A IC FR A
: ON G TI UR AC SB TR NE BS N A A D H N O A J
BLOM HLOBO NITEGEKA RHODE
A IC FR A
: ON G TI UR AC SB TR NE BS N A A D H N O A J
ART BASEL | MIAMI BEACH 6-9 DECEMBER 2012
At Art Basel 43 Stevenson presented Africa and Abstraction, which looked at three artists from Africa who explored abstraction in painting. The project spanned three generations and three continents: Ernest Mancoba was born in 1904 in Johannesburg, and worked most of his life in Europe. Born in Nigeria in 1966, Odili Donald Odita lives and works in Philadelphia. The youngest of the three, Zander Blom, lives in Johannesburg, and was born in 1982. The current project, conceived for Art Basel Miami Beach, forms a second chapter of Africa and Abstraction. It zooms in on a very particular locale and time: the city of Johannesburg in the present day. Because of the twin forces of South Africa’s isolation under apartheid, and a need to process politics and identity through the prism of art, abstraction was slow to gain traction with South African artists. In the last few years, however, we have witnessed a minor renaissance of abstraction, with artists like Blom, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Wim Botha, Nicholas Hlobo, Nandipha Mntambo, Serge Alain Nitegeka, Penny Siopis and Kemang Wa Lehulere all exploring abstraction to varying degrees in their otherwise markedly diverse practices. Johannesburg in particular seems like fertile ground for abstract idioms. Nitegeka – who was born in Burundi and moved to Johannesburg in 2003 – speaks fondly of the city: Jo’burg’s industrial smell carries with it the energy, rhythm and vibe of the city that goes a long way to inspire workmanship and more … The long and broad highways, complex flyovers, elaborate use of cast concrete on roads and skyscrapers, and the grid layout of the city centre … I like structure, especially when it is rational and beautiful. In the interview published here, Blom writes: ‘I live in Johannesburg because I want to make work that feeds off the energy of this city.’ The same is true for Hlobo. Both rarely travel, in large part because they need the madness of Johannesburg to keep them sane. The studios of Nitegeka, Blom and Hlobo are all within a few miles of each other. Robin Rhode, on the other hand, left Johannesburg to settle in Berlin. Yet he still makes the majority of his photographic and video work in Johannesburg, on walls not far from the studios and homes of the other three artists. Like them, he points to the energy of Johannesburg as an essential fuel for his work – spanning both the performativity for which he is best known and the recurrent thread of abstraction that runs through his work, surfacing in its purest form in the paintings from 2007 on pages 66-71, which have not previously been exhibited.
BLOM
ZANDER BLOM was born in 1982 in Pretoria, and lives in Johannesburg. His first US solo show, Place and Space, hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design, opened in Savannah, Georgia, in 2011 and travelled to Atlanta in 2012. In addition to Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg, solo shows have taken place at Galerie van der Mieden, Antwerp, and 5x6x9, Berlin. Group shows include The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989 at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (2011); Ampersand, Daimler Contemporary, Berlin (2010); Why Not?, Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin (2009); and .ZA: Young art from South Africa, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy (2008). Publications include The Drain of Progress (2007) and The Travels of Bad (2009); a catalogue raisonnÊ of Blom’s paintings to date, Paintings: Volume I, will be published by Stevenson in early 2013.
that I work very intuitively and I just didn’t feel so colourful this year. I gradually let colour slip from my palette while something new was brewing inside me. One day an idea had formed in my mind. I suddenly had this burning desire to make incredibly violent paintings. Unsentimental compositions that look like they could swirl off the canvas at any moment and take a limb or end your life with complete disregard, compositions for which the existence of humanity is of no consequence. Black and white was very suitable for this direction – no frills, no decoration, nothing to distract or disguise; just pure, unadulterated, merciless form. I’m slowly moving beyond that space now and you’ll see primary and perhaps even secondary colours starting to re-appear. The wild beast that is colour is already threatening to take over. But for now I’m keeping a very close eye on it.
ZANDER BLOM INTERVIEWED BY ODILI DONALD ODITA
ODO: I have seen paintings of yours where you have used colour more liberally within the current style/format you have now, but I think the reduction to one colour or no colour at all with black and white on linen is very effective. What brought you to this place – to using only black and white paint on linen?
ZB: By the end of 2011 my paintings had become exceptionally colourful and I came to feel that I had achieved what I wanted to at that time. It was a question of control and intent. If I was going to use colour, I needed more control and a clear direction of where to go next. I realised that I had to take a step back and work on the skeletal structure of my developing language, if I was to move forward as a painter. So I simplified in order to expand, mapping out the landscape and finding new territory. The idea was that I would return to colour later, while developing other aspects of my painting. Since that last body of work, colour has been gnawing at me, wanting back in. Only very recently have I given it a small gap to re-enter my work. I imagine that working in monochrome is similar to writing and playing compositions on a piano, while working in colour would be like composing for an orchestra. That’s one side of the story. The other side is
Your paint mark and brushstroke can be graceful and elegant, as much as they can be harsh and edgy like a punk rock number. Are your paint marks iconographic, symbolic, metaphoric, are they experiential events, or are they just marks? And are they figural in any way? Sometimes I see figures, sometimes portraits, in your paintings.
The way I see it is that, in the last hundred and some years, painting has exploded. It has been blasted to shit, and currently the debris of that demolition is hovering about in space. It hangs like a dust cloud expanding and contracting, particles dancing around each other, perpetually threatening to re-form. Therefore the best, the only place for me to start is by painting the formations of shards that are floating around. New things seem to want to form, but it’s a 7
“Unlike people like Picasso or Bacon who followed painting from figuration towards abstraction, I’m following it from abstraction towards something else. I’m dealing with the results of their innovations and my own time.”
long process; nothing solid in the way of traditional landscapes, portraits and figures has emerged so far. While I am very interested in those classic painting subjects/genres, unlike people like Picasso or Bacon who followed painting from figuration towards abstraction, I’m following it from abstraction towards something else. I’m dealing with the results of their innovations and my own time. Perhaps it is circular and will simply move back to figuration, or perhaps I will spend my life painting the dust cloud, not living long enough to see it settle into new worlds. I like to think that it’s at least the beginning of something very exciting, as though we’ve just experienced the big bang of painting or image-making, and it’s only really getting started. It is that possibility of discovery that keeps me excited. My marks are the result of an event of which the purpose is to create an interesting or compelling composition. The focus is not on the painter or the action but rather on the painting, the object, the image. The act of painting is not a performance; it is simply work – doing what needs to be done to obtain a desired result. The process needs to stay open and experimental in order to work successfully, and it needs to stay interesting and exciting in order to keep my interest. Like a live performance or jam session by a good punk or jazz band. I set up a scenario in which the outcome cannot be controlled but I have a rough idea of its possibilities, and am armed with my wits, knowledge and experience. It’s about retaining a space of unpredictability, and keeping a curious balance between the intentional and unintentional. Francis Bacon used to call this way of working ‘trapping accidents’. The important difference between a live performance or jam session by a band is that bands
generally do jam sessions to practise their songs and come up with new things which they then polish and take to a studio where they record all the various parts separately for each song and then mix and cut and edit it to perfection. Instead I record the whole session in the studio. Then I choose the compositions that are successful, they get put into the body of work as they are, and the rest is discarded. The reason I work this way round is because I want the energy of the live session. I want to catch the event as it happens, to trap the composition as it is performed, instead of emulating the event. It seems more alive, real and raw. I find it more exciting and rewarding to work in an intuitive way, as opposed to planning every single element and then executing it. It’s like the difference between a brushstroke and a realistic rendering of a brushstroke. I prefer that the mark is the event and not a simulation of an event. This differs from someone like Jackson Pollock, who was interested in the pure expression of the unconscious mind, or in other words an uncensored catharsis. I am very interested in imagemaking, so where a Pollock might be equally about the event and the result, my work is more focused on the result, which crystallises into an image. I make choices 8
for the sake of the success of the picture, not for the sake of a catharsis. So you can say my paintings are like live recordings, but the fact that they are live recordings isn’t really what’s important about them; they have to be compelling songs or compositions. I want my compositions to have a powerful visceral effect, and to bring forth all sorts of imagery or sensations. I also want it to be a concrete image, not just bits of lace, as Bacon called Pollock’s work. I am coming from a place that is more fractured than where Bacon came from but more controlled than Pollock, and for what I do to work given the space that I operate in, every mark needs to be alive and have its own character. I want a composition to appear as a life form/s unto itself, and as if it had appeared on the canvas of its own accord. I like to think that if you take care of every mark, the composition will take care of itself.
I can go on and on about the aesthetic experience of listening to some rock ’n’ roll album or Bach composition, in the same way people might go on about paintings. You could, for example, compare a sharp jagged and violent line in a painting to an erratic guitar riff played through a range of distortion and effects pedals, or a really clear delicate curved line on canvas to a clean perfectly recorded arrangement of a couple of notes on a piano. There are endless ways to compare and relate music and visual art to one another. I have a little music room at home with some guitars, microphones, keyboards and an electronic drum kit. They are all hooked up to a soundcard/ audio-interface that’s connected to my computer. So it’s a very basic makeshift studio setup that allows me to record everything I do. Whenever I have people over I’ll rope any willing participant into playing. I record long sessions on my own and then listen to them while I’m painting. And when I’m not listening to my own recordings, I’m listening to a lot of classical stuff like Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Liszt, Beethoven, Satie, etc, and of course classics of another kind like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Nirvana, to mention only a few favourites.
I really enjoyed looking at your project The Travels of Bad. How much play does music have in your painting, or how do you bring your interest in music and its energy to the forefront of your painting?
I had a lot of fun making that project. My art practice is really like a child living out the ultimate fantasy. I spend my days making paintings and recording music. When I grew up, a painting in a book by Picasso or Bacon was as mind-blowing to me as Nirvana’s Bleach album. I have a deep appreciation for both visual art and music, and I have a strong desire to produce my own works in both fields, although I’m not interested in the entertainment/spectacle aspect of music, but in recorded sound. Often thinking of approaching a problem in music will help me find a solution in art, and vice versa.
In the previous catalogue, Africa and Abstraction, you tell a very insightful story of making art at home and on holiday with your artist mother and siblings. In an open and organic manner, all of you would make wall paintings, art and craft objects and all sorts of things together. You are very prolific in your painting practice, where you seem to let it all hang out; similarly so with your photocollage and photo-maquette projects. How much does the initial experience of creating with your mother and
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a mountain of trash behind the work I’m doing today. Just like I have hours and hours of recorded music on my hard drives that will never see the light of day because it just isn’t good enough. The frustration lies in coming very close to getting something right and then just not reaching that point or stepping over it. But the more you make, the easier it becomes to not get too attached or disheartened by failure, and to try again. The more you do, the more you can do. I don’t destroy as much of my efforts as someone like Bacon. I side more with Picasso who said that the connoisseur of painting should be separated from the painter. As with music, every take is not going to have the same magic. But there is also no point in editing to the degree that your output slows to a trickle. It’s not difficult to discern between works that cut it and works that don’t; anything beyond that is not for me to decide.
siblings underscore the nature of your current painting practice? Do you align yourself with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Martin Kippenberger, Mike Kelley, Sigmar Polke and Carolee Schneemann, who seemed to work with no line clear line or distinction between life and art? Do you ever feel the need to edit your work, and how does self-reflection play a part in this?
My mother is responsible for teaching me to make, not to sit around and talk endlessly or think about making to the point where it becomes counterproductive. You can always destroy something you’ve made but you can’t learn or benefit from something you didn’t make. Making is also thinking, because it’s an exercise in problem-solving and improvisation. Making is also discovering because it never comes out exactly the way you planned it. If you can see that as the gift that it is and not as a setback, then you are in a position to act on it and use it to your advantage. Making is also humbling because one is constantly faced by and reminded of one’s own limitations. People may think I let it all hang out because I have been quite prolific, but it’s not true. For every successful composition that makes it out of the house, there is at least one failure that stays behind and gets destroyed. Then there are the years that I painted before I started showing any of the results – there is
Through stylistic turn, you are engaging artifice and theatricality to a great degree. Your work moves slyly between high and low art. Style as cliché is also used skillfully in your work, such as your use of Informel painting, as much as the early 1990s ‘just pathetic’ aesthetic. How aware are you of these things, and how much of a vehicle is style for you in your work?
Some things I’m aware of, but for each thing I’m aware of I’m sure there are at least a hundred others that I’m not. I’m not sure if I know anything about the 1990s pathetic aesthetic in art, but I do know a bit about punk rock and grunge from the 1980s and 1990s. I like things that are awkward and just don’t feel completely right. Things that give you a fuckedup feeling in your stomach just looking at them.
“I like things that are awkward and just don’t feel completely right. Things that give you a fucked-up feeling in your stomach just looking at them.” 10
It’s great when something can have that kind of power. Sometimes I use clichés and things that I personally find vulgar or ridiculous, because it can serve some kind of purpose, or just to excite and surprise myself. One day I picked up two books at a secondhand bookshop which really sparked my interest - one by Taschen on contemporary art from the 1980s featuring work by Kippenberger, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter etc, and the other on Charles Saatchi’s art collecting from New York in the 1980s – Jonathan Lasker, Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach and Ashley Bickerton, among others. I was about 18 or 19 at the time, and I couldn’t understand the work at all – art always seemed such serious business to me, and I was like: Are these guys kidding? What the fuck is this crap? What trip are these dudes on? They might as well have been from another planet. And then I read Bickerton’s interview in the Saatchi book and a couple of things he said stuck with me:
perspective freed me from feeling that I had to make these perfect immaculate and incredible artworks, and it made me realise that any aesthetic choice has value. And there is place in this world for any kind of voice. I had a similar reaction when I saw Raymond Pettibon’s work a couple of years later; I actually discovered bands like Black Flag and Sonic Youth through his art. That kind of thing was like a virus that entered my system and made me realise how one can play with styles and aesthetics, and that art doesn’t necessarily have to be a super-serious super-human affair. I realised only then how much humour and ugliness there had been in art through the ages, and how it’s become inaccessible through time, and erased or disinfected by academia. I realised how funny Picasso’s works must have been at the time they were made, before they entered the serious pantheon of art and ‘Modern Masters’. He was taking the piss all the time. Take away the veil of historical importance and just look at the stuff. It’s funny and grotesque and dangerous and violent and pathetic and vulnerable and happy and macho and deprived and sad and tragically ugly … and beautiful. What’s equally funny is that what created such a strong repulsion in me then, is so beautiful to me today. I went off on a tangent there, but yes, you may choose to use an aesthetic or stylistic approach for no other reason than that you like it or it repulses you or it’s funny or it’s outside your window or it’s a challenge to execute. Either way every stylistic choice or cultural quote is a signifier with specific connotations and its own value, to be used however you please like colours in a pack of pencils.
I see an explosion of empty vessels into which we can pour all sorts of delusion, scattered about every dark little corner of every exhibition space. When you empty out an object or an image to such a degree, it becomes open to a multitude of interpretations, and so we can inject into it any sort of escapist desire or hyperbolic theoretical promise we want to wallow in … I’m just kicking the great big, corpulent cellulitic body of art as it lays there in its deathbed, and creating some sort of perverse poetry out of the whole thing, I guess. I’m not sure I understood it completely at the time or even if I do today, but I liked the way it sounded. It was punk and it was contemporary art and I never thought the two could live together. Bickerton’s
Your work has a keen sense of the history of painting, and of art. How do you understand or engage the history of
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“The history of art is like a massive dictionary of formulae, equations, recipes, of previous approaches and solutions to situations in art of the past. Nothing comes from nothing, and nothing exists in a vacuum.”
abstraction in your work, and equally, how much are you engaging the real (ie the real world)?
The history of art is like a massive dictionary of formulae, equations, recipes, of previous approaches and solutions to situations in art of the past. Nothing comes from nothing, and nothing exists in a vacuum. Every type of mark-making or compositional device or idea or concept or context learnt or understood is a potential reference and a tool to be utilised in some way – quoted, interpreted, distorted, manipulated, even ignored or rejected in order to assist me towards solving the elusive and persistent problem of making paintings for myself for today. An obscure detail has the potential to send my own practice in a completely new direction, while whole epochs may be ignored or rejected depending on what I’m interested in at any given time. As for the real world, most of it is out of my control. But the bit that I can control, like what environment I live in, how my house/studio looks, the books I read, how I work – those choices are made knowing that they will automatically influence my work. I subscribe to Tate’s Podcasts and not long ago I watched one which was about an installation by Doug Aitken. In it there was a clip of Jack White saying that if you live next to a factory, there is no way that your work won’t be influenced by that factory. I completely agree. So if you want to be influenced by a factory, go live next to one, or, if you have to, inside one. I live in Johannesburg because I want to make work that feeds off the energy of this city. My studio is chaotic, because a chaotic environment is conducive to a particular kind of process. The results are thus directly influenced by my choices
in life. This method is so effective that I don’t even copy images directly from references anymore. I just stick the references all over the house and scatter them all over the floors knowing that they enter my consciousness, get interpreted and distorted and somehow end up in the work. So of course I’m influenced by the real world and the things in it that are beyond my control, but within the real world I build a smaller world in which I set up scenarios to get the desired result from myself. I’m essentially a chimp in my own experiment, manipulating myself and my environment as far as I can in order to produce the best work I can. Where are you taking yourself and your viewer in your new work?
I’m putting one foot in front of the other, taking it step by step, allowing the work to develop in whatever direction it needs to go. At this moment, I’m still on this black and white trip, but colour is slowly moving back in. I’ve also started using Pollock-like drips, and exploring what Clement Greenberg called ‘overall painting’ – something I thought was a cop-out 12
in terms of composition for years and completely discarded as an option, only to subsequently try it as a starting point, and it opened up a lot of possibilities. I’m increasingly using palette knives and sticks instead of brushes and sculpting with oil straight from the tube. And I’m going through paint like a mad man. On the big works I can end up using over 30 large tubes of oil paint on one work. And because the sculpted areas have to be so perfect, sometimes I can only use half a tube because of the consistency, and the way the paint comes out of the tube is unpredictable. I’ve also started making compositions in all-white; they have a very eerie and alien quality to them, while being quite soft and celestial at the same time. I’m also doing these works that have a sort of numerical feel, almost very ‘made for the white cube’ yet with strong anti-compositional feeling to them. To end off I want to talk about what makes painting so great. I walked to the corner store in my neighbourhood recently, covered in black paint. The man at the till asked me what I do for a living. I said that I’m a painter, to which he responded: ‘Oh, Picasso number two!’ Take that same guy and try to explain some performance piece or installation or purely conceptual art piece. If he’s polite he’ll tell you that he doesn’t get it, and if he’s not, he’ll tell you to fuck off. That’s the beauty of painting. Everyone has some frame of reference for it and everyone can access it on some level. It’s been around for so long that the language is relatively universal. So much of contemporary art is defensive and pretends to be beyond comprehension for ordinary people. So much of contemporary art is accompanied by long texts of justification. Photography, as Susan Sontag notes in her extensive essays on the subject,
is very guilty; conceptually driven practices obviously so too. I’m pretty guilty myself. But with painting it seems you can be as conceptual about it as you want but your own drivel generally remains somewhat in the background. This takes the pressure off, so you don’t feel like you have to try and be the smartest guy in the room. You can really relax, stay at home and focus on the object. It’s very liberating. Painting has freed me from the need to justify my practice and allows me, on a daily basis, to learn new things about myself and the world. This interview took place by email in October/November 2012.
Odili Donald Odita’s paintings were included in the previous exhibition/catalogue, Africa and Abstraction.
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Untitled 2012 Oil on linen 240 x 180cm 1.318
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Untitled 2012 Oil on linen 198 x 120cm 1.320 Facing page Untitled 2012 Oil on linen 260 x 177cm 1.319
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Untitled 2012 Oil on linen 240 x 177cm 1.315
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Facing page left Untitled 2012 Oil and graphite on linen 25 x 31cm 1.310
Above Untitled 2012 Oil and graphite on linen 32 x 44cm 1.312
Facing page middle Untitled 2012 Oil and graphite on linen 44 x 32cm 1.311
Right Untitled 2012 Oil on linen 122 x 93cm 1.317
Facing page right Untitled 2012 Oil on linen 44 x 32cm 1.305
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HLOBO
NICHOLAS HLOBO was born in Cape Town in 1975, and lives in Johannesburg. He has a B Tech degree from the Wits Technikon, Johannesburg (2002). Solo exhibitions have taken place at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (2011); in the Level 2 Gallery at Tate Modern, London (2008), and at the Boston ICA as part of the Momentum series (2008), among other institutions. In 2011 he showed newly commissioned work on ILLUMInations, the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale; his work also appeared in Venice on The World Belongs to You, works from the Pinault Collection at the Palazzo Grassi, and the Future Generation Art Prize exhibition at the Palazzo Papadopoli. Other notable group exhibitions include the 18th Biennale of Sydney, All Our Relations (2012); La Triennale – Intense Proximity at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Touched, the Liverpool Biennial (2010); the third Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008); and Flow at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2008). He was the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art 2009, and the Rolex Visual Arts Protégé for 2010/11, working with Anish Kapoor as his Mentor.
Yes, I would say so. When I was a child, I was called an artist even before I knew what an artist was.
NICHOLAS HLOBO INTERVIEWED BY HANS ULRICH OBRIST
Who called you an artist?
My fellow pupils at school because I was always drawing. I was the one asked to draw on the blackboard and so forth. I would draw pumpkins and cats and so on, but it eventually became more serious. Whenever I had spare time or during lunch breaks I would always be focusing on sketches.
HUO: How did you come to art? Was there some kind of an epiphany?
NH: It was a long process. When I was younger in school I was very interested in music, and at some point I even thought of going into the film industry. I have some experience with set building and I had even gone to several auditions. From my memory as a child I used to draw and illustrate in class, so I think it’s something that is inherent, and later in my life I decided to go and study art. Eventually I had found my way.
Where does your catalogue raisonné start? I think it’s interesting that there is student work, and then usually there is a certain point or artwork where the student work ends and the ‘real’ work starts. For you, where did this epiphany start? Which was the work where you found your language?
I would say my mother. In terms of the art world, I always run away from mentioning any heroes, as my heroes have really been at home. I was raised to believe in myself and to look at myself. However, something of great inspiration for me was when I went to see the 2nd Johannesburg biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor. I found myself being impressed by William Kentridge, Steve McQueen, and many artists that I didn’t know anything about then.
I believe I found my language while studying fine art, in 2001. I was doing my third year. It was the body of work I produced that year which was selected for a show that celebrated democracy, [curated] by Tumelo Mosaka. The exhibition was A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa, funded by Sondela, and it opened in New York at the Brooklyn Museum and travelled to other venues in the United States before coming to South Africa the following year. I started exploring unconventional materials and using stitching as a technique, as an addition to the stories I was telling. Of course it was in 2006, when I had my first solo exhibition at Michael Stevenson, that I really introduced myself to the art world.
So I suppose that was sort of an epiphany?
From the beginning you have used Xhosa as a language
So as you started to study art, who were your heroes?
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having the materials say something. My process is one of unravelling a tapestry, mending it, cutting it up, weaving or knitting together.
for your titles. It’s an important aspect of your work – can you talk about it?
My work and its subjects are anchored in my South African identity. I constantly look at myself and what it means to be me and to belong to this part of the world … the nationality I feel I belong to, being South African, and how it relates to the world. I’m telling a story about all my identities, so I use the language. It’s not the first time it is used; I am retelling it as though a dancer or musician where you need to find the voice and the movement in order to fit into this big group telling the story with your own interpretation. The use of Xhosa is about the process of trying to rediscover and understand this language. For example, if one were to ask me to go into detail about my work in Xhosa, I don’t have a good enough vocabulary. I prefer to talk about my work in English. The languages and cultures are constantly evolving. English is still very predominant and most artists use it to title their works. It is a language that continues to be bolder and bolder and many cultures are taking it in. When I was still studying, I realised I didn’t know Xhosa as well as I should.
I saw a piece yesterday and was thinking it was almost like a drawing in space, like a three-dimensional drawing. Everything you do seems to be connected to drawing …
When I was a student I was introduced to drawing, and I’ve used it always … I believe everything to be a drawing. In fact my drawings aren’t often created using traditional materials – I have made drawings with a knife, for example. You could think of soldiers in a war drawing on the ground with a knife. I regard drawing – even using charcoal – as a violent act. The surface is very pure and calm, and you stab that peacefulness and scar the surface by making that mark. I work myself through the South African maze leaving traces or lines as I go through … whether those lines are physical images or whether they are just imagined. We leave traces however we can – some we can see, some we cannot. Writers of history are making marks; people’s views are just marks and the laws are about drawing lines, or dismantling those lines to separate or unify.
Another part of your vocabulary is the use of ribbons – many kilometers of ribbon that you weave into sculptures. It’s now your signature material. How did
Do you draw every day? Is it a daily practice?
you discover this material?
I sketch in words. I think if I were to rediscover myself, maybe I would go into writing. I find myself to be more curious about words because most words relate to objects.
At first I wanted to paint, and then I discovered that I didn’t want to paint at all. When I was an art student I saw there was a huge pool of materials you could use to convey meaning, and I enjoyed using more tactile materials. I find paint to be laden with baggage and to be very limiting. I like using metaphors and
So it’s actually appropriate that we are doing this interview in a library.
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“When I was an art student I saw there was a huge pool of materials you could use to convey meaning ... I like using metaphors and having the materials say something. My process is one of unravelling a tapestry, mending it, cutting it up, weaving or knitting together.”
Yes. I don’t read much but I find myself collecting spines – I’m fascinated by the idea of books and how people archive their thoughts, how little is put there and how much is missing … Do you write yourself?
I believe my works are pieces of writing. So you write in space?
a drawing, it’s my diary. I’m possessive about it – those are my sketches and my scrolls. It’s to help me find an idea. I keep many sketchbooks, and when I forget something I know it’s in one of the books. It’s about keeping some ideas on the wall.
Yes. I write with objects, and sketch with words. Eventually those words get translated into objects. It’s a very common, conventional way of approaching a drawing. It’s something that resembles an idea about an object, of what it should look like. I don’t know if we have the image of the Visual Diary here, but I feel that when drawing with words you don’t reveal everything.
Does the computer play a role in your process at all?
No, in that sense I’m very old-fashioned. I believe in the power of my mind and in my fingers. I am not against computers as such, nor do I feel threatened by them, but I enjoy employing a childlike approach. A child is not from the digital age, a child is archaic in that sense. A child is one who just dreams and looks around at what is happening.
This Visual Diary is a very large work from 2008. I was looking at it in your catalogue last night – it’s beautiful. Can you tell me about this work?
It’s a sort of sketchbook, made of stitching and drawing. There is more text and writing than sketches actually.
The childhood thing is interesting. In an interview And what is the writing?
with Joost Bosland, you said childhood was the best time of your life.
Several things. I think the idea grew when I was in my old studio. When an idea came I would run to write quickly on the wall. Keeping the diary on the canvas was a way of preserving all those thoughts, all those notes that I’d need to remember at some point. Some people in galleries said they were drawings. But it isn’t
True. Children tend to fantasise and make things that do not exist, and you believe in them. I think the world viewed that way is more beautiful; you are not tarnished with the realities of living. As a child you think life is beautiful. It’s like a game, and each 27
minute is an adventure. When you’re older you realise how hard it is, that most things don’t come easily and you have to work hard for what you need. When you’re a child you expect everything to be there, there’s a high level of innocence. Adults tend to have façades and it can be very pretentious.
their ball-and-claw – America and Europe had it – but in South Africa, that was a particular style, it was very popular. It’s furniture that makes reference to furniture design in this country, and someone who is not South African would not get the point or the association. I am making references to the history of design in this country but also the idea of sitting – the concept of sitting down on things. Whatever you feel is embarrassing or not to be spoken about, you slip under the carpet, sit on it and squash it down.
The writer Robert Louis Stevenson said art is like playing, but playing with the seriousness of children.
Yes. And I can never be a child, but I like to try to imagine what it’s like. When you’re older people might think that you’ve gone mad, which is also interesting.
In this piece, Ndimnandi Ndindodwa, the sofa or the piece of furniture is connected to another material you use very often which is leather.
You’re writing in space, not only with drawings and
Actually it’s rubber. I mean, there is some leather, but it’s predominantly rubber. It’s the inner tyre from the wheels of cars, a material that is becoming redundant in South Africa. In most parts of the western world they are already nonexistent. It was once an organic material, which became synthetic. I feel cars are one of the things that show how we, as man, have evolved. Automobiles are more about men than women in this day. In this country it is a way of showing one’s wealth or achievements. It becomes a status symbol. It’s a play with these ideas.
stitching, but also with very physical objects which are like altered ready-mades. You often use colonial furniture, colonial architecture and design. There is the colonial chair, for example. And in Iqinile, Ikhiwane and Bhaxa (2006) there is a sofa. How do you choose these ready-mades?
I look at all my identities – my ethnicity, my gender, my age, my cultural identity. I look at the things that built this country into what it is. This is the South African style of ball-and-claw. Many countries have
One thing I was curious about is the notion of
“Wherever you go and introduce yourself to people, most people tend to ask about politics: ‘Do you still have apartheid?’, etc. There’s an invisible backpack that follows you; sometimes you’re conscious of it, sometimes you’re not.”
performance. We have spoken about sketches and objects, but what about performance, which you do and which is very present in your books? When did that start?
My first performance was called Igqirha Lendlela (2005). It’s a reference to a folk song by Miriam Makeba. As a sculpture or as a performance, it looks at South 28
African cultural baggage. Wherever you go and introduce yourself to people, most people tend to ask about politics: ‘Do you still have apartheid?’, etc. There’s an invisible backpack that follows you; sometimes you’re conscious of it, sometimes you’re not; sometimes it’s heavy, sometimes it’s not. You know, dung beetles, once they have found dung, they roll it back together – it’s this idea of movement. I am interested in looking at language, how rich it is ... It studies nature, the tiniest creatures. We don’t have to look at huge creatures in order to learn – even small creatures can teach us a thing or two.
You said that performances are sculptures in motion. That is true for most of the performances, then you did Ungamqhawuli in 2008. That’s actually a very still sculpture.
The line or plot that I’m following seems to be most evident in my solo exhibitions at Michael Stevenson. The first was Izele and the second was Kwatsityw’iziko. The first was about birth – someone has given birth, or something has been added to the number that was there. And in my second exhibition, there was an installation about why we have birth in the first place. So there is this line that I follow through these exhibitions. This performance, Ungamqhawuli, explored the idea of a child who is now growing up.
And then you took off with performance. There were seven. Can you tell me about Dubula (2007)?
That was at Extraspazio at Rome. All the webs looked at the idea of representing the body. If you allow the body to give some life to the sculpture …
The sculptures are your children?
In a sense, yes. This is about a child growing up – the idea of exploring, wanting to grow, perhaps in wisdom, intentions or spirituality. The child is used as a metaphor; it’s about elevating one’s self, to be above the world, to have a different vision of the world. It’s not about solely using the eyes, but using the other senses that tend to be lazy because of having the eyes.
You can activate the sculpture? Like Franz West, the Austrian sculptor, he would say the body activated the sculpture.
Yes. The title Dubula makes reference to all sorts of things, such as perceptions around the black male body. The title means to blossom, explode or erupt. There is this appendage that is attached around the genital area. It almost becomes an expansion of the penis. It becomes sexualised in a way, and at the same time not. I thought about Rome, I thought about the colours and the history of Rome, and the games that took place in the Coliseum, and how people came from various parts of the world to be a spectacle — to fight to the death and to be heroes.
Hearing and smelling …
Yes. I was meditating during the piece and I fell asleep which was one of the intentions. It reminded me of my little brother when we would climb trees at home and he would fall asleep up there. And we would try to wake him up without him falling off the tree. It’s about removing and separating oneself from the environment in which one belongs, but still remaining part of it. 29
It’s about setting a table.
You would find works in progress for La Triennale, Intense Proximity, curated by Okwui Enwezor, and for the 18th Sydney Biennale, All Our Relations.
Sometimes you perform this piece, and sometimes
And how do you see Johannesburg? I was reading last
it’s someone else?
night about how the city is so connected to violence and
And what about Deka?
inextricably linked to a darker history …
What’s interesting is that I have never done this performance myself, others have.
I find it to be a very inspiring city. It has a lot of energy. Apart from the violence, I find it to be a place that keeps me here; I feel that this is home. Here there is something that feeds my energy. Apart from the fact that you have to look over your shoulder, it is a city that has a lot of potential. It is a city that is trying. It is actually quite high above sea level and it’s where everyone in this world can come to try and make their lives. And it is not beautiful, so you really need to look to find the beauty. But the people are what make it what it is. There are other invisible energies that I feel are hard to explain.
And how long do they go on for?
Over an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. So it’s a table, and what else?
And a chair. It’s almost that idea of setting a table to have tea and not having any food. But there’s an appendage that is presented which pours out of the body for all to see, in a sense to invite people to indulge in that conversation.
Do you have to always be careful? So, it’s a conversation piece?
Yes, but at the same time not. Johannesburg was very violent during the 1990s whereas now things have calmed down. It is the powerhouse of this country. When you think of New York in the 1970s, that’s like Johannesburg now. It’s like what most big cities have gone through. Without Johannesburg this country would be very different. There is a warmth and energy which comes from the bellies of the people that feeds the soul. I can’t live anywhere else but here. It’s very hard to put into words.
Yes, you could say that. And what about the most recent performance?
I haven’t performed in a long time. It takes a lot of energy and attention. Performances take a lot away from you, and you need a lot of psychological preparation. So now you’re doing more studio practice. If I could come and see your studio now, what would I find?
Do you have any unrealised projects? Dreams? Utopias?
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There are a lot. I find the future to be very fascinating as the future allows you to dream. You realise some of the things you dream. There are several things that are in line with growing up as an artist, as a human being, such as where I’d like to see the work going. Some of those fantasies are controlled by the present and the past. There are things that are simmering in a pot, that are being dreamt, whether I’m awake or asleep. Often I project myself into the future and look at tomorrow before it even gets to tomorrow. When we get to tomorrow and it’s not exactly the way we thought it would be, it’s not the end of the world; we try and dream some more and try other things.
just met for lunch, trying to have ideas go beyond just having food was really hard. I enjoy the idea of working by myself and just diving into my own world. I rarely go to openings, and I enjoy being myself. So you’re not really working with other artists of your generation, but is there a dialogue?
My ambition is to try and stand out by myself, which is really hard. Of course I could be likened to other people as we exist in a world where everyone is taking from the same pool of ideas that are around us, but I do not belong to a group. I am my own group, I create my own world.
So the dream is the future, and the future is the dream? You put your own world into the world?
Yes, and the present could also be the dream. Exactly. What kind of music are you listening to now? This interview took place in Johannesburg in February 2012. An edited version was published in Flash Art, October 2012.
Many things. This morning I was listening to Tchaikovsky. I listen to all sorts of music. I can’t say there is one particular genre I always listen to, but of late I’ve found myself on Saturdays and Sundays listening to Solid Gold on 702, which plays 1950s and 70s and 80s music. In the studio I have a collection of about 2 000 songs. As I try to discover new music, I find the more eccentric the better.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London.
One last question: are you part of a movement or a group of artists? How do you connect to other artists of your generation?
I feel more comfortable being by myself. I love my space. Even when I started to work in a team that 31
Amaqabaza 2012 Ribbon, watercolour, tea stains on Fabriano paper 150 x 230 x 10cm
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Inkwili 2011 Ribbon, watercolour, tea stains on Fabriano paper 150 x 230 x 10cm
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Buna 2012 Ribbon, aluminium on canvas 180 x 120cm Facing page Ntwazana 2012 Ribbon, aluminium on canvas 180 x 120cm
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Izichenene 2012 Ribbon, aluminium on canvas 150 x 110cm Facing page Umfanekiso 2012 Ribbon, aluminium on canvas 110 x 150cm
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NITEGEKA
SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA was born in Burundi in 1983 and lives in Johannesburg. He is currently completing his Master’s in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. He won the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts, and a Fondation Jean Paul Blachère prize at the Dakar Biennale, in 2010. He has exhibited at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (2011), and Le Manège gallery at the French Institute in Dakar (2012). Group exhibitions include Space, Ritual, Absence: Liminality in South African Visual Art at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg (2011); Time’s Arrow at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (2010); and Beyond the Line at the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg (2008).
street-cred. I think the older generation must have worried about a whole younger generation of deaf adults because of the very loud music in some of these matatus. You had favourites, and at times I’d have to wait for nearly an hour for my chosen matatu – every self-respecting young person did. You wouldn’t want to be caught getting out of an uncool ride with a mediocre paint job or without proper bass. You could hear your ride approaching hundreds of metres away, according to the type of music, usually reggae and ragga, and the power of the bass it pumped. The feeling of the bass pounding in my chest reminds me of the sweet feeling of youthful rebelliousness, the invincible feeling you get when music puts you in your element. I picked up Swahili on the street and had a private English tutor – I learnt Swahili and English for the first time. I was 11 years old then, and I lived in Nairobi for nine years. Fluid and vibrant, I remember it. I loved this city.
SERGE ALAIN NITEGEKA INTERVIEWED BY DAVID BRODIE
DB: I’d like to start with a question about the cities you’ve lived in over the past decade. When I consider conversations we’ve had over the last few years, it seems to me that your movement through different spaces – through cities – is one of the animating principles in your practice. Where did you live before making your way to Johannesburg?
SAN: Nairobi, Kenya – I lived in the low-income eastern estates of the city among hard-working, minimum-wage people willing to do anything for a shilling. These estates were densely populated, putting immense pressure on the social amenities. They were covered with networks of small streams of burst sewers, incredibly bad roads and numerous mounds of rubbish. It might sound like hell, but this was my home and I was oblivious to how bad it was. I didn’t care. I guess the chaos of everything made me numb and became my escape. As long as I went to school, saw my friends and occasionally got to play street football against other teams, I was fine. I had no time to ponder the problems of the world. Among the things I miss most are the minibus taxis, affectionately called ‘matatu’. They had the coolest paint jobs and the best sound systems – something that had to do with competition and
How old were you when you came to Jo’burg, and what were your first impressions of the city? Do you recall particular colours, spaces and shapes that had an impact on you?
I was 20. It was in winter, so it must have been the ‘smell’. Jo’burg has a winter smell – have you noticed? Whenever I leave the city and return, the first thing that reminds me that I’ve just arrived in Jo’burg is this smell. Every city has a smell, dependant on a number of things particular to that city. I don’t know what makes up the smell – cars, industries, power plants, township fires … you name it. But if I were to describe it, I would say that it is a refreshing, faint industrial smell. How can industrial air be refreshing? I guess 43
“The long and broad highways, complex flyovers, elaborate use of cast concrete on roads and skyscrapers, and the grid layout of the city centre stuck out the most. The city was structured. I like structure, especially when it is rational and beautiful.”
equation in which sore muscles equal long distances. Walking is still the best way to explore and orientate oneself in new surroundings. For the first few years your movement through the city was entangled with the administrative bureaucracy of attaining citizenship and the right to move through space unmonitored. How did this experience of control being exerted over your rights to space impact on your work?
I wouldn’t say unmonitored, because everybody is monitored nowadays. It is more like being constrained with limited access. In the light of this imposed box, this small box of limited access, my focus grew ever more resolved and acute in relation to the problems faced by refugees and asylum-seekers. I wanted to react and respond, to have opinions and a say in the matters and politics that defined my space. I responded to this type of control by making wooden sculptures that were tensed and bent into shapes. The forces that bent the wood were based on the action-reaction principle and therefore at equilibrium – at a truce. However, this truce was a temporary one due to the possibility of the wood breaking while resisting bending. The shape of the wooden sculpture was at a temporary truce cautiously warning of inevitable rupture as a result of an imbalance in the tensional forces. Metaphorically, this would speak of xenophobic attacks or service delivery protests or any other form of social expression where one finds a collective form of social venting, a kind of squabble between forces.
it is how you choose to smell it. Jo’burg’s industrial smell carries with it the energy, rhythm and vibe of the city that goes a long way to inspire workmanship and more. Apart from the smell, there was what I considered to be meticulous city planning. The long and broad highways, complex flyovers, elaborate use of cast concrete on roads and skyscrapers, and the grid layout of the city centre stuck out the most. The city was structured. I like structure, especially when it is rational and beautiful. I was impressed. How did you move through the city in those days?
I walked; I walked a lot. I moved in and out of the CBD into surrounding suburbs: Kensington, Troyeville, Bertrams, Berea, Hillbrow, Rosettenville, Parktown, Parkview. You learn a lot about a new city from walking, from topography to where you can get a cup of strong Ethiopian coffee. You get a good sense of distance; how far apart the places and spaces you frequent are from each other. The will, ability and strength in your legs not only determine how far and how quickly you can explore, but also form part of the
While your student work was primarily figurative, you have increasingly moved away from figuration towards abstraction. I see this shift as a coming into being,
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strong installation photographs from a recent show; then it moves on to accessing the strengths and new possibilities that the works offer. The installations are short-lived so the selection has to be well-considered to come up with paintings that best represent the strengths of a given installation or sculpture. Once the selection is made, I start painting. The painting is the final permanent installation. The paintings are titled as numbered Studio Studies together with the name of the installation/sculpture they are derived from. It is a very private, meditative process.
a sense of moving away from the literalness of lived experience, towards images that speak to the fullness and complexity of mythical space. What is it that abstraction offers that figuration was unable to?
It offers depth of space to make meaning. Abstraction has the ability to transcend literal two-dimensional readings, to levitate the mind to a ‘fourth dimension’ where interpretation is fluid, ever-changing, dynamic and adaptive. While your work has included several public interventions, it is predominantly studio-based. I am
In your earlier figurative works charcoal was the medium
interested in how you use abstracted space to speak of
you chose to introduce ‘black’ into the work; this shifted
external or world space. In a sense choosing poetry over
as your work moved away from absolute figuration, and in
literalness, studio over world, in painting your sculpture
the newer works you use different types of acrylic paint
and sculpting your paintings, you opt for the second
as the medium of ‘black’. Can you speak a little about
sense of things rather than their obvious thing-ness.
charcoal versus paint, in terms of each offering a very
Can you speak a bit about the philosophy underlying
different kind of blackness through their materiality?
your studio practice, and whether the works made in
There isn’t a ‘versus’ as such. It is a matter of practicality. The black paint is practical in the sense that it is easy to handle and abundant. When I worked with crushed charcoal it used to get quite hazardous and messy. Each material possesses a particular strength of black colour. I love them both.
this space speak directly to experience in world?
The paintings and sculptures made in the studio are translations of the experience of being in the world. My process begins with sorting through a series of
Apart from the dominant black, you restrict your painting and sculptural palette to white, red and, more recently,
“Abstraction has the ability to transcend literal two-dimensional readings, to levitate the mind to a ‘fourth dimension’ where interpretation is fluid, ever-changing, dynamic and adaptive.”
to raw or untreated wood surface. I am interested in the implicit austerity – or discipline – at work in this limited palette.
Black as the dominant colour in my work needs punctuation – it needs colour/s to complement and 45
contrast it; to act as sidekick colours if you like. It depends on whatever works, what amount of each is needed and where – as long as the finished painting is a beautiful aesthetic composition. I follow this simple and direct ethos.
people’s way of being in the world, how they negotiate the world. Forced migration as the cause of their emergence is a complex problem because it is difficult being a foreigner in a host nation, thanks to borders and passports, not to forget the ridiculous accompanying policies.
The black/red/white palette also makes at least a formal connection with some art historical moments – I think
Does the experience of living in Johannesburg demand
of both Suprematism’s focus on pure artistic feeling,
an imagining of space as an abstract body filled with
and Constructivism’s didactic demands. While these
possible meanings – so long as one can see through the
movements had diametrically opposing political and
often overwhelming weight of the objects and human
philosophical goals, the aesthetics of their objects are
narratives which fight for space in the city?
strikingly similar. Do you draw any threads between your
Yes. Like any other metropolitan city, Johannesburg has a lot of different things going on simultaneously. These present a clutter of things. Johannesburg is a very visually demanding city, running high risks of overstimulation and distraction. It is a city of stark contrasts and opposites. You can spot a skorokoro parked next to a million rand Ferrari; a wealthy suburb next to a squatter camp, or nature and wildlife 20 minutes away from the concrete jungle. A sophisticated yet simple tool is needed to make sense of living and working in this madness. Abstraction is one of those tools. Abstraction accesses the realms where words and other forms of expression fail to suffice. Reduction of form into neat and haphazard lines, shapes and forms makes sense as a way of expressing living and working in Johannesburg.
practice and these – or other historical – movements?
Not really – I make stuff and theorise later. However, it happens that sometimes certain threads are drawn, occasionally in the most unrelated of circumstances. Nothing is made in a vacuum, after all. I’ve been studying minimalism for some time now, and it has been a constant influence. In what ways are your works political?
My works speak to the political and social problem of displaced people. The works represent displaced
“Abstraction accesses the realms where words and other forms of expression fail to suffice. Reduction of form into neat and haphazard lines, shapes and forms makes sense as a way of expressing living and working in Johannesburg.”
Your newest work involves a group of performers moving through a built environment in your studio, ‘performing’ your sculptures. Would this be an accurate description for this: ‘performative sculpture’?
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Indeed, it is performative sculpture in the sense that the installation functions as a stage on which to perform or even exercise one’s ability to move and displace objects from one place to another in a ritualistic or choreographed way. The viewer, the person in the space, is made to manoeuver through what appears to be like an obstacle course. The viewer and the installation collaborate to make performance sculpture. A chair is not a chair unless it is sat on. On a lighter note, metaphorically speaking, it could suggest how in our daily lives we perform a balancing act when we negotiate our way through responsibilities, chores and routines. The project is a film titled BLACK SUBJECTS. The film portrays the liminal space, the in-between space of former selves and unknown would-be selves. It is a space/stage where they don’t make any plans or have the luxury of hopes. There is just the now. The moment is lived and confined to the everyday. It is based on the improvised negotiations of survival, a primal human instinct prevalent in all situations where live or die are the only options. These negotiations of survival begin with the construction or finding of a shelter. The film consolidates these ideas in narratives that prop up a sense of the community that arises in the face of adversity. This interview took place via email in October 2012.
David Brodie is a Director at Stevenson.
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Fragile Cargo IV: Studio Study IV 2012 Paint on wood 171 x 180 x 11cm Overleaf Fragile Cargo III vs Fragile Cargo V 2012 Paint on wood 127 x 251 x 11cm
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Fragile Cargo III: Studio Study II 2012 Paint on wood 76 x 109 x 3cm Facing page Fragile Cargo 2: Studio Study V 2012 Paint on wood 263 x 130 x 3.5cm
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Black Subjects: Interior V 2012 Paint on wood 68 x 33 x 3cm Facing page Black Subjects: Interior III 2012 Paint on wood 179 x 148.5 x 3.5cm
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RHODE
ROBIN RHODE was born in 1976 in Cape Town, and lives in Berlin. He completed postgraduate studies at the South African School of Film, Television and Dramatic Arts, Johannesburg, in 2000. Major museum solo exhibitions have taken place at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (2010); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2009); the Hayward Gallery, London (2008); and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2007). Notable group exhibitions include the 18th Sydney Biennale, All Our Relations (2012); Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); The Dissolve, 8th Site Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico (2010); Prospect.1 New Orleans, 1st New Orleans Biennial (2008); New Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005); the 51st Venice Biennale (2005); and How Latitudes Become Forms, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, and other venues (2003-5).
ROBIN RHODE INTERVIEWED BY JOOST BOSLAND
In your serial photography, the last image is frequently left devoid of the elements that carry the sequence forward in the rest of the panels (for example, Fridge, 2004, Blackhead, 2006, and Brick Face and Who Saw Who, both 2008). Taken out of context, these pictures appear as pure abstract compositions. How do you relate these ‘last images’ to the ones that precede them?
The final image could not exist without that which precedes it. As much as the wall drawing relays elements of abstraction, leaning more towards Russian Constructivist principles of pure geometric line and form, the final image in a photographic series is dependent on the unfolding narrative that determines the progression of abstract imagery. We also have to consider the movement of the character within the picture frame, from the first image to the last. Here the physical form reframes the drawn geometry as much as it echoes it.
JB: Few people would think of you as an abstract artist. Yet looking back at the work you’ve done over the past 10 years or so, with this catalogue and exhibition in mind, I kept discovering abstract elements in work I had previously thought of as narrative, or at the very least performative. At what point did you realise that geometry – lines, circles, planes – would be one of the subjects of your investigations?
RR: The notion of essentialism, or the movement towards the essential, has always influenced certain ideas in my practice. I do believe that geometry and mathematics were always an underlying theme, even though I struggled considerably with mathematics as a school pupil. It was my imagination that seemed to acquaint itself with vector graphics, scientific diagrams and mathematical theories. My perception allowed me to believe that there were hidden narratives possessed solely of a human nature that rode the curves of the graph, rather than strictly pure theory. The philosophy of the given vector or equation could then be defined by human emotion, which within itself possessed an aesthetic. This internalisation of the aesthetic becomes expressed through a line or form that either presents our reality partially, or abstracts it completely.
You have spoken before about your interest in antiquity, which Edith Hall has related to the geometric patterns of archaic pottery design. Moving to the 20th century, which artistic movements – or perhaps artists – have most significantly affected the way you think about abstract imagery?
My first inspiration towards abstract imagery would be the Russian Constructivists. This is mostly due to the strong architectural aesthetic that is present in a city like Berlin, where socialist remnants are still present from an era long gone. Another influence would be Futurism. The idea of movement through and across the picture plane by objects as well as the human body, the embracing of youth, technology, speed, across a 59
wide range of mediums, is an undoubted influence. I do believe that the void in South African art history left by its non-participation in the global art world during apartheid could also have been an influence in leading me to investigate Eurocentric artistic movements that in many ways could have a greater social impact. This social impact existed for me on the streets of Johannesburg.
Having to embrace the planned atmosphere of a studio setting, I was left with no choice but to install large canvases on the walls, notably with dimensions close to the human form so as to allow easier access across the canvas surface, and to take to each canvas with the raw processes I used on outside walls which were spray paint and cardboard stencils.
Fewer people still would think of you as a painter.
These paintings do not appear to have been reproduced
During our previous conversation about abstraction,
in any of the books on your work. Were they shown at the
you showed me a painting you made I think in 2008,
Hayward, or anywhere else? Did you deliberately hide them?
and subsequently we decided to show the works in this
I never deliberately hid the works. It was more that people were not interested in the body of work due to the fact that the recognised presence of the body was less visible, or rather more distant. It became difficult for viewers to associate the abstract paintings with my artistic oeuvre at that time. Even though I found great solace in the process of these abstract paintings, it offered me the time and space to experiment with geometric forms before I took to the streets. The working process was very much a type of rehearsal, allowing me to execute street artworks with an efficiency that I had never had before.
catalogue as part of the abstraction project. At the time, what drove you to this switch in media? Could you describe the process of making these paintings?
My interest in abstraction came about after creating the photographic series titled Rough Cut in Johannesburg in 2007. In this work a character pushes a lawnmower across the picture plane while diamond or rhombus shapes appear behind him, sprouting out from the back of the lawnmower. These rhombus shapes represented crystallised microcosms of grass, or even light, left as a trace of the character’s action in frame. I was also interested to investigate whether I could create standalone artworks and not serial photographic works as a means to develop my practice and to explore certain ideas I had with regards to painting and drawing. There was also the influence of Russian music, notably Pictures at an Exhibition for piano solo by Modest Mussorgsky that left me searching for influences in the Russian avant-garde as a starting point to my stage design. I was also confronted with moving into a studio environment for the first time in my career.
The only completely abstract pictures I had previously seen were the Shell Drawings you did around 2007. In these, you use a seashell sculpted in charcoal to create an evenly spaced pattern of imperfect circles, using chalk or charcoal and spray paint on either white or black paper. How did these drawings first come about?
These drawings were inspired by a huge wall drawing I created for my solo exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. I thought it could be interesting to 60
create drawing in a reverse process – having a threedimensional object produced in the drawing medium of either chalk or charcoal, and then using the form to generate line and mark-making. This process becomes a reversal of the drawing medium allowing for a representation of a form. Here the form exists first and then allows for an abstraction of what is represented.
“My intention in creating abstraction is to allow the artwork to hide the body, to act as a mirror while being elusive at the same time towards its creator ... Paintings are secrets. They usually hide the truth.”
Your interest in abstraction appears the most
In the same interview, you speak of the scale of your
pronounced in work you did in 2007-8. The catalogue of
paintings as particularly human. You use the phrase
the 2008 Hayward show Who Saw Who perhaps reveals
‘painting as doppelgänger’. What do you mean by this?
your interest in abstraction in most detail. The texts in
My intention in creating abstraction is to allow the artwork to hide the body, to act as a mirror while being elusive at the same time towards its creator. The body is omnipresent yet needs to be distant. Paintings are secrets. They usually hide the truth.
the catalogue (by James Sey and your interview with Stephanie Rosenthal) make reference to these paintings. Do you remember what was on your mind at that time?
What was on my mind at the time was abstraction as a substitution of the body, abstraction as an extension of the human form. At times I feel that this concept is more rooted in contemporary dance than visual art since modern dance is in itself extremely abstract.
The other three artists in this chapter of Africa and Abstraction are based in Johannesburg. You regularly travel to the same city to work. Might you have some final thoughts about the relationship between
Stephanie Rosenthal asks you about abstraction, and
abstraction and the city of gold?
in your response you call it a space of resistance. I am
My approach to the context of Johannesburg in terms of abstraction is to make that which is familiar, dominant, overwhelming, become more distant or unrecognisable, thus allowing us a re-evaluation of how we experience time and space in a city that offers both inclusivity and exclusivity in a given moment.
intrigued by this link between abstraction and resistance. Could you explain what you meant at the time? Do you still see it this way?
As I’ve mentioned previously, this resistance could be the shifting away from a presentation of the human form, or to resist its overbearing influence in the nature of the given process. This even though abstract art, when one considers the process of Jackson Pollock, is so much governed by the body and its navigation of space across the picture plane.
This interview took place via email in October 2012.
Joost Bosland is a Director at Stevenson.
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Broken Windows 2011 Series of 15 inkjet prints 39.8 x 60cm each Edition of 5 + 2AP
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Shell Drawing 2 2007 Charcoal and spray paint on canvas 294.5 x 114cm Facing page Shell Drawing 3 2007 Charcoal and spray paint on canvas 292 x 114cm
Untitled 2007 Charcoal and spray paint on canvas 178.5 x 152.5cm [0195] Facing page Untitled 2007 Charcoal and spray paint on canvas 247.5 x 151cm [0182]
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Untitled 2007 Charcoal and spray paint on canvas 152.5 x 299.5cm [0183]
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Untitled 2007 Charcoal and spray paint on canvas 152.5 x 294cm [0192]
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Untitled 2007 Charcoal and spray paint on canvas 246 x 141cm [0179] Facing page Untitled 2007 Charcoal and spray paint on canvas 272 x 143.5cm [0178]
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CAPE TOWN Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road Woodstock 7925 PO Box 616 Green Point 8051 T +27 (0)21 462 1500 F +27 (0)21 462 1501
We would like to thank Odili Donald Odita and Hans Ulrich Obrist for their contributions to this project.
JOHANNESBURG 62 Juta Street Braamfontein 2001 Postnet Suite 281 Private Bag x9 Melville 2109 T +27 (0)11 326 0034/41 F +27 (0)86 275 1918 info@stevenson.info www.stevenson.info Catalogue 67 November 2012 Š 2012 For texts: the authors Š 2012 For works: the artists Editor Sophie Perryer Design Gabrielle Guy Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town Photo credits Pages 15-17, 19, 20-21, 33-39, 49-55 Anthea Pokroy; 62-71 the artist