Meditation On Revellers

 

Dathini Mzayiya – The Gravity Of Politics In Art

What is a political art, I often ask myself when observing various works denoting or depicting political scenes, upheavals and personages either in iconoclastic representations or deviant renditions that speak of an expressed sentiment.

The malaise is further exacerbated when exploring a number of Dathini Mzayiya’s works which, as I believe, provide very living metaphors to the confusion of our dead past and breathing present.

A commitment to blackness, as a form of lived disharmony with purported gains of its liberation or lack thereof, the lurking visages of brute force, symbolized by police brigades greased in blood, are yet other iconic indictment on brutalities experienced at the hands of a law. 

His work critiques pluralities of terror against blackness, through layered techniques that express an excess of prohibitions and obstacles within the black experiences in post-apartheid South Africa.

The Saints (2012), also referred to as The Founding Fathers is an emancipatory piece which is not timid in its depiction of a social myths sustained by self-gratifying leaders. Revisiting the work in light of the recent passing of FW De Klerk, one is given untranslatable co-presentation of memory past and present.

As a descriptive, or an interpretative or an explicitly critical approximation of two former leaders, who appear to have painted halos over each other’s heads, the artwork is a crucial as well as a participatory, social activism in light of new form of political communication about our fraudulent past. 

Provocative themes of tokenism are hinted in work depicting the EFF as SOLD, or the altered face on an ANC campaign poster, are speaking as political witness where the black body is a constant battleground for exploitation and fetishism and eventual corruption. 

And as a long tradition of “urban artivists” have always accepted that no art produced against tyranny and violence is ever in vain, such are the vague and nebulous piece expressing Dathini’s feelings about events such as the murder of Andries Tatane and the subsequent acquittal of the POLICE force that fatally shot him, in a purportedly democratic South Africa. 

These pieces form a gloomy chorus of black hopelessness, retracting from established versions of facticity and historical memory, providing a post-political rhetoric devoid of allegiances.

I often stare aimlessly at somewhat destroyed identities fractured on Dathini’s canvases, a mosaic of anonymities exquisitely executed in epic depictions of present histories and believe that the gravity of art is a catalyst in complicating and not simplifying the perceived truth of violations.

This bravery is evident among many young South African artists and should be commended and lauded, even though there might be an alarming anonymity of social spaces for such visceral art that explores vivid narratives of an immediate struggle, especially in townships.

 It is now becoming a concern for galleries prone and accustomed to curate according to market-based tastes that they seem to cater less and less for the ideologically astute citizen who is not interested in utopian escapism, and given art’s interpretive openness, a need for spaces with diversely progressive visions is evident.

Art that is a form of political discourse, is now becoming a norm even in often otherwise conservative spaces where Dathini is working and exhibiting, which could be prelude to the return of art that is insusceptible to traditional political analysis, speaking to current trends and steeped in ideological dissidence and subversions. 

And while some of our talented creative practitioners receive their recognition and public acclaim, there still remains a vast majority who are yet to find audiences. This could be because there still exists trends that privilege certain art practices, thus marginalizing by means of epistemic downgrading other forms of expression.

Artists representing political views are not immune to segregation and perpetual lack of resources; and this can be countered by establishing collective art safe zones, where unrestricted creativity is allowed to flourish.

Images sourced from Artist's Pages

Portraits With Light

 Images By: Paul Zisiwe

SUFFOCATION I & II - Buhle Nkalashe Art

It is often easy to surmise that an artist’s creative process is comprised of rigid routines and methodological analyses of materials for the production of art for its own sake, but I find the opposite is often the case, when observing how Buhle Nkalashe goes about creating his mesmeric diaphanous artworks.

A certain frolicking spirit imbues his mixed media paintings with a somberly contemplative, yet empathetic gaze at subjects he attempts to capture, and this sincerity in interpretation is often what contemporary lack. 

An impoverishment of empathy, as characteristic of pompous postures commonly associated with artists is absent in this young artist, who still considers his rural upbringing a virtue that empowers his complex view of the world and humanity in general.

His craft seems a playful engagement with matter in the material sense, as well as matters close to political climes of a turbulently bourgeoning nation facing a multi-layered future drawn from a tormented and suffocating past.

As with the two artworks in his Suffocation Series, I am struck not only by the artist’s treatment of ephemeral materiality of his objects to foreground sinister realities experienced in the present by many a black people.

The idea of suffocation can be viewed literally but as his artworks slip conventional classification by drawing form varied established disciplines while constantly remaining in aesthetic pursuit of a new, an immersive entanglement with materials, their reassembly on each canvas and the paradoxes and tempered perspective they arouse, give the paintings a haunting air of a silent witness.

Jests of flamboyant colors creeping about an outline of a head on undefined shoulders from darkly hued blues and earthen gold enveloping hidden faces, solely eyes, sightlessly communicating a strangled impression of isolation and helplessness. 

This unenviable pain and breathlessness written on masked expressions is a true metaphor of our times of suffocated imaginations, with emboldened outlines, a form of borders, disallowing fluidity between the subject and their environment.

Figures emerging coherently with serenity that alternates with uncertainty, steady gazes already assailed by dire intimations of rejection hence their veiled appearances, perhaps. 

Nkalashe’s art is not merely tangential, but an art that modifies beyond definitional concerns of multi-disciplinarity, those liminal connections between all disciplines mixed into a singular medium of expression.

He creates work that dares reimagine realities, emotions and premonitions within a temporal sphere of the contemporary, giving a body presence to each event and emotion espoused by each piece. 

I unsteadily assume that these pieces were produced as a lens through which to view broader issues of isolation and trauma in social and political contexts, but that is merely an interpretative stance from an observer’s vantage point.

But, trusting that more invigorating work is yet to be birthed by Nkalashe’s curiosities, we can always look forward to uncanny reconfigurations of the everyday and its pulsating characters.

Find more artworks at

www.buhlenkalashe.co.za

A Neo-Naturalism Of Daniel K Tladi

There is an exhalation that seethes through one upon stumbling upon what is often termed “rare”, be it interviews with renowned writers or artworks recovered after being “lost” for centuries.

I also marvel at what might be called an introduction to the unknown, which in itself does not imply “discovering” that which one didn’t know they had not known.

But, I still find it odd that all art lost to pillage by colonial powers is never viewed through that same lens of awe, as though the art of Africa belongs to humanity in its entirety.

The obscurity of the notion that ours is an art that deserves archiving as mere curiosities, and the inherent prejudice that ours is art that is archival by default, cannot be accepted as a norm, even in circles of art criticism and ‘appreciation” or “appropriation”.

This has led me to constantly question motives of western criticism and thus work towards recording moments in of development in African art, providing some semblances of analyses towards contemporary creative practices by artists who would otherwise be relegated to the margins of artistic landscapes.

Upon discovering the work of Daniel K Tladi at one exhibition at Aardklop Kunste Festival, a natural urge sprung to jot an article as an endeavor to explain to myself the creative visions spurred by the man’s works which I can only call naturalistic, bearing in mind my limited knowledge of various artistic movements which inform contemporary expression.

Naturalism, I had initially associated with literary schools of thought that emanated from a natural rejection of augmentations of reality, those that thrived towards amoral attitudes in the objective representation of reality with complete impartiality. 

When later I became acquainted with various other movements of expression that highlighted nature as the first principle of reality, art forms that attempted to depict the human subject in its formative relationship with natural habitats and social milieu, it invariably became abundantly clear that a new wave of naturalism is being remodeled through oils and brushworks, strokes of a younger emergent generation of South African painters.

Having exhibited his art at various South African art institutes and galleries such as the NWU Gallery and The B Gallery, either in group exhibitions or a solo artists, Daniel K Tladi’s collection always reflects an uncanny preponderance for banal moments between moments of the spectacular, these undefined silences implicit of a patient flow with the time and spaces he captures.

With a visual accuracy approaching that of photography, at a glance, his detailing of landscapes and their magnanimity presented as plausible, rather provides glimpses into a life most often thought of as antiquated and long gone.

Daniel further eclipses his interpretations of nature with paintings of unadulterated rural life; the arduous nature of earthbound toil that characterizes marginalized communities fused with social tension prevalent in contemporary South Africa.

His aesthetic system is not one that attempts to constitute itself as a faithful imitation of realistic objects in natural environments, but conversely capturing transient testimonies of those object in time, with a distinct focus on the barren spaces emerging from canvases representing representational worlds without omitting guarantees of inner truths.

This divergence from notions of exactitude without exhausting the variable potential embedded in events and images depicting those events, is a signature that acknowledges the plurality and dynamism of nature, often speaking to themes of climate change through drought stricken localities, and gender disparities through representation of rural expediency of archaic roles allotted women folk.

Much as art produced by artists of African descent has often been viewed with the condescending lens of western patronage, salaciously viewed as products from the lower rungs of global imaginary evolution, there is an emergent curatorship that has positioned such artists into isolated arena and splendor of fine art galleries. 

These efforts continue to nurture and unearth formidable talent not constrained by the modernist agenda often go unnoticed due to certain unpalatable themes of endemic poverty, gendered violence, political rhetoric echoing anti-colonial dispositions.

Artists such as Daniel are contesting a colonial view steeped in ”an apartheid fetishist romanticism” of African social environments, devoid of critical engagement with psychological nuances of the environments and its people.

A unique voice in an otherwise art world scandalized by old-fashioned concepts of “high art”, Daniel is carving a career with a fiercely local recourse, a sophisticated technique not detached from formalism but woven within a collision of style and aesthetic unique to his human nature and arch sentimentality. Extending the traditions of oil painting into personalized views of social life, his work is composed beyond the chaotic and often immanent gloom of many black livelihoods.

And with an evident commercial acumen that has allowed him to sell paintings to local and international collectors, it is vividly evidenced that there is rapidly growing demand for contemporary African art. This hunger for African art, after centuries of being relegated to museums as specimen of lower humanity, is also staking the hope of contemporary artists on a market that can receive their work.

Chromatic composition of blues, greys coalescing in oranges exploding at times into dreamy golden glows of midday light, a diffusion of strokes of oils to yield unexpected hues of sunset vibrancy; such delicate details by virtue of necessity on the part of the artist, evince a particular fundamental humanity and humility of craft.

Practice without public acclaim, voicing a political sensibility to the lives of black folk for instance, are markedly a move away from a multitude of creative practitioners concerned with non-vicarious representations of the black experience.

Theirs is an emerging, though unacknowledged black art culture, producing accessible work that interrogates complex geographies of poverty, denuded environments as well as the spiritual traumas of exclusion and exploitation, while also lauding the jovial pleasantries of a life given unto fate.

A vexed and complex history manifests itself quite constantly in Daniel’s art, and it is inevitable that the spirit of each place finds expression through his brushwork. And for an artist to immerse himself in this endless quest for authenticity is but a trait of resilient craftsmanship, a hallmark of all selfless creative spirits.

Images courtesy of: Daniel K Tladi

A Note On Meditation On Violence

My work is mainly concerned about contaminating existing visuals and remaking them to challenge views and beliefs about violence, its causes and consequences.

Is violence a persona, an ontological entity capable of possessing and expressing itself through and become embodied inhuman analogues?

Violence as a form of self-modification by captured protesters in this video poem does not intend to reveal my essence as the creator manipulating materials for purposes of pre-inscribed notions, but my interest is more about a non-confessional agency that at least disrupts even my preconceived notions of violence beyond its institutional function as a deterrent and systematic violence as tool in a peace-making mechanism. 

Violence; often depicted as a misnomer in society, throughout history has proven to be the prime propeller of all human effort towards self-realized civility. In my art, this spectacle of violence is transformed into a refusal or outright disruption of notions of violence as an autonomously destructive energy. It posits that such as when art destroys and remakes materials towards a creation independent of its creator, it follows that a new energy that dominates the outcome of the process of making the art or protest, exists beyond the logic of the instruments used to achieve the same art or protest.

Whereas, in instances of protests and riots,  the threat of superior forces is said to ensure social stability, individual violence is relegated an exclusion of being a deviance from the same social norms protected through violence.

In protest scenarios, we observe another imperative for violence, where violent action is directly associated with human intention. This intentionality is a spontaneous, authentic moment crystallized in rage of unfulfilled demands for instance, sparked by the patronizing reception characteristic of pompous superiors, thus unhinging restrained tantrums that breach all parameters of civilized conduct.

This is written not to excuse any brutal and banal destruction that ensues by giving some redemptive optimism to the results of violent acts, but to unveil a glimpse at the unrepresentable and incommunicable aspect of violence that manifests itself through disasters, conveying a crude human nihilism that guides all purposes of self-affirmation. I am not writing this polemic to provide some autobiographical reasons for this video poem, as it is important to consider the work devoid of myself as the creator.

This work is not some disinterested appreciation of violence and the behavioral and ethical implications of violence, but rather and investigation of the perceptual experience and its impact and perceptual capacity enhancement that engages the viewer.

A perceptual participation created through aesthetic engagement with a violent event during a protest is not merely a device for exploring the viewer’s psychological reaction to the phenomenon, that which is not merely neutral but involved with the offensive and often painful.

 

Meditation On Joy II

A Language Of The Intrigued

This "video poet" often struggle to clarify intentions behind his work because he finds that language as a social construct and tool for communicating ideas can be limited, as well as limiting, and for the untranslatable syntax of images, moving or otherwise, language has always faltered and castrated multiple innate interpretation that could exist independent of description.

The “video poet” attempts to explain the works during discussions and articles; and it instead appears that he has taken away some essential mystery by naming elements of these works from those who are meant to fathom their own interpretative ideas independent of his own.

This tendency is exhibited once again when having to name the video poems themselves; the incongruous nature of imagery contrasted with fixed meanings.

Disrupted languages, inverted diegetic sounds and those unaltered atmospherics in certain works are also a form of negation of textual or verbal language to an extent, and are what draws the video poet’s attention to the raw nature of “first takes” and unsegregated sounds in materials used.

Not actual words in their true nature, but the sound of the words without linguistic intent, inscribing naïve narratives onto the images concerned, with an indirect simplicity that requires no formal understanding or translations, thus avoiding the pitfall of translating images to written or spoken words.

Mis-translated images, inversions of meanings traveling from one person to another, feelings and their descriptive words; all these are concerns that assail “the video poet’s” work and he therefore cannot say that he have a clear method of resolving them for the viewer of my video poems. 

They might seem like self-indulgent provocations resulting from an alienated angst, but in essence they area reaction to intrigue, and awe, an attempt to encounter new meaning beyond language of words, but images.

These sequences of works with all their discreet components are used to suffocate whatever norms of rationalities; to unhinge intentionality in order to avoid interpretive inaccuracies and to subordinate language, visual, textual or spoken, leaving only their resonances and ephemeral character in each work.

His is a system of language dispensing of purposeful reality, with no correlation in a world emboldened by choices, language not as some positivist vehicle to sanitize the tragic but embracing the delirium of being.