Frontier Country

Editorial: Synthetic Dirt

2011-07-13T13:54:00.002+02:00

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?

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Living in a quake

2011-07-12T11:14:00.000+02:00

by Ashraf Jamal

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.”

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

2011-07-09T12:37:00.002+02:00

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.

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Don’t think, look!

2011-07-09T09:37:00.000+02:00

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.
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Distorted Echo

2011-07-08T15:48:00.001+02:00

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.

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

2011-07-08T15:45:00.000+02:00

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

2011-07-08T10:38:00.000+02:00

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.

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

2011-07-07T16:13:00.001+02:00

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.

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The Paranoia of Ron T Beck

2011-07-07T16:10:00.001+02:00

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.

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

2011-07-07T14:33:00.000+02:00

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.”

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

2011-07-07T13:55:00.000+02:00

,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’.

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

2011-07-07T13:40:00.001+02:00

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.

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Infospherics and a new South African psychogeography.

2011-07-07T12:48:00.000+02:00

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.

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

2011-07-07T12:35:00.000+02:00

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.

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Dirty Alien Shadow-selves: Synthetic Dirt in District 9

2011-07-07T11:36:00.000+02:00

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.

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

2011-07-06T11:00:00.000+02:00

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.

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2011-04-14T15:18:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-14T13:50:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-12T18:52:00.002+02:00

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

2011-04-12T18:16:00.000+02:00

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 …

2011-04-12T17:53:00.002+02:00

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

2011-04-12T17:45:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-12T17:38:00.003+02:00

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.

2011-04-12T17:31:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-12T17:20:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-12T17:16:00.002+02:00

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.

2011-04-10T06:41:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-07T18:16:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-07T18:03:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-07T17:32:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-07T17:22:00.003+02:00

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

2011-04-07T15:54:00.001+02:00

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

2011-04-06T17:50:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-06T17:33:00.000+02:00

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

2011-04-06T17:22:00.001+02:00

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

2011-04-06T17:06:00.000+02:00

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.

Alette Schoon: Digital sh1t: mobile phones, gossip website Outoilet and the marking of territory

2011-04-06T16:58:00.001+02:00

The digital urinal: mobile phones, gossip website Outoilet and the marking of territory The notorious and recently banned mobile phone based website Outoilet has been using gossip, insults and explicit sexual commentary to create specific experiences of space and representation among communities in South Africa. While some have hailed the advent of the mobile internet as an escape from the local to the global, characterised by "timeless time and the space of flows", Outoilet's ghetto anarchy questions this sanitised notion of technology with its idealised freedom. Through a flurry of crude text-based postings on its geographically-specific bulletin boards, the hyper-real township here becomes simulated on the mobile telephone screen.

Outoilet's interface allows one to highjack other people's identities and discard them at whim, so creating layer upon layer of representation and doubt, generating speculation, talk and community. Through communal surveillance practices of everyday scrutiny these text postings become visual and spatial, drawing boundaries which are both geographical and social, policed by online notions of the logic of the streets and the neighbourhood.

Alette Schoon teaches Mobile Communications and Television in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes. This paper is based on her MA research into young adults and mobile phones. Before working in academia Alette made documentaries and educational films in Johannesburg, taught activists how to produce media in Cape Town, and programmed computers in Pretoria.

Bettina Malcomess: am I a victim of this wicked game

2011-04-06T16:33:00.000+02:00

Synthetic dirt vs. Aesthetic clean

Synthetic is usually used in the sense of synthesis, the combination of two or more parts, whether by design or by natural processes. Furthermore, it may imply being prepared or made artificially, in contrast to naturally. The Greek root ‘syn’ translates as ‘together’. In philosophy of law, a synthetic person or legal or juridical personality refers to the characteristic of a non-human entity regarded by law to have the status of a person (in Latin, the person ficta). This is central to the philosophy of law, allowing one or more natural persons to act as a single entity, such as a corporation.
Adapted from: Wikipedia definitions of Synthesis and synthetic person and synasthesia

Athi-Patra Ruga
...the naivety of Beiruth 4

The title comes from Pipi-lotti Rist’s ‘I am a victim of this song’, her appropriation of Chris Isaak’s melancholic ballad: ‘Wicked Game’. I would like to argue in this paper that South African art practice in general approaches an aesthetic that is much more ‘clean’ than ‘dirty’, and in fact its ‘synthesis’ of the experience of the present results in a product that is most often object based and readily commodifiable. Work rarely challenges the aesthetics of clean, clear, discrete display in gallery spaces or museums, and often when work does this it is left out of the critical conversation or edited and reframed for museum displays, or cropped for magazines and catalogues. I propose that South African media and the representation of political language and events are where the real ‘synthetic dirt’ is located. Debate around the current access to information bill is playing itself out in a much more ‘dirty’ fight, with the ‘Right to Know’ campaign wearing masks of the current minister of security to a meeting in parliament. This kind of disruption, which makes use of the image in a ‘dirty’ way, presents an interesting counterpoint to the much ‘cleaner’ mode of image production that mostly dominates contemporary South African visual art. A ‘clean’ aesthetic poses few questions to modes of representation in museum or galleries, and hence to the reception and the structure and status quo of audiences. I propose that the reason for this disavowal of these structural concerns is an obsession with our own ‘synthesis’, the invention of our own ‘togetherness’, so as to emerge as the fictional collective identity: the South African contemporary.

This paper would propose to look at contemporary image making in South Africa in general, across a spectrum of disciplines and modes of popular and fine art production including newspapers, magazines, music video’s, television commercials and the internet. I would look at some artists who I would argue have worked ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’. This includes Tracey Rose, Dineo Bopabe, Athi-Patra Ruga, Gimberg Nerf, Ed Young, Gerald Machona, The Joubert Park Project and Donna Kukama.

Imraan Coovadia: Curveball 2

2011-04-04T18:32:00.000+02:00

“Every book by Vladimir Nabokov is a blow against tyranny, every form of tyranny.”

Vera Nabokov’s 1968 formula puts in the clearest form the emerging Cold War identification of freedom and a certain kind of difficult literature. The literary-historical evidence is not so unequivocal concerning tyranny and masterpieces: King Lear did no damage to the Jacobean police state, while Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Lincoln’s account, was one cause of the 1861-5 Civil War (but it may not be a masterpiece and Lincoln’s words to Harriet Beecher Stowe were not recorded until 1896). Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago put the Soviet regime on trial, yet Coetzee’s Disgrace, channelling white racial fears about their loss of power under majority rule, may have done no favours for the new democracy in South Africa.

For Vera, as for her husband, the authoritative style claims the self-evidence of the statement. She allows no exceptions to the rule (“every book” and “every form of tyranny”), referring to her husband not as her companion of forty three years but as a phenomenon to be addressed in its objectivity. In 1968, a year of insurgency in France and Vietnam and Mexico, the most searching challenge to tyranny was mounted by Nabokovian literature. While political revolution could fail, or substitute one tyranny for another, or reduce one form of tyranny while neglecting its other manifestations, each of Nabokov’s books, although explicitly devoid of any express political purpose, struck “every form of tyranny.”
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Synthetic Dirt Colloquium 2011

2011-04-04T18:02:00.000+02:00

16th and 17th April

Art South Africa: Special Edition V9.1

2010-12-12T15:32:00.004+02:00

Papers from the Colour Colloquium were published in a special edition of Art South Africa V9.1 September 2010.

These final papers are also posted below. Next Year's Colloquium will be held in April under the theme, 'Synthetic Dirt.'

Rat Western: Prologue

2010-09-12T13:00:00.005+02:00

“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.
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Ashraf Jamal: Colours of Wakefulness

2010-09-12T12:00:00.003+02:00

“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.
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Mark Hipper: A Shifting Discolour: Chromatic Grey

2010-09-12T11:00:00.004+02:00

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

2010-09-12T10:02:00.003+02:00

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.
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Michael Smith:In a Sea of Possibilities

2010-09-12T09:30:00.002+02:00

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

2010-09-12T09:00:00.000+02:00

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.
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Mary Corrigall: Re-imagining the Self through Colour

2010-09-12T08:30:00.003+02:00

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.
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Jenette Unite: Terra: Sands and Detritus Soiled with History

2010-09-12T08:20:00.003+02:00

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.
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Virginia Mackenny: Blue: A Shifting Horizon

2010-09-12T08:00:00.000+02:00

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.
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Vaughn Sadie: Arguments for Light

2010-09-12T07:00:00.001+02:00

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

2010-09-12T06:00:00.000+02:00

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

2010-09-12T05:15:00.000+02:00

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

2010-09-09T04:47:00.000+02:00

[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.

Detached: The use of colour in Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta’s paintings by Emma Taggart

2010-03-09T11:18:00.000+02:00

This paper will look at the use of colour by Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta in work he completed for the solo exhibitions “Window-dress puppet master vs Institution chicken boy” (2005) and “Detached” (2007).

In these exhibitions Sapeta acts like a dowsing stick zoning in on dark emotions found in the underbelly of the city environment. He captures in his work the alienation and confusion often symptomatic of city life. Along with his lonely figures he also paints the corrupted, power hungry and destitute.

Sapeta’s uses solid colours as a backdrop to create the sense of alienation in his work. The background colours range from acid yellow to green grey and murky blue. They offer no protection to the figures in the foreground, emphasizing rather than diminishing the figure’s alienation in their environment. The flat colour backgrounds expose the foreground figures, pushing them forward and leaving them vulnerable with no illusion of depth to retreat into.

The colours also dominate the canvas. Sapeta often paints his figures off to one side, creating the sense that the background colour has pushed the foreground figures into the corners of the work further alienating them from the painting.

If there is any depth in Sapeta’s work, it is created by elements of the city’s architecture which looms large over the figures. Tall buildings or telephone wires (a common feature in Sapeta’s work) create some depth by receding towards a vanishing point, but they too hang in an empty no man’s land of colour.

Sapeta’s use of non-natural colour and flat backgrounds is reminiscent of the move towards Abstraction in the western tradition of painting, and no doubt Sapeta has been influenced by these artworks. However, unlike the utopian ideals underlining much Abstract art, Sapeta’a work is about dystopia. The metaphysical, emotional or spiritual depth explored in Abstract art is subverted in Sapeta’s work by the disjuncture between his destitute figures and the colour behind them. The strong colour of the background alienates the foreground figures; they are out of sync with the background and feel superimposed. The background colour offers no insight into the emotions of the individual but rather clouds interpretation. It is the contrast between the strong unified colour in the background and the small alienated figures in the foreground that emphasises the lack (of substance, willpower, character etc) of the foreground figures. The solid colour is what makes them appear so desperate in their environment.

This paper will explore the relationship between colour and alienation in Sapeta’s work further making reference to use of colour in Abstract painting, and relating Sapeta’s work to other contemporary artists who use abstract colour in a way that is a subversion rather than imitation of Abstract painting from the Modern tradition of painting.

TERRA: Mining the Artist’s Paintbox from the African Industrial Landscape by Jeannette Unite

2010-03-03T16:16:00.001+02:00

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

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

Over the past decade visual explorations include journeys to Namaqualand, Simon van der Stel’s copper mine, the first colonial mine from 1685, to harbours and construction sites and visits to active gold, coal, salt, manganese, titanium and platinum as well as obsolete and archaeological mine sites. I take photographs from these travels and duplicate images from mining museums and archives, the internet, mining journals and libraries. But the most significant treasures I get from mines are the sands and detritus soiled with history.

My pallette is jars filled with metalliferous and diamondiferous mine dump sand, dust, overburden and metal oxides. My artworks incorporate industrial waste containing enough metal to yield startling colour when molten in kilns in extreme temperatures. The artist as end user of mining re-establishes the art and science link and reminds us that pre-industrial era artists used pestles and mortar in art production. The abstract chthonic glass panels are constructed from recycled detritus and sometime toxic material like lead, arsenic and cyanide that catalyse the mineral and metal reactions.

My material is both subject and object of this corpus of work. Abstract landscapes are made from the actual landscape in a ‘beauty-from-waste’ aesthetic.

I am currently investigating a way to transform current research into work around the issues of the Resource Curse, also known as the ‘paradox of plenty’.

Arguments of Light by Vaughn Sadie

2010-03-01T13:50:00.001+02:00

In 1807, gas-lighting was first installed the streets of Europe, fundamentally shifting the conception and experience of urban environments. According to an article entitled “Arguments against Light” published in the Cologne Zeitung in 1816, this new street lighting was objectionable on a number of theological, judicial, medical, moral and socio-economic standpoints. From a contemporary standpoint, 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, economic loss and would tamper with ‘the divine plan of the world’. Almost two hundred years later, artificial light not only permeates our public and private spaces, but shapes the ways in which we experience the world. So ever-present are these forms of lighting, that they have become banal and imperceptible. We tend not to notice them or the light and colour they emit. Until they go out.

This paper will explore the relationship between artificial light, colour and space, and how this contributes to the construction of our urban environments. For the purpose of this paper, I will be focusing on a series of examples of domestic and public uses of artificial light that draw on electricity (such as, compact fluorescents, tungsten light bulbs and mercury vapour street lamps). The discussion is therefore not focused necessarily on different colours, but on the intricacies of tone, arguing that meaning and significance has been attached to the design and tone of these lights, that fundamentally shape our experience of space. Artificial lights, and their tonalities, shape our understanding and experience of time and space, often more than we recognise.

Lefebvre, in his spatial triad, argues that space is produced by the relationship between ‘representations of space’, ‘representational space’ and ‘spatial practices’. These relationships are imbued with power (Massey) and it is in the light of this thinking, that I argue that artificial light is both a manifestation of dominant ideologies and a mechanism of social control.

In order to illustrate this argument, I will be using examples of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Dan Flavin, in relationship to my own work.

Re-imagining the Self through Colour: the Politics of Pink in the Art of Lawrence Lemaoana by Mary Corrigall

2010-03-01T13:14:00.002+02:00

With its ability to seduce and lure spectators, it was French theorist Charles Blanc who in the 19th century unequivocally declared that colour in and of itself represented the feminine sex – monochromatic drawings were viewed as masculine.

Nevertheless specific hues or colour groupings have also been subject to gendered classifications, albeit that these have not remained fixed over time. In 1809 German Romantic painter and theorist Philipp Otto Runge concocted a colour circle of ideal and real values in which a range of warm tones from yellows to orange were pegged as distinctly masculine and while at the other end of the spectrum the cool blues to the violets were deemed as essentially feminine. When the neo-romantic expressionists began to work with the same colour chart almost a century later, these associations were reversed. Despite these radical shifts in values the semiotics of colour have intrinsically invoked a discourse on gender. So while deconstructivist theorists such as Stephen Melville have suggested that colour is “bottomlessly resistant to nomination, attaching itself absolutely to its own specificity and the surfaces on which it has or finds visibility,” it has been subjected to cultural definitions.

South African artist Lawrence Lemaoana attempts to uncover and challenge gendered notions attached to the colour pink, nevertheless the power of his expression rests on exploiting the culturally inscribed values attached to this colour. Lemaoana projects this signifier of femininity onto masculine protagonists associated with what is deemed an essential masculine pursuit, rugby, thereby subverting the ‘rules of the game’. Lemaoana’s liberal use of pink in works such as the Last Line of Defence (2008) also summons a discourse on race. For while pink is associated with femininity this tone is also, and particularly within the canon of traditional western painting, connected to the colour of human skin - for obvious reasons these connotations are interrelated. In such a context it is Caucasian flesh tones that operate as the default signifier of skin. So while Lemaoana’s art manifests as photographs of pink-clad subjects it wrestles with the politics of western painting and its relationship polemics on race. Studies of colour have centred on painting largely because, as art historian John Gage observed, colour valorised the radical truth of painting.

The colour pink gives expression to Lemaoana’s art but he also employs it as a device to re-imagine or re-conceive of notions of the self, not only the masculine self but the black self. By completely enrobing his subjects in pink he shatters the archetypal masculine self while similarly advancing them as ‘ideal’, albeit synthesised, white-European protagonists. In this way while his subjects are liberated on one front they are similarly locked into another circumscribed identity on the other. This paper will explore this paradoxical position which Lemaoana articulates in relation to both gendered notions attached to the colour pink as well as the manner in which this colour has manifested in the canon of western painting.

“In a sea of possibilities”: the work of new colourists Georgina Gratrix and Michael Taylor by Michael Smith

2010-02-24T15:43:00.001+02:00

In Patti Smith’s epic 1975 track “Land” the word ‘possibilities’ recurs numerous times at the song’s culminating verse. Smith’s lyrical style in this track, 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.

Colour’s associative promiscuity and suggestibility help it lend art a value beyond simple, empirical reportage or social mirroring. In apartheid South Africa, where the system functioned to shut down so much possibility, rendering various forms of image-making (and thereby thought) undesirable, ill-advised or downright illegal, colour remained transgressive in its suggestion of conceptual and emotional multiplicity. In post-apartheid art, blighted for the bulk of the post-liberation period by arguably conservative delineations of identity, painting in colour seems to hold possibilities for expression that sidesteps the predictable and the coagulating.

This paper will consider that colour never left us, and that despite various forms of agit-prop-style art and the moral binarisms their monochrome palettes expressed, there remained at the heart of SA art production artists like Robert Hodgins who used colour as expressive of more nuanced moral and political positions. I will argue that Hodgins’ work presented positions along the spectrum between good and evil, and between moral outrage and morally bankruptcy.

I will then explore the work of two young painters, Georgina Gratrix and Michael Taylor, placing them within a lineage established in SA by Hodgins, and considering how their work taps into certain notions of fluid subjectivity and mobile positioning, which extend the possibilities of SA art beyond the confining impulse towards marking out territories of identity.

The de-saturation of the commonplace: A meditation on South African photography by Matthew Partridge

2010-02-24T15:39:00.001+02:00

In this paper I will take David Goldblatt’s move to colour in his recent series Asbestos (2003) and Intersections (2005) as well as Intersections Intersected (2007) as an entry point to discuss the de-saturated aesthetic that has come to typify much of South African documentary photography.
In many ways Goldblatt’s shift in stylistic emphasis can be said to be inspired by the current developments in digital photography. However, the nuance is more discrete than merely traversing the barriers of the silver gelatine print which has come to typify Goldblatt’s documentary oeuvre.

In his recent work there is a distinct sense that the colour that he uses is de-saturated and bleached of its chromatic veracity, thereby accentuating the superficial banality of his lens’ subject. Here the routine existence that he captures is mystified and almost aged prematurely, similarly attesting to recent trends seen in photographers such as Guy Tillim and Pieter Hugo.

What this paper seeks to explore is the relationship of de-saturated colour to the subject and more importantly, its semiotic affect on the photographic object. Here the materiality of colour becomes intricate in the muted power relations between the subject and the object. It will be suggested that this expands problematic questions of photographic fidelity, not only to that which the photograph represents, but to the digital manipulation of the environmental light which gives the image its auratic presence.

‘Fading From History: The Print Culture of Vladimir Tretchikoff and its Legacy’ by Andrew Lamprecht

2010-02-23T12:46:00.000+02:00

This paper will examine the manner in which Vladimir Tretchikoff used mass-produced prints as a vehicle publicise his work as well as to take it to markets outside the usual channels of ‘high art’. Dubbed ‘The King of Kitsch’ by some of his critics, he nonetheless created a new aesthetic which drew praise (and purchases) from ordinary middle- and lower class audiences who would not buy another artwork in their life.

The significance of colour and its application to subjects both everyday and extraordinary is of considerable significance here. Today we tend to be familiar only with faded vestiges of the prints bought in unprecedented numbers in the 1950s – 70s but these works were suffused with colour at a time when critically acclaimed South African art frequently tended towards the dung colours in their palette.

An examination of significance of these ubiquitous prints to popular culture both in the time they were first marketed and subsequently as a trope will conclude the paper.

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

2010-02-23T12:42:00.000+02:00

Rather than tackle the nuances and complexities of the question of the uses of colour in recent South African art, which would have numerous counter-examples for every example adduced, this paper takes a different tack.

The paper argues that the major historical currents in SA art of the last thirty years or so fall into two general streams. Firstly, they were conditioned by protest and reflectionist critique in the apartheid era, which did indeed lend itself to the stark and monochromatic styles and palette of the constructionist agitprop poster, mural and realist scene. Secondly, a range of conceptual and ‘neoconceptual’ styles arose in the latter part of the apartheid era, and the post-apartheid years. Much of this was focused on so-called ‘new media’, characterised in turn by either impressionistic and widely varying video and installation work, or by shades of documentary photography, which carried on the anti-apartheid agitprop lineage.

In the first post apartheid decade, the simultaneous rise of the internet as a graphic and aesthetic medium and the globalisation of capitalism meant that the concept of a national character, and national identity itself, came under pressure.

If the ‘South African Question’ for art, then, is how to understand the colour palette in such a way that the country’s political and racial diversity is productively represented, how is such an ambition to be understood in the context of a globalised ‘aesthetics of disappearance’?

I use Virilio’s term here with some focus – his theorisation of a culture of ‘dromology’, of the realisation of the futurist dream of a culture of ‘speed and dynamism’, has been dramatised by the spread of ‘technologies of light’ – primarily the internet. These technical possibilities have homogenised national cultures and ‘flattened out’ the palette – both in the sense of colour and that of cultural experience – it is possible to have in our era. How is the South African Question – that of a national idea of colour – to be addressed in this context?

When White Was The Colour And Black The Number: Colour Tests From The 1970s by Sean O’Toole

2010-02-23T12:28:00.002+02:00

In 1970, having completed his undergraduate studies at Michaelis School of Fine Art, Gavin Jantjes left South Africa on a scholarship to study at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany. In 1972, similarly enabled by a bursary and fresh from winning the 1971 Art South Africa Today exhibition for his sculptural work Swing (1971), Malcolm Payne travelled to London to begin his postgraduate studies at Central St. Martins. In 1974, two years on from graduating and still based in Hamburg, Jantjes started work on A South African Colouring Book (1974-75), a series of eleven collage prints that juxtapose found images and text related to South Africa’s then apartheid context. At almost exactly the same time, Payne, working in a self-consciously Duchampian mode, oversaw the production of Colour Test (1974), a screenprint depicting a South African identity card with the face of its holder removed.

Both these works, authored in absentia so to speak, are seminal examples of South Africa’s agitprop graphic style, a declaratory practice often devoid of metaphor and bounded by the historical context out of which it emerged. Unlike many subsequent examples of work created in response to the apartheid context, A South African Colouring Book and Colour Test are marked by their conceptual clarity; while politically strident, both these graphic works retain an autonomy that is pivotal to the afterlife of any art object. Partly, I will argue, this is because they do not abdicate invention and thought to ideology, a feature of so much art making (including photography) authored by South African artists in the period 1970 to present. Colour, always a woolly concern for an engaged artist, is partly to account for the persistent afterlife of these two works, the former included in the collection of the Tate Modern, the latter shown on Okwui Enwezor’s survey exhibition, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s.

Produced in the wake of the massive proliferation in artistic strategies of the preceding decade, Jantjes’ work deploys the formal strategies of Warhol’s paint-by-numbers work, Do it Yourself Flowers (1962), to markedly different effect, while Payne, a notable colourist, demonstrates both continuity with, and opposition to the exuberant graphic style of his mentor, Walter Battiss. Which highlights a possible critique of both their works. Remarking on the commonalities that bound many of the practices refined in the 1960s, Clement Greenberg, in a 1968 essay revisiting his celebrated 1939 essay ‘Avant Garde and Kitch’, states: “Design or layout is almost always clear and explicit, drawing sharp and clean, shape or area geometrically simplified or at least faired and trued, colour flat and bright or at least undifferentiated in value and texture within a given hue.” The great champion of abstract expressionism compressed his dismissal of this new art into a single word: linear. A fair synonym for linear, albeit not a singular word, is the phrase “free from irregularities”: in this close reading, I will argue that A South African Colouring Book and Colour Test achieve their ongoing impact precisely because of the irregularities they manifest as artworks authored during a period of heightened social and cultural activism.

Red: The Iconography Of Colour In The Work Of Penny Siopis By Brenton Maart

2010-02-16T16:29:00.000+02:00

Painting is a particularly powerful way of embodying the imagination, the unconscious, fantasy. As a carnal medium, it is violent, erotic and beautiful. - Penny Siopis (2005) in response to Sarah Nuttall in the interview “On Painting”, Art South Africa, 4:2, 36

Within the visible spectrum it is the colour red that – through ages and cultures, across geographies and histories, spanning time – has acquired the greatest number of associations. Taking its vacillating meanings from direct and specific human experience, red is sometimes the colour of passion, of guilt, of sin. At other times it may be the hue of anger, fire, violence, revolution. It can adopt the meaning of courage, sacrifice, martyrdom. Red is also the colour of warning. But above all, its most enduring link is to the colour of blood. Blood-red is the evidence of wounding and the experience of trauma. Eyes that are blood-shot are rimmed in red.

The South African artist Penny Siopis (born 1953) has, consistently and with increasing allegorical agency, made the colour red central to her signature. Each new exploration (every successive body of work, regardless of its medium, approach, composition, language, concept, concern) returns to the application of red.

Curated by Brenton Maart, the exhibition Red: The Iconography of Colour in the Work of Penny Siopis (KZNSA Gallery, Durban, South Africa: 23 June to 19 July 2009) examined the artist’s use of this range of pigments over a period of 27 years. Using visceral and explosive key examples from important bodies of artwork, the project analysed the changing meaning of red in South Africa: from the base layer of sexual and grotesque excess from the early-1980s; through the colour of political revolution and fear in the late 1980s, and the colour of fear and xenophobia in the 1990s; to the artist’s more recent application of the colours of trauma and shame.

A Shifting Discolour: Chromatic Grey by Mark Hipper

2010-02-16T16:25:00.000+02:00

Grey is ashen, we think, dull, colourless, the world of colour etiolated and reduced to a tonal scale or, alternatively, it can offer the eye the drama and intensity of light and dark, of shadow and chiaroscuro.

Grey is also however the mixture of all colours into something quite other and far more subtle and complex and ambiguous. Chromatic greys are made up of all colours and ascribing to them a singular chromatic identity is confounded by the shifting signification and suggestion of hue that marks them. They are translucent, opaque, ambivalent, dense and rich with echoes and properties of all the colours of the spectrum.

All colours, particularly in a painting, are modified by those around it and a chromatic grey, like a chromatic scale in music, offers a richness that is unbounded by our usual understanding and recognition of colour. As a palette it is colour mediated and removed from the immediate sensory experience of the world. I intend to elaborate on this in a discussion of the work of Luc Tuymans, Gerhard Richter and Zola Toyi.

Blue – a Shifting Horizon by Virginia MacKenny

2010-02-15T16:14:00.001+02:00

Free Fall, 2008, oil on acrylic on canvas, 2 x 1.6m

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 (Sept 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 choose to represent on the page.

The paper explores the continuing fascination with the colour Blue for artists. It aims to briefly contextualise the colour by sketching some of its historical importance and its value both financial and symbolic. Initially one of the most expensive colours to produce (ultramarine blue was ground from pure lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan) it only adorned areas of great symbolic importance like the Virgin’s cloak. Yet with the drop in costs of production (a competition was held in the nineteenth century to encourage the invention of a cheaper alternative) it has not lost its allure.

Its importance in the work of more recent artists is attested to by Yves Klein’s invention of Klein Blue and the winner of last years Turner Prize Roger Hiorns choice of the colour when he soused an abandoned apartment with blue copper sulphate solution. Left to develop blue crystals grew in a shimmering surface over every aspect of its interior. Derek Jarman used it as the only colour in his twelfth and final feature film Blue, released just four months before his death.

The blue screen in Jarman’s work is not a backdrop for the projection of other images, but remains ‘blank’ with voice-overs that are a testament to his life. Imageless it remains a place of interior imaginative projection much as does the night sky where people have created pictures by “joining the dots” as it were, possibly making the sky the biggest canvas available to us.

Intriguingly the astronomer Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), who came to South Africa to map the stars in the Southern hemisphere invented the cyanotype during his time here using it to record the indigenous flora of the region. Soon usurped by other photographic means the cyanotype persisted becoming a staple of the architect’s office in the form of a blueprint.

This link with ‘origins’ and sources remains somehow central to the use of blue, whether it is the blue of the ‘void’ or a place of blue screen projection – both empty and endlessly full. Some small reference in this context would be made to my own production and its utilisation of blue in what seems to have become a fundamental element of my palette.

Aberrant Light And Colour (After The Rainbow) by Maureen De Jager

2010-02-15T16:05:00.001+02:00

Rainbow Over Grahamstown, 7 February 2010

The term ‘rainbow nation’ was coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe post-apartheid South Africa after the 1994 elections. It was re-iterated by President Nelson Mandela in his first month of office, when he spoke of ‘a rainbow nation at peace with itself and with the world’ (Manzo 1996:711). Thereafter the term ‘rainbow nation’ quickly gained credence as a signifier of multi-culturalism and diversity, contra Apartheid’s discriminatory division of South Africans into ‘black’ and ‘white’. However, detractors of the term have also been quick to offer critique, arguing that it glosses over the legacy of racism by evoking a false semblance of peace, stability and reconciliation.

My paper considers an alternative angle on the problem of ‘smug rainbowism’ (Jeremy Cronin quoted in Manzo 1996:71), by detouring back to an ‘original’ rainbow and hence to a pivotal moment in our understanding of light and colour: Sir Isaac Newton’s 1665 experiment wherein he split light into the spectrum by passing a sunbeam through a prism. Taking Newton’s prism as both starting point and metaphor, my argument aims to unsettle the rainbow’s status as a stable, dependable and unambiguous signifier. Instead, I suggest that the rainbow – as optical phenomenon – is aberrant and unstable, a spectral spectrum, summoning the vicissitudes of indeterminacy and doubt rather than some steady reality.

Rainbow Over Grahamstown, 7 February 2010

Optically and philosophically, Newton’s dispersion of light into the spectrum undermined the ostensible stability of vision and replaced this with mutability and flux. It did this by insisting that colour is both relative and non-intrinsic: colour is the result of the different rates of vibration of the waves comprising the spectrum. Entering the prism as a unitary beam, these waves are deflected proportionate to their speed of vibration. Red pulsates slowest and is thus least refrangible, whereas violet vibrates fastest and is thus deflected more from its course. Colour waves, in this sense, ‘model a universe whose constituents move at different rates, reaching locations at different times’ (Armstrong 2008:267-82).

Newton’s splitting of light into the spectrum thus initiated some surprisingly ‘postmodern’ ideas. It emphasised ‘the ungroundedness existing at the core of perception’ (Armstrong 2008:271) by asserting that the velocity of light rays, and the distances they travel, are differential factors in how and what we see. Because light takes time to reach the observer, and because we occupy different time-space relationships to the things that we observe, the relationship between observer and observed is constantly changing and variable. What we ‘see’, in effect, is the always-belated arrival of light rays and colour waves – an after-image displaced in time and space from the ‘real’.

Like light rays emitted then and visible now, I argue that Newton’s prism experiments still have implications for us today – especially in a South African context, where colour has so often been used as a stable, delimiting marker of race and identity. For, against the logic of classification and certitude, Newton’s colour spectrum prompts us to remember the variable, ungrounded and aberrant nature of light and colour, and hence of all perception.
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1Manzo, K. 1996. Creating boundaries: the politics of race. Colorado: L Rienner Publishers.
2Armstrong, I. 2008. The lens, light, and the virtual world. In Victorian glass worlds, 253-271. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Colours of Wakefulness by Ashraf Jamal

2010-02-02T21:35:00.003+02:00

Colour as palette has peremptorily served its aesthetic demands in South African art but, substantialy, remained peripheral. The reason for this is that South African art has consciously or unconsciously been mired in responsibility. As a consequence SA art has damagingly deviated itself from the reckonings of art expression. So much so that SA art has come to define itself according to the received dictates of “justice,” “rightness,” “propriety.” SA art, therefore, has been declamatory.

While the process made sense as an idea it bizarrely failed to access that protest and outrage in the realm of colour. Why this was the case was perhaps because SA art was driven by the will to make a statement. The need was precise. But the need in the context of this debate was not sufficient. Why, because the monochromatic dominated SA aesthetics. By this I suggest that an overdetermined morality consumed the complexities of living here, and, as a consequence, how we have told our stories has damagingly inhibited the very rub of complexity. Aesthetics as a reactive and preordained energy has diverted the concern with colour-as-palette in this country. This has everything to do with how the perceptual register has been constructed, how we as South Africans have been tutored to see the world.

Call for papers: Colour

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

Colloquium at Rhodes University in Grahamstown,
Hosted by the Fine Art Department
March 27-28, 2010

Colour in the South African context has immediate connotations with race and identity and these associations have had extended exposure within post-apartheid art making. But as an ongoing trajectory of exploration, once the observations have been made, the tonal variety of this commentary becomes increasingly flat.

Diversity - such a buzz word of the political transitional head-space - is, in general, sorely absent from much of our recent artistic output when what we mean by diversity, in the artistic colour palette, means a full spectrum of colours as well as their complex symbolic, cultural and emotive resonances.

Black and White, the Monochrome of High-Modernism, served well within the apartheid struggle period to subvert grand narratives. There was little appeal to delve into the complexity of the colour palette at a time where in our context ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’ seemed so clearly and immediately definable. Now we come to a point in which we must question how in fact might we use or be using colour to express the complexity of human existence. If we look at the contemporary art of the rest of our continent, bright colour has oft been used to express profound and painful observations. Why then here, do we relegate bright colour to the realm of the merely decorative, the primitive, denying its complexity and consider the monochrome persistently as sophisticated? Why are primary tones relegated to the primary school art-box?

But it is not merely the bright or colourful which we wish to consider. Colour after all has the ability to be as technically multifaceted as that which it expresses. Colours all mixed together have a specific tone: greyish, brownish mud and what is that mud if not a grand space for new creation?

We invite thinkers, writers and critics to submit 500 word abstracts on the theme of colour as pallete, with specific attention to its applications or innovations in South African art.

Deadline for submission of Abstracts: February 8, 2010
Deadline for Final Submissions: March 13, 2010
Duration of paper: 15minutes

Contact either:
Rat Western
Ashraf Jamal