Replica Issue 6

The Butcher Boys

Everyone deserves a chance to create a mirror they can look into and feel proud, even within the marsh of indigestible commercial junk dispensed by the entertainment industry.

The conveyor- belt culture of producing be it music or film, let alone literature, leaves no artist exempt from the innate sacrifice of passionate ambition that is being canonised.

Repackaging human desires has always been a major economic commodity for the 21st century’s industrial civilization and this trend we should have expected to be pervasive at all levels of human interaction, communication and social constructs. And the resultant hostage mentality is what most artists are confronting through their expression, and Orion Quest and Aak.da.GOD have taken the calling to an esoteric paradigm.

Through Hip Hop, most young South Africans have found an affiliate mode of expressing protest, and this outlet is gaining prominence which should qualify a professional analysis as a barometer of social temperance.

The new Hip Hop says: “The young are disenfranchised, under-resourced and angry and it is MC's who have taken the responsibility of being social commentators, in a language of youth, aimed at highlighting the plight of the youth who are the future of a nation.”

In the new South Africa, this militant trans-galactic vibe laced with apocalyptic rhymes is beckoning the youth to build political movements through the hip-hop musical culture.

Ok, subcultural categorizations that might include the Militant urban commando and Conscious Rapper seem fitting when a Hip Hop Crew transitions what today’s hip hop is usually associated with - a lifestyle full of glamour, money, women, violence, drugs, and sex. What once originated as a medium of expression has now become a catalyst for capitalistic gratification; the hip hop movement has objectified women in general and turned wealth, over-flashy jewellery, and cars into must have commodities for social acceptance.

One separating element of their craft is the depth of the musicality and skill weaved into multi-layered beats, laced with potent lyrics from a sound intellectual activist tradition.

Superimposed narratives that do not aspire to exist independent of the lyrics while remaining capable of standing alone as instrumentals of note, are what sets aside the crew’s signature style as refreshing and unique. 
 

The Reckoning

The first single to be released independently from the soon to hit the streets debut album is a truly macabre track, a monotonous voice renders a monologue about darkness, something to the effect that “I see more now in the dark, than what I have felt in the light.”

And I will still search for that hauntingly sombre monologue for sure.

When the beat begins, a prologue to disaster unfolds with cinematic lucidity.

A skit voices waging inner battles suddenly prepares for lyrical moans, bass tones gurgled with ghostly samples in the rear of a battle zone start making you want to start stomping.

A melody that suddenly implodes is the vehicle upon which the cynical lyricism of Orion Quest travels, while simultaneously teleporting the listener to paranormal landscapes of nightmares of a foreseeable future.

Metaphorical implications of the streets as dangerous as real combat take precedence in their rhymes, which compels me to ask who are the real enemies of man in contemporary realities?

It thus appears that these anomalous characters that pen responses and rhymes aren’t mere puppet for pickpocketing the masses of the senses, but serve to elevate the knowledge content leveraged by seasoned delivery into the SA Hip Scene.

Bleeding Skies
Inglorious Basterds

"From Marikana Hill to Constitution Hill"- An exhibition by Pitika Ntuli

Pitika Ntuli – Some Works 

It is an unforgettable sight, the sculpture exhibition of Graphite, Bone and Found Metal Sculptures by the seminal poet and artist Pitika Ntuli at The Constitution Hill Women's Gaol. A significance on the artist's depiction of the figures places emphasis on what I can call ‘the historic temperament towards identity in modern Africa’. A constant dialogue between the technical proficiency of his sculptural craft and the metaphorical themes inherent in the various forms created is visible, taking on a symbiotic relationship that constructs a symbolization that is other worldly.

There is an undeniable spiritual dimension to any encounter with Pitika Ntuli's works, which often leaves ones' tongue soiled by residues of post-industrial experiences and histories. This constantly evolving theme, though often analysed from an academic point of view, is what draws most people to the art - whether informed about the arts in general or not. A form of accessibility which translates from this inadvertent spiritual connectivity alluded to is perhaps what made an impression on even the security guard who volunteered to take me around the prison compound. He was spell-bound by the artworks; from contorted faces emerging from hunched backs to humanoid wheelbarrows - this was something dense to digest. It all seemed like a dream, a séance with a clan of ancestral entities who gave a divine form to those deformed by perils assailing every soul that was and those that are to be - an invocation of spirits - a process so profoundly embedded in forms viscid with expressed joys, sometimes morbidity or other transcendent symbolic imagery.

The bone sculptures, the scale of which are beyond human (perhaps because they are at times elephant bones or other animal remains), took me on exploratory expeditions on ideas of a post-human evolution. Here I see a centuries-old tradition of abstraction in African art before the European colonial period, putting a stained mirror in front of ‘the present man’ showing the face of an afro-futuristic human metamorphic grotesquery. With facial expressions resembling visible appearances of an invisible inner self, their ghostly postures invoke a sense of looking into a post-apocalyptic purgatory, a world beyond the confines of a body’s ideas of pain and fear.

Yet, these elegantly figural compositions show the artist's dexterity in a light that even sober the viewer's mind. These works, I felt, "exorcised," anyone from fear of the unknown by giving form to it. For as the security guard informs me, the prison compound is a haunted place; where the spirits of those who faced the hang-pole still roam. He showed me places that night-watchmen dread to enter. So it was rather fitting that such haunting works of transformative sculpting be housed in a haunted coliseum of executions, where cries of political prisoners once echoed.

Then there are pieces which seem like assemblages of randomly found industrial materials whose geometric form is dictated by their inherent properties, such as wheelbarrows, shovels, various metallic mechanical parts welded together, or electronic transistors that become organs of a sacred biology abstracted here.
The results are gestures and attitudes of these zinc and steel sculpture are essentially performative, as though in an unknown expressive dance. Not similarly morbid with souls of the deceased in the expressions of the bony and bronze faces, but a metallic dance to a harmony in the last movements of a doomed civilization.

The dense tonal textures on the rusted skins of these automatons are what summons them eerily to life, while the bodies themselves depict geometric yet abstract idioms on reality in an innovative three-dimensional form.

It is my impassioned advice that anyone vaguely interested in sculptural arts pay a visit to this extensive exhibition, and be forever transformed by the poetry carved on bone and metal.

Pictures: Paul Zisiwe