Art South Africa: Special Edition V9.1

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

“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.

Ashraf Jamal: Colours of Wakefulness

“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.

Mark Hipper: A Shifting Discolour: Chromatic Grey

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.

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

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.

Michael Smith:In a Sea of Possibilities

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.

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

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.

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.

Jenette Unite: Terra: Sands and Detritus Soiled with History

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.

Virginia Mackenny: Blue: A Shifting Horizon

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.

Vaughn Sadie: Arguments for Light

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.

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

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

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. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.