited members of the gallery staff of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid to scream at Picasso’s Guernica, “Autohagiography,” an installation consisting of audio interviews conducted with himself under hypnosis, and “There’s No Place Called Home” an on going, world-wide intervention using incongruous foreign birdcalls broadcast out of speakers concealed in local trees, for example the calls of South African summer birds in Japanese trees during midwinter.

www.theotherjameswebb.com

Dominic Thorburn: Dirty hands or hands-off? – the printmatrix in a mediated milieu.

As with language the printed image is never static but constantly evolving. Printmedia by their very nature have always been in flux, ever changing in their technologies and thus latent expressive powers and reach. This perpetual shift remains its forte and has ensured the survival of printerly images within our visual psyche.

Since the first images were made by dipping hands in natural pigment and pressing them on cave walls in Lascaux and Altamira artists have been getting their hands dirty to make their mark. The making of multiple images today though can be a more hands-off affair to ‘do the dirty’ (so to speak), often harnessing new media and utilising digital imaging and technical collaboration.

In the past boundaries which defined the activities of printmaking were limited to technical categories – most often the traditional techniques or mediums used to make prints. The print was defined as the map and not the territory the map describes. Contemporary print may stake claim to new creative territory which goes beyond any map; the meaning of the images and interventions produced by printmedia now often become the expanded terrain of the exploration, the border crossings in a larger picture.

Print today is not a technique, a category, or even an art object - it is a mediating matrix, a theoretical idiom for developing ideas and dialogue. In the same manner as language cannot be defined as alphabets, words, or grammar, contemporary printmedia cannot be defined merely as a series of technical activities. It is more appropriately defined by its function, its philosophical approach, and the conception and evolution of concepts and images it generates and synthesises.

Gavin Krastin: A Retrospective, Altered Daily - Synthesising Meaning from ‘Dusty’ Dances

Alan Parker and Gavin Krastin Retrospective5 - Chandelier Photograph: John Hogg

Premiering at Dance Umbrella 2011, Retrospective – Altered Daily, choreographed and performed by Alan Parker and designed and performed by Gavin Krastin, is a kinaesthetic and visually framed durational performance art event that surfaces discourse encircling ideas of originality, meaning making and intertextuality:

What if...
 What if the movement really does mean nothing?
What if you add a little something to nothing?
Does the nothing become something?
Is the something something new or is it something else?

Repeated each day for eleven days, the ‘dance’ (dubbed Trio F) is an extension of ideas presented by Yvonne Rainer in her seminal work, Trio A. Much like the original, Trio F, is a relishing of all things ‘un-dancey’ – no phrasing, no virtuosity, little rhythm, no variation or repetition and, essentially, no intended meaning. Every day the extraneous theatricalities of another production are then ‘pasted’ on top of it. (Alan Parker in the programme of Retrospective – Altered Daily, 2011) 

Not only does Parker paste the theatricalities of various old (‘dusty’) dances onto his anti-metaphoric and anti-metonymic body, with the aid of Krastin, but alternatively Parker inserts himself into pre-existing works, imploring the questioning of the originality of the work. Furthermore, by placing meaningful signifiers (through music, costuming and design, which each have their own historical context, story and intertextual resonance from the original productions, from which they were taken) in a meaningless dance phrase and space, Parker engages with alternative methods of meaning making.

This paper serves as a critical appreciation of the poignant aim of Retrospective – Altered Daily; to flatly question, or undermine the hallowed principles of originality, intention and expression. It will excavate the system of meaning making involved in the work, and ultimately how the work synthesised meaning from a meaningless body due to the proximity and involvement of indexed objects, sounds or visuals in the performance space, or near to the anti-metonymic body.

The paper is the result of a qualitative process of collecting and engaging with critical texts (primarily in the form of academic texts, journal articles and reviews sourced from Library services and internet facilities), related to the topic, as well as interviews with the artist Alan Parker. In addition, there is an interpretative and embodied method of research involved, as I am the designer and performer of the work.

Mary Corrigall: Spatial tourism: ‘Interspatial Commerce’ within Contemporary South African Art

Vaughn Sadie and Bronwyn Lace: Unit for Measure

Nicholas Bourriaud proposes that a branch of contemporary artistic practice is designed to engender “interhuman commerce”, a brand of heterogeneous art which evokes what he terms relational aesthetics. Hence it trades on and generates an alternative communication zone where new models of sociability can be advanced. Consequently this theory of form comprises of engineered social interactions instigated by an artist to create the conditions where “the individual struggles with the Other.”

A relational aesthetic product in the South African context would more than likely be burdened by identity politics, given that social relations are often haunted by the baggage of the Apartheid era. In charting a course beyond the self/other dichotomised coupling, which predominated contemporary art at nascence of the post-apartheid era, a number of South African artists, primarily based in Joburg, have developed a kind collaborative practice that chooses to explore and challenge the spatial conditions that have contributed towards fixing relational dynamics between individuals. Most of these artists operate from self-reflexive positions in that their practices also evince an awareness of the impossibilities inherent in mapping space and how representational models and new media such as Google Earth engender virtual maps, which often flatten the character of space.

Given the concerns that drive this ‘spatial aesthetics practice’, the art forms are often site-specific performance or installation works of an interdisciplinary nature – with such a keen spatial awareness dancers are ideally positioned for this work. The artist operates as an intermediary and the performance or intervention a tool to foster new relationships within socially/ politically loaded spaces such as no-go zones in the city or townships . In these instances depoliticising and demythologising areas of the city are the end product. This practice is centred on generating an ‘experience’ that is both synthesised and real, which is intended to “set new ways of living and models of action” .

In outlining the characteristics of this practice or form of art this paper will touch on the work of collaborative artworks/interventions by Marcus Neustetter and Stephen Hobbs, and Bronwyn Lace and Vaughn Sadie as well as interdisciplinary site-specific initiatives such as the X-Homes and In House projects, which encompassed dance, theatre and performance art.

Mary Corrigall: Art Critic and Writer. Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Visual Identities in Art and Design, at the University of Johannesburg

Chad Rossouw: The Paranoia of Ron T Beck

Ron T Beck is corrupt, international and invisible. He is the opposite of the corporate spin-doctor. Ron is the doer, the producer, the enabler. Moving from dodgy mining deals in Russia, to dealing arms in Iran, Beck is multi-talented, nonchalant, and enormously immoral. He embodies the filthy underbelly and maneuvering that enable gross corporate profits. He is also an artwork, an invention of artist Charles Maggs, and probably your friend on Facebook. Beck only exists through images and abrupt statements on social networks. The images are generally found on the web, and are characterized by all the eyes in the picture being censored. The statements range from geographical to philosophical, with a spy fiction paranoia that is distinctly familiar.

Charles Maggs scans the internet for images and ideas that reveal the hidden structures of Capitalist power. Like a true paranoiac Ron T Beck can be found lurking anywhere. He washes up like the dirty foam on the shore of the internet. By using Facebook, Beck becomes close. He is part of our network, someone we know. The implication of our own complicity, or at least indifference, is revealed by his presence.

This paper aims to investigate two points around Beck as an artwork. Firstly, it will look at how Maggs constructs the character on Facebook from a variety of sources. And secondly, the importance of the context of the character, both in terms of social networking and South African art production.

Charles Maggs: Distorted Echo

The politics of imitation, real world mash-ups, and other accidents of ultra-mediation in contemporary society. 

In our ultra-mediated societies today, constructed behaviours and actions from popular culture are increasingly reflected in day to day reality, like a powerful feedback loop between the synthetic, processed or constructed world and that of the analogue, human or ‘real’ world. The medium may be the message, but the question is what happens when you hold up a giant mirror to this signal.



This paper is concerned with the politics of imitation, real-world mash-ups and other accidents of ultra mediation in contemporary society. It is less about Elvis impersonators or people who act out scenes from Star Wars in their back gardens, and more about how these imitations and coded behaviours have began to invade the mechanisms of state.

These invasions are where the primary accident of ultra-mediation is located. An identifying symptom of this accident is the proliferation of imitation and repetition. More and more events and situations in the real world, and in the mechanisms of state, are similar to each other and to those from popular culture. This paper will identify examples of these reflections and point to their origins in the world of popular-culture.

Following this it will explore the politics of imitation and try to contextualise it both at the level of the individual, and South African society today. It will conclude by looking at how identifying these feedback systems is a productive creative strategy in the context of relational artworks by exploring contemporary South African artistic practice that reflects these concerns.

Paulette Coetzee: Authorship and Authenticity in the Post-Post-Past

This colloquium’s call for papers is an interesting text, which offers a rich brew of ideas while simultaneously gesturing towards and avoiding what it implies and elides. The oxymoronic term, “synthetic dirt”, invites a wide play of interpretations. I will focus on polarities around (im)purity and multiplicity/singularity. These polarities – and the overlapping, blurring continuities within and around them – exist within a larger temporal framework; the brief directs us to the contemporary, the now, the new. We are called to the cutting edge, the “front-line” of culture, to witness and bring-to-being, in a manner both exciting and prosaic. (Our lived present largely comprises our shifting re-imaginings of pasts and futures; what we imagine we help make, though not quite as we please.) The colloquium’s framework is geographical as well as historical, with the slippery term “South Africa” presented as a nexus between local and global, and between (apartheid) past and (“post-post-”) possibilities.

The invitation-text posits dirt as “raw” and “human” versus cleanliness as “cooked […] synthetic”. I have simplified a complex range of associations around dirt and cleanliness as two sets of interweaving yet opposed, value-charged oppositions. On the one hand, dirt may mean evil, diseased hybridity, uncontrolled sexuality, death. Cleanliness, meanwhile, is good, healthy, uncontaminated. On the other hand, dirt may signify down-to-earth authenticity, children of the soil, honesty, fertility, acknowledged mortality, humility, humanity. These positive attributes are set against cleanliness as threatening modernity, sterility, fascism, dystopian scienticity, cyborg technology. Polarities of multiplicity/singularity in artistic composition seem to work in a similar way: multiplicity may signify communal customs, archetypal well-springs of tradition, or ultra-modern (death of the author) mixings and fragmentations; singularity may suggest (Western) individualism (as imposition/invention) and suspect grand narratives, or straightforward purity of traditional method. In all the above, one can read lingering or returning discourses associated with certain posts and their tethered pasts.

My exploration will draw on the following texts: a song recorded by Hugh Tracey, Ivan Vladislavic’s novel The Exploded View and poetry collections (recent and forthcoming, respectively) by Sonwabo Meyi and Anton Krueger.


Paulette Coetzee is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and works in the Registrar’s Division at Rhodes University. Her PhD research examines Hugh Tracey as an example of late-colonial whiteness. She has also published poetry in New Coin and Aerial and in a collection titled As Each New Year Opens (Aerial Publishing, 2006).

Josh Ginsberg: I am Equipment: Artist as Interface

The proposed presentation outlines I am Equipment, a project which situates myself as a part of the artwork allowing participants to engage me in conversation to which I respond with imagery, video, text, audio and voice. The database that facilitates response is of my own design with regard to both content and structural mechanics. It is a complex dynamic network, comprising +-­‐ 20 000 discrete objects (text, video, still and sound) organized entirely by subjective association. A highly idiosyncratic tagging system facilitates immediate access to elements by both formal and oblique references, allowing me to respond by speaking through the media. As a function of the database’s networked and associative design, related or oblique elements presence during searches. This results in unexpected nodes upon which to forward conversation. The work (a performance comprising the database and myself) is designed to encourage questions leveled at it. It is in effect, a contemporary response to Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961): I become an interface fielding questions related to the work’s own making. Broadly, this project is invested in the space between art and the discussion of it, and as a result the conference platform (with the presentation mode of address) is an ideal site for its activation.

Josh Ginsburg is a practicing artist, currently completing a Masters in Fine art at the University of Cape Town where he also teaches on the relationship between art and technology.

Anton Krueger: Digital Dirt – On the Raw, Rough Works of Aryan Kaganof

Aryan Kaganof works in the widest range of media imaginable – text (poetry, prose, philosophy, blog); fine art (etching, painting, photography, performance); music (blues, noise music, dub); and, predominantly, in film (feature, documentary, experimental.) As a film maker, Kaganof considers himself to be principally an editor; remixing and splicing together cultural artefacts from the detritus of the overproduced late 20th century. His pieces could be described as dirty on at least two levels – the subject matter is often crude, vulgar, offensive, sometimes involving incest, sadomasochism, suicide, urination and vomiting. Also (since most of his creations are entirely self produced in quick bursts of energy) the technical quality of his work is often rough and somewhat underproduced, i.e. “dirty” in the sense Peter Brook uses the adjective to define the Rough Theatre.

The latter has lead to a sometimes less refined product; and yet, there is certainly a case to be made for the necessity of roughage as a source of fibre in any artistic diet hoping to combat the belly- ache of white bread commercialism. With reference to the other pivotal keyword of this colloquium, “Synthetic”, Kaganof has been on the forefront of the digital revolution in cinema. He was the first film maker in the world to boost a digital feature film on video up to 35 mm – (Naar de Klote / Wasted [1996]); a process he then took to Japan when he made the first Japanese digital feature – Shabondama Elegy (1999).

Kaganof also made the world’s first cell phone feature film boosted up for screening, SMS Sugar Man (2007). It seems paradoxical that despite his manifestos on digital production – what could be more synthetic than numbers? – his themes still favour sensuality, and bodies bursting out of the confines of the great synthetic synthesizer of social mores. In this paper I’d like to consider how these two opposite elements play off each other in Kaganof’s works. Drawing on a range of examples, I would like to focus chiefly on his role as the editor of digital dirt. BIO:

Anton Krueger has published in a range of genres; including criticism, poetry, prose and drama. He teaches in the Department of Drama, Rhodes University.

Maureen de Jager: Playing dirty: earth/water/wind in Lindi Arbi’s Last One Standing

Video Still from Lindi Arbi's Last One Standing

Frustrated by the bureaucracy impeding her South Korean residency, 2010 Spier Award winner Lindi Arbi threw her materials down the stairs. Picture it: 40kg of expanding polyurethane bubbling and puffing, filling out the negative spaces like an abject Rachel Whiteread. Then she wrapped this inverted staircase in plastic and took it to the beach, for her altogether uncanny performance, Last One Standing. In the resulting video – a collaboration between Arbi and Korean film-maker, Junebum Park – we see Arbi and her assistants tethering and securing the ominous parcel. The tide comes in; the parcel is adrift. The tide goes out; the parcel is beached in glutinous mud.

In the context of this colloquium, I introduce Last One Standing to reflect on the status of real dirt in a glib technocracy – the kind of dirt so dirty that it resists being sampled and streamlined into the synthetic. How does technology cope with excessive materiality, I ask, and what happens to the dirt on our hands when its matter is mediated and dematerialised? In Arbi’s video, allusions to real dirt predominate. The terrain is muddy, the tethered sculpture is muddy, even the palette seems a dull, muddy grey. Ironically, however, the performance was recorded at high resolution; thus the scene may be muddy but the picture is crystal clear…
In response to this paradox, I argue that technology’s aversion to dirt is amply in evidence, as is its tendency to sanitise. At the same time, I suggest that the real dirty-work of Last One Standing lies not in the visuals but in the sound (or, more accurately, in their disjunction). For the clarity of what we see is distinctly at odds with the deafening, distorted crackle that we hear: a ‘bad’ recording of the gusting wind which drowns out almost everything else. In effect, the soundtrack captures the wind not as a sound but as a presence – as a series of waves which assault the recording equipment and then, in turn, assault our ears. Being a register of impact, this ‘dirty’ sound ruptures the sanitising screen of the synthetic: it reaches us materially (albeit invisibly), carrying real clout.

Raél Jero Salley: “A beautiful way we go impossibly”: Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Changing Same

In this paper I argue that the poetics of Dineo Seshee Bopape’s work re-­‐imagines contemporary life with a mixture of awe, excitement, and romantic vision, while also challenging the status quo about what is seeable and sayable about South African artists and their artworks. Bopape’s work is charged by an energy that re-­‐assembles the visible constitution of beings articulated by political debates, including race, gender, sexuality and African existence. Working in South Africa and elsewhere, Bopape’s work highlights the fact that contemporary “mash-­‐ups” from Africa actively respond to questions about individual being and contemporary social belonging, but also valorize contemporary blackness. For instance, Changing Same (2010) is a series of digitally assembled videos that reference new-­‐ media technology, cybernetics, biotechnology, and/or altered states of consciousness. These images insist on visual process that reframes understanding of the body, history and our world. Changing Same is a contemporary artwork that explores correspondences between the appearance of beings framed by geo-­‐political discourse, the circumstances of that framing. The artwork also re-­‐imagines by using digital manipulation to unravel would-­‐be indexical links. Taking Bopape’s Changing Same as a case-­‐study, this paper interrogates various meanings of the visual in relation to contemporary African visuality, as well as its political, cultural and ideological forces.

Raél Jero Salley, Ph.D. is an artist, cultural theorist, historian and Senior Lecturer in Painting and Discourse at the University of Cape Town. Salley’s research is focused on contemporary art and visual production, primarily the visual practices of Black and African Diaspora.