Mikhael Subotzky WYE

Mikhael Subotzky WYE

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Sydney

Contents

Mikhael Subotzky WYE

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 18 March – 21 May 2016

16 Preface

SCAF Project 30

19 Vibrations in the Landscape:

The Imaginary Divinations of Mikhael Subotzky’s WYE Nina Miall

Gene Sherman

35 WYE

36 Film One: Feio

90 Film Two: Hare

144 Film Three: Lethbridge

205 Scripts

263 Artist

Biography

264 Contributors

265 Acknowledgements

Pages 4–13: Mikhael Subotzky WYE Study (3–12), 2015 dimensions variable mixed media

Preface Gene Sherman Chairman and Executive Director Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

This is SCAF’s thirtieth project and it marks another milestone in what the organisation has achieved: we have been operating successfully as a foundation for eight years and our thirty projects, most of which have involved newly commissioned work, now represent a significant corpus. This project also marks a departure, since for the first time the Foundation is veering slightly off course, both geographically and in terms of its focus.

In what is now a 30-year combined history of exhibitions and projects initiated

by Sherman Galleries (1986–2007) and SCAF (since 2008), we have kept our eyes firmly trained on the Asia Pacific Region, including West Asia (the Middle East) and Australia.

Mikhael Subotzky, however, is a young South African artist, albeit one with a highly imaginative practice and a rock solid national and international reputation. Why include a South African visual practitioner in what has up until now been a clearly defined framework that excludes that part of the world?

While I am of course aware that in making choices subterranean currents are inevitably at play, influencing thinking and decision making, two very conscious reasons do spring immediately to mind: On the most evident level, Subotzky himself includes Australia in a ‘wye’-shaped concept that draws a line between England, South Africa and Australia.

In his work the colonial past, an uncomfortable present and an imagined future all play out within the ‘wye’ via a set of fictional characters with made-up names who are of those three countries and depend on one another for their narrative presence and their very substance – Feio in Australia; Craig Hare in South Africa; and James T. Lethbridge in South Africa via England. So Subotzky’s project is at least partially linked to Australia – our country being a key part of a triangular web that includes additional and related places and sites, both real and imagined. Our Australia/Asia vision, therefore, remains intact.

At a deeper level my choice of a South African artist represents a going home of sorts. I first left South Africa for Australia in 1964 with my father, mother and brother, who are all now deceased. The emigration was a journey into the unknown at a time when communication channels were often faulty, misinformation was rampant, and a relatively unsophisticated Australia was bound by an all-white immigration policy and restrictive trade union regulations.

The expedition failed miserably. My mother in particular found living in nineteen sixties Australia, more precisely Melbourne, harrowing. We returned home with our tails between our legs, firmly of the opinion that England, and specifically London, would have been the better option. And so it became our next move. In late 1969, Brian and I, recently married, swung into action and the anticipated move from South Africa to England took place.

Alas another disruption loomed on the horizon. Torn out of my French teaching position at Watford Grammar School for Boys in Hertfordshire, I flew back to Johannesburg to support my father in what I thought would be a temporary glitch in our plans. The year before,

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my mother had taken her own life – a tragedy that was an indirect result of the failed move to Australia and the decision by her beloved three sisters and adored mother to make a life in the very place she had earlier been unable to embrace. My brother was only seventeen at the time and deeply affected by my mother’s untimely death. He was allowed home for only two brief days from his quite brutal obligatory South African Army service – circumstances that led to drug addiction and later were a likely factor in his own premature death.

We stayed on in South Africa for two short and difficult years. A stillborn child added fuel to a growing internal fire where stress and anxiety seemed relentlessly to burn.

Finally, in 1976, we decided to join our extended South-African born family, by then well settled in Sydney. We never looked back.

Apartheid South Africa had been for me a time of political dissent, moral dilemma, parental instability and personal tragedy, with the loss of both my mother and brother. I decided to distance myself once and for all and to eschew returning whilst apartheid continued as the soul-destroying framework for our beloved country.1 Our personal ‘wye’ – South Africa, England, Australia – clearly meshes with Mikhael Subotzky’s imagined scenario. When Mikhael articulated his initial concept my heart skipped a beat: was I able to imaginatively go back to my birthplace for the very first time since the late seventies? After some soul searching I decided I could, and the commission proceeded.

Now that I’ve detailed my motivations, I’d like to step back for a moment to explain how I came to Subotzky’s work and how that early interest progressed into something more substantial. Brian and I were at the Basel Art Fair in 2007 when, at the Goodman Gallery booth, we encountered (not for the first time) the work of senior South African artist David Goldblatt, this time alongside a young comparatively unknown compatriot, Mikhael Subotzky. Goldblatt’s body of work was familiar and compelling but uneditioned. We felt immediately drawn to his photo media scenes of marginalised African workers standing in long queues, waiting in the early hours of the morning to start their hours long journeys to work as domestic and non-skilled labourers in Johannesburg’s highoctane city environment.

The series was entirely valid as documentation, of course, but in the context of art-world conventions, having numbered editions felt like a necessary requirement for a contemporary art collection. We turned our attention to Mikhael Subotzky, an artist in his twenties, clearly deeply committed politically and with enormous visual flair. Subotzky had spent his final study year focussing on the South African prison system, which included running a three-month workshop programme for inmates inside the walls of Pollsmoor Prison in Capetown in 2005, and this was soon followed by time spent photographing African prisoners in high-security jails such as the Western Cape’s Beaufort West.

Those prisoners – to whose images we were drawn – wore loosely fitting bright orange uniforms that stood in stark contrast to their dark skins. I was particularly taken by an image that shone with an array of these bright textiles draped over multiple standing bodies and the collective bright white teeth of the prison choir, singing mightily in chorus. We acquired that particular image and, over time, several more. Subotzky was fixed on our radar, and his much loved work continues to hold a special place in the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection.

Subotzky’s WYE project took time to percolate and mature. With hindsight, commissioning Mikhael Subotzky for a SCAF project was simply a matter of time.

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Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country, New York: Scribner, 1948.

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Vibrations in the Landscape: The Imaginary Divinations of Mikhael Subotzky’s WYE Nina Miall

Towards the middle of Mikhael Subotzky’s WYE, James T. Lethbridge, an 1820 settler to South Africa who has been dowsing in the Eastern Cape near Port Elizabeth, struggles to comprehend the curious and contradictory landscape he has encountered on his arrival from England. ‘The flow of energy from the earth to my fingertips makes little sense, the vibrations seem to speak a language that I do not understand’, he remarks, ‘can Nature itself move by different laws?’ Rather than query the trustiness of his instrument or his own colonialist assumptions – both of which exert far more influence on his predicament than he realises – Lethbridge instead attributes the disarrangement of his senses to the ‘grosser frequencies’ of his alien landscape, this ‘vindictive’ land.

Lethbridge is joined in his endeavour by two other prospectors, Craig Hare and Feio, each of whom uses a form of divination synchronous to their era to explore their intellectual and physical relationship to the land they inhabit and, in a further abstraction of the film’s three interwoven narratives, to each other. Sympathetic to their misguided efforts is WYE’s fourth prospector, Subotzky himself. His divine interventions as the architect of the story reveal an artist who is, for the first time in his work, charting fictitious territory, probing its unfamiliar topography with his pen in a complex, polymorphic narrative through which he seeks to resolve his own internal conflicts as conclusively or inconclusively as his characters. All four diviners share a perspective that, despite the vast differences of time and place, can be understood to relate to the mindset of J.M. Coetzee’s white colonialist poet: ‘In the words he throws out to the landscape, in the echoes he listens for, he is seeking a dialogue with Africa, a reciprocity with Africa, that will allow him an identity better than that of visitor, stranger, transient’.1 The overarching structural and conceptual framework of Subotzky’s film installation derives from the letter Y (the phonetically-spelt Old English ‘wye’ of the title), whose shape has traditionally lent itself to a variety of practical applications, from railroad construction to mechanical and electrical engineering. Adapting it for artistic purposes, Subotzky envisages an imaginary cartographic triangle enveloping the United Kingdom, and two of its former colonies, South Africa and Australia, its exterior sides etched by the migration of people over centuries. In drafting a Y shape into the middle of this triangle and elevating it into a third dimension, the artist admits the imaginary space for a new fictional narrative in which these three countries converge across time and space. A narrative structure for WYE is thus harnessed which spans three temporalities – historical, contemporary and futuristic – and three disparate colonial experiences: English, Australian and South African.

The point of spatial and temporal convergence, where the activity of all three films is concentrated, is the vast, windswept beach of the Cape Recife Nature Reserve, just outside Port Elizabeth on South Africa’s eastern coast. Washed up on

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the shore by Subotzky’s imagination are the three protagonists of WYE, surveilled with sweeping, panoptic authority by the Reserve’s zebra-striped lighthouse.2 While each character dominates a different screen within the installation, their stories are by no means discrete; instead, they are multiply located across the three screens in various concrete and spectral forms.

The first film focuses on the experience of the androgynous and perhaps disembodied Feio, an Australian psycho-anthropologist from the future who has travelled to the east coast of South Africa to study Craig Hare, a metal detectorist from Feio’s past (our present day). From a base in the Lighthouse Apartment, Feio accesses the beach-combing Hare’s bodily experience through the futuristic practice of ‘deep enacting in’, an extension of the pseudo-scientific twentieth-century anthropological principle of ‘deep hanging out’ (essentially, sustained and in-depth engagement with the subject of study). For a short period known as an ‘enactment’, Feio enters Hare’s ‘body-memory stream’, bewildered by the range of unfamiliar corporeal sensation s/he encounters in Hare, primary among which is the mental and spiritual disquietude he feels at the legacy of colonial rule in South Africa.

While attempting to follow strict enactment protocol, Feio enjoys a transportive, almost

Opposite: Mikhael Subotzky Sticky-tape Transfer 09, South African Mosaic, 1978, 2014 130.5 × 187 cm Pigments inks, white-out tape, dirt, and J-Lar tape on cotton paper Left: Thomas Baines The British Settlers of 1820 Landing in Algoa Bay, 1853 51 × 76.5 cm Oil on canvas Courtesy Albany Museum, Grahamstown

fetishistic absorption in the material, dwelling intensely on Hare’s weighty physicality and his negotiation with the landscape.

Subotzky’s formulation of Feio as a genderless, postfigurative, future scientist introduces a radical metaphysical dimension to WYE, one which finds correlations in the philosophically-inflected postmodernism of writers such as J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy. Common to each is the presence of a hyper-aware protagonist who is engaged in speculative abstractions of human experience, staged self-reflexively by their authors.

Through Feio’s desire to prolong the experience of embodied sensation (despite violating enactment orthodoxy), Subotzky raises questions concerning proximity and distance, subjectivity and objectivity, that pertain as much to his own artistic practice, particularly as a documentary photographer, as to Feio’s psycho-anthropology. He is particularly sensitive to the poetic and political contingency of this sort of fieldwork, what James Clifford has identified as ‘its positivist and colonialist historical associations (the field as ‘laboratory’, the field as place of ‘discovery’ for privileged sojourners)’.3 In Feio, Subotzky pictures the fraught condition of the anthropologist, the skewed spatiopolitics of a discipline which has participated in a long, contested tradition of Western travel and which has traditionally exoticised Otherness from a position of privilege. Despite its futuristic imagining, Feio’s bodily occupation of Hare shares the same ethnographic and colonialist underpinnings as Lethbridge’s settlement of the land, its starting point a similarly politicised position of cultural dominance.

Through extending the tradition of Western scientific and cultural history, Feio’s perspective holds particular resonance for the Australia of the present and of the future, engaged as it is in an ongoing audit of its own unsettled relationship with its indigenous people. It registers Clifford’s point that the principles and practices of sociocultural

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anthropology are changing ‘as the geography of distance and difference alters in postcolonial/neocolonial situations, as power relations of research are reconfigured, as new technologies of transport and communications are deployed, and as ‘natives’ are recognised for their specific worldly experiences’.4 The second film revolves around Craig Hare, a present-day South African who seeks solitude through metal detecting, a preoccupation which is both symptomatic of a wish to connect experientially with this remote, incomprehensible landscape, but also of a latent colonial desire to exert control over it. Mining the post-apartheid landscape, he finds its natural beauty blighted by the presence of human suffering, a reflection of his own sense of white guilt. Hermanus, a coloured homeless man encountered by Hare while prospecting, forces Hare to reckon with the burden of his ancestral legacy. As the two men dig up an old box, buried by Lethbridge in the ground 200 years previously, their interaction is clouded by residual colonial sentiments and allegiances. Any sense of common endeavour between the men unravels as their racial and cultural disaffinities estrange them. Unnerved by the breakdown in relations with Hermanus which, for Hare, epitomises the inevitable failure of the postcolonial project in South Africa, he makes plans to migrate to Australia, mistaking it for a country which has resolved the problems of its own colonial inheritance.

In the figure of Hare, Subotzky articulates the contemporary white postcolonialist mentality with its sense of shame about the failure of ingrained social and racial inequalities in South Africa to have been adequately redressed in recent times. The

Left: Mikhael Subotzky Hermanus (smoking) I, Icon Building, 2006 105 × 131 cm Inkjet on satin photo paper Opposite: Mikhael Subotzky Boat 2, 2008 (Unique smashed) 60 × 48 cm Inkjet prints, framed and mounted to Dibond, with face-mounted toughened glass smashed by the artist

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Left: Mikhael Subotzky Maplank and Naomi, Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, 2004 (Unique smashed) 50 × 75 cm Framed and mounted on Dibond with face-mounted toughened glass smashed by the artist Opposite: Mikhael Subotzky Self-portrait (with the help of an optometrist) L, 2012 100 × 80 cm Inkjet on satin photo paper

confrontation with Hermanus effectively establishes what Mary Louise Pratt has termed a contact zone, a space where ‘cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’.5 Caught face to face with Hermanus in the hole in which Lethbridge’s box is buried, Hare’s sense of self is destabilised by this transculturation, his tendency to understand the black, homeless figure of Hermanus in his own image profoundly disturbed. In this regard, Hare also acts as a proxy for the artist himself, with Subotzky self-reflexively staging his own discomfort and interrogating the perceived ethnocentric prejudices he brings to bear on his subjects through his work.

Subotzky expresses an interest in intellectual and political positions which ‘enter into the colonial mindset and break it apart from within, rather than simply criticising it’ and he speaks eloquently about the need for photographers working in a documentary mode to acknowledge their privileged perspective by ‘looking inwards as much as outwards’.6 In exploring some of his own imbalanced negotiations with his subjects through the character of Hare, Subotzky uses him as a vehicle through which to extend his thinking into the questions of seeing and representation that are present in his earliest photographic work and yet were only first explicitly problematised in his kaleidoscopic archival project Retinal Shift (2012).7 A more recent installation Pixel Interface (2015) reveals the artist’s ongoing navigation of the relationship between the (white) photographer and his (predominantly black) subject and his acute sense of complicity in its biases and distortions: ‘My initial instincts as a documentary photographer slowly became more and more at odds with my attempts to understand the image-making process and the relationship between my internal psychological world and the subjects

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of my images. The aim is not to discredit my instincts of the time, which were to use my photographic work as a tool to bridge the sheer social, racial and economic divisions of the society into which I had been born. And yet, I find it vitally important now to acknowledge some of the deeper motivations for doing this work. I have come to believe that most photographers are completely blind to the extent to which they seek out, through making images, external manifestations of their own internal conflicts.’8 If WYE shows the artist turning to fiction to ventriloquise this conflict about how subjectivity is constituted, Hermanus is the foil, the Shakespearean consciencepricker – a homeless character who, while far from an archetype, is emblematic of the many dispossessed subjects encountered by Subotzky in his work. As the only character to have been translated from Subotzky’s photographic work into the fictional world of WYE, Hermanus’s symbolic value to the artist is manifold. Subotzky first met the real Hermanus on the Icon building site in Cape Town while he was working on his Umjiegwana series (2005) when Hermanus, who was laying bricks deep inside the building, implored the artist to photograph him. A decade-long friendship ensued, which the artist describes as ‘deeply affectionate, but also deeply complicated by the asymmetries of age, class, race and life experience’.9 While it also fulfils the immediate requirements of narrative and characterisation, the real Hermanus’s inclusion in WYE shows Subotzky working selfreflexively through the complexities and tensions of the artist/subject relationship using the filter offered by fiction’s reassuring abstractions. Only once is this fiction suspended.

When Hare insists that Hermanus take the copper from Lethbridge’s box (‘it will be worth something’), Hermanus’s renunciation of it is directed as forcefully to Subotzky and the audience, as it is to Hare: ‘Ek weet (I know)… these are your things.’ It is a spiked eschewal, one which invokes the historical subjugation of South Africa’s indigenous people but also a sense of disenfranchisement that persists to this day.

Armed with his favourite rod of Old English hazel, James T. Lethbridge, the 1820 settler transplanted from England to South Africa, dominates the third film in WYE.10 His fervent dowsing efforts unearth an ancient landscape resistant to being read in imperialist terms and leave him profoundly disoriented as, like the coastline he plumbs, he becomes ever more ravaged by the elements in the process. ‘Until you visit the Southern Hemisphere’, he writes in a letter to the Dowsing Guild of London, ‘you cannot comprehend the disarrangement of your senses which is wrought by this aberrant land.’ Lethbridge’s impressions of the landscape and its inhabitants depart, more and more radically as the film progresses, from the garden colony he initially anticipated, with its mythological ideal, forged by the Romantic European imagination, of an unspoilt paradise populated by noble savages.11 Against the virtues of Lethbridge’s beloved Devon hills are the vices of this antipastoral wilderness with its ‘heavy upside-down heavens’.12 Rather than grounding him, the illegible vibrations resonating through the hinterland suggest a gross state of inversion, prompting him to raise his dowsing stick to the skies in a desperate search for the spirit of this unknowable, untameable land. Buffeted by the winds and misled by his dowsing rod, he roams the shore like a weather-beaten Lear, increasingly paranoid that forces greater than himself are at work.13 Losing his grip on reality, he imagines joining with ‘a great horde of natives… screaming imponderable insights in their heathen tongue’ to save a beached whale, whose skeleton lies, in reality, long since buried on the beach. A counterpoint to the estrangement of Hare and Hermanus, this

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Mikhael Subotzky Hermanus (inscribed diptych), 2007 (detail) 182 × 151 cm Inkjet print on cotton rag paper with inscription

sunstricken reverie shows Lethbridge finding solidarity with the local Xhosa people; in this imagined communion he perceives ‘a new fraternity to reorder nature’. (See p.245.)

Within the historical trajectory of WYE, Lethbridge operates as the dislocated colonial perspective, an unreliable witness to what he encounters on account of his faith in occultist practices and of what Coetzee has called ‘the inherited Eurocentric conceptual scheme’ that filters his perceptions.14 His isolation within the landscape and his failure to find adequate words for his experience suggest the inverse of an optimistic pastoral mode that ‘by the labour of hands makes the landscape speak, and peoples it with an ideal community.’15 The whale skeleton incident reveals such an ‘ideal community’ to be a fabrication. In its place is the very real insistence on the distinct superiority of white experience exemplified by British colonial governance in WYE and entrenched as government policy with the introduction of apartheid in South Africa over a century later.

Overshadowing the individual experience of this paranoid 1820 settler are the pathologies of the wider colonial enterprise, whose most virulent aspects continue to inflame discussions of race in South Africa today.16 In his essays in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, J.M. Coetzee speaks about the various ‘dream topographies’ of South Africa, projected colonialist formulations of the South African landscape which sit at odds with the harsh reality and yet which speak of this fundamental human need to connect with the land experienced by Lethbridge: ‘[T]here is a rival dream topography as well: of South Africa as a vast, empty, silent space, older than man, older than the dinosaurs whose bones lie bedded in its rocks, and destined to be vast, empty, and unchanged long after man has passed from its face. Under such a conception of Africa – “Africa, oldest of the continents” – the task of the human imagination is to conceive not a social order capable of domesticating the landscape, but any kind of relation at all that consciousness can have with it… This landscape remains alien, impenetrable, until a language is found in which to win it, speak it, represent it.’ 17

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Mikhael Subotzky Sticky-tape Transfer 13, Quiver Tree / Robert Jacob Gordon, 2014 Triptych in three frames: 125cm × 95 cm, 125cm × 99.5 cm, 125cm × 100 cm Pigment inks, J-Lar tape and Micropore dressing tape on cotton paper

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The theme of projection, whether understood as physical, psychological or filmic, binds the various intersecting arcs of the three narratives of WYE, creating oscillations in the perspective of the characters that echo the vibrations in the landscape, its perennially shifting sands. Subotzky’s intention is ‘to speak to the political nature of projections onto the land, the history of the construction of the landscape genre as both a visual and ontological frame which becomes a means of control, the history (and future) of the academic disciplines that seek to read the land and the traces of its inhabitants, and the undercurrent of desire and fetishisation in colonial, twenty-first century and futuristic studies of foreign lands.’18 United in their profound sense of cultural dislocation, Feio, Hare and James T. Lethbridge dowse into each others’ lives, seeking to understand the others’ unique physical and spiritual connection to the landscape in a fugitive circular narrative akin to three hares chasing each others’ tails. Each assumes the role of a cultural anthropologist, their varying tools and perspectives reflecting critically on developments in the discipline in the past two hundred years, as well as speculating on its application in the future. For Subotzky, representation of the body is invariably connected with an anthropological project. In WYE he problematises the shortcomings of anthropology as study and discourse, its contexts of domination and privilege, through his characters’ misunderstandings and misrepresentations. Feio, Hare and Lethbridge’s socially-, culturally- and historicallyconstructed perspectives frequently meet at odd angles to each other, characterising their

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Left: Mikhael Subotzky Moses and Griffiths, Film Still 28, 2012 15 × 26.67 cm Inkjet print on cotton rag paper Opposite: Mikhael Subotzky Moses and Griffiths, Film Still 33, 2012 15 × 26.67 cm Inkjet print on cotton rag paper

engagements with each other primarily as ones of discomfort, difference and disaffinity.

Subotzky imagines the three protagonists ‘writing’ each others’ stories in ‘an endless, impossible triangle’, but, as David Malouf has remarked in the context of Australia’s British inheritance, ‘a triangular relationship is not always a comfortable one’.19 The result is a dissolution of community intensified by the inherent instability of subjectivity, its tendency towards projection and transposition. In their failure to connect either with each other, or with the landscape, Subotzky’s alienated protagonists exhibit the scars of colonial and apartheid ideology with their historical insistence upon irreconcilable difference. Their differing perspectives on the colonial legacy of South Africa reveal a further instability – the instability of history – which Subotzky expresses in the carefully orchestrated editing of WYE and the way in which the events of the tripartite narrative reverberate across centuries through the psychogeographic overlay of different scenes. As they loop, the three films shift screens within the installation, embodying postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe’s notion of the multiple temporalities of colonialism: ‘an interlocking of presents, pasts and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones.’20 This notion is also echoed in the integrated musical score for the work, which threads permutations of a traditional English folk ballad ‘The Three Ravens’ across and throughout the three films. Time is not linear but is lived in its multiplicity and simultaneities, particularly in Africa where the idea of a singular distinctive historicity, one that is not ‘embedded in times and rhythms heavily conditioned by European domination’, is no longer valid.21 Subotzky’s concern with the instabilities of subjectivity and history finds its precursor in his first multi-channel film installation Moses and Griffiths, part of the body of work created and compiled for Retinal Shift (2012). A filmic portrait of two museum docents and their respective historical buildings (the Observatory Museum and the 1820 Settlers Monument, both in Grahamstown), Moses and Griffiths offers a meditation on the discordant relationship between institutional and personal memory, on how the official record as enshrined by public monuments departs from the individual personal histories

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to which it claims to bear witness. Subotzky filmed his principal subjects giving their institutional tours, before filming them again giving a personalised tour, then entangled these public and private narratives in a four-screen installation that foregrounded the anxieties of historiography in the colonial context.

In WYE, Subotzky conducts a scansion of the South African landscape and its inhabitants with the awareness of an explorer who doesn’t wholly trust his instruments of navigation, or his bearings – who doubts his own dowsing stick. While the excursion into fiction marks a new direction for the artist, WYE’s fundamental preoccupations – with projection, with white guilt, with colonial inheritance – are consistent concerns throughout Subotzky’s work. At the heart of WYE is an artist attempting to convey the evolving political nuances of his own position in relation to his subject, and to picture faithfully the crests and crevices of the complicated moral territory he’s traversing, to make sense of the strange vibrations in the landscape. The imaginary divinations in WYE are, by the artist’s own admission, an attempt to ‘scratch at the surface’ of the vexed terrain of post-apartheid South Africa, to mine its volatile topographies with their historical scars, contemporary anxieties and future disaffinities.

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Mikhael Subotzky Pixel Interface II, 2015 Installation detail, All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015

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J. M. Coetzee, Introduction to his anthology White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Haven and London: Radix in association with Yale University Press, 1988, p.8.

Subotzky’s fascination with the all-seeing panoptic view and how it acts as a Foucauldian apparatus of power was announced in his graduation project Die Vier Hoeke (2005) and has continued in projects such as Beaufort West (2007), whose prison occupies a traffic roundabout in the middle of the town, Moses and Griffiths (2012), in which the Observatory Museum’s camera obscura offered a 360-degree survey of Grahamstown, and Ponte City (2009), with Patrick Waterhouse.

James Clifford, ‘Anthropology and/as Travel’ in Etnofoor, Jaarg. 9, No.2, p.7.

Clifford, ibid., p.7.

The term ‘contact zone’ was first formulated by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, London and New York, 1992), and has since been used widely in Literary Studies, Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies as a general term for places where white western travellers have encountered their cultural, ethnic or racial other and been transformed by the experience. Contact zones are sites of struggle, but also places of hybrid possibility and political negotiation. They are most often trading posts or border cities, cities where the movement of peoples and commodities brings about contact.

From a conversation with the artist, 24 October 2014.

Retinal Shift (2012) is the title of a body of work of Subotzky’s that became a travelling exhibition, having resulted from the artist’s being awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award, a national prize for promising young South African artists. According to the artist’s statement about the project, it ‘investigates the practice and mechanics of looking in relation to the history of photographic devices and Subotzky’s own history as an artist. The works in the show draw on archival portraits from the last century, found surveillance footage, and Subotzky’s own photographs from various sources that are re-contextualised here.’ (From Mikhael Subotzky Archive website).

Artist’s statement on Pixel Interface as reproduced on his website.

From an email exchange with the artist, 6 November 2015.

Four thousand British settlers were brought to the Eastern Cape by the British colonial government in 1820 in an effort to ease Britain’s unemployment problem following the Napoleonic Wars and to settle the troubled border regions of South Africa, defending the eastern frontier against the neighbouring Xhosa peoples.

The misconceptions of European Romanticism are also alluded to in the work’s title, as Subotzky details in WYE’s proposal: ‘the River Wye is the spiritual home of the English picturesque, prominently referred to in establishing texts of Romanticism by Gilpin and Wordsworth at the same time as fingers of European imperialism spread inland in Australasia and Southern African and gathered into fists.’

Subotzky’s treatment of the landscape as perceived by Lethbridge invokes the georgic variety of the pastoral mode, which Coetzee describes as ‘holding up the garden in bloom against the garden in decay, the garden degenerating into wilderness’. (Coetzee, op. cit., p.4.)

Postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe sees impressions of Africa such as Lethbridge’s persisting to this day: ‘Whether in everyday discourse or in ostensibly scholarly narratives, the continent is the very figure of “the strange.” It is similar to that inaccessible “Other with a capital O” evoked by Jacques Lacan. In this extremity of the Earth, reason is supposedly permanently at bay, and the unknown has supposedly attained its highest point. Africa, a headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability, is portrayed as a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete, strange signs, convulsive movements— in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos.’ (Achille Mbembe, ‘Time on the Move’, the introduction to On the Postcolony, Oakland: University of California Press, 2001, p.3.

J.M. Coetzee, ‘Idleness in South Africa’, in Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, Vol. 8, Issue 1, 1982, p.121.

Coetzee, White Writing, op. cit., p.9.

As I write this, the contemporary debate sparked by the #RhodesMustFall student movement of 2015 resonates still. The question of the relevance of colonial- and apartheid-era monuments, in which their symbolism is weighed up against the importance of a historical record, however offensive, has inflamed race relations, particularly at universities, which have been accused of institutional racism and of being bastions of white privilege by black students calling for ‘the decolonisation of education’ in South Africa. While initially focused on the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from the University of Cape Town campus as an act of restorative justice, the #RhodesMustFall movement escalated to address the need for a new articulation of public spaces and monuments that register the trauma of those systematically colonised and segregated, and serve to reclaim black history. As Okwui Enwezor has noted, ‘The triumphalism of the monuments is both impressive and distortive. The sheer ubiquity of these forms can only begin to suggest the extent to which colonial and apartheid structures sought to invent a wholly new social memory for South Africa.’ (‘The Indeterminate Structure of Things Now: Notes on Contemporary Photography’ in Home Lands / Land Marks exhibition catalogue, London: Haunch of Venison, 2008, p.31.)

Coetzee, White Writing, op. cit., p.7. Coetzee’s writings on the colonial experience in South Africa are an important reference for Subotzky, particularly as they address the question of an authentic language through which to convey South African experience in its complexity and the quest for such a language as pursued through a framework in which language, consciousness and landscape are interrelated.

Artist’s proposal for WYE, p.5.

David Malouf, ‘Made in England: Australia’s British Inheritance’, Quarterly Essay, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003, p.51.

The Australian writer has written at length about how the instability of subjectivity creates fault lines in the bedrock of a collective national consciousness, recognising ‘the fragility of such moments of cohesion, or shared emotion and presence, that alert us to the equally fragile but no less significant moments of difference.’ (David Malouf, ‘The States of the Nation’ in The Best Australian Essays 2010, edited by Robert Drewe, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2010, p.200.)

Achille Mbembe, Introduction to On the Postcolony, Oakland: University of California Press, 2001, p.16.

Mbembe, ibid., p.9.

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Mikhael Subotzky WYE

Colour Plates

Mikhael Subotzky WYE, 2016 3 channel film with sound, 45 min Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, with support from Sebastian Louis, Gene & Brian Sherman and Goodman Gallery Images courtesy the artist and Goodman Gallery

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Film One: Feio

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When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.

William S. Burroughs, cited in Edward S. Robinson, Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011, p.138

One of the most common ‘hallucinations’ of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject’s body at an angle… yes quite an angle it is the ‘Other Half ’ worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step.

William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, New York: Grove Atlantic, 1967, p.49

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It made sense, of a kind, to assume that the further south one went, the more grotesque life must become. What demonic freaks, what affronts to normality, might the Southern Continent not produce? And what trials for the mariner? Waterspouts, hurricanes, clouds of darkness at midday, ship-eating whales, islands that swam and had tusks—this imagined country was perhaps infernal, its landscape that of Hell itself.

Within its inscrutable otherness, every fantasy could be contained; it was the geographical unconscious. So there was a deep, ironic resonance in the way the British, having brought the Pacific at last into the realm of European consciousness, having explored and mapped it, promptly demonized Australia once more by chaining their criminals on its innocent dry coast. It was to become the continent of sin.

Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, London: Vintage Books, 1988, p.44

South Africans are drawn to Australia for many reasons, not least because it offers all the comforts of home – outdoor living, a suburban temperament and cold beer – without the blacks.

Charlotte Bauer, cited in J. van Rooyen, The New Great Trek: The Story of South Africa’s White Exodus, University of South Africa Press, 2000, pp. 141–142

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To see is to enter a universe of beings which display themselves, and they would not do this if they could not be hidden behind each other. In other words: to look at an object is to inhabit it, and from this habitation to grasp all things in terms of the aspect which they present to it. But in so far as I see those things too, they remain abodes open to my gaze, and, being potentially lodged in them, I already perceive from various angles the central object of my present vision. Thus every object is the mirror of all others.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2002, translated by Colin Smith, p.79

It is, however, clearly unfortunate grammar to claim that there is a ‘we’ or an ‘I’ that does its body, as if a disembodied agency preceded and directed an embodied exterior. More appropriate, I suggest, would be a vocabulary that resists the substance metaphysics of subject-verb formations and relies instead on an ontology of present participles. The ‘I’ that is its body is, of necessity, a mode of embodying, and the ‘what’ that it embodies is possibilities. But here again the grammar of the formulation misleads, for the possibilities that are embodied are not fundamentally exterior or antecedent to the process of embodying itself. As an intentionally organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation, as Beauvoir has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation.

Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (December 1988), 519–531, p.521

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Film Two: Hare

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One dream topography that the South African pastoral projects is therefore of a network of boundaries crisscrossing the surface of the land, marking off thousands of farms, each a separate kingdom ruled over by a benign patriarch with, beneath him, a pyramid of contented and industrious children, grandchildren, and serfs. But there is a rival dream topography as well: of South Africa as a vast, empty, silent space, older than man, older than the dinosaurs whose bones lie bedded in its rocks, and destined to be vast, empty, and unchanged long after man has passed from its face. Under such a conception of Africa—“Africa, oldest of the continents”—the task of the human imagination is to conceive not a social order capable of domesticating the landscape, but any kind of relation at all that consciousness can have with it. (…)

This landscape remains alien, impenetrable, until a language is found in which to win it, speak it, represent it. It is no oversimplification to say that landscape art and landscape writing in South Africa from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth revolve around the question of finding a language to fit Africa, a language that will be authentically African. Of course there exist plenty of authentically African languages, languages indigenous to the subcontinent. But their authenticity is not necessarily the right authenticity. The quest for an authentic language is pursued within a framework in which language, consciousness, and landscape are interrelated. For the European to learn an African language “from the outside” will therefore not be enough: he must know the language “from the inside” as well, that is, know it “like a native,” sharing the mode of consciousness of the people born into it, and to that extent giving up his European identity. So, quite aside from the question of whether it is practical for a European to enter African culture in sufficient depth, quite aside from European doubts about whether the black man anyhow “appreciates” the landscape into which he was born any better than an animal does, the question has to be rephrased: Is there a language in which people of European identity, or if not of European identity then of a highly problematical South African-colonial identity, can speak to Africa and be spoken to by Africa?

J. M. Coetzee, ‘Introduction’, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, New Haven and London: Radix in association with Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 6–8

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But, if the mirror does attest to a real presence that is, at the same time, an untenable figure, this mirror cannot tell us what participates in the figure’s background, foreground, and perspectives-in what we might call its “magma,” that is, its volume, content, and flesh. The mirror is silent when it comes to telling how the figure subjugates itself, paints itself, is transparent to itself, and where it is uncircumscribed, indeed cannot be circumscribed. In fact, both in the light of the advancing world and in everyday interactions with life, Africa appears as simultaneously a diabolical discovery, an inanimate image, and a living sign. As such, what might be called its immediate being-in-the-world does not necessarily coincide with what the mirror shows. This does not mean either that the sign is completely free with regard to what it designates, or that there is, here, only a simulacrum.

The implication is that the order of truth in which Africa is situated is not unequivocal. Adopting Merleau-Ponty’s terms, we can say that, in this order, the opposites can drive each other out but they can also pass into each other. Nothing is outside that is not at the same time inside.

Achille Mbembe, ‘Conclusion: The Final Manner’, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2001, pp. 240–241

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From the old Chief ’s throat came, powerfully, one of the great cries of South African history: ‘Here is no honey,’ he shouted. ‘I will eat honey and to procure it I shall cross the rivers Sunday, Coega and Swartkops. This country is mine’ – with this he stamped his foot violently on the ground – ‘I won it in war, and shall maintain it.’

He shook his spear at Cuyler with one hand, and with the other raised a horn to his mouth and blew it. His warriors then rushed towards Cuyler, who retreated and ordered his own men to fire. But it was almost dark, their aim was poor, and the Xhosa melted into the bush.

Noel Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People, London: Pimlico, 1993, pp. 382–383

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Film Three: Lethbridge

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If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft, In darkness, and amid the many shapes Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the wood How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguish’d thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led; more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by,) To me was all in all.

William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour (July 13, 1798)’, Lyrical Ballads, London: J. & A. Arch, 1798

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One of the first facts we learn about English history is that Britain was invaded and settled in the fifth century by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

Britain too is a settler state, though of long duration; a composite nation with a population, largely, of long-standing and recent migrants. And the fact of that original invasion and settlement, which the English keep strongly alive as part of the narrative, is not only a fact of history but a condition of identity (it is worth noting that the Romans too presented themselves in this way, not as natives of Latium but as invaders and settlers, immigrants from Troy). Such a notion of identity is unusual, and unusually liberating. Independent of the tie between blood and soil, between race and Heimat, it is not limited by it either. Identity is portable. It can be transported, and with no risk to its particular virtues and strengths, reconstructed on another shore. It is ideally suited, that is, to the creating of empire.

David Malouf, A First Place, Sydney: Knopf / Random House Australia, 2014, p.321

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The land is my backbone, I only stand straight, happy, proud and not ashamed about my colour because I still have land. The land is the art. I can paint, dance, create and sing as my ancestors did before me. My people recorded these things about our land this way, so that I and all others like me may do the same. I think of land as the history of my nation. It tells us how we came into being and in what system we must live. My great ancestors who lived in the time of history planned everything that we practice now. The law of history says that we must not take land, fight over land, steal land, give land and so on. My land is mine only because I came in spirit from that land and so did my ancestors of the same land. We may have come in dreams to the living member of the family, to notify them that the spirit has come from that part of our land and that he will be conceiving in this particular mother. The land is my foundation. I stand, live and perform as long as I have something firm and hard to stand on.

Dr Galarrwuy Yunupingu, cited in Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996, p.40

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End

Mikhael Subotzky WYE

MINUTE ONE

Scripts

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART ONE: DEEP ENACTMENT: THE LIGHTHOUSE APARTMENT MINUTE ONE

FILM TWO: HARE PART ONE: METAL-DETECTING: BEACH MINUTE ONE

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART ONE: DOWSING: THE DUNES BEYOND SPINE ROCK MINUTE ONE

The camera is on a drone, facing out to sea, the horizon level in the middle of the frame.

The camera is on a drone, facing out to sea, the horizon level in the middle of the frame.

The camera is on a drone, facing out to sea, the horizon level in the middle of the frame.

The drone pulls the camera away from the horizon and in through the open sliding door of the lighthouse apartment.

The drone flies the camera away from the horizon and down to the beach near the lighthouse. We see Craig Hare, a white man in his forties, entering the frame and metal-detecting along the line between the sand and the sea.

The drone pulls the camera away from the horizon over the rocks until we see James T. Lethbridge appear, gazing out across the beach from atop a dune, an Englishman in 1820s clothing.

FEIO (VOICE-OVER) (Feio speaks in an androgynous voice that has a future-inflected Australian accent) Am Feio. Welcome to the faculty of Psycho-Anthropology. This deep enactment is in the bodymemory stream of Craig Hare, a BE volunteer who was settled from South Africa in 2016, and was thus one of the last million migrants to be welcomed in Australia.

We hear a steady beep from the detector’s earphones as if we were in Hare’s head. Every now and then the beeping increases in volume and pitch and this makes him stop and scratch around a little with a spade, before proceeding down the beach. We hear Hare’s gentle breathing, but do not hear any sound from the world through which he is walking.

No dialogue or voice-over.

MINUTE TWO

Lethbridge kneels down and opens his wooden chest. A compartmentalised tray in the bed of the box contains an ink well, a few writing quills, various copper trinkets, a Claude Glass, and a collection of flax seeds. In the roof of the box, a wye-shaped dowsing rod is clipped in place on top of a red velvet lining.

Lethbridge removes the rod and pulls gently at its arms to test that it is in order. He is satisfied, tries it out in his hands and surveys the landscape again.

No dialogue or voice-over.

This 12-minute enactment is recorded for the thesis, 21st Century Bodies and Movement: Identity in the Last Days Before Enclosure. Macquarie Syndicate.

Deep-enactment commencing… Now. Hhhww. (A brief exclamation at entry into the enactment stream, which Feio attempts to mute for professionalism) We see various views of the apartment, as if from a ‘first-person’ perspective – a foam mattress, wicker furniture, flapping blinds and the views through the windows.

This landscape, as it falls on the retinas, is as ‘picturesque’ as any that have seen from the live viewing points at Woolloomooloo or Middle Head. But, as expected, the sensations in body are not those would associate with enjoyment.

We hear a beep that denotes the impending end of the first minute of the deep-enactment.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART ONE: DEEP ENACTMENT: THE LIGHTHOUSE APARTMENT MINUTE TWO

A dog with one brown eye and one bright blue eye runs up and stares directly into the camera.

FEIO (V.O.) (We hear a sharp intake of breath from Feio, and then various soft murmurs) A hand reaches into the frame and pats and plays with the dog. The camera then moves rapidly to a small desk and ‘sits down’ in front of an open laptop. We see two hands alighting on the keyboard and the fingers beginning to type an e-mail. The words form, letter by letter, on the screen and periodically a word or sentence is deleted and changed, or automatically corrected if it is misspelt.

FILM TWO: HARE PART ONE: METAL-DETECTING: BEACH MINUTE TWO

Various shots show Hare continuing to metal-detect along the beach, heading towards the distinctively shaped Spine Rock.

A coloured man can be seen approaching Hare from behind. As he comes nearer, Hare gets more and more uncomfortable and repeatedly looks over his shoulder. But as he passes, the man greets him and asks cheerily if he has found anything. Hare smiles guiltily and shakes his head. The man passes and carries on down the beach.

HARE’S TYPING WORDS Struck through text is deleted by Hare in the process of typing. Bold text is added after Hare returns to the place of typing.

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART ONE: DOWSING: THE DUNES BEYOND SPINE ROCK MINUTE TWO

A wide shot reveals a round tent that Lethbridge has pitched in the lee of a dune.

Lethbridge emerges from under the shelter, his dowsing stick in hand. He looks around and adjusts his clothing, making sure his coat is neat and straight. He begins to dowse in the twilight, veering up and down the beach on the far side of the distinctive Spine Rock.

MINUTE THREE

LETHBRIDGE (VOICE-OVER) Gentlemen of the Dowsing Guild of London, I write to you from distant shores, from where it is my privilege to furnish the inaugural scientific accounts of the practice of divination on the African continent.

This is a wild and beautiful country, majestic, and pristine. I have brought my favorite rod of English hazel; will Old Country timber vibrate to the grosser frequencies of this alien land?

The surety of touch that blessed these humble farm-raised hands in Devon has been shaken and rolled by the Atlantic, but I am confident of success.

Dear Gemma, How are you?

I hope that you are well!, and I am so sorry that it has been so long since I wrote. How is everybody in Perth? Darryl? Hannah? And the twins?

My party is detained on the coastal plain at Algoa Bay, waiting for the Governor to approve our departure for the interior. I must report back after two nights, but rather than wait in idleness, I have stolen away to make camp on a rocky point. Here I can practice my craft in solitude and meditate on occult matters without distraction.

FEIO This e-mail is tagged blue in the records. It was understood to reveal the subject’s motivations for emigrating to Australia. The moment of its writing was chosen as the focus of this deep enactment in order to analyse whether this movement from South Africa to Australia was related to the subject’s later decision to volunteer for the Body Emancipation program.

Even if I do not find material property to advance my prospects here, I will find a treasure more valuable yet, the very soul of this Southern land.

But… from within the body, the words slip past, as if on a different dreaming… as if completely separated from perception.

We hear a double beep that denotes the impending end of the second minute of the deep-enactment.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART ONE: DEEP ENACTMENT: THE LIGHTHOUSE APARTMENT MINUTE THREE

The frame freezes and then a status bar moves across it while the footage that we have just been watching rewinds to the moment when Hare stroked the dog.

FEIO (V.O.) A Grenchild Spike… twenty-first century relationships to animals were highly emotional.

Selectively emotional, of course, as they would eat some species while maintaining emotional attachments to others.

FILM TWO: HARE PART ONE: DEEP ENACTMENT: THE LIGHTHOUSE APARTMENT MINUTE THREE

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART ONE: DOWSING: THE DUNES BEYOND SPINE ROCK MINUTE THREE

With a low camera, sweeping from side to side (as if from the viewpoint of the metal detector), we see a dog running up and down the beach fetching a ball which is constantly re-thrown by an unseen hand. Eventually, the camera sweeps even further on its arc and settles on a white man buried to his neck in sand.

Sitting by a small fire outside his tent, Lethbridge heats a small kettle for tea. He hums to himself and sings small snatches of words from ‘The Three Ravens’ (the song on which the musical score for all three WYE films is based).

Hare carries on walking past this scene and looks back to see the dog sniffing and licking the Buried White Man’s head. The Buried White Man’s daughter runs up to him laughing, and pours a plastic bucket full of sea water over his head and he splutters and laughs with her.

LETHBRIDGE (SINGING) There were three ravens sat on a tree, downe a downe, hey downe, hey downe.

MINUTE FOUR

They were as blacke as blacke could be, with a downe…

The section where Hare strokes the dog is then played over and over again in more and more zoomed detail, focusing in on the dog’s eyes.

Then one of them said to his mate, where shall we our breakefast take?

The Spike is somehow skewed, almost inverted, as if the point of connection is being untwisted by… something. Logging for further analysis.

With a downe derry, derry, derry, downe, downe.

We hear a triple beep that denotes the impending end of the third minute of the deep-enactment.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART ONE: DEEP ENACTMENT: THE LIGHTHOUSE APARTMENT MINUTE FOUR

The hands hover over the keyboard for a while as if struggling to find words. The frame freezes and we see the same status bar as before, this time fast-forwarding until Hare is standing in front of a small gas burner. His hands appear and start preparing coffee in a moka pot. While the coffee boils, we see the view through the kitchen window as Hare stares outwards.

FILM TWO: HARE PART ONE: DEEP ENACTMENT: THE LIGHTHOUSE APARTMENT MINUTE FOUR

Hare is now in and amongst the different formations that surround Spine Rock, metal-detecting in the space between them. He keeps glancing around him, as if worried that he may be approached by another person.

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART ONE: DOWSING: THE DUNES BEYOND SPINE ROCK MINUTE FOUR

We see Lethbridge continuing to dowse in the early morning light. He appears puzzled, periodically dropping his rod, wringing his hands and staring at his fingertips.

LETHBRIDGE (V.O.) My dear fellow diviners, it is the second day of my study, and thus far I have yet to find anything of substance. Until you visit the Southern Hemisphere, you cannot comprehend the disarrangement of your senses which is wrought by this aberrant land.

FEIO (V.O.) A strange thing, to look down upon the world from this window. As if the eyes are measuring the world, or measuring the body’s relation to it. The images on the retina are held in the periphery, as if the landscape is something that needs to be calculated against.

MINUTE FIVE

The flow of energy from the earth to my fingertips makes little sense, the vibrations seem to speak a language that I do not understand, can Nature itself move by different laws? No! The sun still rises in the east, an object dropped still falls to the earth, and the tides still follow the pull of the moon, despite the fact that its Hare is turned on his head.

We hear four beeps that denote the impending end of the fourth minute of the deep-enactment.

An extreme close-up view of the darkened reflection in Lethbridge’s Claude Glass reveals the landscape in front of his tent. We then see the opposite view of the back of the Claude Glass frame and Lethbridge’s eyes staring into it.

To keep my senses, I try to hold a picture of home in my mind, the Blackdown Hills of Devon where I had my most cherished success. Yet my imagination fails, eroded by the force of this sun, the wind, the heavy upside-down heavens. I am due back in Algoa Bay tomorrow, so I must overcome this lethargy and work day and night to produce the results I need to conclude these studies.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART TWO: COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE MINUTE FIVE

We see through Hare’s eyes as he returns to his desk.

FEIO (V.O.) Counter-transference note: strong desire both to stay with the dog and to gaze longer out of the window. A compelling paradox – the landscape makes the body feel small and insignificant, while the dog reassures its sense of scale.

Hare stares for a while at the screen, and then starts typing again.

HARE’S TYPING WORDS I’m writing to tell you I’m thinking I might take you up on your offer of a place to stay while I look into opportunities FEIO (V.O.) ‘opportunities’ HARE’S TYPING WORDS there. I’m not sure if you know, but I’ve been living on the beach in PE for a few months now.

FEIO (V.O.) Words and sensations realigning somewhat… ‘The all and the not all’. Heavy sensation is… lighter.

HARE’S TYPING WORDS It’s been great to get away from things.

Since David got… I’m sure you heard about David’s incident. It shook us all up. I took this job at the lighthouse because because I was shit-scared of staying it came up, and it was a chance to get away from Joburg. And it’s in a nature reserve so I get to live the country life that seems to be in our genes! I don’t have to deal with constant bloody politics and people telling me… people, just the constant bloody wind! I don’t know if you remember how exhausting it is to live in South Africa? Every traffic light, every check- out counter, every time you park your car, you’re up against the coal face of such a fucked up complicated difficult) complicated complex history. The government is so corr… And it’s not getting any better.

FILM TWO: HARE PART TWO: THE ENCOUNTER: THE BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE FIVE

(The dialogue and action in MINUTES FIVE to EIGHT will be workshopped with the actors playing Hermanus and Hare. The action and dialogue written here are guides that will be refined during the workshop process.)

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART TWO: STRANGE VIBRATIONS: THE DUNES AND BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE FIVE

We see Lethbridge trying to dowse in the midday sun, unsteady in the intense heat.

He returns to lie down under his shelter, but cannot cover his whole body in shade. No dialogue or voice-over.

MINUTE SIX

We hear a sudden surge of beeping frequency and tone from the metal-detector. As this happens, Hermanus (a tall, coloured, homeless man) walks past and sees Hare moving the stick repeatedly over the same spot.

HERMANUS Found something?

HARE (assuming that Hermanus is begging) Sorry, I can’t help you today.

HERMANUS Has your stick found something?

HARE Sorry, not today… Oh (realising that Hermanus is not begging but rather is interested in what he is doing) ya, let me show you.

Hare takes off his headphones and a flood of beach and wind noises are suddenly heard. Hare shows Hermanus how the metal detector works. He insists on putting the earphones on Hermanus’s head which is awkward because Hermanus is so tall and has to stoop.

Once the headphones are on, Hare moves the stick back and forth over the spot and Hermanus initially flinches at the sound, but then stands dead straight, staring off into the distance as if he is imagining what is underground.

HARE Do you hear how the sound changes when it is over the metal?

HERMANUS Come, let’s dig it out!

We hear five beeps that denote the impending end of the fifth minute of the deep-enactment.

FEIO (V.O.) (Lets out a brief exclamation of frustration at the beeping)

HARE You want to dig it out? OK… Conscious of the politics of race and labour, he starts digging himself. Hermanus tries to get involved to show Hare what angle to dig at, but Hare persists for a while before eventually handing over the spade. It immediately becomes clear that Hermanus is much stronger, and has done a lot more manual labour in his life.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART TWO: COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE MINUTE SIX

(Minute six is a quiet moment across all three films. Each of the protagonists is mostly silent, engaging with their study / labour / practice. The musical score fades away to allow the ‘real’ sounds from each film to come to the fore and overlap – Feio’s small exclamations over the sound of Hare typing / the sound of Hare and Hermanus digging / the wind and wave sounds that surround Lethbridge.)

HARE’S TYPING WORDS This job on the beach is perfect. One would think that a lighthouse keeper is a busybody man person, but nowadays everyonething is computerised, controlled by sensors and relays and I’m pretty much just a body plonked here because of some international maritime law that requires a constant human presence at every lighthouse. Which suits me just fine. I’ve taken up metal-detecting which I love – my days are spent walking up and down the beach happily lost

FILM TWO: HARE PART TWO: THE ENCOUNTER: THE BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE SIX

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART TWO: STRANGE VIBRATIONS: THE DUNES AND BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE SIX

(MINUTE SIX is a quiet moment across all three films. Each of the protagonists is mostly silent, engaging with their study / labour / practice. The musical score fades away to allow the ‘real’ sounds from each film to come to the fore and overlap – Feio’s small exclamations over the sound of Hare typing / the sound of Hare and Hermanus digging / the wind and wave sounds that surround Lethbridge.)

(MINUTE SIX is a quiet moment across all three films. Each of the protagonists is mostly silent, engaging with their study / labour / practice. The musical score fades away to allow the ‘real’ sounds from each film to come to the fore and overlap – Feio’s small exclamations over the sound of Hare typing / the sound of Hare and Hermanus digging / the wind and wave sounds that surround Lethbridge.)

Hare wants to take another turn at digging, and Hermanus (grinning and knowing the politics of the situation too), hands the spade over to him. This goes on for a while, one man digging while the other rests.

Lethbridge emerges from his shelter in the evening, but looks freaked-out and dizzy. He starts dowsing, but constantly stops, inspects the tension in his rod and holds his hands up as if to see if they are shaking. His clothes are becoming ragged.

MINUTE SEVEN

FEIO (V.O.) ‘happily lost’ HARE’S TYPING WORDS in my own world.

FEIO (V.O.) Diverging again…

We hear six beeps that denote the impending end of the sixth minute of the deep-enactment.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART TWO: COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE MINUTE SEVEN

We see through Hare’s eyes as he stares out of the bathroom window. On the window-sill sits a box of matches and an almost-finished toilet roll.

FEIO (V.O.) La chair du monde. The flesh of the world.

FILM TWO: HARE PART TWO: THE ENCOUNTER: THE BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE SEVEN

Eventually Hare is almost completely inside the hole, with just his head visible. He strikes the spade against a hard surface and struggles to lever out the object.

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART TWO: STRANGE VIBRATIONS: THE DUNES AND BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE SEVEN

We see Lethbridge continuing to dowse at night. He has placed his oil lamp on top of Spine Rock and is dowsing around it. Every now and then he returns to the lamp to inspect his rod or his hands.

Hermanus jumps into the hole to help him and ends up standing very close, literally face to face with Hare.

They look into each other’s eyes for a moment and then Hermanus grabs the spade and levers the box out of the ground.

LETHBRIDGE (V.O.) The disturbance grows stronger. It pulls at the rod which pulls at my insides as if the ground will absorb me. Why can I not read this land?

They get the box to the surface and then clamber out of the hole themselves. They open the box and initially all that they see is a rotting wooden tray with a few pieces of copper on it.

On arrival at Algoa Bay, I benefited from the patronage of Myles Bowker to be invited with a small group of gentlemen who were entertained by Colonel Cuyler at Fort Frederick. The Colonel spoke most grievously of the natives, accusing them of constant cattle rustling, which he attributed to their greed for livestock, for ever more numerous wives, and for the copper trinkets and buttons that the army use to buy the loyalty of certain chiefs.

MINUTE EIGHT

We see the top of the toilet cistern as the handle is pulled down to flush the toilet.

We hear seven beeps that denote the impending end of the seventh minute of the deep-enactment.

HARE You see, it was this copper that was making the high-pitched sounds…

Hermanus realises that there is a second smaller box underneath the tray. He opens it to find a copper tube inside, and inside that a letter, which he unfolds and holds up as if to read.

HARE Do… do you read?

Hermanus passes the letter to Hare, who starts reading aloud.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART TWO: COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE MINUTE EIGHT

Instead of typing, Hare picks up the letter that he and Hermanus found on the beach from behind his laptop.

FEIO (V.O.) The letter that Hare found, which was lost. Feio to read it into the records: (Feio reads in unison with the voices in FILM TWO and FILM THREE) ‘… the land between Algoa Bay and the Great Fish River was cleared prior to our arrival, as I had hoped to converse with Xhosa witch doctors to inform my studies…’

Hare throws the letter back down onto the desk.

FEIO (V.O.) Immediate bodily response to the content of the letter, a strong abrasive sensation in the pineal gland. The writer is obviously techno-culturally primitive, but…

We hear eight beeps that denote the impending end of the eighth minute of the deep-enactment. … more time is needed to access this letter and read it into the records. This enactment may be too short.

FILM TWO: HARE PART TWO: THE ENCOUNTER: THE BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE EIGHT

HARE (READING THE LETTER) (Hare reads the exact same words that are being said in Lethbridge’s voice-over in FILM THREE, so that for a moment, we hear the two voices speaking together.)

‘Personally, I was disappointed to hear the Colonel say that all of the land between Algoa Bay and the Great Fish River was cleared prior to our arrival, as I had hoped to converse with Xhosa witch-doctors to inform my studies.’

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART TWO: STRANGE VIBRATIONS: THE DUNES AND BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE EIGHT

LETHBRIDGE (V.O.) Personally, I was disappointed to hear the Colonel say that all of the land between Algoa Bay and the Great Fish River was cleared prior to our arrival, as I had hoped to converse with Xhosa witch-doctors to inform my studies. I was intrigued to find out if they have developed any crude faculties of their own for divination, and perhaps they could have shed some light on my current travails.

MINUTE NINE

Hare pauses briefly and glances up at Hermanus.

HARE (READING THE LETTER) (Again speaking in unison with the voice-over in FILM THREE) ‘Perhaps it is land itself that is malevolent or reluctant to yield to its new inhabitants?’

HARE This was written a long time ago…

HERMANUS Ek weet (I know).

Hermanus gets up and dusts the sand off himself as if preparing to leave.

HARE Hey man, wait. Take some copper… it will be worth something.

Hermanus looks back nonchalantly at him.

HERMANUS Ek weet (I know)… These are your things.

HARE At least let me give you something for your help…

Hare scrambles to his feet and pulls out his wallet and looks at the notes inside. He hands Hermanus a R50 note, which Hermanus takes slowly.

HERMANUS (Ambiguous in tone, both cheerily joking and sarcastic) Dankie baas (Thank you, boss).

Hare looks after him distraught, unable to read his tone.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART FOUR: ‘PASSIVELY-ENACTED ENJOYMENT’ MINUTE NINE

(In PART ONE, the narration generally alternated between FILM ONE and FILM THREE, minute by minute. In PART THREE, it still alternates between the two films, but in a much more fragmented and less structured way.)

FILM TWO: HARE PART THREE: AFTER THE ENCOUNTER: BEACH MINUTE NINE

We see Hare from behind as he watches Hermanus walking away.

He packs up his metal-detecting gear and reassembles the chest and then sets off back down the beach towards the lighthouse, struggling to carry both the gear and the box.

We see Hare reflected in the bathroom mirror, staring directly into the camera. His eyes are slightly red, but his face completely calm.

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART THREE: MADNESS: THE DUNES AND BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE NINE

(In PART ONE, the narration generally alternated between FILM ONE and FILM THREE, minute by minute. In PART THREE, it still alternates between the two films, but in a much more fragmented and less structured way) MINUTE TEN We see a close-up of Lethbridge lying down on the beach in the midday sun. He is afraid, paranoid, and stares up at the sky. He sings a brief snatch of the song, deliberately warping the melody.

FEIO (V.O.) The DEGB warns against actively enjoying an enactment, but at the same time acknowledges that passively-enacted enjoyment is inevitable due to the data in some streams.

LETHBRIDGE (SINGING) Downe in yonder greene field, downe a downe…

There lies a Knight slain under his shield, with a downe…

Feio, wish… Feio would control what Hare sees. Feio would move around. But am an uninvited passenger.

His hounds they lie downe at his feete, so well do they their Master keepe, with a downe.

Lethbridge presses the dowsing rod into the wet sand, until only its imprint can be seen. A gentle ripple wave arrives and washes it further in.

LETHBRIDGE (V.O.) My body catches each gust of the invisible directly. Each night and each day I feel its presence hovering and watching from yonder by the point. Floating, twenty feet above the sand as if perched in an invisible guard tower.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART FOUR: ‘PASSIVELY-ENACTED ENJOYMENT’ MINUTE TEN

We see, as Feio does through Hare’s eyes, as he sits staring at his laptop screen.

FEIO (V.O.) ‘The word is en-fleshed’. The fingers, the word-forming peripheries, feel… nothing, hardly even the touch of the keys.

FILM TWO: HARE PART THREE: AFTER THE ENCOUNTER: BEACH MINUTE TEN

We see Hare walking from right to left across a frame that is filled mainly with sand, sea and sky. As Hare passes, the camera lifts slowly into the air on a drone and follows him towards the lighthouse, keeping him at the bottom of the frame as he walks across the expanse of beach.

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART THREE: MADNESS: THE DUNES AND BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE TEN

Dowsing near Spine Rock in the moonlight, we see Lethbridge stop suddenly, awe-struck. He looks back and forth between a small set of rocks in front of him and the large Spine Rock to his right. He realises that it is a whale skeleton that is half- buried in the sand in front of him. He looks up towards the point (where he believes ‘his spirit’ to be watching) and smiles knowingly at it.

MINUTE ELEVEN

LETHBRIDGE (V.O.) Dear Fellows! This evening, in my melancholy, I was delivered of a great sign from the deep!

A giant whale, over forty feet in length, washed up on my beach, blowing great plumes into the air as it struggled in the heat. I raced down to inspect it and hauled seawater to cool its distress.

HARE’S TYPING WORDS For so many years I tried to face the realities FEIO (V.O.) ‘realities’

Lethbridge stands very much alone, next to the skull and the rib-cage of the buried skeleton.

HARE’S TYPING WORDS of South Africa rather than run from them no comment here on your decision to move to Aus, I know that it was down to Matty’s circumstances. You remember Nanna’s maid Petunia who had those gorgeous grandchildren who used to smile at us and beg for chappies?

Finally! I was joined by first one, then a few, then a great horde of natives, descending onto the beach from the dunes, screaming imponderable insights in their heathen tongue.

Remarkably, instead of attacking me, we were united in the common cause of saving this leviathan, in using all of our mortal bodily forces in trying to return it to the sea, a new fraternity to reorder Nature.

FEIO (V.O.) But the insides feel heavy again and the words seem to scrape somewhere behind the eyes as they are formed. But Wernicke’s Area in the Cerebral Cortex, where words are really formed… feels nothing.

Lethbridge kneels next to the skeleton, attempting to touch each part of it.

Rejoice, for I am saved! No sooner did the natives arrive, then they were gone, save for one dear fellow who has agreed to stay in my service. Having lived in Fort Frederick, he speaks a smattering of English. The whale blubber can be boiled down to sustain my oil lamp for months to come, while there is enough meat here for even longer, if we can just find a way to keep it in the heat.

HARE’S TYPING WORDS I put Gift through school and used to go hang out with him in Soweto and drink Black Labels and I even offered to pay paid his university fees. But the fucker the bugger got lazy and I stopped going to Soweto when I started feeling subtly threatened by his friends. It was small things… That’s just one story, but trust me FEIO (V.O.) ‘trust me’ HARE’S TYPING WORDS there’s more and eventually it felt just such a relief to get away from all that, to stop having to be constantly reminded of our… to walk this beach and pay attention to this country’s incredible natural beauty, FEIO (V.O.) ‘incredible natural beauty’ HARE’S TYPING WORDS rather than all its problems.

We hear ten beeps that denote the impending end of the tenth minute of the deep-enactment.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART FOUR: ‘PASSIVELY-ENACTED ENJOYMENT’ MINUTE ELEVEN

HARE’S TYPING WORDS Going through the twins’ facebook albums, I was amazed by how similar the beach on Rottnest Island looks to my one here, lighthouse and all! But I bet you don’t have beggars approaching you on the beach there, or have to worry that a (tik) meth addict is hiding behind the dunes waiting to mug you. (Which is why I am writing…)

FILM TWO: HARE PART THREE: AFTER THE ENCOUNTER: BEACH MINUTE ELEVEN

The drone shot continues to follow Hare towards the lighthouse.

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART THREE: MADNESS: THE DUNES AND BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE ELEVEN

We see Lethbridge on his hands and knees, pulling at a thicket of tangled roots on the edge of the dunes.

He appears to be wrestling with the bush itself, and eventually emerges with a knotted wye-shaped root which he pulls at to test. He binds the arms of the root to his wrists with smaller pieces of vine.

MINUTE TWELVE LETHBRIDGE (V.O.) This is a vindictive land. I will not return to my party, to toil against it as colonist, until I have penetrated it with my scientific and spiritual faculties, and delivered this knowledge to my brothers in London.

Hare stops writing and stares out of the window for a while. He then picks up Lethbridge’s letter and turns to its last page – where we see the same distinctive splotch of ink that Lethbridge is actually making in FILM THREE.

Lethbridge has attached a harness of rope around his chest, and is using it to drag the wooden box behind him, while his wrists are bound to his new dowsing rod, which makes it difficult to hold the oil lamp to light his way.

FEIO (V.O.) (Reads the words that are being written by Lethbridge in Film Three, slightly ahead of Lethbridge’s writing.)

‘The sprite is in me. I anticipate well the doubts in far away London – how do I know, ask the Gentlemen of the Guild? Is not the fact that you are reading this…’ Ah

His movement is weak and he appears to be going around in circles. Every now and then he stops, stands on his chest and peers out to sea as if expecting to see a boat, and then looks up to the sky.

Hare puts the letter down again and his hands return to the keyboard.

FEIO (V.O.) The record’s access to this letter is only through deep-enactment.

The frame freezes and the status bar re-winds to the moment when Hare was reading the letter. It is played over and over again in more and more zoomed detail, at first focusing on the words, but then shifting towards the ink splotch, which eventually fills the frame.

We hear eleven beeps that denote the impending end of the eleventh minute of the deep-enactment.

FEIO (V.O.) Cannot abandon… No need for methodological orthodoxy… but need to go back forward, just one more minute.

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FILM ONE: FEIO PART FOUR: ‘PASSIVELY-ENACTED ENJOYMENT’ MINUTE TWELVE

The frame freezes and fast-forwards to a moment when Hare is typing.

FILM TWO: HARE PART THREE: AFTER THE ENCOUNTER: BEACH MINUTE TWELVE

HARE’S TYPING WORDS I’m writing out of the blue, I know. Trust me, it’s out of the blue

We see Hare entering the compound and climbing the exterior stairs of the lighthouse apartment. The drone rises until it is level with Hare as he opens the door to enter. The camera then moves around the apartment and up to the lighthouse itself, before heading out to sea and settling with the horizon in the middle of the frame.

FEIO (V.O.) ‘out of the blue’

——— (This is also the first shot of FILM THREE)

HARE’S TYPING WORDS for me too. What does that even mean, ‘out of the blue’, is it out of the sea or the sky? Your offer for me to come over there and check out opportunities has never… been at the back of my mind for a while. But I didn’t think about it seriously, till now. {{{ Something happened today Something happened today. It’s a public holiday so there were more people than usual on the beach. I was metal-detecting happily along the beach and I met this this guy comes up to me while I was metal-detecting and gives me one helluva fright. Just as the thing was going ape-shit with the biggest find I have ever made. Don’t worry, I’m not leading up to another violent story of life in your homeland. But for me it was… }}}

The camera is on a drone, facing out to sea, the horizon level in the middle of the frame. The drone pulls the camera away from the horizon over the rocks until we see James T. Lethbridge appear, gazing out across the beach from atop a dune, an Englishman in 1820s clothing.

END

FILM THREE: LETHBRIDGE PART THREE: MADNESS: THE DUNES AND BEACH NEAR SPINE ROCK MINUTE TWELVE

It is daytime and we see Lethbridge dragging the chest to a spot on the dunes which is recognisably the same place where Hare and Hermanus had dug out the chest in FILM TWO. With a manic calm about him, he opens his chest and removes the letter that he has been writing. He dips his quill and writes these last sentences in increasingly messy scrawl, below the words that we have just heard him speak in the last voice-over.

LETHBRIDGE (V.O AND WRITING) Dear Brothers, I have found it.

As Lethbridge starts to write, he spills a splotch of ink that makes a distinctive shape on the page.

Now that my future is decided, I have dispatched my servant to Algoa Bay to send word of my success. He carries a note with strict instructions that the mail ship should anchor off the point on its way down to the Cape. They will send a boat to the beach to collect this letter, and I can only imagine the excitement and anticipation that will await its opening in London.

The sprite is in me. I anticipate well the doubts in far away London – how do I know, ask the Gentlemen of the Guild? Is not the fact that you are reading this proof enough?

The camera slowly moves away from the screen while Hare is still typing. As it starts moving, Hare deletes the entire passage in blue brackets above. The last thing we see is Hare typing the following words to replace it: But why the heck not!?

Finally, he replaces the letter in the small box underneath the tray, seals the chest and starts digging with his hands.

FEIO ‘why the heck not’

The camera lifts up on the drone, and flies directly over Lethbridge as he digs. It continues over Spine Rock, then the shallows and finally settles over the sea with the horizon in the middle of the frame.

We hear twelve beeps that denote the impending end of the twelfth minute of the deep-enactment. The last beep is sustained.

——— (This is also the first shot of FILM ONE)

FEIO (V.O.) What? No, can that be twelve minutes already? Extension? Yes… This body… Feels like Feio has an… I…

The camera is on a drone, facing out to sea, the horizon level in the middle of the frame. The drone pulls the camera away from the horizon, and in through the open sliding door of the lighthouse apartment.

END

Having left the laptop screen, the camera moves towards, and then through, the sliding door towards the sea, settling back on a level shot with the horizon in the middle of the frame.

——— (This is also the first shot of FILM TWO) The camera is on a drone, facing out to sea, the horizon level in the middle of the frame. The drone flies the camera away from the horizon and down to the beach near the lighthouse. We see Craig Hare, a white man in his forties, entering the frame and metal-detecting along the line between the sand and the sea.

END

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Film Credits

Page 254: Mikhael Subotzky WYE Study 14, 2015 21 × 31.5 cm Ink on paper Page 255: Mikhael Subotzky WYE Study 8, 2015 20.5 x 13.5 cm Graphite on paper Pages 256–257: Mikhael Subotzky WYE Study 16, 2015 21 x 29.5 cm Ink and graphite on paper Pages 258–259: WYE crew on set, 2015 Photo: Felix Seuffert

WYE A film in three parts by Mikhael Subotzky Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, with major support from Sebastian Louis, Brian and Gene Sherman, and Goodman Gallery.

Produced by Goodcop Directed by Mikhael Subotzky and Laurence Hamburger Produced by Laurence Hamburger Executive Producers Gene Sherman, Liza Essers, Mikhael Subotzky, Laurence Hamburger Director of Photography Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein Edited by Matthew Swanepoel Production Design John Nankin Sound Design and Music Adam Lieber Cast James T. Lethbridge John Nankin Craig Hare Antony Coleman Hermanus Hermanus Van Wyk Feio Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood Focus Puller and Additional Photography Felix Seuffert Sound Ivan Milborrow Art Director Ismaeel Solomon Colourist Nic Appostolli (Upstairs Post) Final Mix Rob Brinkworth (Resonate) Written By Mikhael Subotzky Additional Script-Writing Darrel Bristow-Bovey, Zandi Tisani Script Advisors Maria Baumann, Gwydion Beynon, John Nankin, Craig Higginson Production Management Matshepo Maja, Janine Williams Production Co-Ordinator Nonjabulo Lekhethoa Digital Imaging Technician Jo May Post-Production Supervisor Michelle Barrow (Priest) Camera Assistant Luke Gordon Gaffer Neo Potsane Props Maker Tim Hopwood Standby Props Andy Cassels Production Assistant Benito Carelsen Runners/Interns Jack Tamunotonte, Virgil Jacobs Whale Skeleton supplied and re-constructed by Greg Hofmeyr (Marine World) Production Assistant (Goodcop) Mbali Mthethwa

Subotzky Studio Caitlin Pieters Medeine Tribinevicius Chantelle Booysen Karina Polycarpo Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Gene Sherman Danielle Devery Michael Moran Emily Rolfe Camera Supplied By Media Film Services Catering By Fat Cats (Port Elizabeth) Special Thanks Tom Swartz Spinnaker B & B Diana Cilliers Zandi Tisani Denvor George (Mosaic Tourism) Henry Clapton (Treasure Quest Treasure) Shaun Franklin Lisa Wilter Anya Mendel Eve Mendel Michelle Nebergal Nina Miall Christopher Klatell Mark Godfrey

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Artist Biography

Mikhael Subotzky’s film, video and photographic works are concerned with the structures of narrative and representation, as well as the relationship between social storytelling and the formal contingencies of image making.

Subotzky’s first body of photographic work, Die Vier Hoeke (The Four Corners), was an in-depth study of the South African penal system. Umjiegwana (The Outside) and Beaufort West extended this investigation to the relationship between everyday life in postapartheid South Africa and the historical, spatial, and institutional structures of control. Beaufort West (Chris Boot, 2008) was Subotzky’s first monograph and the series was included in the exhibition New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2008).

The exhibition Retinal Shift was produced for the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2012 and toured South Africa’s major museums. Retinal Shift includes two large photographic and video installations that critically engage with the artist’s own ambivalence towards the processes of representation and image construction. Retinal Shift (Steidl, 2012) was published to accompany the exhibition.

Retinal Shift also includes Subotzky’s first major film installation, Moses and Griffiths 2012, which uses four screens to narrate the contrasting and conflicting institutional and personal histories of two seventy-year-old tour guides in the small South African town of Grahamstown. Moses and Griffiths has subsequently been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2013) Yale Art Gallery (New Haven, 2014) and Art Unlimited (Basel, 2014).

A third monograph, Ponte City (Steidl, 2014) is the product of a six-year collaboration with the British artist Patrick Waterhouse. This project focuses on a single 54-storey building that dominates the Johannesburg skyline. The building is cast as the central character in a myriad of interweaving narratives that, through photographs, commissioned texts, historical documents, and urban myths, chart the convoluted

histories of both the building and Johannesburg itself. The Ponte City exhibition, which consists of a single installation of thousands of photographs and documents, has been exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh, 2014), FoMU (Antwerp, 2014) and Le Bal (Paris, 2014). Excerpts from the series have been shown at the Liverpool (2012) and Lubumbashi (2013) Biennales, as well as the South African National Gallery (Cape Town, 2010). Ponte City won the 2015 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize.

Subotzky’s most recent body of work, Show ‘n Tell was initiated while on residency at the Musée MAC/VAL (Paris, 2013). Show ‘n Tell looks at the relationship between images, the various instruments of their construction, and both the politics and physiology of their reception. The works in the series use a variety of methods to explore the vicissitudes of perception and how the construction of images relates to the history and vulnerability of both their materiality and their narrative content. The installation Pixel Interface II, was the centerpiece of Show ‘n Tell, which was included in the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor.

Subotzky was born in 1981 in Cape Town, South Africa, and is currently based in Johannesburg.

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Contributors

Dr Gene Sherman AM is Chairman and Executive Director of Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

She was formerly Director and Proprietor of Sherman Galleries, representing major artists across Australia and the Asia-Pacific region (1986–2007). She is Adjunct Professor, UNSW Art & Design (formerly COFA); inaugural patron of the MAAS Centre for Fashion; a board member of the Australian Institute of Art History (2013); and a member of the Sydney Contemporary Advisory Council (2014). Dr Sherman is Co-Chair of the Tate Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee; a member of the International Association of Art Critics; and an Asialink Asia Literacy Ambassador. Dr Sherman’s awards include the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2003), Doctorate of Letters honoris causa (University of Sydney, 2008), Member of the Order of Australia (2010) and the B’nai B’rith award (2014).

Acknowledgements

Nina Miall is a curator at Carriageworks, Sydney, where her projects include Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance: 1980-1981 (2014) and 24 Frames Per Second (2015). With a B.A.Honours in Art History and Theory from the University of Sydney and a Masters in Contemporary Art from the Courtauld Institute London, Nina was Head of Public Programmes at London’s Royal Academy of Arts from 2002-2005, devising talks with artists such as David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons and Frank Auerbach. She went on to co-direct contemporary art gallery Haunch of Venison for six years, organising solo exhibitions by other international artists, before returning to Australia in 2012. Miall has lectured and written extensively on contemporary art, and is also a director of Future Perfect, a Singaporebased art gallery.

Gene Sherman and the SCAF team warmly thank the artist, Mikhael Subotzky, and his studio, particularly Medeine Tribinevicius, and Chantelle Booysen (before her).

We gratefully acknowledge the Goodman Gallery, and Sebastian Louis, who has pre-purchased an edition of WYE, for their generous commitment to Mikhael’s work and the SCAF project.

The following individuals have assisted with this project.

Thank you for all of your support: Nina Miall, whose contribution to this project has been significant and much appreciated; Nelson Meers Foundation, and Sam Meers, who continue to support SCAF’s Culture+Ideas programme with grace and generosity.

Our dedicated Patrons’ Circle Barry Sechos – what would we all do without Barry’s legal counsel and wise guidance?

I would like to extend a huge thank you to Gene and Brian Sherman, Danielle Devery, Michael Moran and the rest of the wonderful team at SCAF. Gene’s vast intellectual, philosophical and emotional support for this rollercoaster of a project will always be hugely appreciated. I would like to thank Sebastian Louis, Liza Essers, Laurence Hamburger and Maria Baumann for making this project possible and real. Thank you, for your invaluable contributions, to Nina Miall, Lara Koseff (and the rest of the staff at Goodman Gallery), Matshepo Maja (and everybody at GoodCop), Medeine Tribinevicius, Caitlin Pieters, Karina Polycarpo, Chantelle Booysen (and everybody who passes through Subotzky Studio), Mark Godfrey, Gwydion Beynon, John Nankin, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Hermanus van Wyk, Antony Coleman, Janine Williams, Matthew Swanepoel, Jane Alexander, Okwui Enwezor, Anya Mendel, Eve Mendel, Gideon Mendel, Darrel Bristow-Bovey, Craig Higginson, Simon and Catriona Mordant, Charles Green and Lyndell Brown, Oliver Hermanus, Shaun Franklin, Michelle Nebergall, Moeneeb Dalwai, Tristram Miall, and Eddy Nicholas Bekoma.

Mikhael Subotzky

Johnnie Walker (aka Joni Waka) who has long played an indispensable role assisting the SCAF team with international and Asia Pacific artists, particularly but not exclusively during their time in Sydney.

SCAF would like to acknowledge the contributions of Charlotte Bauer, William S. Burroughs, Judith Butler, J. M. Coetzee, Robert Hughes, David Malouf, Achille Mbembe, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Noël Mostert, Deborah Bird Rose, Edward S. Robertson, J. van Rooyen, William Wordsworth, and Galarrwuy Yunupingu.

Gene and the SCAF team are indebted to Brian Sherman for his hugely generous and unwavering support of SCAF from the start of the foundation in 2008. SCAF could not – and would not – exist without him.

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Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

Exhibition History

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) was established in April 2008 as a not-for-profit organisation to champion research, education and exhibitions of significant and innovative contemporary art from Australia, the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East.

SCAF works closely with creative practitioners in commissioning new work and developing exhibitions that energise and respond to the gallery’s four-part complex comprising a large exhibition area, mini ‘out-site’ space, versatile theatre annexe and Zen garden. Extensive projects are developed through partnerships with public art institutions at a regional, state and national level while broad public engagement with contemporary art is fostered through publishing and forum programmes. In addition, Sherman Visual Arts Residency (SVAR), located directly across the road from the gallery, offers a supportive environment and accommodation for visiting artists, filmmakers, architects, writers, curators and scholars. The experience of developing Sherman Galleries (1986– 2007) as a respected commercial and educational enterprise within the international art world underpins the Foundation at both a conceptual and practical level.

Dr Gene Sherman AM, SCAF Chairman and Executive Director, drew on her extensive international networks to establish the Foundation, and initiates and guides its activities in collaboration with an advisory board of respected peers: Andrew Cameron AM, Doug Hall AM, John Kaldor AM, Sam Meers, Akira Nakayama, Tomoko Nakayama, Dr Claire Roberts and Michael Whitworth.

SCAF is a member of CIMAM, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art.

2013

2008 Project 1

Project 16

Project 29

Ai Weiwei: Under Construction In partnership with Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney

Fugitive Structures 2013 / Andrew Burns: Crescent House In association with BVN Donovan Hill Olafur Eliasson: The cubic structural evolution project, 2004 Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

Collection+: Christian Thompson Curated by Alana Kushnir

Project 2

Jonathan Jones: untitled (the tyranny of distance) Project 3

Jitish Kallat: Aquasaurus

Mikhael Subotzky: WYE

Project 17

2009 Project 4

The View from Elsewhere In partnership with Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

Collection+: Chiharu Shiota Curated by Doug Hall AM Project 18

Feel & Think: A New Era of Tokyo Fashion In association with National Art School, Sydney

Project 5

Project 19

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA

Collection+: Sopheap Pich Curated by SCAF and Erin Gleeson 2014

Project 6

Charwei Tsai: Water, Earth and Air 2010

Project 20

Fugitive Structures 2014 / AR-MA: Trifolium In association with BVN Donovan Hill

Project 7

Project 21

Fiona Tan: Coming Home In association with National Art School, Sydney

Fugitive Structures 2014 / Tomahawk // Archer Breakspear: Poly In association with BVN Donovan Hill

Project 8

Brook Andrew: The Cell In association with Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane Project 9

Contemporary Art for Contemporary Kids In partnership with Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

Project 22

HOME: Chien-Chi Chang and Chen Chieh-jen In association with National Art School, Sydney Project 23

Collection+: Pinaree Sanpitak Curated by Jasmin Stephens

2011

2015

Project 10

Project 24

Yang Fudong: No Snow on the Broken Bridge

Shaun Gladwell: The Lacrima Chair

Project 11

Project 25

Dinh Q. Lê: Erasure

Collection+: Shaun Gladwell Curated by Dr Barbara Polla and Prof. Paul Ardenne In association with UNSW Galleries

Project 12

Tokujin Yoshioka: Waterfall

Project 26

2012 Project 13

Janet Laurence: After Eden Project 14

Alfredo Juan Aquilizan and Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan In-Habit: Project Another Country Project 15

Go Figure! Contemporary Chinese Portraiture In partnership with National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Yang Zhichao: Chinese Bible Curated by Dr Claire Roberts as part of Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection Curated by Suhanya Raffel In partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Project 27

Fugitive Structures 2015 / Sack and Reicher + Muller with Eyal Zur: Sway In association with BVN Architecture Project 28

Hugo Moline and Heidi Axelsen: Owner Occupy

266

2016 Project 30

267

For project details and touring schedule, visit sherman-scaf.org.au

Mikhael Subotzky: WYE Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 18 March – 21 May, 2016 SCAF Project 30 Published by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16–20 Goodhope Street Paddington NSW 2021 ABN 25 122 280 200 www.sherman-scaf.org.au © 2016 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Copyright in the text is held by the authors.

Copyright in the images is held by the artist unless otherwise indicated.

The material in this publication is under copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission from Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. Where applicable, every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and acknowledge the source material. Errors or omissions are unintentional.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is a not-forprofit organisation providing a platform for innovative visual artists primarily from Asia, Australia and the Pacific Rim. All donations over $2 are tax deductible and will support our exhibition, educational, public and artist-in-residence programmes.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Mikhael Subotzky : WYE / Mikhael Subotzky; Nina Miall (essayist); Gene Sherman (contributor); prepared under the direction of Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.

ISBN: 9780994417411 (hardback) Subjects: Subotzky, Mikhael.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation–Exhibitions.

Art, Modern–21st Century–Exhibitions.

Artists–South Africa.

Video Art. Other Creators/Contributors: Sherman, Gene.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, issuing body.

Dewey Number: 770 Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Chairman, Executive Director Dr Gene Sherman AM General Manager Danielle Devery Exhibitions Manager Michael Moran Communications and Events Manager Sophie Holvast Collections Manager Aaron de Souza Assistant Curator Emily Rolfe Coordinator – Programmes and Publications Rebecca McLean-Chan Executive Assistant to Gene Sherman Hannah Brunskill Exhibition and catalogue management Danielle Devery and Michael Moran Advisory Board Andrew Cameron AM, Doug Hall AM, John Kaldor AM, Sam Meers, Akira Nakayama, Tomoko Nakayama, Dr Claire Roberts, Michael Whitworth Media Consultancy [art]iculate Digital Media Consultant Ross Colebatch Partnerships Consultant Bambi Blumberg Design Mark Gowing Studio Editor Julie Rose Proofreader Kate Scardifield Typeset in Marr Sans Printed in Australia by Ligare

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation 16–20 Goodhope Street, Paddington Sydney NSW 2021 Australia ABN 25 122 280 200 sherman-scaf.org.au

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