Frontier Country: Black Landscape: An Argument in Three Parts

In a somewhat questionable marketing endeavour, the Eastern Cape Region has been sign posted, ‘Frontier Country’ and indeed this is what it is. Historically it is the site of the 9 Frontier Wars and much brutal conflict and living here presently can still seem the edge of nowhere by comparison to many major South African metropols. With Grahamstown at the heart of it, it is also a cosmopolitan space not without vestiges of past pain but - like many colonial outposts in a post-colonial time - it is no longer a satellite to an absent motherland, a mere microcosm of elsewhere, but also a world unto itself.

A potential space of intellectual, debate rather than military conflict – geographically isolated from metropolitan trends – a melting pot of many places, a crucible. In more recent history, this frontier space has been a site of culture, of experiment. Home to an annual arts festival, how is it that Grahamstown with a population of just under 140 000 can command so much creative imagination in novels, plays, poetry and art? Frontier, Border, at the end of the world but not about to fall off – merely at a vantage point to observe a view to come.
- Rat Western

Showing posts with label Black Landscape: An Argument in Three Parts. Show all posts

Thursday, September 9, 2010

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

[1]

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

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Light

Light:That agent, force, or action in nature by the operation of which upon the organs of sight, objects are rendered visible or luminous. That which furnishes, or is a source of, light, as the sun, a star, a candle, a lighthouse... The time during which the light of the sun is visible; day; especially, the dawn of day. The brightness of the eye or eyes. The medium through which light is admitted, as a window, or window pane; a skylight; in architecture, one of the compartments of a window made by a mullion or mullions. Life; existence.

Red

“If one says red (the name of a colour) and there are fifty people listening it can be expected there will be fifty reds in their minds, and one can be sure that all these reds will be different.” - Josef Albers

“The colour of dark wine occurs when sunlight rays are mixed with what is pure black, like the berries of the grape … for their colour is said to be wine-dark at the moment of ripening, for when they are growing black, red changes to purple.”- Aristotle

“The French have a happy expression for the less perceptible tendency of yellow and blue towards red. They say the colour has an oeil de rouge, which we might express by a reddish glance.” - Goethe

Green

“I summon all of you to nourishing Venus – and while strolling through all this greenery, we might ask why the colour green is a sight that helps us more than any other, and why it delights us. Green is the middle step in colouring and the most temperate….” - Ficino

“She took of the fruits and ate. Then the eyes of both were open, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig-leaves together and made themselves aprons." – Genesis 3:7

“Absolute green is represented by the placid middle notes of a violin.” - Kandinsky

Brown

Yellow

"The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick." - L. Frank Baum

“I'd rather drive the yellow brick road, you wouldn't happen to know of a rental car place around."- Ryan Stiles

"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." - Pablo Picasso

"There is no blue without yellow and without orange." - Vincent Van Gogh

"Now, I do come from a part of the country where the people say that the only thing in the middle of the road is a yellow line or roadkill."- Blanche Lincoln

"Yellow usually means it's not that serious." - Bobby Unser

"I told my dentist my teeth are going yellow. he told me to wear a brown tie.- Rodney Dangerfield