WAYNE BARKER, ARTIST’S MONOGRAPH
Published 2000 in association with Chalkham Hill Press
Published 2000 in association with Chalkham Hill Press
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To my wife to be, Claire;<br />
my two daughters, Kendra and Kayla;<br />
and my late father and brother,<br />
Douglas and Mark.
Origination & Co-ordination: Henri Vergon<br />
Text: Charl Blignaut<br />
Editor: Brenda Atkinson<br />
Research: Rita Potenza<br />
Graphic Design: Rohan Reddy<br />
Published in association with Chalkham Hill Press<br />
& the French Institute of South Africa.<br />
ISBN 0-620-26018-1<br />
This edition copyright © 2000 Chalkham Hill Press<br />
The text is copyright © 2000 Charl Blignaut & © 2000 Alan Crump<br />
All professional photographs are copyright © the photographers.<br />
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without<br />
permission from the publishers except for the quotation of<br />
selected passages in criticism or reviews.
4. Introduction<br />
7. Vienna Calling<br />
9. 60’s Suburbia<br />
12. Johnny Rottenism<br />
14. Anyone for Tennis?<br />
18. Fourteen Days in Hell<br />
20. The Bad Art Attacks<br />
22. The Famous Five do Downtown<br />
24. Fragments of a Murder<br />
25. Have you Hugged a Fascist Today?<br />
28. Landscape with Target<br />
30. Blood Money<br />
31. Le Monde a L’envers<br />
34. Bigotry on a Stick<br />
36. The Heart of Neon<br />
39. Divorce in Paradise<br />
40. The South African Thing<br />
42. Storming the Ramparts<br />
44. The Wax Hand<br />
45. A Love Story<br />
46. Frankfurt in Latex<br />
47. The Talking Curio<br />
50. Back to Basics<br />
51. Dirty Laundry<br />
52. A New Kind of Freedom<br />
54. Biography<br />
55. Photo Credits & Works
After the considerable amount of unpublished<br />
material I have read about Wayne Barker's work, I find it<br />
somewhat strange that the artist should ask me to<br />
contribute to this publication. After all, it was I who accused<br />
him during the last Standard Bank national drawing<br />
competition, over a decade ago, of "playing silly games"<br />
and of "shameless self- promotion." The outcome of this<br />
exchange was, for some, and undoubtedly Barker, that a<br />
reversal had taken place. I had become the mouthpiece<br />
representing an authority "dominated by patronising white<br />
experts." Long before the change to a democratic<br />
government a new cultural political correctness had arrived.<br />
The days of judging art, especially judging art for no<br />
remuneration, were nearing the end. The question of<br />
who was capable of judging whom, who represented<br />
who, and who was acceptable to all parties made the<br />
task unenviable and became a political minefield. Wayne<br />
Barker has always had problems with authority both at<br />
the level of the individual and that of a system. In fact any<br />
young artist who does not possess a healthy degree of<br />
irreverence against previous art systems has some cause<br />
for concern. Brancusi believed this of Rodin at the<br />
beginning of the<br />
twentieth<br />
century,<br />
and contemporary<br />
British<br />
sculptors still<br />
insist that every<br />
generation<br />
should commit<br />
patricide of their previous masters. After Henry Moore,<br />
their sentiments are comprehensible.<br />
In South Africa, the tradition of artists waiting<br />
interminably for the nod from a commercial gallery or<br />
museum curator to exhibit their work is still in existence.<br />
But an alternative group of artists began to question the<br />
traditions of this system more than ten years ago. Wayne<br />
Barker was certainly one of them. Audacious, truculent,<br />
witty, highly critical and iconoclastic, the works he produced<br />
and the alternative venues that he found and encouraged<br />
artists to use, posed a genuine alternative to the existing<br />
system. Most artists felt more comfortable in the somewhat<br />
confined area of only making art works. The possibility of<br />
an artist challenging the domain of museum curator and<br />
orchestrating contentious exhibitions with work from<br />
different and sometimes jumbled perspectives was initiated<br />
and encouraged by Barker. Though much of the work was<br />
not purchased that was by no means an indication of the<br />
quality of the shows. The South African art public had<br />
generally been used to logical and sequential exhibitions<br />
which dealt with single themes and comprehensible<br />
parameters. For artists to curate cutting-edge exhibitions<br />
without the experience and qualifications of seasoned<br />
museologists was both foreign and risqué. This was one<br />
important contribution that should not be underestimated<br />
when summing up this artist's creative output. It requires<br />
as much ingenuity as the making of an artwork itself.<br />
Superficially, Barker's work often possesses a cavalier<br />
quality and his personality appears to be that of a cultural<br />
cowboy reminiscent of the young Robert Rauschenburg<br />
of the mid 1950s in North America. The cultivating of a<br />
persona also seems for some artists to be an inextricable<br />
4
part of the making process. One has only to consider the cultivated egos of two titans of the twentieth century, Duchamp<br />
and Warhol, to recognise this trend. Underlying this outer appearance, Barker is an extremely serious artist, whose<br />
concerns deal with the human condition, a condition far more about tragedy than comedy, and of loss, confrontation,<br />
vulnerability and the insecurities of change. Dealing with these potent issues is not foreign to many South African writers,<br />
playwrites, and movie makers, but to be an artist there is the language of materiality with which one has to contend.<br />
In all Barker's works, whether they are paintings, installations, assemblages or objects, there remains an underlying<br />
aesthetic, which is the understanding of how to "put things together" and how to incorporate "stuff," in a way that only<br />
experienced artists succeed in doing. The materials he uses may not necessarily be traditional (after a century of using<br />
found objects nothing can really be regarded as sacred), but the manner in which he allows objects and surfaces to<br />
coexist, and how new meaning is invented and evoked, is part of his unique visual alphabet and narrative. I have<br />
selected three of the many works that he has produced. The first work initially appeared to be a fairly weak facsimile<br />
of a typical Pierneef painted on a mass-produced template displaying various anti-personel mines produced by the<br />
previous government for a public-awareness campaign. On closer scrutiny the message was apparent. It was visionary<br />
and loaded with a plethora of socio-political and cultural inversions. At that time only a committed and courageous<br />
artist would have attempted such accusations. This small, quiet work acted for me as a cultural sledge-hammer. The<br />
fact that this work hangs in the South African National Gallery reflects the knife edge which both this state institution<br />
and the artist walked. This work is devoid of malice, which I believe applies to all his work, but is imbued rather with<br />
a message of the tragedy of a dying culture and the agony of an unknown new one to be born.<br />
The second work was " Lulu the Zulu." This is a painting of such salacious and unacceptable adolescent naughtiness<br />
that it offends almost everyone. The feminists, the purists, the academics, the cultural mind police, the museum curators<br />
and the Kitsch lovers were all highly displeased by this work. It nevertheless, talks of altered sensitivities, exploitation<br />
and reversals of value which South Africans had, still have and probably will continue to have to some degree in the<br />
future. As the past constructs the present, so too does contemporary art which, if worth its salt, reflects identity changes,<br />
the rethinking on gender, political neglect and assumed cultural values. Barker's work uncomfortably reminds us that<br />
few people live truly independently and that individuals are continually being moulded by ongoing propaganda, social<br />
conditioning and nowadays spin doctors.<br />
The third work, exhibited in 1994, entitled " Coke Adds Life" is a ghoulish installation dealing with the awful irony of<br />
the cheapness of consumerism and the cheapness of life during the civil war in Mozambique in the 1980s. The<br />
glamourising of a multinational carbonated sugar beverage in preference to subsistence food is reminiscent of Marie<br />
Antoinette's absurd statement revisited in Africa two centuries later. The installation, adorned by contemporary advertising<br />
lights, AK 47's, traditional religious icons and a Tonga maize-grinding vessel are chilling reminders of the clash between<br />
past and present, "Blood" and "Hope," impassive multinationalism, and ancient rituals in the chaos of present day Africa.<br />
5
Much of Barker's works reflects the complexity and<br />
diverse values of many cultures in one country. It is this<br />
complexity, the multi dimension of different worlds with<br />
different voices which he manages to sew into his works.<br />
The creative space he has forged appears to have been<br />
germinated in his challenging and questioning of<br />
established structures from an early age. The journey does<br />
not make for easy living but also does not suffer from the<br />
taboo of talking about "the other." Nor is his work<br />
regurgitated iconology.<br />
During the South Africa of the 1980s, the cultural boycott<br />
had some positive effects on the creative output of many<br />
artists in the country. As the groundswell of social and<br />
political resistance increased, so too arose a questioning<br />
of rigid cultural authority and fearsome political repression.<br />
Out of this crucible, Barker's career began. Inevitably this<br />
cultural isolation could not sustain itself and the need for<br />
artists to experience and exhibit abroad has been enriching<br />
for both them and for this country's art. To become part<br />
of the world there are certain systems which the art world<br />
requires. I refer to the quality of publications and the<br />
proliferation of the written word which automatically<br />
internationalises the art. South Africa has, in my opinion,<br />
several artists of unquestionable merit who have the ability<br />
to take their place on the international exhibition arena.<br />
At present there is a shrinking support for all the arts which<br />
is a matter of grave concern and in the end it will be left<br />
to the ingenuity of the individual to survive both in this<br />
country and abroad.<br />
I have willingly contributed to this publication because<br />
I believe this artist has a proven track record which warrants<br />
the kind of exposure that he deserves. South Africa has<br />
never been a boring country and the unique and often<br />
traumatised dynamism which acts as a catalyst to unleash<br />
the creative energy of certain makers is missing in secure<br />
environments. So much of first world art has had the visual<br />
and conceptual corners sanded off it. Although some of<br />
Barker's works could well do with editing, his energy and<br />
iconoclasm has produced art which at best is raw, maverick,<br />
beautiful, tragic and humorous. The all South African boy<br />
he is not, a good artist he undoubtedly is.<br />
Alan Crump<br />
6
7<br />
"There's a strong flying story going down," says<br />
Wayne Barker of his family history. "Particularly on my<br />
father's side. Before me there were three generations of<br />
fighter pilots, air force pilots, military men... "<br />
A cursory glance around the artist's Johannesburg<br />
studio - a big old charmed space with arches and bad<br />
wiring that used to be a hip urban restaurant - and it seems<br />
that the family flying heritage stops here. It's as hard to<br />
imagine Barker in uniform with a two-car family as it is to<br />
imagine him abstaining for any length of time from parties<br />
that begin at dusk and career into dawn.<br />
Barker breaks off his sentence to answer his cell phone.<br />
It's Vienna on the line, and he is invited to open a show of<br />
student work there later in the week. But he's flustered by<br />
the idea of another financially thin stint in Europe when he<br />
should be home working on his retrospective. He sweetly<br />
but firmly declines.<br />
As a key member of the generation of white South<br />
African artists who assailed the racist ideologies of the<br />
country's contemporary history, Barker has been part of<br />
the first wave of local producers to be offered air tickets<br />
and significant international options. In the process of<br />
travelling, his work has been increasingly marked by colonial<br />
histories and pop culture signposts beyond his own country's<br />
often violently fractured borders: spice winds and trade<br />
routes, exploration and invasion, the traumatic semiotics<br />
of cultures meshing. In the back half of Barker's portfolio,<br />
birds, butterflies and aeroplanes suggest that there's a<br />
strong flying story going down here after all.
When he talks about growing up in the dire political and cultural conservatism<br />
of late-70s Pretoria, it's clear that flight then was much more about fleeing than<br />
flying. As a teenager, he would run away from home to become a wood carver<br />
at the coast. And as a conscript in the South African Defence Force, he lost no<br />
time in fleeing the institution that had been a second home to three generations<br />
of Barker men.<br />
Coupled with the contradictions of a country where freedom was a highly<br />
relative term, his family's nationalist politics and patriarchal values created a<br />
schism that Barker would compulsively concentrate on straddling in his artistic<br />
work. Writing about the paintings on Images on Metal, Barker's debut solo<br />
show in 1989, Weekly Mail critic Ivor Powell put it this way: "It's as though [in<br />
Barker's work] meaning is the point where the lies of one's childhood meet the<br />
realities of the present, not a fixed point but an intersection." Shaped by those<br />
schisms, Barker would later emerge in the national press as a prankster and<br />
cultural agitator, in one instance assuming a black identity for the purposes of<br />
entering a national drawing competition. Still later, he would devise a performance<br />
piece that had him covered in brown chocolate and playing the piano naked:<br />
a bitter-<br />
sweet brown-white man with something to say about the stages of personal<br />
initiation, the commerce of cultures, and the agony of political entropy.<br />
"In a way it's a bit like having two identities," he says today. "But one was an<br />
identity I had to reject, which was based on my entire education as a white South<br />
African male."
In 1963, the year in which Barker was<br />
born, the National Party's apartheid policy<br />
was beginning to reveal the ruthless<br />
expediency of its ideological core. President<br />
H.F. Verwoerd governed from Pretoria when<br />
the Rivonia Trialists - a core group of African<br />
National Congress leaders including Nelson<br />
Mandela - were run to ground, tried, and<br />
incarcerated on Robben Island.<br />
Valhalla, the outlying suburb of Pretoria<br />
where Barker spent his first ten years, was<br />
not what it seemed. Growing up there, he<br />
recalls healthy stretches of "fruit trees and<br />
koppies", a "kind of innocence" that concealed<br />
its less benign status as home to a military<br />
air base and the families of Defence Force<br />
employees. These were apartheid's most<br />
villainous years - of total onslaughts in the<br />
townships and categorical denials about<br />
South Africa's military presence in<br />
neighbouring Angola and Mozambique.<br />
"We were absolutely part of a system<br />
where you were taught to hate black people,"<br />
says Barker today. "It was entrenched in<br />
virtually every conversation at home."<br />
Yet he also recalls family gatherings as<br />
"quite real and warm, like there was a sort of<br />
gemutlich vibe. You had drunk uncles playing<br />
match boxes and singing Sarie Marais and<br />
all that stuff."<br />
Barker found "unconditional love" at a Jewish nursery school and<br />
bonded with his older, adopted sister Linda, who introduced Bob Marley<br />
and hotpants to the neighbourhood. He witnessed two black men he<br />
knew from the corner shop being severely beaten by police for not<br />
carrying Pass books; he was rattled by the sight of street kids downtown<br />
while travelling home from a swimming gala one night, loaded with<br />
sweets he had won.<br />
9
It's not particularly difficult to imagine how the Glen<br />
High School in Pretoria was able to bring out "total Johnny<br />
Rottenism" in Wayne Barker.<br />
Despite its thistle emblem and tartan-clad cheerleaders,<br />
The Glen was not a pretty place in Scotland. Its dusty fields<br />
with their adjoining littered hollow lent themselves to<br />
smoking dope against the back fence while kicking at the<br />
tufts of grass still trying to grow. Its walls begged the<br />
malcontent scrawl of irremovable graffiti.<br />
The year was 1976, Soweto a cultural universe away.<br />
Barker was in Standard Six and his brother in Standard<br />
Eight. Together they were the neighbourhood's "legendary<br />
reprobates", bored white schoolboys who believed that<br />
to be wild was somehow also to be innocent. Buying dope<br />
one day, Barker was arrested and his Glen High career<br />
came to an abrupt end. Soon after, so did his home life -<br />
with all his clothes in black plastic bags, he ran away with<br />
a friend and became an apprentice woodcarver in Nature's<br />
Valley, where the fragrance of ocean and earth mixed<br />
headily with the thrill of flight and an almost anonymous<br />
freedom.<br />
Although his parents knew where he was, Barker had<br />
no contact with them until eight months later, when he<br />
returned to Pretoria and crammed his final two years of<br />
schooling at Capital College.<br />
Conscription loomed, and Barker, for better or for<br />
worse, followed his instincts and enrolled at Pretoria<br />
Technikon to study its first-ever art course. After a year<br />
spent living in his parents' outside room - a year of exploring<br />
13<br />
basic techniques and discovering a staggering backcatalogue<br />
of art history books and "art heroes" who he<br />
had barely known existed - he decided to take his art<br />
studies back to the coast. Over this time, another split<br />
became part of the make-up of his identity: the wayward<br />
rebel full of unfocused energy learned to shift, focus, and<br />
absorb information that would literally allow him to survive<br />
in a culture of reactionary thinkers. Later, when Barker<br />
would need a trap-door out of the military, the books he<br />
had read would be the material for performances in which<br />
he was the tragi-comic star.
In his two years at the University of Cape<br />
Town's Michaelis Art School, Barker's rough and<br />
ready painting instincts made a favourable<br />
impression. But he couldn't shake the lingering<br />
sense that something was up with the drinking<br />
water. As the filmmaker Mira Nair once put it:<br />
"Cape Town is not itself. Here even the vegetation<br />
is imported."<br />
Out of place in the city's small circle of<br />
smugness, Barker began to feel that maybe<br />
Pretoria wasn't so bad after all, at least it was<br />
what it was, however horrible. In Cape Town, P.W.<br />
Botha and his ever-encroaching states of<br />
emergency seemed to be able to exist in some<br />
sort of bubble somewhere above the mountain.<br />
Like his cousin Brett Murray and his soon-to-<br />
be new friend Barend de Wet, both already fourth-<br />
year art stars at the school when he arrived,<br />
Barker emerged from his encounters with the<br />
more genteel, gin-sipping, faux-bohemian side<br />
of life in the former colony thinking hard and<br />
muttering aloud.<br />
When a respected lecturer, Neville Dubow,<br />
asked his students to sculpt extensions of their<br />
bodies, Barker decided to make "a colonial thing".<br />
"It was a tennis court off my body - and I<br />
dressed up as [Dubow] and then got the rest of<br />
the students to throw tennis balls at me. Other<br />
people were making wings and stuff. And he was<br />
furious. He was devastated."<br />
14
Barker's brief outing as a tennis court was just the first of many little cultural interventions and art parodies he would<br />
come to perform. The next time he did it, though, he would be Charlie Chaplin and the stakes would be higher.<br />
15
When a lecturer at Michaelis told Barker<br />
that what he really needed was to go to the army,<br />
learn some discipline and then go back and<br />
paint, he obviously never knew his student. Or perhaps<br />
knew him all too well. When Barker returned from Cape<br />
Town at the end of 1983 having failed art history, his father<br />
insisted that he would do his bit for the country.<br />
Barker ignored the family pressure and spent that<br />
Christmas in Johannesburg. The decision would shift his<br />
context and redefine the parameters of his work, largely<br />
due to the influence of two people working there at the<br />
time. In Cape Town he had met a young actress and started<br />
helping her and a friend construct the sets for their plays.<br />
The actress was Megan Kruskul, and her friend was Chris<br />
Pretorius. Before leaving the country to pursue international<br />
opportunities, Pretorius and Kruskul would come as close<br />
as anyone ever has to being<br />
underground stars in Johannesburg.<br />
Working with them, Barker acquired<br />
skills that would later add weight and<br />
conviction to his military performance<br />
repertoire.<br />
When critic Brenda Atkinson today<br />
writes about the "ravishing aesthetic<br />
impact" of Barker's work, and of how<br />
he is able to turn "politics into beauty",<br />
the artist should probably, however<br />
briefly, tip his hat in the direction of<br />
South Africa's<br />
alternative theatre<br />
scene. Pretorius, a<br />
writer and designer,<br />
would almost certainly<br />
have instilled in Barker<br />
a sense of textured<br />
space and odd lighting. Kruskul, with whom Barker had<br />
become involved, would act in plays with names like Weird<br />
Sex in Maputo. She was also known to chant sick ditties<br />
and spit political outrage at the singer of a seminal punkish<br />
agit-rock band called Koos. Of the authors she got Barker<br />
to read, he would say in the Vryeweekblad: "In the army<br />
I was three people - Umberto Eco, Carl Jung and Joseph<br />
Heller."<br />
Early in 1984, Barker's call-up papers arrived at his<br />
parents' home. He and Kruskul were devastated, but she<br />
and his mother eventually dropped him off at the military<br />
18
ase in Voortrekkerhoogte, Pretoria.<br />
Barker was stunned.<br />
"I took one look and decided no way, not interested."<br />
Although the End Conscription Campaign had begun<br />
to gather momentum, white boys who refused to march<br />
to the apartheid tune for two years and return for camps<br />
for years thereafter essentially had two options: to go to<br />
the army or go to jail. Conscientious objectors could be -<br />
and were - arrested and imprisoned for up to five years.<br />
Barker's best option was to have himself classified<br />
unsuitable for service. With a renewed recklessness and<br />
a grand concentration of energy, he set to work. It took<br />
him about two weeks.<br />
"What happened was that in the army I met Jeremy<br />
Nathan [later a leading independent film producer], a<br />
confused theologian and a poet who'd been studying for<br />
nine years. We were in different barracks, but somehow<br />
we met and we'd strategise on the parade ground and<br />
we'd swap notes. We refused to<br />
carry rifles and understood how we<br />
were being indoctrinated."<br />
In those days the army was<br />
partly an extension of the white education system: on any<br />
given Friday afternoon you could see teen troopies strut<br />
their stuff in polished boots on well-watered school fields<br />
across the country. Because Barker had kicked a soccer<br />
ball deftly, in the army he ended up in the sport bungalow.<br />
"I was with all these fucking massive ous built like shithouses.<br />
And there I was going into passive resistance<br />
mode, pretending to be a bit mad."<br />
Barker's informal education kicked in: his desperate,<br />
off-the-cuff fusion of psychoanalysis and theatre had him<br />
marching like Charlie Chaplin, as well as bonding "to get<br />
to the Corporal to get to the Sergeant to get to the Lieutenant<br />
to get to the Captain to get out."<br />
He was duly released. Temporarily disowned by his<br />
family, he moved to Johannesburg and started painting.
Something was up in<br />
Johannesburg's art scene. Form just<br />
wasn't coping with context. The<br />
cultural boycott, always painful, was<br />
really starting to hurt. Political niceties<br />
couldn't cut it anymore, and Barker<br />
was one of the new kids on the block.<br />
The new kids - including a brace of<br />
artists and theatrical types emerging<br />
from Cape Town - were steadily being<br />
marginalised. They weren't sure they<br />
trusted their ideas in the hands of<br />
academic institutions, and had<br />
developed a distaste for the same<br />
old commercial galleries housed in<br />
leafy suburbs. Not that invitations to<br />
exhibit were particularly forthcoming<br />
- to this day Barker has never shown<br />
at the terribly important Goodman<br />
Gallery in Johannesburg. Its polite<br />
exigencies were part of the same<br />
forces that turned him into a tennis<br />
court and called up the ghost of<br />
Charlie Chaplin. Like some sort of<br />
pre-millennial Rimbaud, the Barker<br />
who turned up at Important Gallery<br />
Openings would enjoy the free booze<br />
and then take off all his clothes and<br />
rugby tackle the artists.<br />
"I thought the art was really bad. It was old. Like any 24-year-old I thought<br />
I was onto something fresher."<br />
Apart from the burgeoning multicultural scene at the Market Theatre<br />
complex downtown, the party sucked. So the kids decided to try and throw<br />
their own. The next few years would see the rise of Gallant House, the Black<br />
Sun theatre and Barker's own Famous International Gallery, more modestly<br />
known as Fig.<br />
20
In 1986 Barker had made his commercial art debut<br />
on the experimental wall at The Market Galleries (a new<br />
artist who painted on glass made a small notice in<br />
Johannesburg's daily newspaper The Star). Showing in<br />
the main space were friends up from Cape Town - including<br />
Barend de Wet and Kevin Brand. With Fig these artists and<br />
their Johannesburg contemporaries had a free space in<br />
which to test new work on their peers and on the arts<br />
press, often seen at openings looking somewhat<br />
beleaguered by having had to drive into the downtown<br />
badlands on a Sunday night. But no matter how vinegary<br />
the boxed wine, nor how sour the press, Fig would come<br />
to be regarded as a vital stop-over on the way to the<br />
mainstream success achieved by many who exhibited<br />
there. William Kentridge, Robert Hodgins, Joachim<br />
Schönfeldt, Neil Goedhals, Kate Gottgens, Lisa Brice, Kendell<br />
Geers, Steven Cohen et al all stopped over at Fig on their<br />
diverse paths to local and international recognition.<br />
A black South African art scene never happened at<br />
Fig - not for lack of trying, but because it would take some<br />
years for a mainstream system for black artists to emerge<br />
from a painfully segregated society. When it did it would<br />
settle at the Market<br />
precinct and then<br />
at the revamped<br />
Goodman.<br />
Barker still recalls every blurry detail of the opening<br />
show at Fig: "The Cape Town crowd came up and we did<br />
our first show, Urban Melodrama. We called<br />
22<br />
ourselves The Famous Five. We covered each painting in<br />
newspaper and we got the Prince of Swaziland to open<br />
the show. He used to walk around town in heels with a<br />
cigar mic shouting into a megaphone - wearing an afro<br />
and a kilt... "<br />
It was scenes like this, coupled with the arrival of a<br />
new breed of art intellectual from the more liberal<br />
universities, that would, by the early 90s, prompt much<br />
press speculation about the emergence of "an authentic<br />
Johannesburg avant-garde". For most, though, the label<br />
would seem frivolous in the face of an unprecedented<br />
national State of Emergency facing the country.
24<br />
In 1989, Nelson Mandela was<br />
still in prison; P.W. Botha had<br />
suffered a stroke and F.W. De Klerk<br />
was about to replace him as State<br />
President. The first lurid exposés of<br />
apartheid hit-squad atrocities were<br />
rattling the headlines of the<br />
independent press.<br />
Battering, bruising and<br />
abrading pieces of metal until<br />
images suggested themselves on<br />
the surface like channelled spirits,<br />
the artist then pasted ready-made<br />
products or painted a series of vivid,<br />
colliding images in oils on his dusty<br />
downtown canvasses. These<br />
canvasses would make up Images<br />
on Metal, his first solo show, held<br />
at the Market Galleries.<br />
He transformed the gallery<br />
space into a closed reality littered<br />
with pop signs and scruffy wonders<br />
- goldfish circled their bowls on the<br />
floor beneath the paintings.<br />
Interspersed with a series of line<br />
drawings of black faces - called<br />
Victims - symbols of Afrikaner<br />
nationalist history looked out,<br />
as Powell described it, "from<br />
fragments of a murder".
By 1992, Barker was well known to the downtown<br />
police. In those days virtually everyone with a remotely<br />
subversive record - and certainly all conscientious objectors<br />
- had a file kept on their activities at the notorious police<br />
headquarters, John Vorster Square.<br />
It was there that Barker was taken after his second<br />
arrest. "What happened was a policeman, a big, big, white<br />
policeman had just caught a street child for petty theft and<br />
fucked the bejesus out of him in front of me, so I was<br />
again faced with this whole terrible reality of do I -<br />
can I - speak for him. Or<br />
do I just ignore it?"<br />
Barker lost his temper.<br />
The arresting officer<br />
lost his docket. Barker<br />
spent the better part<br />
of his week in the<br />
holding cells, where<br />
25<br />
he was faced with another moral question. "I was in the<br />
cell with two far right wing AWB types who had just<br />
murdered a black man. They had stolen his guitar and<br />
they had killed him."<br />
Late on the second night, the Sergeant came to tell the<br />
one man that his brother had committed suicide, and<br />
Barker found himself nursing the enemy through his trauma.<br />
"Suddenly I was the only one who could help console<br />
this guy... For hours and hours.<br />
About death and about loss. At<br />
the same time I was sitting there<br />
hating him. For me it was<br />
another big wake-up call about<br />
what a contradiction I'm living<br />
in, living in South Africa."
The Johannesburg Art Gallery, a grand old building<br />
in downtown Joubert Park - and once the epicentre of the<br />
city's cultural life - now found its collection of European<br />
masters increasingly hemmed in by taxi ranks and hawkers,<br />
betting totes and whores.<br />
To Barker, the ironies littering the pavements on his daily<br />
walk from street culture to high culture - from the Fig to the<br />
JAG - were plentiful. Hawkers in the shadow of the Stock<br />
Exchange; swish fashion stores alongside street barbers;<br />
squats built from cardboard boxes emblazoned with product<br />
logos that guaranteed they'd wash your whites whiter than<br />
white.<br />
Inside the gallery, Barker had been scrutinising the<br />
Pierneefs.<br />
Jacob Hendrik Pierneef was a formalist painter of<br />
landscapes who had - throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s<br />
- been endorsed by the Afrikaner state. A good part of his<br />
job had been to provide government department buildings<br />
with outsized canvasses of a rigorously stylised and sanitised<br />
South African countryside. Throughout his career, he had<br />
been active in the Afrikaner Broederbond, a cultural<br />
movement established in 1918 that quickly evolved into a<br />
highly secretive brotherhood for the Afrikaner elite. Working<br />
in tandem with the Dutch Reformed Church, the Broederbond<br />
was instrumental in promoting the apartheid policy. It pulled<br />
the strings of parliamentary puppets right up until its<br />
members were named in the press in 1993.<br />
Now Pierneef's paintings became the canvas on which<br />
Barker worked.<br />
If his Images on Metal had been "a deconstruction of<br />
the apartheid mettle", then his Pierneef series dug deeper.<br />
It not only probed the origins of Afrikaner nationalism's<br />
particular breed of cultural imperialism, but also documented<br />
its collision with modern-day mass culture. Without being<br />
politically patronising and with a deceptive pop simplicity,<br />
Barker's Pierneefs were able to signpost the complex<br />
historical realities at play as the country began to lurch<br />
violently towards democracy.<br />
In Pierneef's world view, wrote Unisa art historian Nic<br />
Coetzee, the land was given to the white man by God and<br />
it was the white man's duty to bring order to a barbarian<br />
continent. He did so by a process of selecting certain<br />
elements favourable to the vision of the country held by the<br />
Afrikaner elite and ignoring those deemed unsightly.<br />
Pierneef's neat white homesteads showed no signs of the<br />
underdeveloped black locations lurking just beyond the<br />
frame.<br />
Barker took what was behind the scenes and put it<br />
upfront. On to his meticulous copies he placed brassy,<br />
unprecious pop imagery - ready-made commodities and<br />
oil-painted targets, soiled proletariat spades and bleeding<br />
African curios.<br />
The works bristled with relevance and Barker no doubt<br />
expected them to be greeted more favourably than they<br />
were by the art establishment. Though today considered<br />
a pivotal entry in the country's contemporary art record, at<br />
the time the works were overlooked by a string of competition<br />
judges.<br />
Where others may have accepted defeat, Barker decided<br />
instead that it was time to turn up the heat. But first, he<br />
would have to take a day job.<br />
28
It was early in 1990 that Nelson Mandela was released<br />
from jail. He walked from the grounds of Cape Town's Victor<br />
Verster Prison into the final hours of a three-year state of<br />
emergency and was greeted by ululating masses and a great<br />
jostling of international television cameras. A set of that footage<br />
would wind its way back to Johannesburg, to the CBS News<br />
library in the South African bureau, where it was Barker's job to<br />
source and file material for international reports.<br />
The pictures that he sorted were harrowing. The country<br />
had embarked on a course of volatile multi-party negotiations;<br />
the right wing had unleashed a terror campaign, and he would<br />
be startled by previously prohibited archive material - of military<br />
activity in the townships and decades of police brutality.<br />
For Barker, who had never even owned a television set, CBS<br />
brought greater insight into the inner workings of mass electronic<br />
media and their complicated modes of commercial production.<br />
If the pop in his art was presented from a position of compassion,<br />
then what he saw emerging on the videotapes was the real<br />
thing - hard product. Human suffering and political drama<br />
30<br />
packaged into inserts for adspend on the<br />
international market.<br />
"For the first time I saw the real<br />
power of the media," says<br />
Barker, "and it was really<br />
quite overwhelming."<br />
He decided to<br />
hang on to<br />
some of the<br />
archival<br />
footage,<br />
certain that he<br />
would find a<br />
use for it one<br />
day.
On July 4 1990, five months after his release, Mandela's<br />
call for a Southern African leaders' summit was making<br />
headlines. "Mugabe, Chissano and Mandela to Meet" was<br />
top of the news in The Star. Just below that, beneath an<br />
account of an abortive Zambian coup attempt, was a third<br />
story: "Art Entry Rocks Grahamstown Festival". The story<br />
was the new South Africa's first contemporary art scandal<br />
and its popular introduction to the work of Wayne Barker.<br />
Deliberately breaking the rules, Barker entered two<br />
works in the prestigious Standard Bank Drawing<br />
Competition. One, under his own name, came from the<br />
Pierneef series. The other, a crudely charming and overtly<br />
political triptych called CV Can't Vote, was entered under<br />
the fictional (black) name of Andrew Moletse. Eager to<br />
redress decades of neglect, the judges found the Moletse<br />
work was just the kind of thing they were looking for. It<br />
was accepted for exhibition; the Barker was rejected.<br />
"SA art caught with its pants down" was Powell's<br />
headline. Barker told journalists that he had created<br />
Moletse in order to test some of the problems facing<br />
local art - and to expose the "ethnocentric bias" of<br />
an art world he regarded as "dominated by patronising<br />
white experts."<br />
31<br />
In the slew of press that followed the Moletse scandal<br />
Barker would be accused by competition judge Alan Crump<br />
of "playing silly games" and of "shameless self-promotion".<br />
In truth, Crump could just as well have seen Andrew<br />
Moletse to be watering the expansive ground for debate<br />
that existed between the old order and the new, between<br />
Third World art development and First World art trends and<br />
between issues of representation and appropriation.<br />
These were to become cultural buzz phrases as the<br />
country opened up and cultures began to exchange real<br />
ideas. The academic art world was turned on its head,<br />
and political and social structures were changing<br />
irrevocably. Mandela's release had seen the cultural boycott<br />
begin to crumble, and the advent of the first large scale<br />
international showings of South African work outside the<br />
country.<br />
Back home the nascent avant garde was finding its<br />
feet: alternative Afrikaners blew up on the music fringe;<br />
artist Braam Kruger initiated the Mamba Awards for<br />
contemporary art; state sponsored cultural institutions were<br />
boycotted by returning exiles. It was only a matter of time<br />
before Barker and his contemporaries would cross into<br />
the mainstream. By 1992, the Everard Read Contemporary<br />
Gallery had opened its upmarket doors, offering them a<br />
commercial home. Barker was selected as the début solo<br />
artist.
Back in Johannesburg it seemed the Biennale was going ahead without the new generation of local artists. Although<br />
a Zulu Lulu was featured on the Spanish pavilion, Barker felt that the local selection simply did not reflect what was<br />
happening. It was the same old problem, but this time he didn't do blackface or hurl tennis balls at the organisers. He<br />
decided instead to claim a piece of the Biennale precinct and curate his own show.<br />
At a stage in contemporary South African art characterised by infighting - mutterings and fists flew in the build up<br />
to Africus; artists clashed with local government, curators clashed with bureaucrats and the press clashed along after<br />
them - Barker was perfectly poised to bring together his contemporaries.<br />
The Laager - a circular art encampment created out of 14 12-meter shipping containers - would come to be regarded
as the gem of the Biennale and much praise would be bestowed on Barker's curatorial instincts.<br />
Writing about the 1995 Africus Biennale in an edition of Modern Painters, David Bowie discussed The Laager as<br />
"a symbol of nationalist isolation", suggesting that the irony of the show was that it exposed Africus itself to be a bit of<br />
a laager.<br />
"What it does for me personally," he wrote, "is present the work of a bunch of wildly talented, young, mostly white<br />
artists dealing with the South African Thing... Wayne Barker, curator of this fringe event offers a deconstruction of the<br />
history of image in South Africa from 1930 to the present... "<br />
The United Nations agreed with the pop star and offered backing for the show to be taken to Chile as a cultural<br />
exchange. What remains startling about The Laager is how in both its content and its presentation - a shipping container<br />
per artist - it pre-empted the 1997 Africus Biennale, which addressed issues of cultural identity around the theme of<br />
Trade Routes. Barker was about to set sail on a voyage of discovery across the seas. First, though, there was South<br />
Africa's own colonial history to reconsider.
Had you visited Trade Routes, curated by Okwui Enwezor<br />
at the Electric Workshop for the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale,<br />
and made your way towards the back and up a floor or two<br />
you would have looked down upon The World is Flat - a stark<br />
and astonishing sight.<br />
Barker's huge new piece was a map of the world constructed from<br />
3 000 army uniforms and 2 000 green beer bottles. At the southernmost<br />
tip of Africa was a neon sign reading VOC - the logo of the Dutch<br />
East India Company (DEIC).<br />
It was the DEIC's commercial fleets - heroes of the apartheid history<br />
books - that instigated South Africa's earliest colonial land wars and<br />
forged a trail for the Boers to eventually settle in the interior and claim<br />
a republic. In 1652 the Cape colony was established by the DEIC when<br />
the trading company set up a refreshment station under Jan van Riebeek<br />
- to stave off scurvy on the voyage north. Soon enough the indigenous<br />
Khoikhoi people were enslaved, beginning a campaign of resistance in<br />
1659. The station would become a British settlement and a military base<br />
would be established at its heart, today known as The Castle of Good<br />
Hope.<br />
It was at The Castle in 1995 that The World is Flat began its life as<br />
Is the World Flat? - on a show called “Scurvy” organised by Barker,<br />
Kevin Brand and Brett Murray - in which they recolonised the military<br />
museum and claimed it for<br />
contemporary culture.<br />
For Barker it was a milestone<br />
and a political victory. Particularly<br />
considering that in order to construct his work<br />
- in the very first room ever built at the Castle<br />
- he would have to request materials from<br />
the army. In 1995 the Defence Force was<br />
trying desperately to incorporate the former<br />
resistance armies into its ranks. "I had to<br />
negotiate with them," says Barker. "I told them<br />
it's all about forgiveness."<br />
Today Barker says that “Scurvy” was the<br />
first time that he began to think globally about<br />
his work. That he was looking at identity.<br />
What were his own colonial origins? Was the<br />
VOC logo - the first multi-national logo in the<br />
world - a bit like the Coca Cola logo today?<br />
In a press release for “Scurvy” he added:<br />
"Is this how we see the world through the<br />
media? Through a flat plain of images?"
In 1990, at the height of the FIG's notoriety and at the<br />
invitation of the state-funded South African Association of<br />
Arts (SAAA), Barker had led a delegation of artists to Pretoria<br />
to create a show called Klapperkop. Arriving at the gallery,<br />
guests found the works covered with black cloths. The Fig,<br />
announced Barker, refused to unveil the exhibition unless<br />
the SAAA disassociate itself from politically insidious funding<br />
decisions. What had particularly irked The Fig was the<br />
apartheid state's sponsorship of a group of South African<br />
artists to show in Pinochet's Chile.<br />
So, taking The Laager to a post-Pinochet Chile at the<br />
invitation of the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art,<br />
and paid for by the United Nations, provided considerable<br />
political affirmation for Barker's rational and romantic art<br />
mission.<br />
"I met a poet who was friends with a guitarist whose<br />
hands got cut off by Pinochet's thugs. I met artists who<br />
had been blindfolded by the dictatorship - for months -<br />
and then taken out of the cells and shown the light. All<br />
these people became part of my Santiago exhibition."<br />
The bulk of the work was called Tiempo de Amor/Time<br />
to Love and was the genesis of what would - over the<br />
coming months of European travel - become Barker's first<br />
European solo, Nothing Gets Lost in the Universe.<br />
Time to Love was shown outside The Laager, in a lift<br />
shaft of the museum. It included a neon "love" sign and a<br />
Hoopoo bird, newspaper headlines and, for the guitarist,<br />
a wax hand bought at the religious market in Rio, where<br />
it would have been used as an effigy to pray for healing<br />
of the body part.<br />
From Santiago on, wax worked its way into Barker's<br />
palette with ease. It was second skin. Like the army<br />
uniforms or the white pigment of Xhosa boys undergoing<br />
initiation into manhood, wax would return frequently as<br />
an agent of transformation in Barker's later work, at times<br />
evolving into latex and even chocolate.
All Washed Up in Africa would play itself out in various<br />
contexts in the two years leading to Barker's 2000<br />
retrospective at the Johannesburg Art Gallery - the same<br />
gallery that he had visited to copy the Pierneefs and that<br />
now houses his work in its permanent collection.<br />
All Washed Up in Africa was the title of his second<br />
solo at the Frankfurt Hanel in 1997, and of a beautifully<br />
crafted Pretoria exhibition at the Millennium Gallery with<br />
Ian Waldek in 1999. His contribution to the 1998<br />
Angolan/South African exchange Memorias Intimas<br />
Marcas was another version of Nantes, drawing on both<br />
personal and political histories.<br />
There was a wax room with the washing line projection,<br />
debris, blood, a waterfall and photographs of himself and<br />
his brother playing on the beach during the time of the<br />
Angolan war.<br />
There was also "an army room" and again Barker drew<br />
on his role as a public art agent. He put out an appeal for<br />
donations of old South African army uniforms so that he<br />
could offer them to Angola as an apology for the pain caused<br />
by the country's involvement in the war. Thousands arrived.<br />
By now, though, the populist side of Barker's work and<br />
personality was about more than just offering the artist up<br />
as a public facilitator. When combined with his ironic jester<br />
act, he was starting to create a fairly significant breed of<br />
performance art.<br />
Visiting the 1998 Venice Biennale with Waldek, for<br />
example, the artists were outraged to learn that not a
single African country was represented on one of the world's most important exhibitions. Barker and Waldek invited<br />
the curator of the Biennale to join them in St Mark's Square, where they asked to wash his feet in public "as a sign of<br />
forgiveness, so that next time he would take care to remember that Africa does exist."<br />
Later that year, Barker found himself in Austria, giving art classes to Slovakian children. While he was there he<br />
collaborated with the Austrian artist Barbara Holub in a piece called Kunst ist Kinderspielen/Art is Child's Play at<br />
the Kunsthalle in Krems.<br />
Barker had videotaped himself playing the piano in the gallery - having discovered a talent for grandly insane<br />
compositions with a flow like lyrical jazz after his brother's death in an aeroplane crash earlier that year.<br />
In Krems Barker lay on the gallery floor naked and covered in chocolate while a video of himself playing the piano<br />
flickered over his body. Next to him was a neon sign reading WCB. It looked a lot like the Dutch East India Company's<br />
VOC logo he had used in work before, but spelling the initials of Wayne Cahill Barker, or, he adds: "White Coloured<br />
Black". In later performances Barker would play the piano live, covered in chocolate which he once had licked off his<br />
body as he pounded the keys. Why chocolate? "Because it's brown," he says.<br />
Once Barker had posed as a black man in a national drawing competition and bronzed racist dolls to elevate their<br />
status. Neither act is too far removed from covering himself in chocolate. Lying on the floor in Krems, his name a multinational<br />
cultural logo, Barker then rose to switch on a television set. On the screen appeared hundreds of butterflies<br />
as, all around him in the gallery, projected bird silhouettes danced on the walls.<br />
"I think I was trying to find a free space to work in," he says, "trying to move away from work related directly to<br />
where I live. And trying to find a new kind of freedom."
<strong>WAYNE</strong> <strong>BARKER</strong>'s artistic career spans almost two decades, marked by a bitter-sweet mix of politics, poetry, and a<br />
passion for subversion. Tracking that career from apartheid South Africa's most violent years to a new democratic dispensation,<br />
the artist's monograph explores the contradictory impulses of "African identity", and Barker's exploration of a continent's<br />
commodification.<br />
At times part Pop Art, at others a layered deployment of traditional genres and media, Barker's work stands as much<br />
as an indictment of colonialism as of misplaced political correctness. From the first seduction to the twist in the gut, it is as<br />
beautiful as it is provoking.