Sven Christian [SC]: Hi everyone. Thanks for coming to listen to this talk, which follows the launch of Ashraf Jamal’s most recent book In The World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art (2017).

In the introduction Ashraf makes it very clear that the twenty-four essays, which each feature the work of a different South African artist, are in no way meant to be authoritative or canonical. Rather, they are intended to embrace elements of uncertainty and doubt, and in so doing, allow for the life of a work to be reinterpreted.

For the purpose of this talk we’re going to focus primarily on four of these artists — Mary Sibande, Zanele Muholi, Mohau Modisakeng, and Thania Petersen — whose work is currently on exhibition. Before we do, I’d like to chat about the context in which the book was produced. When did you decide to start writing it and why was that approach important to you?

Ashraf Jamal [AJ]: Firstly good afternoon to everyone, and thanks very much for taking the time to be here. This book was kick-started three years ago, and frankly the inspiration was not necessarily a good one. It was fuelled by the protests at my university which made campus ungovernable and made it impossible for me to teach. What it did give me is time. I knew I needed to write, to say something about what I saw as the merits — but primarily the dangers — of Fallism, because I felt like the attack against the universities was a profoundly unhealthy initiative. For me it was symptomatic of what I call ‘the death instinct,’ which is pervasive worldwide. It is the negation of education, the negation of the mind, the negation of debate, which are qualities that I cherish very deeply. As a consequence I thought I would write something that was more open-ended. That was the first impetus for the book, in May 2015, when I started noticing how intolerant people had become at my local bar.

It was also because I co-authored a book with Sue Williamson called Art in South Africa: The Future Present (1996), in which we memorialised the artists of the 90s. I noticed how swiftly those artists had assumed a major place in the global pantheon, and I was horrified by how easily an artist could become iconic or representational of a certain state of mind or being. I felt that one needed to be more open-minded about artistic practice. Surprisingly this is what Sven decided to make the focus of our conversation today.

SC: I was interested in the iconic currency of imagery that you reference in the introduction. Often someone will write about a particular body of work from a specific viewpoint, which then becomes the general trajectory for the way the work is perceived. You try approach a lot of the texts in this book from new vantage points, to open up new readings and understandings of the work by suspending judgement and embracing what you call a ‘peculiarity of perspectives’. You’ve also written about a lot of the artists featured in the book before. I wanted to ask about the revisiting of their work and the new perspectives that this approach brought, starting with Mary Sibande in your chapter African Baroque?

AJ: Sven — who was also my student at Rhodes University — was with me when Mary Sibande won the Standard Bank Young Artist award for The Purple Shall Govern (2014). At the time I was struck by it because it contrasted so significantly with her previous works, like They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To (2008), which was part of a much more emblematic and iconic vision of Sibande’s. It’s the figure of the maid in a transmogrified, transcendental and triumphant space. But it’s an idealised projection. On the other hand, The Purple Shall Govern shows a women caught in this maelstrom of energy, this tentacular world that seems to devour her, open her up, and loosen her.

Where it seems to me that her earlier works were memorial, even fetishistic, The Purple Shall Govern was much more liberating. It was instructive in many, many ways. If one were to consider womanhood more generally; or black womanhood more specifically; or black South African womanhood even more specifically — you would see yourself caught in this chain of events that are incredibly punitive, crippling, and hurtful. She tried to overcome that history when she began her pantheon. With The Purple Shall Govern there is a sudden turn to the self that can’t be easily codified, simplified, or objectified. It is the self which I argue owes a hell of a lot to the Baroque.

I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that moment in Western art history, but the Baroque technically follows from the Renaissance. It was loathed for being excessive and exaggerated because there was no centrifuge or core. This impulse is something that we have inherited. We must have a core, we must have a fulcrum to balance ourselves.

At this chaotic moment in history, art that actually breaks down the fulcrum, that spins outward into a void, is far more honest and illustrative of what we are as human beings. Most people don’t have the courage to make art like that. It’s easier to protect and project yourself.

It is interesting that it is her earlier, more iconic work that people hold very dear to themselves. I’m thinking here about the work that was exhibited on the walls of the city of Johannesburg during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. People loved these, but they are not the images that will help us survive as human beings. We need to actually enter the void, to be unafraid, to be fearless. It’s like Nietzche’s point that if you gaze into the abyss be careful, because the abyss will gaze back at you. People don’t want that, but on the contrary it’s a very good thing, because you suddenly lose that sense of selfhood and self-possession.

In Black Skin, White Masks (1952) Frantz Fanon says that what was most devastating about colonialism was not simply the domination and control over the black body, but the complete evisceration of the black mind, imagination, and soul. What happened as a consequence of five-hundred years of colonialism was the construction of the very beingness of the black body, the beingness of the black man and women, the basic inculcation of the void. Now this constitutive void, which is the history of oppression, is what people feel must be routed out. How? By recovering a sense of selfhood. By finding what is distinctively mine, what is representatively ours as black people. My argument is that this is just the beginning of a much more complex journey. What needs to be reclaimed is the life beyond the void, not the life which is the surface — the life defined by reason and representation. We are so preoccupied with fetishes, with the iconic. While important, these remain banalities within the greater complex of what it means to be human.

SC: I’m not sure how many of us had an opportunity to attend The Purple Shall Govern at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival. It was at the Voortrekker Monument. One component was housed in a circular gallery beneath a stage. It was dark, bar some purple lighting. There weren’t any figures, but there were all of these umbilical forms suspended from the ceiling. Walking into the space you had to push your way through them. At one point we decided to sit down, and you could hear festival-goers carrying on around you, people walking on the stage above. It felt a bit like being back in the womb. Ashraf how do you think the Baroque as a tradition applies to this, to the ‘chaotic core’?

AJ: Renaissance painting was structured to give you a place from which to see the world. Standing and looking at a painting, you are somehow centred by it. It is a world that is constructed for your eye. You are moderated, mediated. The Baroque denies that. It forces the eye to shift about. You’re caught up in a hurly-burly: an exciting, tumultuous space. For the rationalist that is horrific. Today we are all forced to be rationalists, but I aspire to unreason as the basis for thinking. To find the Baroque manifest in this particular body of work was thrilling, precisely because I felt the black body had been forced into a box — a frozen space of representation.

SC: In your paper on Zanele Muholi, there is a quote by Teju Cole that references the series Faces and Phases. It reads:

To look at their faces in portrait after portrait is to become newly aware of the power of portraiture in a gifted artist’s hands. Muholi doesn’t grant her sitters independence — they are independent — but she makes their independence visible. Faces and Phases is a complete world.

Thinking about what you’ve said about Mary Sibande’s work, how people gravitate toward this emancipatory ideal, this sense of self-realisation or completeness, I’d like you to expand on why you chose to include this particular quote to think about Muholi’s portraits?

AJ: Frankly I disagree with Teju Cole’s vision here, because it’s idealistic. He is playing into the hands of the notion that what we are getting in these images, primarily of lesbian women, is a sense of self-possession, of completeness: that they are being presented and gifted to us in their wholeness. To assume that what Zanele Muholi is doing is simply gifting us this sense of wholeness — this being that has arrived — is an ideal. Just think for a second about the grotesque oppression of the black lesbian women in the context of South Africa, let alone worldwide. I feel this to be an example of lazy critical prose on the part of Teju Cole that feeds into a politically correct ideology. It does not question the complexity of the being or the right of the black body to its complexity.

Instead it arrives at its own state of completion, which I believe is far too rapid, far too hasty, and fundamentally dangerous. It seems to be a powerful liberator’s logic, this tendency toward the belief in completeness or arrival, but for me it stunts the journey of black experience.

SC: Do you think that same sense of completeness is invested equally in both the liberation struggle as it is in rainbow nation rhetoric?

AJ: Absolutely. The need for completion is a fantasy built into liberation logic. If you think about resistance art in South Africa since the 1970s — which is when it assumes major traction — what you see is that the human figure in art becomes central. You’ll witness the disappearance of movements like abstract art. More and more the figure — primarily the black figure — assumes centre stage in South African aesthetics. It becomes indomitably present. My query is why? Why is virtually all of our art human-centric? For me that is important. It’s profoundly limiting as a focus area.

What concerns me about the enormous popularity of a figure like Zanele Muholi is that she is a figure that you can’t question, because she is seen as inviolable, as sacrosanct, as the ultimate icon of liberatory photography from South Africa. She has a huge global traction. While Faces and Phases is very important, it is important for me not because it is of any great aesthetic significance, but because of its sociological, political, and historical significance. With Mary Sibande it was the genius of The Purple Shall Govern that sets her apart, not the four Sophies that preceded. The same can be said for Somnyama Ngonyama (2015), a breakout series of works by Zanele Muholi of enormous epistemological and aesthetic significance.

SC: So there is this trajectory of an emancipatory ideal that is then shattered and reconstructed… Do you then think the precursor is a necessary lead up? Would the shattering be possible without the precursor?

AJ: That’s a very good question. One could argue that it’s important that we need to move through the material to get to the immaterial; to move through the objective to get to the profoundly subjective; from the beautiful to the sublime — but in all honesty what has always drawn me to any artist has always been their sublimity. I have very little interest, concern, or feeling for their morality, their good conscience, their works of nobility. For me these works mean nothing in the greater scheme of things because it is only an artist’s ability to capture what is profoundly human—what connects us all—that matters most. So yes, causally you could argue that Mary Sibande had to evolve from that particular point to arrive at this point. Similarly Zanele. But I could do without the evolution. I would rather have the jump-cut and move to the good stuff, or at least my subjective interpretation of what I consider to be the good stuff.

SC: What you’re saying reminds me of an exhibition I went to a while back at Commune1 called The Other Camera, curated by Paul Weinberg. I remember reading about the story of Ronald Ngilima, who had been taking photographs in Wattville, Benoni, around the 50s and 60s. At the time he was working for a tobacco company, returning home and documenting the lives of those around him. Much like in Faces and Phases, you could see that the photographs had been premeditated. People had time to dress, there must have been this build-up to the image itself. Many of the negatives were put in a box and stored, then he passed away. Years later a relative, I think his grandson, got them developed. It was interesting for me to think about the relevance of these images, both then and now. From my understanding photography during that period, at least the photography that we’re familiar with, had a sense of urgency in relation to the struggle. It needed to get a point across quite directly. So these undeveloped images may not have carried as much weight at the time—we don’t know—but they certainly do now. It makes me think about Susan Sontag, her thoughts on the role of photography and the ways in which it can be understood. You also mention this in relation to Somnyama Ngonyama, about Zanele’s constructive approach, and what you refer to as their opacity...

AJ: Images don’t always allow themselves to be read as easily as one might think. They also allow themselves to be misread. Édouard Glissant calls this the opacity of images. The key thing, especially in relation to the black body, is that it should not be typologised, typecast, or constructed as something which is immediately accessible or defined. It has a right to be misunderstood. That is key. It is about creating that space of depth, surprise, and wonder which is the right of every human being. It’s this right which I feel Zanele Muholi finally claims in this series of self-portraits. She took them on a daily basis, so they vary enormously, but as portraits they weren’t designed merely to return us to the depth and complexity of being. They are also highly stylised, playful, odd, opaque and weird. This new aesthetic health is what Toni Morrison would call playing in the darkness. I’m very glad that it’s being feted here in this museum.

SC: To quote again from this chapter, a piece that Teju Cole wrote on the work of Roy DeCarava called Known and Strange Things (2016):

The viewers eyes might at first protest, seeking more conventional contrasts, wanting more obvious lighting[...] but, gradually, there comes an acceptance of the photograph and its subtle implications: that there’s more than we might think at first glance, but also that, when we are looking at others, we might come to the understanding that they don’t have to give themselves up to us. They are allowed to stay in the shadows if they wish.

AJ: We live in this cursed transparency. It’s vital that we hold onto the gentleness and the delicacy of mystery, which is the source of love and desire, rather than incarcerate and define people according to a set of fixed terms. This dance, this greater subtlety, is slowly beginning to assume some major valency in South African art. Up until now it has remained largely turgid, identitarian, sated in an overly reductive way. Hopefully we’ll all finally evolve into becoming much more subtle intellectuals, artists, and lovers of the human.

SC: In your book you also mention the performative and theatrical elements involved in this series. I’m wondering if you make any connection here to the type of performative work you find in Tony Gum?

AJ: Yes, certainly. I saved Tony Gum for last in my book. She was a student of mine at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. I was introduced to her in the first week of first term. She showed me images of herself on her phone modelling Coca-Cola. They’re incredibly whimsical, ironic, and so utterly incidental. At the same time they are so massively loaded. This is a moment of lightness in South African art which has been long awaited. We imprison ourselves in seriousness because we want to hold onto the moral high-ground. Sometimes you need to dance. Tony Gum embodies this beautifully.

Interestingly Zanele recently mentioned online that Tony Gum is her favourite photographer at the moment, which is very curious, because they’re strikingly different. It shows us that between these two women there is not only synergy but a healthy difference which we’re allowed to celebrate. It’s that greater ‘diversity’ which we all talk about (forgive the awful word). Tony Gum represents that Pop Art-lite moment.

SC: Do you think this pop aesthetic is similar to the kind of stylisation in the work of Mohau Modisakeng? Looking at the Untitled (2012) series of high contrast black and white photographs, these images have an almost advertorial quality to them, akin to fashion photography. How would you differentiate their respective approaches? What similarities or differences do you think might underlie their work?

AJ: There’s definitely an intriguing shift towards a heightened stylisation in South African photographic aesthetics. What it means as yet I cannot entirely say, but I see it clearly in both of their work. It is an incredible sense of self-awareness, of posturing, which need not be seen as something negative. It could be seen as something of a fulfilment. They’re inhabiting multiple selves. It’s not “Here is the image of the black man’s essence”. It shows a freedom from the tyranny of the essential, a step into the realm of play and charades.

The sequence of images that I’ve chosen to focus on by Modisakeng is actually Metamorphosis (2015). I think it’s far more complex. What intrigues me is what he has learnt from Santu Mofokeng, a sense of radical sublimity. His photographs are profoundly enigmatic. They refuse the iconic, they refuse the representational, they refuse the burden of morality and history. It’s that enigmatic quality, which we see clearly in Santu Mofokeng’s Eyes-wide-shut, Motouleng Cave - Clarens (2004), which I think Mohau adopts, inherits, and manipulates. It’s reaching towards something that is so obtuse and rare, the sublime, and yet it’s doing it by being so stylised. The paradox is screamingly obvious. It’s daring, peculiar, and deserving of thought and feeling. It is within that fold of sublimity and stylisation, between these two seemingly discrepant and mutually exclusive conditions that we find new possibilities and a new way of experimenting with being.

SC: You also quote Diane Arbus in saying that “a photograph is a secret about a secret.” Looking at Modisakeng’s work, what do you think this secret is?

AJ: In the Metamorphosis series it’s about the void. The void must not be avoided. The void is there to be embraced, immersed in. It must engulf one. The secret lies in layers and layers and of mystique and mystery. We believe that meaning can be extracted from everything, that meaning lies within something and can be plucked out and held. For me the assumption that everything is interpretable is a major limit. It’s a rational approach to aesthetics and to art. I hold fast to the mystery.

It reminds me of a very beautiful phrase by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) when he says, “It is the zone of occult instability that the people dwell and the revolution comes from.” It’s this occult instability which I find particularly intriguing about that series of work, and that desire for occultation. If Tony Gum is objectively light and playful, Zanele Muholi deeply mysterious, and Mary Sibande deeply introspective, the one thing they have in common is that they’re all searching to exist in spite of codification, in spite of a noble world, in spite of the tyranny of meaning, which has historically been affixed to the black body.

SC: I think much of the codification that you’re talking about is because we’re lazy. It’s easy to fall back on press releases, exhibition reviews and so on. How do you as a writer try to balance giving form to an idea without falling into this trap?

AJ: It’s very simple — from years of reading poetry. I’ve always been drawn to the enigmatic. It’s just the nature of the beast that I am, or the academic training that I was given. As a post-structuralist I was taught to always question the fixities of anything, to always place things under erasure and open things up to enquiry. That’s an intellectual tradition I have inherited, but it’s also got to do with growing up as a little boy in Heideveld. My grandmother spoke Tswana, Xhosa, Zulu, English, and Afrikaans. She was a devout Catholic. Every Sunday all the mothers would gather around our linoleum floor, with our vinyl furniture, our plastic tea cups, and our bread with jam and nothing else. The languages would be flying. The Irish nuns would be there. What I saw was an endless medley of people laughing and getting along. The inheritance that I received as a young boy was that there was a profound humanity that linked all people. All one needed to do is enter into the mystery of being human and diffuse the tyranny of definition inflicted by history in order to think but more importantly to feel and to love. Writing for me is not simply and exercise of mind, it’s an exercise of passion.

SC: Talking about your personal experiences growing up in a multilingual household and so on, let’s talk about the work of Thania Petersen. In Arafrasia you write that “Identities, like personhood, are fragile and permeable categories — essentially non-essential — compromised, abraded, formed and deformed, effectively deconstructed.” I know that ‘Arafrasia’ is a term that you coined. What does it mean?

AJ: Arafrasia: the Arabic, African, and Asian worlds. I spent many years living and teaching in South-East Asia, and I continued to work as a maritime historian. I published and edited a book on the Indian Ocean, which was fortuitous when it came to thinking about Thania Petersen’s work. I could utilise all that knowledge and find a way to analyse a different trajectory of who and what we are as Africans. Global migration has played a big part in who we are. In this regard, Cape Town has always been the tipping point, that place between places. Cape Town was created as a drive-by, a 7-Eleven, a hospital, a madhouse, a refuelling station. It was never intended to be a place where people actually lived. Over time people congregated from various parts of the world. One group came from South-East Asia and the Indian sub-continent. It’s these people who Thania Petersen tends to focus on.

I should say that I couldn’t have written this essay without a brilliant book by the poet Gabeba Baderoon called Regarding Muslims (2014). It is an astonishing study which gave me a lot of space to analyse how Thania Petersen positions her ‘Malayness’, because ‘Malayness’ is a construct. We live by these papier-mâché conditions that we try to hold ourselves together with, but they’re fragile, laughable, sad, even pathetic. ‘Malayness’ is one of those conditions because it has been essentialised. It’s performed. Thania stages ‘Malayness’. You can see it in the I am Royal (2015) series. She’s created her own personal set. It appeals to the oceanic, to the world between the land and the water, that sense of unsettlement. There are many contact zones that make us up. If we realise this, then we will stop seeing people according to their gender, their race, their whiteness, their blackness, or any other banality.

The I am Royal series is in many ways the most exotic, most iconic representation of ‘Malayness’. The work that I find far more interesting the Barbie and Me (2015) series. This is work that is about the kitschness of Malayness, the trashiness. It’s loud and garish. There’s her acting it up like a Kardashian, or in her black hijab, standing with her children. Flamingo (2017) is part of the first series of light boxes which I still think to be the most daring and exciting works that she’s made. It depicts her with her iPhone, taking endless photographs of herself in these ridiculous poses, in all this ridiculous underwear. There are multiple Thania’s. It’s so loud, so playful, so wondrous, and so indulgent that it makes me quite giddy, but it’s not what most people want. Most people want the oriental. They still feed into that tradition which Edward Said analysed. Too much of our art is stern, and we’re so afraid of laughter. We need to find ways to play that into our work and our love of art.

SC: Perhaps this is a good time to open it up to questions from the audience?

Audience: Do you think there will ever be a point where we are able to actually reconcile or reclaim the humanity that has been disassociated with the black body? What is the difference between humanism and morality, between humanism and the humane?

AJ: There is a difference between morality and ethics. Morality, which is a dodgy human fabric, sets up ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’. Ethics is about greater distinctions between good and bad in the everyday. You may recall Neitzche’s line, “It is useful to exaggerate when dealing with emergencies”? Well, we are in an emergency. The world is ugly. As an antidote we don’t need more morality. We need people to explore and experiment with alternative realities. In this sense I think the Baroque, with its exaggerated aesthetic, its refusal of the centrifuge, is an aesthetic that can take us forward.

We don’t go around with this grand narrative of what we are. That’s a fantasy we fix to ourselves, belatedly. In actual reality we live in a state of perpetual wonder, confusion, doubt and fear. It’s in that space that we make our greatest and most profound encounters. For me Baroque is interesting because it opens up the world rather than shuts it down. I believe this is what we need from our artists. To be braver and more confused, and less ideological or prescriptive.

SC: I was looking through the index of In The World. The most referenced individual is J.M Coetzee, followed by Freidrich Neitzche, Walter Benjamin, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Achille Mbembe and, surprisingly, Andy Warhol. I’m interested to hear where you see Pop Art ‘fitting into’ all of this? Is it the simulacra, the copy-paste?

AJ: Absolutely, we live in a Warholian nightmare. In a world of plastic. Plastic sex, plastic feelings, plastic selfies. We are our own surplus. What do we do with all the shit that we leave behind, all the waste? What do we do with our wasted emotions? Hatred is a profoundly wasted emotion. There is just so much of it. How do we deal with it? Where does it go? Who does it hurt? Warhol is the embodiment of that inescapable sickness. The key thing to then consider is how we link that Warholian tendency with the self-stylisation you find in Mohau Modisakeng or Tony Gum’s work, which playfully flirts with that plasticity. Where is it going? It’s not clear yet. What is clear is that we need to restore compassion. We need to love in spite of hate. We need to understand in spite of the limits of people. We need to break open the barriers we set up for each other. If we don’t do that all we will do is reproduce the typecasts and the stereotypes.

Audience: How do institutions, especially art institutions, frame an environment where you can have that playful sensibility?

AJ: Stefan Collini has written an excellent book called What Are Universities For? (2012). In it he talks about the importance of celebrating autonomy: the right of the body to itself. This is the key thing. If we don’t celebrate autonomy all we will do is create a serf mentality. We need to break away from that. We are in a major crisis at universities. Teaching seemed like such a redundant and pointless existence, simply because the nature of dialogue had been corrupted.People were back in their camps. Last year I had a classroom which horrified me. It was literally split, physically, along colour lines. Can you imagine entering a classroom like that? There’s nothing more demoralising for people to assign themselves their place, their seat in the room, according to their colour.

Whether we will survive this moment I don’t know. I am all for solving the needs of education for the poor, but decolonisation of a global institution? Education is not something peculiarly continental or African. It’s a global reality. We need to be able to connect with the world. When I teach my students I basically hold up my hand and say, there are five dimensions that you will need to learn and understand by the end of your first year: You must understand the local, you must understand the regional, the national, the continental, and the global. All of these facets must be at work in your being. Only if all these facets are alive in you are you truly in the world.

SC: I wanted to ask one last question about the role that art can play in all of this…

AJ: The role of art is definitely not morality. Moral art is dull art. It’s not art at all. It’s sanctimony, it’s religion, and it’s not free speech. I’m looking for art that actually battles, confounds, ruins, displaces, moves and hurts one in ways that cannot be pre-empted or understood. That’s the best art and that’s what makes Jane Alexander’s Butcher Boys exemplary, because it remains profoundly enigmatic. The greatest art that exists is art that can bind us in the complexity and humility of what it is to be human, art that allows you to fall in love, or just to fall.