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

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‘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.