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

by Mary Corrigall 

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

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

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

Vaughn Sadie and Bronwyn Lace: Unit for Measure

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Corrigall: Re-imagining the Self through Colour

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

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

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

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.