INTERVIEW WITH JACO VAN SCHALKWYK | PRETORIA ART SCENE | ARTLife
Jaco van Schalkwyk Contemporary Artist Wilhelm van Rensburg Fort Greene, Brooklyn is pivotal in the life and work of young artist Jaco van Schalkwyk. He worked as a bartender at the Alibi, a neighborhood dive bar, while studying at the Pratt Institute, known for its drawing department. Henry Miller purportedly frequented the Alibi around the time of writing Tropic of Capricorn. Spike Lee filmed Do the Right Thing down the road. It was at the Alibi where Van Schalkwyk befriended Carl Hancock Rux, with whom he would collaborate for much of his time in America. Van Schalkwyk left South Africa for New York at the age of 19. He stayed there for nine years, in Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Pratt is a Bauhaus type art school with foundation courses- Figure Drawing is a compulsory subject. Having enrolled to study Industrial Design, Jaco found himself gravitating to Drawing in stead. He was, ironically, not particularly good at drawing in high school, compared to his fellow students. (In the 90s, Pro Arte high school in Pretoria was a breeding ground for artists such as Wim Botha, Zander Blom, and Jan Henri Booyens). In the Drawing department, van Schalkwyk studied under Dennis Masback, Sal Montano and William Sayler, who encouraged the students to copy Michaelangelo, Raphael and Tintoretto. This while attending anatomical dissection lectures at Columbia Medical University. And, of course, the work of these Renaissance artists was just down the road at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where art students were allowed to draw the collection. In his spare time, Jaco copied the drawing style of William Kentridge.
were already open. But he opened my soul. Absolutely”. Van Schalkwyk, however, felt that he did not always want to be the apprentice. (“’Nothing grows in the shadow of great trees’, Brancusi said of Rodin”, he observes wryly.), He needed to come into his own. Back in South Africa, Jaco teamed up with Zander Blom to form Jaco + Z-dog. They perform around the country, mostly in tiny bars, and produce and market their own EPs. “I wanted to get out from behind the laptop. Zander and I messed around trying out different roles and instruments until the one day, very surprisingly, it turned out that I could kinda sing. So we went with that. Now I get to perform in a way that is very different to the way I used to before. The interaction with the music is much more immediate. In stead of a keyboard, I use my voice, which means I get to talk to the audience directly.” While performance is a vital part of Jaco’s creative output, working with Blom highlighted a burning desire to return to the relative safety of the artist’s studio. He took up drawing again, culminating two years later in his first solo exhibition at GALLERY AOP in April 2011. He had gotten a crash course in South African contemporary art when designing the 2009 Johannesburg Art Fair catalogue. While coveting the images of Walter Battiss’ rare photo screen prints, Robert Hodgins’ unknown digital prints, and Zanele Muholi’s Miss Divine series, he was surprised to discover the work of Avant Car Guard. “What they were doing seemed so fresh, after what I thought was a very staid New York contemporary art scene. And then I realized, hold on, that’s Jan-Henri at Pierneef’s grave. These are my peers, man.”
Pratt also offered filmmaking. One of Jaco’s instructors in that department was Bob Knight who taught him film editing, splicing 16mm film on flatbed Steinbecks. His interest in experimental filmmaking was ignited. Van Schalkwyk assisted Astria Suparak during her Pratt Film Series screenings (1997 - 2000), where he was able to immerse himself in rare experimental film. This experience compelled him to take up time-based media, ‘drawing over time’, such as Video Art, as part of his practice.
But Van Schalkwyk actually stopped drawing for eight years. This was partly due to another subject he took at Pratt, the Philosophy of Mathematics, under the tutelage of Robert Richardson. He encountered such philosophical problems as modality, infinity, radically singular events and non-Euclidian Geometry. Yet, when he tried to visualize this in drawing, he was stumped. “I began to feel that all my compositional decisions were essentially pre-determined. The stuff I wanted to investigate, I thought at the time, simply could not be expressed on paper. That’s when I began working in video more seriously.”
It was Van Schalkwyk’s video work that formed the basis for his collaboration with Carl Hancock Rux, renowned author/performer/multi-disciplinarian. “Carl taught me almost everything I know about being a multi-disciplinarian, but also about performance and cadence, and about the history and tradition of that cadence.” Rux became his teacher and mentor, encouraging him to try his hand at musical composition and performance as a laptop musician. At the same time, Rux often had to protect him against hostile audiences and occasionally even other band members. “When I messed up during the Central Park rehearsals, and the band confronted Carl about his inclusion of a total novice, Carl stood his ground. It is something that I’ll never forget. It allowed me to grow into places, creatively, I could never have dreamt of.”
A return to drawing proved to be tougher than he had anticipated. “When I took up drawing after those eight years, I was shocked to discover that I had lost the finger muscles, the skills to draw. So I drew under a pseudonym – it took the pressure off! I could make clumsy lines for a few years while my hands lost their amnesia. In the end, the practical and philosophical solutions to my drawing problems just took time to solve. Previously I had feared comparing my work to the old masters. I mean, when you draw, they too are like your peers. Before, I just had no fun playing with guys 500 times my size. But now, having grown a bit, it is a liberating experience. Now my peers are my inspiration. It is an immensely satisfying position to be in, and I feel quite lucky.”
Rux and van Schalkwyk ended up working closely together for three years, collaborating on Mycenaean, performed at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2006, ASPHALT, performed at REDCAT, Los Angeles and Rux’s third studio album Good Bread Alley released on Thirsty Ear Records. Says van Schalkwyk: “All of a sudden I was an Afrikaans boy from Pretoria touring in a Black American blues band. I got to meet people, truly great people, who I didn’t even know existed before. I wouldn’t say that Carl opened my eyes... they
The freedom he gained in performance seems to be transforming the way he interacts with drawing: “Where before I used to hang on to the work vehemently, now I want the drawings to go out into the world. Only when the drawings are sold and removed from the gallery, are they finished”, he says. “They must move!”
SA ART TIMES. July 2011
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