An essay commissioned by AVA Gallery to accompany the exhibition of the same title by artist Givan Lötz.
Say a word repeatedly and it can lose its meaning. In the same way, the longer one stares at one thing or another - a tree, for example - so its identity and meaning can begin to loosen from it, leaving one with just, well, some thing. Certainly, a thing as real and apparently definite as the tree it once was. But a thing once again imbued with a mystery that somehow challenges the idea that calling it a tree got us any closer to knowing what it really was.
Without a name, what remains of a thing, essentially, is form. Form is arranged matter. Less definite, perhaps, but no less substantial and arguably more lastingly true by being alienated from its limiting descriptors. We are not our names, as much as it is convenient to pretend that we are. Say your own name aloud and then wonder if this is all of you. The order and arrangement of the world around us may indeed be seen as a desperate attempt to bring it under our control.
Givan Lötz is having none of it. His latest show Unearthly at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) pulls the rug from beneath us, constantly probing at the idea that the names we give things are in fact arbitrary and, when taken away, that the world around us devolves into a multiverse of pre-named everythingness. For him, “The unbound world is fluid and dangerous...where there are no things there is only a stream of manifold, nameless sensations shifting in fullness.”
This is all of course a good thing. Lötz, you see, is persuading us to engage with a more innate - and less articulate - knowledge. Drawing from the Michael Polanyi line that “we know more than we can tell” Lötz describes his works as “an inarticulate scream.”
For Unearthly Lötz pulls together a series of what appear to be details of imagined matterscapes, things before they were called something; nebulous substances in flux. The substance seems in the process of formation, like volcanic magma before it has crystallised.
This partly explains his use of wax as a medium, a substance that is both solid and vulnerable to change. Wax is waterproof but also susceptible to being destroyed by a rise in temperature - or someone with an over curious thumb, eager to explore the inviting texture of the works. Lötz worked with what is now his trademark meticulousness to apply layer upon layer of wax in the encaustic - or ‘burning in’ - method more commonly associated with craft hobbyists. This impish elevation of a lowbrow artistic method is not surprising when you discover that Lötz has for years been a musician with distinctly punk tendencies. It is even less surprising that his songs don't have distinguishable verses and choruses. He likes to thumb his nose.
While scratching at these ideas - and refining his use of the encaustic method - during residencies in New York and Finland, Lötz found that he was creating scenes that might be microscopic in their detail or panned out so far as to be blurrily indefinite. Atoms or galaxies. The wax, then, became the glue that bound these floating atoms together, something to gather an unruly dust into a temporarily discernible item for a moment. The works are as a result best viewed in this way; alternately close up and at some distance, the effect being wonderfully confounding and immersive, as if zooming in and out of something without ever quite figuring it.
The colour palette with which Lötz works is hyperreal and as such appears false, the tones bright and almost neon, both garish and seductive. The motive in using these so-called ‘fake’ colours is to play with the idea that what appears unnatural can of course never be, being as it is a concoction of earthly materials. Here also we see more clearly the joke Lötz worked into his title.
The sculptural works - assembled branches covered in a glossy gypsum composite - appear as if strange forms retrieved from a shipwreck. Their placement has the effect of staging the show as a museum of alien discoveries, the viewing experience like stepping into an ancient cave full of mysterious and ancient clues. Are we witnessing scenes from a million years in the past, or a million ahead, a planet reclaimed by nature and long vacated by the fleeting human intrusion? Lötz doesn’t say. But perhaps we are seeing another world entirely, one that has always been there. A world simply of matter, free of its labels, radiant and beguiling. A world we recognise but can’t explain.
An essay commissioned by SMITH to accompany Dale Lawrence’s solo exhibition, Further Prototypes at the gallery.
When is an artwork finished? At show time? When the artist says so? What if an artist isn’t ‘finishing’ them on purpose, and what if he’s active in the gallery throughout the show? What if he’s asking himself—and us—whether there is such a thing as finished at all?
This is one of many curveballs thrown by Dale Lawrence in Further Prototypes, his third solo show at SMITH, the latest stanza in his wry inquiry into the ambitions of art and its practitioners. With Look Busy (2016) and Another Helping (2017), as with his Art Joburg show Amateur Hour (2018), Lawrence scratched at these ideas, studying the tension between focused intent and wilful abandon. Here, he puts the ideas to theatre.
“Finished is dead,” says Lawrence, who chooses instead to work with the vitality of experimentation. Doing so brings action, change, motion and surprise into another distinctively considered collection of mixed media offerings that this time includes imagery variously scratched into animal fat, drawn onto photocopier glass and printed on bread. There’s also a bath in the gallery and, yes, he will bathe in it. Every day for six weeks.
In Seen and Not Seen, the bathtub work, Lawrence will prove his interactions with it without showing them. We will see solely the evidence of his activity; the memory of it. A wet footprint, perhaps, or a crumpled towel. By repurposing the gallery as a working space, a conduit through which Lawrence passes, he draws attention away from the idea of finished works hanging inert on a wall and towards the lively, uncertain environment from which his works are made.
Throughout the show, Lawrence will be otherwise active in the space, working on his largest canvas to date, the 1.75m x 3.5m Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Large Bathers in situ. These elements of his normal life—the painting, the bathing—help to set the show in a state of flux, placing artmaking as a functional part of the everyday. Here Lawrence draws from German artist Joseph Beuys, who considered art much broader than painting, sculpting and exhibiting. For Beuys, as for Lawrence, the impulse to create is seen as a basic component of human life.
“Completeness and incompleteness coexist. We are never finished. Our routines become rituals and our rituals can degenerate into routines. Art is a form of distilling reality, where grand intentions and everyday mundanities are the subjects—with sometimes overwhelming and sometimes underwhelming results.”
Hercules is Lawrence’s playful tracing of a mashup of two classic scenes with similar compositions by Frederic Lord Leighton and Paul Cézanne. Leighton’s horrified characters, Cezanne’s indifferent bathers and finally Lawrence’s cursory retelling of these stories probes at how the function of art has changed. Art used to need to capture critical and epic moments, later just moments. What do we ask of it now?
That this and other works are in fact or appear ostensibly unfinished stems from a disregard for finality that permeates this collection and can be traced further back. Amateur Hour fleshed out an argument that achievement is subordinate to the act of the pursuit thereto. Then as now, pursuit is Lawrence’s first virtue. To arrive is to abandon pursuit, to be finished. And finished is dead.
Lawrence’s use of masterpieces as source material in the show stems from this notion. His respect for striving over finding sees prototypes as new models of thought. The creative sphere is one for experiment and testing, where new ideas and aesthetics are prototyped and test-driven before being adopted in the real world.
“When a work is considered a masterpiece it implies that an idea has been refined to the point of absolute completion and perhaps exhaustion, leaving it short of much of the vitality of the prototype.”
Lawrence’s most pointed jab at this is the work St. Lawrence Handing out the Treasures of the Church, where he treats a photocopy machine’s glass as a printing plate. Viewers of the work will be able to print out a copy of the famous scene, as artist and device stage a modern parody on the doling out of churchly treasures. The cumbersome photocopier is the artist himself, a dubious intermediary through which an original and pure thought must traverse. Repetitions mean diminishing returns. More is less.
“If art is a means by which to pay homage to inspiration it is also proof of the inability of human beings to accurately express the purity of that inspiration. The observer principle suggests that it is impossible to observe a phenomenon without changing it. Art is an interference.”
Portrait of Ideal Self as St. Paul the Hermit, Except Not so Poor and Hungry and Naked and Lonely and Cold is a relief print on a sheet of bread, akin in both substance and design to the communion offering but depicting a figure engaged in a leisure activity. Bread is a basic unit of substance and signifier of spiritual nourishment, yet only represents meaning. It has none in and of itself.
St. Lawrence? Communion bread? Has Lawrence gone all religious on us? The gallery is, after all, art’s church. This is where a form of aesthetic communion is practiced. This is where we gather to drink wine and hear nominated spokespeople muse on the meaning of it all. The substance of the offering depends in some part to the faith we place in the institution that houses it, and of course the person handing us the sacrament. Communion bread is either metaphysical and full of meaning, or vacuous and in dire need of some Marmite.
Or, as Lawrence suggests, lightly salted like a Lay’s crisp. Perhaps the crowning piece of the show is another remake, this time a riff on the 'Tragedia Civile' by Jannis Kounellis. Lawrence uses Lay’s crisp packets where Kounellis used gold leaf to festoon a wall signifying the accomplishments of the past. Lawrence replaces the original’s hook, hat and overcoat with a bowl of Lay’s lightly salted crisps lying on the table for consumption, while a mobile phone lies charging on the shelf instead of a paraffin lamp. This self-administering of communion, a modern offering of no substance in an age of cheap imitation and distraction, wonders at the depth of our dubious relationship with conveyors of meaning.
But accomplishment implies some measure of success and finality, and we know how Lawrence feels about those things. His title for the installation, Tragedy of the Rainbow Warriors, mashes up the original with a newspaper headline marking a supposedly seminal moment in recent South African history. Nelson Mandela, dressed in a Springbok jersey, hands captain Francois Pienaar the 1995 Rugby World Cup trophy. Here is a moment that aimed to tell us something had ended. But was this the end—or the beginning—of anything?
Clearly, Lawrence detects a kind of idiocy in viewing this or any moment as a conclusion or resolution. “We were supposed to feel like something had been solved. We were offered absolution from our sins, cheap closure in a flash. The truth was something a lot less certain.”
Lawrence doesn’t miss this opportunity for another witticism. Noting that we lay our crisps onto our tongues like communion wafers, he nominates a Western brand as our priest. As Apartheid ended and sanctions were lifted, we South Africans were rewarded with a deluge of attractive but empty gifts from the West. The Gods were good to us.
If Lawrence is playing with his use of the pedestal it is more as jester than preacher. Like a king’s clown he agitates, entertains and excites, making himself vulnerable, present and unguarded. Lawrence’s work can also be downright funny. A found ceramic vase lies shattered on the floor beneath its pedestal, surrounded by a handful of rubber bands, the dull accoutrements it was used to contain. The ornate is reduced to a vessel for cheap, functional detritus. A vessel, grand and full of potential, tragically reduced to its base utility. But is an ornament less impressive when it is being used?
With Nameless and Friendless, Lawrence removes the legs from one found chair and attaches them to the ends of another, making one absurdly tall and the other comically legless. The height difference implies a hierarchy yet both are made precarious and arguably useless by the modifications. Does more chair make a chair not a chair? How much chair can you remove before a chair is not a chair anymore?
In a series titled Attempts, Lawrence shows a stack of Indian ink on paper drawings, each attempt piled on top of the next. The drawings are gestural and impulsive, full of Lawrence’s trademark concerted playfulness. The sum total of these attempts are presented as works in themselves, their finished-ness abrupt and questionable.
Lawrence’s fat works—for which he avidly carved into slabs of tallow made according to a Joseph Beuys recipe—dig into the idea of fat as both an essential, life-supporting substance and one that signifies superfluity and excess. Self-portrait in Front of the Burning Cathedral references the recent Notre Dame fire and queries the potential of burnt wood as something very much alive and useful. Lawrence’s surface this time is burnt yellowwood, South Africa’s national wood, mirroring the French oak beams used to support the Notre Dame’s spire.
Further Prototypes may speak to Kounellis’s work in one instance most clearly but the kinship runs deeper and permeates the show. Kounellis was famously direct, his work keenly responsive to its time. When invited to inaugurate an upmarket art gallery in the late 1980s, he filled the space by suspending large pieces of ox carcass on iron panels. “I apologise to everyone: I would like to have made an Arcadian landscape, but the times did not permit that,” Kounellis told the curator.
For Lawrence, like Kounellis, art is an occupation and a mirror. It is what it sees. What Lawrence sees is uncertainty, possibility, transience. The magnificent in the mundane, the mundane in the magnificent. A loop with no end, an endless question.
I saw Die Antwoord
In the Kloof Street Woolworths
Ninja was in the grains aisle
Looking at, well, grains
Yolandi was pushing the trolley
With a kid; maybe Tokkie?
They looked like they look
But I didn’t feel scared
They stood out, but that might
Have been Woolworths’ fault
I was interested in what they
Were having for supper
Because they are celebrities
I briefly forgot what I was there for
Then I remembered: mushrooms,
Steak and, oh yes, Marmite
I was curious to know what crazy
Choices Ninja would make, but
Instead of trying to look
Into Yolandi’s trolley
I pretended not to care so that
My cousin would be impressed
I hoped that they would join me
In the checkout queue
Instead of the non-celebrities
Who unfortunately did.
This is a story about a book. A book I was given on my 16th birthday by my aunt and godmother, who is no longer here. A book that I subsequently lost, like so many things given to me. A book that told me a story before I’d even opened it.
My Aunt Ann was at the youngest of four, the little sister in more ways than one, being much smaller than her three brothers, the oldest of whom is my father. She was not quite diminutive, but she was delicate and petite. She spoke - and laughed - softly. From what I can piece together from family stories and my own memory, she had suffered as a teenager and stumbled into adulthood a little unready and a little wild. Among her early mistakes was dating the Comrades marathon legend Bruce Fordyce, who much later would show up at her 50th birthday party, drunk and perhaps worse than drunk after completing a motivational speech nearby. Dressed in a good tux, Fordyce asked me for a double whisky, downed it, then demanded another and took to the crowd like he owned the place. I wondered whether my aunt would have been pleased to see him like this. Or pleased to see him at all.
The husband she eventually chose was as different to Bruce Fordyce as a human being can get. She found him buried in the aisles of a Johannesburg library, working away with presumably no idea he would soon be married with two blonde children. His own family is a long-bearded clan from the Groot Marico, a sparsely-peopled wilderness north of Johannesburg; Herman Charles Bosman country, where life is more or less like it was a hundred years ago. He was like his kin in the best ways, but kept a foot in the world and later started a plumbing business to make his way in the city. Now, with both children out of university, he spends most of his time in a tiny village a few hours out of Cape Town, where, from what I can tell, he mostly paints, plays the piano and uproots alien vegetation, seldom interacting with anyone and appearing not to mind at all.
The book. In my mid teens I was adamant I would be a poet. I had a green A4 notebook with a gold decorative border given to me by my parents that was full of my attempts to ape my favorite writers; Eliot, Cummings, Pound, Cohen. My poems weren’t good yet, but I loved dreaming them up and loved even more how it made me feel to create them; changing the order and pace of sentences, inventing new rhythms, new ways of saying. I masqueraded as a well-adjusted public school boy and enjoyed the friends I had, truly loved the sport and the fooling around. But, more privately, I wanted to be a writer and those who loved that about me I loved the most for it. My aunt Ann understood. We didn’t see each other often, but she understood.
The book she gave me on my 16th birthday showed how much she understood, but it would take 24 years and a stroke of fortune for me to realise it.
My grandmother, Ann’s mother, is 94 and lives in a retirement home in the southern suburbs of Cape Town. On my 39th birthday this year, at lunchtime and with no other plans, I drove out to visit her and we spoke at length about the institution’s laughable food. I transcribed her crisply delivered rant and posted it on my website. We all laughed together at the descriptions of colourless, lifeless and tasteless food and the tragicomedy of the fact that it was being prepared by two chefs who, being devout Muslims, were forbidden from tasting their offerings by religious decree. The kitchen not being halal, these poor men were serving what they could only hope was decent (and mostly wasn’t).
Working in food as I do, this was funny but also devastating. I had always suspected - and am now convinced - of the effect that food can have on people when made with love and with the right attitude. A good meal can be profoundly transformative, laying the foundations and acting as the catalyst for all good things. A bad one is equally powerful.
With this fresh in our minds, and with my birthday only a few days past, my grandmother decided to give me a present. When she first handed it to me I felt a strange sensation that I couldn’t place. She told me that it was something that made her think of me. She then said it was only right that she give it to me because it was in fact already mine. It was of course the book I’d lost decades before, that she had fished out of my parent’s bookshelf and found the first page inscribed by her daughter, now eight years gone, wishing me a happy 16th birthday.
For Matthew - ’96
Love Annie &
Freddie.
Etienne & Emma.
The book is Martin Versfeld’s Food for Thought: A Philosopher’s Cookbook, and from the first page I felt as though I was staring into my own soul. Versfeld was a philosophy lecturer at UCT in the 70s and wrote a handful of small-run publications, this one perhaps his most celebrated but even then not widely successful. I hadn’t heard of Versfeld before seeing his name on the cover, and might never have done were it not for my aunt. It’s a book about food, ostensibly, but to borrow the words of Andre Brink, it is also “a book of profound wisdom and great delight, that transcends our customary systems of thought to become an enquiry into human values”. There are innumerable joyous moments, like this one, on pots: “Distrust the family whose pots are small.”
It speaks to me personally, as if a soothing vindication of all I wish to be true about the world. It makes me feel understood, it makes me think of the people who understood me as a young man, who understand me now, and most of all it makes me think of my godmother, who we all called Annie, who gave me this book, who died too young, who saw in a 16-year-old boy the man he most dreamed of being.
My grandmother is 94 and lives in a retirement home called Avondrust, which translates as ‘Evening Rest’. The irony is not lost on her. She has her own name for it: Dead End. Of the many things she finds disturbing about the place, the miserable food is her worst. On a recent visit, I recorded a conversation with her about it.
You mentioned something about balls.
They will say: ‘Today it’s balls.’ Meat balls, chicken balls, fish balls.
All on the same day?
No, this will be over three days.
So balls are spread over three days?
Three days of balls. They are called chicken, fish and meat and I suppose they are, but they don’t taste of anything.
Do they actually say ‘balls’ on the menu?
They say balls.
Isn’t there a day where there’s a kind of ‘fun’ food?
No. Only on days like Christmas Day, or Mother’s Day, you know, they might have something. I mean, they can do it. So instead of having a frozen yoghurt square sitting in a round plate, [that is] absolutely obscene, they push it through a thing, so it goes ‘roly roly’ and put a cherry on the top and then it looks exciting.
Butter or margarine?
Margarine. No butter. Butter is nowhere. That magical taste of butter. They don’t use butter. I could go on for a long time.
Margarine is a killer.
It’s a killer. I can’t eat it. I take my own butter down.
You can do that?
You can do that. People come in laden with bottles of chutney and pickles and, you know, garlic salt.
Is there anything good?
Huh?
Is there anything nice?
Mm-mm. Mainly because it doesn’t taste of anything. Nothing tastes.
So it’s basically all the same nothingness, just in different shapes? That’s terrible. What about breakfast?
I don’t go to breakfast.
Because it would be egg powder?
No, that’s usually lunch or supper. Egg powder thickened. A quiche is macaroni and sauce made of milk - I presume it’s milk, could be powdered milk - and thickener. And then that’s poured over [the pasta] along with a few leftovers of lunch vegetables, which taste of nothing, chucked in, [that goes] in the oven and then a very inferior cheddar on top which turns into plastic sheeting. It’s not crisp and it’s melted and it’s brownish, but you’ve got to cut it with a very sharp knife because it’s plastic. Don’t let me go on.
It’s not often you see food done so badly but with such flair.
It’s almost genius. They’ve got a soup pot. They start off and you sit there thinking, ‘Oh, Jesus, why didn’t they throw a chicken stock cube in there?’, just to give it that little bit of taste.
What do they do a lot of?
Oh, they’re great on beans. When in doubt, just throw some baked beans on the plate.
Do they make their own beans?
No, they’re canned beans. They must get them in giant-sized cans. Last night’s supper was two slices of tomato and four slices of cucumber on a plate. And on the menu it said: Sandwich. So you’re invited to margarine your bread and make a sandwich. But no dressing, nothing.
That was dinner?
That’s supper. All the women have little bags. They keep their things in their bags. I’m going to start doing that, because I can’t...I can’t wait to get to your mother’s house because she will give me bacon. I have not tasted bacon for a year and a half. I haven’t had an egg in a year and a half.
There’s no bacon?
It’s once a week, at breakfast. And I don’t go to breakfast.
Do the others grumble about it?
No, they've got so ‘mak’. It’s as if they’ve been hit on the head and are now incapable [of complaining]. They just eat and go back to their rooms. There is a comment book on the sideboard and you’re invited to comment. Well, I put things like, ‘OK, now let’s talk about this.’ I write half a page. There’s no response, although I’m assured they have a meeting once a week to discuss these comments, which by the way are generally ‘Lovely supper’ or ‘So enjoyed the chicken’. I am slightly...different.
Can you remember some lines you have written?
I once put, ‘For what it’s worth, this is my recipe for a white sauce.’ I said, ‘There are three basic ingredients: butter, flour and milk. And seasoning.’ No comment.
So it’s almost these passive aggressive, message-in-a-bottle type things hoping a cook with a conscience comes across them?
I put, ‘Quiche: definition, white sauce: definition’ and so on.
Incidentally, do they spell the items on the menu correctly?
Quiche they get right.
What about omelette? Nobody gets that right.
We never have an omelette. They’ve never had to spell it.
They just need to know how to spell ‘powder’ and ‘beans’?
She may be a celebrated international artist whose work has been exhibited alongside the likes of Warhol, Hockney and Raucschenberg, but Esther Mahlangu remains relatively obscure in her own country. It’s hard to find South Africans who know her well. It’s almost as hard to find Mahlangu herself, living as she does in the tiny rural community of Weltevreden - old Afrikaans for ‘satisfied’ - in the KwaMhlanga region of Mpumaplanga, three hours drive from Johannesburg.
And it is there Mahlangu may have stayed her whole life, painting traditional Ndebele designs on the houses of her village, like her mother and her mother’s mother had done for decades, had a group of French art curators not stumbled across her village in the late eighties. That chance encounter led to an exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris, which in turn caught the eye of the curators of the BMW Art Car series and since then, Mahlangu, who turns 76 in November, has been to places she and her family scarcely knew existed. In the relatively tiny Ndebele community, it is no small matter for someone to have travelled as far as Johannesburg; to have gone abroad is almost miraculous. She herself refers to these various foreign destinations as being ‘Over the seas’, while outside her home a sign reads: ‘Ndebele Art School for Children: Done by Esther Mahlangu. THE 1st LADY TO VISIT OVER SEA.’
Mahlangu was born in 1935 on a farm near Middelburg, in the Mpumalanga Province, not half an hour from where I find her, dressed as always in traditional Ndebele clothing, this crisp, stark winter morning. She was the first of nine children. Her mother, and her mother’s mother, were simple traditional women who decorated their houses as a matter of custom. When Esther was 10 years old, she was taught to paint. Mahlangu’s work has been widely described as ‘traditional contemporary’ and certainly her more modern take on ancient Ndebele art - brighter colours, shapes derived from more modern objects such as her trademark razor blade or itjhefana - fits that description. She has also been mentioned alongside abstract geometric contemporary artists Sol Lewitt and even Damien Hirst, both of whom have experimented with bold, colourful and often huge geometric works. Not that Mahlangu knows, or cares, who these other artists are.
We sit for the interview over lunch of roast potatoes, chicken, mashed butternut, spinach, rice, beans in a rich gravy and a French salad, served dutifully by family at the guest house. Later, she will proudly lead me around the complex, pointing out recent renovations - five new rooms in a modern hut built in the traditional Ndebele fashion; circular, thick-walled, covered with a thatch roof. The small bedrooms have curved walls and bright beds with almost luminous linen that might be garish if it didn’t somehow fit perfectly. There are bright purple couches laminated in plastic covers, frilly pink duvet covers and, of course, Ndebele designs are festooned on the walls, teapots, mugs and just about everything with a paintable surface. It is at once an utterly strange and charming guesthouse, unlike anything I have ever seen and without question the only one of its kind.
Outside, a young boy is painting the exterior with painstaking attention, dabbing small green brushstrokes inside a triangular space. The first of many clues that beyond the accolades and the plaudits and the international fame, Mahlangu is most concerned with doing what her mother and her mother’s mother did before her: taking Ndebele art into the next generation.
Apartamento: I found it very strange while researching your work that you are very famous around the world but far less so at home, despite your various awards, international shows and so on. How do you feel about this?
Esther Mahlangu: It’s not so good. People do know me here, but not very well. I think people should know me here.
In a foreword for your 2003 retrospective at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town, Harvard Professor Kyle D Kaufmann referred to your show at the prestigious Documenta 9 festival as further evidence of this strange anonymity at home. He wrote, “Perhaps it is because the others, including William Kentridge and Marlene Dumas, are closer to the tastes of those who curate and collect contemporary South African art. Perhaps it is because Ms Mahlangu’s work is too ‘African’.” What do you make of that?
Too African? I don’t know. For whatever some reason Ndebele art here is just not as appreciated as it is overseas. But what can I say about that, really? It is how it is.
Do you remember your first attempts at painting?
When I started, my mother and her grandmother were not happy with my painting at all! When they used to go for lunch I would go to where they were painting and paint as well. I thought I'd done something beautiful, but when they came back they said, ‘Esther, what have you made here!' So they said I should not begin by painting the front of the house - I should start at the back! Over there where people couldn't see, they said. So I painted and painted and painted and when they came to look they said, 'No this is not right...make it dead!’ But after a short while they began to like it and after a long time they said, 'Ok, you can come to the front now'.”
It would have been the 1940s when you started, and being in a rural town I’m interested in what sort of materials you were using at the time?
We used what we could find, what my family had been using for a long time before me. We weren't painting with paint, you understand, it was earth; white earth, red earth, black earth, whatever we could find around the farm. We would mix it with water and wet cow dung. We used to make brushes with chicken feathers and stronger ones brush with baboon hair. I still use the chicken feather brushes today but the cow dung has been replaced. It helped to bind everything. It made the paint stronger. But if it rains heavily or hails, the paint will wash away. When I was growing up, we used to paint in winter - there was a lot of competition among the different villages around who was doing the best work - but then in the rainy summer months all the work would wash away and we’d paint again in the winter. That's why these days we use normal paint, so it lasts longer.
When did you first start experimenting with these bright colours and trademark shapes, like the razor blade - or ‘itjhefana’ - you have made your own?
I remember seeing colourful paints in the nearby town Middelburg when we used to visit. I thought - I want to use those colours, and soon I was able to get hold of some. My mother and grandmother didn’t like the new colours at all when I started, because it wasn’t traditional in their eyes, after a while they started to like it. The shapes are all taken from actual things, like lamps or boiled sweets or, yes, razor blades.
Your line is almost perfectly straight, as was that of the student painting the outside of the guest house when I arrived. Yet I’ve heard you have never used any form of ruler, tape or any aids whatsoever.
Yes, I’ve always used a free hand; that is the Ndebele way. That’s why it can take a lot of time to complete some of these bigger jobs I’ve been asked to do, like painting he entire front of a first floor office block in Japan. It was my second big job after Pompidou, and I had actually turned it down at first because I told them didn’t offer enough money (laughs). But when they saw how much work went into it they ended up paying me more than I had asked for.
Your breakthrough came when you were into your fifties, when the researchers from the Pompidou invited you to exhibit in France. That was truly a life-changing few weeks in your life. Could you tell me the story?
I remember it very clearly. There was a man who came from France, who came to take pictures. After that, when I was at the Botshobelo Museum, I heard from them to say that my work had been chosen from a whole list of other art. To me this was 'Number One'! They came back and asked for me at the museum, they said, 'We are looking for Esther'. I said, 'That's me'. You?, they said. Yes, me! They showed me a photo they had taken and I said, 'That one, that's my house!' So they said I should go overseas to France to paint. I said ok. Then I asked, where is France?!'
They told me it was overseas. I asked, 'With what am I going to get there?!'. With an aeroplane, they said. I said how long will I be in the aeroplane? They said if you leave today you will be there tomorrow. I stood dead still and said, 'No! I can't say yes or no. I must go home and ask what they say.' So I went home and told my family. They said, 'No mama, you surely heard them wrong. I told them I didn't know who I was going with. My son Elias said, ‘I will come with you’. I said ok. I hadn't told the people at the museum yet, I wanted to talk to my family. When I told my bosses that they want me to to overseas, they said 'Who does?. I said there's some people from France here who took some pictures of my house and these French people want me to go and paint. They said 'No Esther are you mad!' I said no I'm not mad I speak the truth!
They asked if I had been given anything, a piece of paper or anything. I told them I did. So I brought out the piece of paper and gave it to them. But nobody could understand it because it was written in French! That was funny. So they said, ok, we're going to take this piece of paper to the big office in Middelburg and we'll show them. The Middelburg office sent it somewhere else because nobody could speak French there either. But days later they told me, Esther, you're right, it's true, they want you to go and you must go. I said I don't know who I'm going with but they said I had to go alone. So the time arrived, they came to fetch me at home and took me to the airport. They told me we we're going on a Sunday but came on a Saturday. My grandchild wasn't here, he was in Pretoria. So I told them I can't go because my grandchild isn't here. They said no Esther, we're going, we'll pick him up on the way. We didn't pick him up and when we got the the airport I told them we had to go back home and check if he's come home. We went to his house, and they said he'd gone to my house. They said, It's time to go! I said I'm not going if he doesn't come with. I'm waiting for Elias! They said, we must go today, they will bring Elias the next week. I said alright.
So they told me, ‘Where the aeroplane stops, you must get off. When you see the people walking off you must follow them out the door. Then you'll see someone there to pick you up.’ When I got out in France I saw the people who had come to pick me up signaling for me to come over. But I told them no, I'm waiting for my mielie-meal! (Mielie meal is a traditional Ndebele staple, made from corn). I brought a whole lot of mielie meal because they said there wouldn't be any in France.
I was wearing the traditional Ndebele clothes. So I went off to the place. They showed me which house I was going to paint - a house that had been built exactly like my house, except without a thatch roof. I couldn’t believe it. On Monday Elias was still not there, but they said they were getting him on Tuesday. I said I'm coming with. He will see my clothes and know where to go! They said don't worry. When he came back Pierre told me he couldn't get Elias. I said, 'PIERRE! told you! But then Elias came round the corner…we laughed so much.
So, when I arrived I was preparing to paint, buying the colours and so on. I realised that I needed cow dung, so I told Pierre - go and fetch me some! He said, 'In Paris?'. So he went off looking for some and came back with some dung. I said no Pierre, this is horse dung! But I said ok, I can use it, and I started on my house. The day came, it was a big party, and afterwards they said to me - you must go to Bordeaux to paint a caravan. I said ok, and I went. Then I was invited to Japan.
Since then you have travelled all over the world. Do you remember the places you loved the most, and the people you most loved meeting?
Let’s see. I’ve been to Lisbon, Nantes, Livorno, Belgium, Lyon, Amsterdam, Italy, Spain, America, Washington DC, New York, California, Charleston, Pennsylvania, Pittsburg, Atlanta, South Carolina, New Jersey, New Orleans, Texas. And Germany and Switzerland. And Brazil. And Australia. All the countries I've been to, people loved me very much. They smile, they laugh. They were very happy to see me, because they wondered, ‘How do you sleep wearing this stuff?' 'How do you eat?' 'How do you wash?'. I tell them I wash nicely! I don't take them off. I walk with them, sleep with them, take showers with them, because this is the Ndebele wedding ring. The rings around your neck your parents give you; those around around the ankles your husband gives you. There are some inconveniences - when I go through airport security I always set the machine off! (laughs) When the machine goes off they always ask me to take the rings off before I walk through and I say No I can't take them off!
You have been to so many beautiful cities. I wonder, have you ever been tempted to live elsewhere?
No, no, no. I can go to all these places, but I must come back. I must come home. My place is South Africa. My children are here, my grandchildren are here. This is where I was born, this is my home. I can't leave.
You must have met many famous people along the way, famous artists in particular?
I have met so many famous people, but I can't remember them. (laughs)
I notice you have pictures of Nelson Mandela (his successor) Thabo Mbeki and a few other dignitaries on your walls. Have you met them?
Yes, I’ve met Madiba, and Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. The other two I met overseas, but Madiba was the only one to have visited me at the Ndebele Royal Kraal. It was a long while ago but that was special.
Seaking of politics, it could be said that your work has in recent decades taken on a more political significance. In his book ‘A Portrait with Keys’, local writer Ivan Vladislavic remembers the moment Ndebele painting became a fad in Johannesburg in the wake of the Art Car. He wrote “It was a striking symbolic moment in the invention of the new South Africa, a supposedly traditional, indigenous culture laying claim to one of the most desirable products our consumer society had to offer, smoothly wrapping this contemporary symbol of status, wealth and sophisticated style in its colours...It suited the early nineties perfectly: Africa was coming to the suburbs in the nicest possible way.” How political is your work?
I wouldn’t know what to say to that. I stay out of politics. I paint because I love it. It stretches my heart wide, and when I’m doing it I am very very happy.
There are lots of rich people
In the cafe
They have good shoes
And good trousers
And good handbags
And good eyebrows
One has her boobs out
Not fully out
But almost fully out
She is wearing yoga clothes;
clothes only for yoga
The music is soft and light
It mustn’t hurt the ears
of the rich
The waitress is the owner
She slides around, or glides
Like she’s on wheels
People take small mouthfuls
Of scrambled egg and small buns
With raisins in them
Rich people look nice
And they smell nice
Some of them look cross
And nobody is laughing
Maybe it’s because laughing
Shows your teeth, and what if
there are bits of raisin?
I like to come to these places
The temperature is good
And it makes me feel safe
But I also notice things
About me
Like my jeans have a bit
Of cream cheese on them
And I didn’t spend enough money
On my hair
The rich people don’t mind
that I am here
I could also be rich, perhaps
Only I’m not rich
Because If I was I would’ve added
That expensive sausage
To my breakfast (the local one
Made by the man with lots
Of tattoos)
and maybe even
A second coffee
I arrived at David Krut Projects’ unlikely suburban bureau in Newlands on a wintry night and, parking between two swaying pine trees in the pitch dark, I half wondered whether I’d made a wro…
I failed my driver’s license test twice and only got it on the third occasion by bribing my instructor. The first time, when perched on a hill with my handbrake up, poised to attempt the dreaded “hill start”, I nervously plunged the gearstick past first and into reverse. I revved the engine, released the handbrake and flew backwards towards the instructor, who leapt out of the way and flung his clipboard onto the grass in the process. No words were exchanged and none were needed. I had failed with flying colours.
I shouldn’t have gone back to Durbanville for a second test. I shouldn’t have gone back to Durbanville for any reason, but specifically for a doomed exam. Doomed because anyone who fails so flamboyantly the first time is going to have his work cut out the second time around and so it proved. I did make it up the hill but not out of the yard; a bumped pole, a sigh, a familiar traipse back to the office and I was back in the car with my mother. I remember being more concerned about the fact that I’d wasted the application fee than anything else.
It would be two years before my third try and only after my learner’s license had expired, which meant going back to Ottery to rewrite it, the whole process becoming like a boring version of snakes and ladders. The first time, I arrived full of confidence and duly failed. Having scraped through the second one, I finagled an appointment at Fish Hoek testing centre. Smaller, flatter, more English than Durbanville, I thought: I’ll pass this one.
In fact, I simply had to pass. A week after the appointment I was due to fly to Sweden to begin a life with a girl I had rashly proposed to earlier that year on a small, treeless island half an hour from Malmö. Later, when we inevitably parted, I realised that proposing to marry someone actually means wanting to be married to them and isn’t, as I firmly believed at the time, just a new and cool way of saying you’re into someone. But this was long before that. The pressure was on. I started the car.
Fish Hoek was odd in that you had to drive a bit to get to the place where the driving test began. In that short journey to the yard, I wasn’t sure whether I was being tested or not. This uncertainly would prove crucial when, having aced the various neck-craning, eye-darting assignments in the yard, I rolled the car very slightly as we parked in front of my instructor’s office, stopping him halfway through a sentence I was sure was about to conjure the magic word: “passed”.
“Hmm,” he said instead. “I’m sorry but that’s a fail.” I frantically tried to argue that this bit wasn’t the real test, that the test began and ended in the yard, but quickly realised the insanity of my pleas and simply gave up. A few seconds passed in silence. We sat together, our seatbelts still on, in a parking lot empty but for the car we were in, a Toyota Tazz, I recall. I had nothing left to say. I was a 20-year-old engaged university dropout who had failed his driver’s test for a third time and whose mother was sitting in another car, a sky blue Opel Cub I recall, reading and waiting to pay, at the other side of the building.
“I…can’t fail this test,” I said eventually, to nobody really; it was a way of bracing myself for the walk of shame. But my test was not over. As I reached for the keys in the ignition, the instructor, who curiously still hadn’t taken his seatbelt off, spoke three words I will never forget. He said them slowly, deliberately. “Talk to me,” he said, staring straight ahead.
So, I talked. I told him my story. He listened patiently and when it was over, he told me he had an idea. He would go inside to look over the paperwork and I would go to KFC and buy a Zinger meal. Why? It being early in the morning, he hadn’t yet had breakfast. I must have thought this was perfectly reasonable because I went straight to my mother and got into the car. Our conversation went something like this:
Mom: “And?”
Me: “We need to go to KFC”
Mom: “Did you pass?”
Me: “I won’t know until we go to KFC.”
We drove into the centre of Fish Hoek and found the KFC easily. I went to the door, stared through the glass into the empty kitchen and my heart sank. It was closed. I am going to fail my driver’s test because KFC is not open, I thought. I was not ready to be amused by this.
Whether it was my idea or my mother’s, it was decided that instead of going back empty handed we should try another take-away place. Wimpy? Spur? Maybe he wasn’t fussy. The Spur, too, was easy to find. Any flash of garish colour stands out against the desolate grey of a seaside town in winter. I went upstairs and found, to my relief, a smattering of bored waitrons. One handed me a large wooden menu in the shape of a tombstone and I found what seemed to be the closest to a zinger meal we were likely to get at 9am on a Tuesday morning in Fish Hoek.
We drove back from the Golden River Spur in silence. I placed the bag on the instructor’s desk. He peered into it, regarding the contents. Was he counting them? Burger – check. Chips – check. Fanta – check.
He opened a drawer in his desk and found a stamp. Wetting it with a prolonged, firm push into the inkpad, he began the routine I had waited years to see: a violent double stamp, the flourish of a pen, a bit of sticky tape over a photo of my smiling face. With that, it was done. I had my driver’s license.
That was 17 years ago, the same winter Hansie Cronje was in court over match fixing allegations. There was a mood of corruption in the air. I remember going through the motions, not realising - not wanting to realise, perhaps – what was happening. It was years after that strange morning when the penny finally dropped. I hadn’t passed my driver’s license, I had bought it for a chicken burger. I had passed, but I had also failed.
Questions remain. Was this just the sort of thing that happened at Fish Hoek testing centre? Should I have done something about it? And where was my mother in all of this? When I play the movie back in my head, she plays a minor supporting act. She is uncritical, compliant even. But I know she would have asked questions if she had cottoned on. Perhaps I lied to her when I got back to the car. Perhaps I couldn’t bear to tell her I’d failed again. Perhaps. I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.
The Company's Garden
maintained by a spirited few
is nevertheless forlorn
as if Ottoman or Greek
with its tired and well-worn
paths through unkempt rose-bushes
and between sad palms, swaying to
a doleful music - the longing call
of geese from Egypt, hadedas
and complaining police sirens.
And then, saluting,
the hulking figure of a man, now stained
with scrubbed-off paint
his Achilles heel angle-ground
10 inches deep,
not (yet) all the way through
An accompanying essay for Dale Lawrence’s solo exhibition at SMITH in 2016, ‘look busy’.
This piece was available at the gallery throughout the show at SMITH Studio from April-May 2016. Commissioned by the artist himself, the essay aimed to explore the premise of his show. Lawrence’s work, the lion’s share of which is a combination of linocuts and acrylic paintings but also includes a monotype, a screen print, two wax-print dyed fabric pieces and a hand-woven wool tapestry, explores the nature and often-questionable necessity of work. Look Busy refers to the need for us all – arguably artists in particular – to fill our time with activity, whether or not that activity has any utility or purpose. Does art need to be time-consuming, or indeed painstaking, to justify itself? Interrogating idleness and what might be called an “occupation obsession”.
look busy
I am tasked with writing an accompanying essay to a show entitled look busy. This is the show you are currently at, no doubt. In a way, you are reading this essay while I am writing it.
I have the suspicion that Mr. Lawrence has used italics in the title of this show to convey movement or impetus, perhaps humorously implying urgency without there actually being any. Is he using the writer’s device of not just saying something but saying something? Do the words, imbued with this energy, appear to be busy themselves?
I am sitting at my computer, writing, but am I busy? When I am not actually typing words am I still “writing”? Is writing even work? What defines work? Is it only work if there is money involved? Must it necessarily be difficult, or at least require effort to be considered work? Perhaps at the very least it needs to make something work. It is work if the result of that work is something that works. If so, writing is not work and I am not working.
work /wəːk/ noun activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result.
If experienced lawyers are paid more than inexperienced lawyers and the same applies to any other member of the established workforce, then what is it that artists are meant to be gaining experience in? What is an artist’s job?
Yesterday I drove around. It counted as a workday. I attempted nothing more ambitious than call a hairdresser and book an appointment. Not long after that I called back to cancel. I am getting married in a week. It makes me feel as though I have a lot to do and can’t possibly fit anything else in, but the truth is, yesterday I drove around. I must have looked busy.
I have the idea to write a diary of my process in writing this essay. I could title it ‘Work in Progress’, which is a phrase I’ve always found somehow amusing. It would also be clever and appropriate. Am I excited by this idea because, ironically, it contains less work? Am I looking for ways to swap the least effort the most output? Don’t work hard, work smart, say the all-knowing THEY.
THEY also say that less is more. Is it? Lawrence is an interesting case study in this regard. His current show exhibits two very different styles of work. On the one had there is painstaking, methodical, arduous and deliberate work that, as a result, takes a very long time to produce. On the other, Lawrence’s unserious, minimalist paintings seem to betray this intensive approach. Seen together, we have restraint and control beside gay abandon. Lawrence himself, in hand-scrawled notes he photographed and sent to me, has asked whether work that takes him longer should be seen as more valuable.
(Matthew can’t get to the essay right now because he is very busy not getting to the essay. He will return to it at his earliest convenience, which will coincide with the completion of his round of online golf at St. Andrews links. For all intents and purposes, he is working on the essay. He has the volume turned down on his laptop in order to mute the damning clink of virtual golf club on virtual golf ball or the swirling of virtual wind across virtual Scottish beachscape.)
BACK TO A GOOD QUESTION FROM D. LAWRENCE: DOES IT MATTER HOW LONG ONE TAKES TO MAKE AN ARTWORK? IT FOLLOWS TO WONDER WHETHER SOME ARTISTS FILL TIME DOING THINGS TO THEIR ART THAT SABOTAGES ANYTHING PURE THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE, POSSIBLY AS AN INSECURE REFLEX TO LOOKING AT SOMETHING SIMPLE AND SEEING IT AS INSUFFICIENT. “LESS” BEING IN THIS ESTIMATION NOT ONLY “NOT MORE” BUT ALSO “NOT ENOUGH”. THERE ARE CERTAINLY ALSO THOSE WHO UNDERCOOK THEIR WORK AND HIDE IN THE RELATIVE SAFETY OF HAVING NOT REALLY SAID OR DONE ANYTHING.
This bit is hard to read.
A gentleman named Tim Krieder wrote a popular article for the New York Times in 2012 in which he argued that “busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” I believe he is quite right, and found the quote to be apt in this context. It is worth asking, however, whether my cutting and pasting of this paragraph can be considered work I have done.
busy /ˈbɪzi/ adjective having a great deal to doBusy as a verb is arguably more pertinent here, meaning in this form to “keep oneself occupied”. For example: “Dale Lawrence busied himself with the preparation for his show”. He busied himself. It is clear here that the busyness is coming from him; he is choosing to be busy.
Where are those lines going in Lawrence’s paintings? Does he know? Or has he set out to find out, to draw out, an answer from the line itself? Who is in control? If a line has a purpose or a destination, is it a better line?
Sitting in a busy café. It is busy. This busyness is an orchestration of movement, a manufactured dance conducted by the hiss and grunt of a coffee machine, some light trip hop and a murmur of mumbling.
Have I done enough, or too much?
This concludes the essay. I trust it kept you busy.
This article was first published in THE LAKE Magazine, April 2016. (Portrait by Oliver Kruger)
Jaco van Schalkwyk arrives at our meeting place, a smart café across the road from his Bree street studio that has optimistically attempted to marry luxury cars with macchiatos, looking disheveled. He has had a long night, certainly not his first, and there is a faint smell of alcohol on his breath. Dressed in what can only be described as ‘Cape Town formal’, he matches a suit jacket with flip-flops, a combination that might go some way to describing the man himself; a serious man, but a pragmatic one too. What it doesn’t tell you is how funny he is. It was the poet Rilke who said that “almost everything serious is difficult; and everything is serious”. Van Schalkwyk appears to share his view, gravely applying himself to his art with a painstaking, methodical and, yes, pragmatic approach that yields hard-won but immeasurably satisfying riches. He speaks quickly but deliberately throughout our meeting, measuring his words, selecting them. Art is a serious business, and to begin with a quote of his own, “you’re either making art or you’re making hot dogs”.
I had a plan for this interview, but maybe we should abandon the plan in the spirit of how I think you approach your art: opportunity for chance within a set form.
Yes. In any case, I had a strange night last night. Freaked out.
When you freak out, what do you physically do? Do you just sit there, or pace around, what?
Well, losing control is losing control. I can't put a word to it. It is what happens. [laughs]
What is the difference between an artist with no work and just an unemployed person?
Let me put it to you this way – what I do is also an elaborate form of begging. I try to create really, really enticing ways to ask you for money. We can all do that, which is wonderful, but you need some education in this matter. Constable said that ‘a self-taught artist is someone taught by an ignorant person’. You need some instruction but the potential is there – every person has the proclivity to make art. This is the great Marxist ideal: that we fish in the morning and write in the afternoon. That is the culmination of the revolution, not working in a mine or an office. So, what is the difference between an unemployed person, say, and an artist? Hopefully nothing.
What guides you, then?
I have a sort of a spirit animal, if you like, which came to me in a vision in Los Angeles, in a Holiday Inn. I saw this leopard in a neon tree, a tree of neon green and it was pawing at me saying ‘Look at these spots. Whenever you see me, remember that you need to take care of your first-order principles’. And that is a process of constant redefinition of what things are, because everything is in flux. The way we come to definition, the way we define things - those are first-order principles. And so one’s philosophy might be set and as such there are constraints but the process of redefining how we define is constant and never ending, which is why we can make art until the moment we die, hopefully.
In an older interview you point readers to an essay by Bridget Riley titled At The End Of My Pencil. I read it with great interest and the central word seemed to be “inquiry”. She seemed to be saying that for an artwork to be worthwhile, its creator needs to approach it with the understanding that she knows nothing. It is a process of asking rather than telling.
I have never liked being told what to do. I don’t want to be told what to do. When you say inquiry, my first thought is Michelangelo, especially with drawing. Drawing is a focused, singular inquiry into the unknown. Essentially drawing is thinking. And thinking is asking and figuring something out for yourself, as opposed to being okay with just being told about the way things are. Every drawing is a question, and you would not be questioning knowledge if you were okay with being told what to do by it, you know?
If there is simply art and non-art, can there even be such a thing as “bad” art?
Oh, there is definitely such a thing as bad art.
Does it matter, though? Doesn’t time eventually sort the wheat from the chaff?
Time sorts it all out. The viewer is not the guy who owns everything. The viewer is time. Posterity. It is unimportant what people think. Time is the viewer.
Still, a lot of artists who time eventually recognizes have long since died when it does. Often, said artists have had a torrid time when they were alive and ignored. Francis Bacon said it takes about 75 years for it to all sort itself out. What do you make of this?
Cezanne is a great example of that. They said he couldn’t paint. [laughs]
Another of Riley’s suggestions in her essay was that “relinquishing some cherished notion or something that you have relied on” was part of the a destructive side to creative life which she called “essential to an artist’s survival.” Bacon has also talked about destroying what you love most about something in order to be free enough to create. The writer William Faulkner said that in writing “you should kill all your darlings”. He might not be being literal but he, like the others, is honing in on an idea I wonder if you might share – that acting habitually or resting on familiar ideas and favoured methods might be an obstruction to making art.
It comes down to actually killing things, and you experience all the trauma that goes with that. But essentially, we are dealing with pragmatism. Because everything is in flux, we must guestimate or ballpark-figure-our-way through what we’re doing - we are never exactly sure. The moment you’re exactly sure you’re making hot dogs, not art. So yes, I’d say repeating familiar ideas precludes art from being made. Also, liking or not liking is a very simplistic way to look at something incredibly complex. So by liking or not liking, you’re kind of missing the point.
Practicing this rigorous inquiry and discipline of not allowing habit or comfort of familiarity to poison the “meta workspace” as you call it must make living your actual life difficult in that you could begin to mistrust comfort, familiarity and other such things and make mistakes by cutting out the things that you as a human being might need. How do you reconcile this?
I don’t know. But I love my girlfriend and she helps me with this problem.
What do you want to do, if anything, with your art?
I feel that my purpose is to question first-order principles. I’m calling for a rethink of the rules that we make. Like, I don’t believe there is a distinction between form and colour. I question the distinction. Or the exact nature of the distinction. Perhaps the distinction needs to be updated.
Riley went back to square one, literally, in order to rediscover her fascination with the creative process. You spent much of your 20s not engaging with art at all. What brought you back?
I stopped drawing for six years after I finished studying. In fact, it happened while I was studying. I stopped making art entirely. I was concerned with forms I was using but didn't understand. I didn’t have the ability to understand the forms I was interested in working with.
When did this change?
It was when I came back to South Africa. I had no money. I was living in my mother’s house approaching 30. I took an office job for the first time in my life and it was just terrifying. It blew my mind how mundane a life without making art was. Whenever I got drunk, I’d pull out the last drawings I made in NY and go “Look, I used to do that!” One night I showed them to a friend I’d just met – the painter MJ Lourens – and he convinced me to exhibit them at Cameo Framers in Pretoria. They all sold. And I didn’t miss them when they were gone. I just felt relieved, like the drawings were finally finished because somebody else was getting to enjoy them. Finally letting go of those drawings made me understand things differently. There is great joy in communicating something. What’s the point of making stuff and keeping it under your bed for six years?
Did this mean you were able to see your exact position at the coalface?
What clicked was realising that if everything is in flux and everything is constantly changing, then my picture of a tiny constrained space is going to be similar to the whole picture. I mean, stop trying to fuck around and say shit about things you don’t understand. If everything is infinitely complex, don’t do stuff that you don’t understand. Deal with what you have.
That dream that you had and the relationship you have with this leopard character – you are clearly listening to prompts from an alternative source. Listening to voices in your head is conventionally considered a form of madness. What do you say to that?
I grew up in apartheid. That is madness. So my not listening to instruction seemed like the sanest thing to do. So if it’s about leopards coming to me in hotels in Los Angeles, I’ll take that any day over some fuck telling me that I have to hate other people. To me, art is about affirming that man is one. Always has been. We are affirming our humanity and our shared existence. I still believe in that dream and will until I die, no matter what this incarnation of democracy does. It is another government doing whatever it is doing. I will not stop believing in that rainbow, that fairytale, that thing. That is not going to change. Because I know what the alternative is. I grew up in it. So I’d rather be mad, thank you. [laughs]
What is the worst thing about being an artist?
The shittest thing about being an artist? That people expect you to be fantastic forever. That’s insane. That you’re going to be brilliant for decades and decades and decades. I mean, Matisse is a special case. He had a great decade when he was young and then ended with a flourish. He had two decades of brilliance! Bacon was brilliant in the 60s and its debatable if he was brilliant by the end. He would debate the same thing. This is what killed Johannes Kerkorrel (Ralph Rabie) – that he had to fucking reinvent himself every time he went on stage. Too many people in this country think that if you’re in the newspaper you’re rich. We’re struggling, man. Art and culture are in trouble. We don’t make money easily. Count on one hand the amount of people who are making a great living out of art. That is the toughest thing; that people assume that you’re fabulously wealthy if you’re on television. It’s not the case.
