TRADITION AND TRANSITION

It was September, late in the evening, and copious amounts of Shiraz and Merlot had led Kevin Roberts and I to leave the comfort of our loaded conversation, outside, around a warm fire. In our heightened state of awareness we decided to childishly wander off into the cold, dark bushveld on the outskirts of a hamlet called Rosendal near the border of Lesotho and the Orange Free State. Our task was to reach a distant red light, which looked to be some kind of aircraft beacon on top of a hill on the other side of a large open grazing field. As we walked I realized the fascination that often strikes me when I leave the city and enter the countryside, where it seems plausible just to forget everything and get lost in the vastness of the landscape; disappear, never to be heard from again. At the same time, one also feels an odd connection to the surroundings by virtue of one’s disconnection from nature and dependence on the supposed sanctities of the city. As we haphazardly stumbled across the uneven, cattle trodden ground an unlikely sense of awe entered my mind, knowing that we were about fifty kilometers away from the nearest town. Of course, despite the effect of the red wine, reason interjected and I soon dispelled my overtly sentimental ideals, falling back into the narcissism of human reason.

Perhaps it was our scholarly ramblings, which certainly generated some relevant discourse, or maybe it was the resonating image in my mind of Kevin’s painting on the wall back at the house, but I came to realize that the integrity of his subject matter is oddly reminiscent of the area that we navigated that night in the highlands of the Basotho people. The silhouettes of the sandstone cliffs, moonlit thorn bushes, and wind swept grasslands in the distance created an undeniably South African vernacular image in my mind that had an uncanny resemblance to the images in Kevin’s artworks. His idiom is interwoven with rich visual tapestries that seem tailored to the farmlands of the Eastern Free State where we found ourselves exploring that night. The indigenous colors, cognizant gestures, and considered textures of Kevin’s compositions are stitched and cross-hatched onto traditional themes such as portraiture, still-life, and landscape painting to reveal the underlying poetry that is diversely South African. Although much of the imagery in Kevin’s work is painted from memory, this geography in the Eastern Free State, with its cattle, corrugated iron roofs, grasslands, dams and irrigation, could be serialized as the inspiration for his paintings.

Local crafts such as weaving, braiding, and pattern painting seem to be dominant techniques that Kevin uses to customize the topography of his works. He unconsciously mediates the patterns of the land with the crafts of the people inhabiting it. Although Kevin does not directly comment on the socio-political issues at hand, he does appropriate certain activities and trends in order to cut and paste his mythology together. Teaming fish, chopped and gathered twigs, ploughed fields and sown crops may suggest some sort of commentary on the economic structure of this country, and many of these analogies were commonplace in that area of our boisterous voyage. More so, these icons represent the life sustaining flora and fauna of the land, canons to the labored over soil. This approach is also symbolized by Kevin’s use of fishnets, reservoirs and various environmental measuring tools, which reminded me that despite the isolated position the presence of man was undeniable, evidenced by the glowing red beacon that Kevin and I were traveling towards.

As we walked we discussed Kevin’s design motifs and how he fuses the naturalism of his subject matter with the abstraction of his metaphors to create a serialized and patterned realism. This vernacular is continued in his use of wooden parquet flooring and lattice screens, netting, doilies and lacey algorithms, which he superimposes and juxtaposes with flat or textured surfaces, thereby toying with the perception of realism, naturalism, and abstraction. The landscape itself becomes a lattice of meaning and signification, a matrix of symbols and archetypes born from human systems of categorization and organization (taxonomy and teleology). Cattle tags and plant tags, along with various other labels also suggest the historicism and materialism of the world that became obvious to me that night. Kevin did not seem too concerned with my embellished commentary of his work, making me come to the conclusion that he was somehow ulterior to the petty proclamations of the postmodern meta-narrative, comparable to the attitude that Jean Dubuffet had towards the foundations of art, or Michel Foucault had towards the structures of society.

By the time that Kevin and I had reached the end of the field, which was bordered by a barbed wire fence, forbidding us from reaching our target, he briefly described the infrastructure of the surrounding farms. Despite the intrusive economic necessity of human development, the rawness of the territory was still apparent to me. After taking some night pictures of the distant Maluti Mountains we began to make our way back to the house and the thought of a warm fire became quite a source of comfort to me. We went on to discuss this ulterior nature of his work, being neither traditionalist nor conceptualist, or overtly theoretical. His formal stance can be compared to that of a Renaissance master, but he clearly plays with institutional limitations and reconstructs traditions using rehashed modernist notions, such as deconstruction, fragmentation, and repetition. This is coupled with a random, almost contradictory knowledge of critical theory and philosophy, using notable archetypes such as the Jungian, dualistic analysis of anima and animus, which would certainly explain Kevin’s use of various, similar looking women in his work and his placement of texts such as the Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan in some of his paintings.

If one had to theorize about Kevin’s work then I suppose that, much like de Chirico or Magriite, his act of completion is established on the primacy of his environment, focused on the brutality the individual subconscious and the ubiquity of the collective unconscious. Kevin’s various overlaid, superimposed, saturated, multiplied, juxtaposed, and repeated metaphors, signs, symbols, patterns, texts, and naturalistic, illusory elements structure a humble iconography that embraces the ‘outsider’ traits of naivety, innocence, and primitiveness. He executes this iconography with the utmost level of skill and intelligence, creating a silent discourse around territories, universals, absolutes, and borders. His work is almost anarchic in its subtlety, abstract in its realism, tentatively and sensitively suggesting memory and history, diversity and difference, passage and time, containment and freedom, nature and culture.

As we got back we doused the fireplace outside, picked up the empty wine bottles and entered the house. Kevin started the fireplace inside and put some coffee on the boil. I began to conclude my thoughts, devising odd couplings in my head, such as idiosyncratic multiplicity. The final thought was that Kevin makes art that is neither postmodernist nor modernist; his approach can be described as non-conformist to such conditions. The didactic and cultural nature of his work always keeps the door open to debate, but he does not consciously make art to fit within the contemporary regime of South African art, and the often paradoxical character of his work surprises even the most conceptual sensibility.

VISCOSITY, CHAOS AND THE EVERYDAY PRACTICE OF PAINTING

There are far too many individuals to thank for creating that legacy of fragmented corruption and clinically messy geographies, that have brought society into the oblivion of fake revolutions known as Postmodernism. The late Postmodern tendency to defy itself by once again, and again, embracing, and then negating, and re-embracing, oblivion only proves that the various, often fraudulent, perspectives and surrogate manifestations of pluralism are certainly the harbingers of singularity, ‘truth’ and eventually implosion, or death. From these ashes, constructed on the anomaly of redundant discourses still generated by the entropic vestiges of modernism, it seems frivolous to think of an artistic endeavor with the ability to alternate from the tradition of Postmodernism, and by proxy Modernism.

Mark Erasmus mangles this historical hubris into his own brand of pata-superficial, trans-formal topologies. His paintings, like territories, communicate dissimilarity through dissonance, toying with the implosion of Modernist formalism and the death of the meta-narrative in a universalized space governed by networks, isobars, and the relentless mythologies of a few dead men. Erasmus’s work is at once an ode to the meta-narrative, and by default a negation of the meta-narrative, thereby visually manifesting the concept of singularity on the canvas using his invented and didactic materialism of paint. His paintings express an allegory to abstraction through the reality of paint and the physics that dictate the behavior of the surface.

At first glance one could easily excuse Erasmus’s paintings as pseudo-formalist modernist clones, verging on copies of Morris Louis or Piet Mondrian, much like the contemporary work of Sarah Morris. However, one would be mistaken in making such an assumption, simply because these paintings do not conform to the limitations of the ‘new’ or the ‘post-‘, two concepts that have saturated the last one hundred and fifty years. Erasmus arduously infects his brand of formalism through a processed and networked neo-platonic dissimulation, fairly reminiscent of works by Jim Lambie or Ian Davenport. Erasmus seems to play with the physicality and plasticity of the illusory, two-dimensional surface, through the reverse engineering of institutions in color, space, material and surface. He constructs his monument backwards through a fission of formalism and expressionism, physics and spirituality, randomness and pattern.

Erasmus sees color as an illusion created by the viewers reading and understanding of the surface, and in a ubiquitous manner he uses many visual tenets from tradition to execute his highly conceptual paintings. The most notable of these tenets are superimposition, juxtaposition and the repetition of line, either through meshing or cross-hatching, or simply focusing on verticality alone, and layering. Flat surfaces are also texturally built-up, reminding one of the layered artworks made by Angela de Cruz, agitating the density of the surface to the point of destruction, or Shozo Shimamoto embracing fateful, often destructive processes and events to reveal the seriality and conceptualism of layering.

Erasmus’s process easily tricks observers into thinking that his paintings have been arduously masked, when in actuality he drips and pours paint, using no brushes or masking tools, over an angled surface, using his own viscous recipe and chance events forced by gravity and the surrounding environment to create an illusion of the pure and rational image (the horizontal and the vertical). As a result, critics of Erasmus’s work have rehashed that already exhausted discourse surrounding the death of painting, but it can be argued that Erasmus’s painterly approach is more conceptual, creating an undertone that shudders the declaration: “death for death’s sake”. Erasmus introduces a new perspective on the ‘new’ to the viewer, tolerating the notion that the physical make-up, composition, viscosity, and color relations of paint have not nearly been understood enough for painting to merely wither away.

There are far too many individuals who don’t know enough about paint, and those artists who claim to have this knowledge almost certainly fall into that closed box of bogus romantics; the proverbial “art shaped whole”. Erasmus makes no such rash claims; he grew up in a family of paint chemists, working commercially with the viscous material everyday since he was a child. His art making is based on a very real, lifelong experience of paint, quite literally making the act of painting part of his lived life and his livelihood. Erasmus’s perspective on paint is surely an alternative to that overbearing, pseudo-romantic notion of the archetypal artist that many painters are seduced by, which is perhaps why the declaration of the death of painting is so predominant, and critics are so quick to point it out. Erasmus does not even attempt to think outside the box, he dismantles it slowly from the inside.

Erasmus’s painterly background turns the mere act of mixing paint into an organic and instinctual practice. Practices can be described as actions that are learned and repeatable, but Erasmus turns this understanding into a ritual teetering on religion that defies any structure but looks structural. Painting is a natural and scientific tendency in Erasmus’s work, starting with the mathematics of painting, constructing his composition in that voided space suggested by the enigmatic grid. He intuitively relates to the matrix, reading its anomalies in relation to the quirks of his mixed paint, allowing the architecture of his substrate to gradually surface; its irregularities define its logical interpretation later.

Eventually, Erasmus seems to resign himself to the resolution of reality, attempting to depict homeostasis in abstract, visual form. The chemistry of pigment and the viscosity of paint resounds through clusters of color groupings, following fragments of theories and concepts suggestive of Pollock, Itten, Kandinsky, Rothko, and Noland, to mention a few. Chaos and order collide. Each color has a formula, mixed using a universal colorant, poured into a measurement of pure acrylic emulsion where the physics of paint communicates viscosity as the major concern in Erasmus’s practice.

The material nature and physical composition of the paint itself is poeticized and formalized, using gravity and the behavior of paint in relation to the environmental conditions (wind, temperature, humidity). The painting reserves this memory for the viewer. The paint becomes a skin that concludes Erasmus’s practice. The cellular make-up of the paint contains a discernable history sealed in the layers of paint like strata weathered into the earth and covered by time. Erasmus allows painting to exist in the ashes, because there are far too many colors to destroy, making him one of the few divine painterly tricksters out there.

4'33" (FOR DIGITAL MEDIA)

The thought crossed my mind a few weeks ago to do a performance of 4'33" using digital technology, modern sound equipment, and music production software. A recent event focusing on performance art at the Bag Factory, called RE/Action, gave me the opportunity to take advantage of this happy idea.

4′33″ is an experimental musical work by former Fluxus member and avant-garde composer John Cage (1912 - 1992). The original piece was composed for piano and consists of about four and a half minutes of silence with an introduction by Cage saying: “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it”. Even though its first manifestation was for piano, Cage had originally composed 4’33” for any instrument, giving me allowance to perform a digital version in two parts in front of an audience at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg.

Cage structured 4’33” in three randomly selected movements, depending on the action, performer, and setting. Thus, the beginning an end of each movement is not dictated by the composer. Despite this premise, I decided to compose the digital version in two parts, the first part being the original piece, and the second part taking the form of a remix. Cage did, however, stipulate that the title should reflect the timings for each movement, which is why my performance of 4’33” began at about 19:15 (after all the other performers at the event had finished). Unknown to me this was also about the time that the Imam calls the faithful into prayer at the nearby mosque. The original sub-title of 4’33” was “A Silent Prayer”, which was referred to by the presence of Lerato Shadi, suspended with cloth in a messianic pose on the wall opposite to me, giving the entire room a religious atmosphere of Christian and Muslim, East and West undertones (or overtones; whatever strikes your fancy).

I introduced myself and the piece, and then I sat down in front of my Korg midi controller, MacBook Pro, Tascam audio controller, a marantz amplifier and Sony earphones; surrounded by condenser microphones, KEF monitors, lots of cords and about thirty five people. I readied myself, because in my experience sound equipment almost always has issues, not to mention computers. Each part lasted about 5 minutes, including the breaks between movements and live editing time. As mentioned, the first part consisted of Cage’s original 4’33”, with completely random beginning and ending points for each movement, and 30 second intervals separating the three movements. I thought part one was fairly successful because most people kept as silent as they could, except for some late comers who did not quite catch on to what was going on, but the Imam's sound came totally unexpectedly, and almost perfectly.

After the piece had been successfully recorded in part one of the rendition, there was about a two minute respite before the commencement of part two. The chants of the Imam took up most of movement one in part one, so I decided to focus on that section of ambiance in the remix. I aimed the microphones at the monitors and left them to record whilst the remix was played through the speakers. In this way the remix was recorded as heard by the audience during its live production. Silence and noise was amplified, spliced and fragmented in a totally random manner, bearing no pattern except for some repetitive sections, with no interludes or pauses for about four and a half minutes. Part two was interesting because onlookers did not know they were still being recorded and felt free to speak there minds. Little did they know that I could hear their conversations very clearly with my earphones, with statements like: “what is he doing… Why is he just sitting there?”, and “is there a problem with his equipment?”

Once both parts had been completed, after about 10 minutes, the recording, re-recording, and remix was published immediately on an Ipod Shuffle and put up for sale for R2000. There was no buyer, which completely dumbfounded me, because I was sure that people would give anything for an Ipod shuffle with amplified, broken silence on it. Given this disappointment an edited and mastered version of the two parts will also be made available as a free download in due course.

The full title of this rendition has been settled on as: 4'33" (a silent prayer for Darfur), piece for digital media. This title was influenced by the serendipitous event of the Imam chanting, and also by a friend who answered me when I told him about my performance: "...fuck Shane, why do you perform these meaningless acts when you could be saving people in Darfur or something..."

Thank you to Johan Thom for organizing the event, "RE/Action". Thank you also to all the other performers, Rat Western, Lerato Shadi, Bronwyn Lace and all the rest, you guys were great. And, thank you to the Bag Factory for hosting the event.

Below is a nice rendition of 4'33" by David Tudor, a student and colleague of John Cage.

Video: John Cage - 4'33" by David Tudor

A CONVERSATION WITH SEAN O'TOOLE

After publishing the Anticube manifesto in 2006, just before the second construction of Anticube as a solo exhibition, I sat down with Sean O'Toole to chat. The result of this conversation was the following opening speech:

THIS IS NOT A HAT

(An excerpt from an unpublished, imaginary interview with Shane de Lange)
by Sean O’Toole.

How many hats do you own, Shane?
Lots.
Come on – be more specific.
Um, about eleven or twelve, I think.
Any favourites amongst them?
The cheap ones, they seem to have more character.
You know, ever since I first bumped into you at the Bag Factory and you asked me to open your show, I’ve been thinking about hats.
Hats?
Yes, hats – you were wearing a flat cap of some sort. It made me think about the place of hats in twentieth century art practice.
Okay, if you say so.
No, no, Shane, think about it. At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued and wrecked the theatre. Andre Breton expelled him from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.
Now you’re just quoting verbatim from The Third Mind.
Damn, how did you know?
I’m a big fan of William Burroughs.
Really?
Ja …
How so?
Posthumanism.
Post- what, Shane?
Posthumanism, it’s a kind of ‘coming together’ of various ideas critical of the discourses and practices associated with modernism and humanism. It has only recently emerged as a buzzword in academic writing. I particularly like N Katherine Hayles’ writings on the subject. Here’s a favourite quote: “… increasingly the question is not whether we will become posthuman, for
posthumanity is already here. Rather the question is what kind of posthumans will we be.”
Hey wait a minute, Shane, one minute we’re talking hats and the next you’re headed off into highfalutin theory. Can’t we just talk hats again?
Okay, sure, hats it is then Sean.
Thanks. I find it interesting that you mentioned Burroughs, I’ve seen pictures of him wearing everything from boaters and baseball caps to fedoras and felt trilbies. He was a very stylish guy. His taste for hats aside, what is it that draws you to Burroughs?
Science fiction.
Are you sure you don’t mean Scientology? You know Burroughs was into Scientology.
No, no, I definitely mean science fiction, Sean. He was an early advocate of the idea of the posthuman.
Ah, I see you don’t want to let go of that word.
Don’t be so cynical, Sean. Here, listen to this passage by Burroughs: “The Disease spread, melting the face into an amoeboid mass in which the eyes floated, dull crustacean eyes. Slowly a new face formed around the eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that grows inside it.”
Hmm, okay Shane ... um, I’m not going to pretend I understood all of that but I can see the relationship between his words and your illustrations. I quickly want to talk about your wall panels – they tend to remind me of the American artist Frank Stella.
I suppose, formally, well, sort of, maybe. Here’s something for you, Sean. Did you know that his 1999 sculpture Bandshell was based on the shape of a beach hat given to him by his kids?
No, I didn’t, Shane.
Well now you do.
Thanks.
Thanks.

SHADOW FOLLOWING MEMORY

"How would you like to die"?
"I don’t think I would like that very much at all". (Tom Waits in an interview with Vanity Fair).

Most people like to believe that life can be controlled and ordered, and that it can be an experience that will hopefully develop into a long and meaningful journey. Unfortunately, things do not always turn out the way people might like, and we often find out that we have very little control over our lives. Basie Yssel is an artist who finds these variables intriguing. Having recently almost died from hepatitis, and being a sufferer from diabetes, one might say he has a special insight into this enigma.

Yssel’s art is about the unpredictability of life despite efforts to predict it. He emphasizes the points of convergence and disappearance which form the various experiences that constitute life. This process of splicing reveals a hyphenated space wherein preservation and loss implode, or in Yssel’s words, where shadows follow memory. I see this transformation of documents into monuments as expressive of the virus of history. Documents freeze and record memories for posterity. Monuments manifest memory’s entropy. Yssel attempts to capture his angst and awe in the face of this flux. His working method and understanding of existence comprise a spiritual and systematic synergy. Quantum physics is an important influence on the development of Yssel’s art. Most of the time we tend to see only the things that matter to us at a specific moment in time, but life tends to exceed the sum of its parts. Yssel attempts to transcend petty views of the universe, emphasising the ways in which fate, chance and serendipity affect the imagination and inspire creative tendencies. We are continually presented with choices, meetings, and happenings that inevitably change the outcome of our lives. The embrace of chance and accident in Yssel’s work derives from his interest in Abstract Expressionism. Yssel draws inspiration from artists like Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly, who employed chance incidents in the art making process, not only because they propagated the unpredictable, but also because they emphasised formal elements, such as texture, plasticity, and juxtaposition, which underlie, and often become, the subject matter of an artwork. Often these formal elements are mixed with transcendental ideals, thus merging the physical and the metaphysical. Using this as a point of departure, Yssel introduces the element of figuration into his work. This figuration is always suggestive and vague, primarily allowing the viewer to construct her/his own image.

While serendipity is central to Yssel’s work, he also makes recourse to a more controlled and objective use of symmetry, balance and harmony.

Yssel has been using computer technologies as a tool for art making for many years, and he is probably one of the first artists in South Africa to have done so successfully. From as early as the late 1980s, Yssel has used computer programs such as Photoshop to construct elaborate greyscale images that are made up of various scanned objects and computer drawn dynamic elements to form intricate digital collages. Recently, Yssel has begun to introduce more traditional media, such as ink and wash, pencil, and charcoal, into his digitally altered images. He begins by drawing, painting, and scribbling out a satisfactory image, which he then proceeds to scan into the computer for further manipulation. The end result communicates resistance and attraction, raising both epistemological and ontological issues, specifically pertaining to the processes that structure reality, knowledge and existence.
For Yssel, the lyrics of Tom Waits exemplify these oscillating influences, which Waits expresses as follows:

"My wife’s been great. I’ve learned a lot from her. She’s Irish Catholic. She’s got the whole dark forest living inside of her. She pushes me into areas I would not go, and I’d say that a lot of the things I’m trying to do now she’s encouraged. And the kids? Creatively they’re astonishing. The way they draw, you know? Right off the page and onto the wall. It’s like you wish you could be that open".

Yssel’s work delves into the labyrinths of the mind, insinuating itself into the subconscious. The images themselves are reminiscent of Rorschach inkblot tests, which morph mirror-like into one another, hinting at ambiguous forms that often render our observational skills numb. Psychologists use these tests to evaluate the personality characteristics and emotional functioning of their patients. Such tests are very suggestive and lead to multiple interpretations. A plethora of possible images hover in the mind’s eye, teasing personal associations from the subconscious mind. Working within the ambiguous parameters of concrete and abstract, known and unknown, Yssel creates an interplay of opposites and parallels; schisms and unions.

Chaos and expression, uncertainty and confidence, pattern and symmetry, balance and harmony are all dissected in his images. Consciousness and intent can be found alongside uncertainty and vagueness in Yssel’s particular point of view. This is an artist trying to come to terms with the eccentricities of existence and the absurd formulations that accompany attempts to understand it.

In this way, Yssel explores traditional Cartesian dualism, focusing on issues of mind and body, inside and outside, experience and understanding, waking and dreaming. However, he takes these concepts further by placing them in a contemporary technological context through his use of digital media, thus emphasising further oppositions between virtuality and reality, representation and simulation.

These images, digitally printed on paper, allude to a continual state of evolution; yet they have a strong sense of stability and symmetry. From a formalist perspective this alters our view of what a painting or a drawing can be: if a pencil line is scanned, is it still a drawing? If a brushstroke is manipulated in Photoshop, is it painting?

Yssel’s art probes into the vanishing points of life and along the mind’s horizon line. The area of convergence cannot exist without the splitting point. He makes traditional binary oppositions and dualistic distinctions unclear and morphs them into a digital aesthetic that is indicative of how the media and technology have become a dominant factor in the way we live our lives, physically and metaphysically. By delving into the psyche, Yssel’s work blurs the boundary between the observer and the observed, destabilising the relationship between subject and object, allowing viewers to stop and look into themselves. Between the picture and the mental projection, the viewer’s own interpretations are engaged. One becomes conscious of one’s own subconscious thoughts. The artwork gazes at you, or rather turns your gaze towards you.

I wrote this text for Basie's exhibition catalog, coordinated by Abrie Fourie and Harry Siertsema for the Map project, in September 2006. Basie Yssel died on the 21st of December 2006.

LOST IN THE POST

Asha Zero depicts a world molded by the media, communicating a synthesized and accelerated society. Zero’s hyperrealistic painted collages express the pastiche of audio and visual simulations that have developed into the anxieties of the present day. His work suggests a kind of neurosis that most people seem to experience in the present Orwellian constructed world.

Zero exposes us to the media spectacle of the global village by juxtaposing many traditional modernist approaches, such as collage, gestural painting, and pop elements, with more contemporary elements and concepts, such as Neo-expressionism, graffiti, and electro-clash design. Extracts from torn tabloid icons and celebrity magazine cut-ups are pieced together to assemble ‘über-cosmetic’ and ‘pseudo-idealistic’ deformations. By sacrificially mutilating already established modernist perspectives, Zero turns plasticity into plastic living, and manages to expose the dissident of postmodernism. Zero embraces the comedy of the techno-urban environment in its entire tragic splendor, finding parallels between the angst we feel inside the city, and the awe we feel outside of it. In this way, zero creates a poisonous concept of lethargy as a cathartic cure to an over-accelerated instantaneous world of glitches and delays.

As the world becomes ever smaller with the growth of media orientated technologies and the increased speed-up of networks, proximity is often equated with promiscuity, covering the world in a blanket of globalization and westernization. This is a schizophrenic space that Zero relates to in an equally schizophrenic fashion through his use of various guises. He plays with various aliases in an attempt to negate his own identity, choosing anonymity over autonomy. Zero delivers a perspective of a downloaded reality in the midst of a smoldering consumerist society which has a special affinity to the techno-organic space of the city, where the individual merely becomes a cipher in a buzz of cellular automata. Spectacular culture has saturated the globe in a haze of electronic media that brings traditional modernist notions of identity into question. Zero’s ‘trans-politics’ filters out the capitalistic and consumerist elements that structure western existence by utilizing clippings from the very advertisements, tabloid photo’s, and television programs that propagate the supposed coherence of society.

Zero draws much of his inspiration from music videos, cult films, poster and album cover art, because they are indicative of, or rather they render an awareness of, a late capitalistic, postmodern era. Such imagery is also evident in the billboards, MTV blips, and humming fast food signs that surround us. Zero simply makes this sublime situation apparent in a funny and sometimes juvenile manner, supported by his refined sensibility and wit.

Zero is careful not to conform to a singular or autonomous individuality, but rather incorporates a number of brands into his idiom of multiple personalities and bogus corporations. Zero refers to these brands and aliases as his ‘collectives’, intent on confusing the assumed universalism and coherence of the global village. Zero does not have a preference for any specific guise, and he adopts these ‘sub-alter-ego’s’ as playthings of sorts. These characters include such names as Palinki, Broop Nook, Whatsnibble, and most importantly, the Imposter. The imposter implies deception and falsity, but it also suggests the all important poster boy; the face of the brand or corporation and the mediator of capitalistic dogma.

Zero, like many other artists today, dramatizes the fabrication of western, and westernized, society’s so called multiplicity, which has grown out of an obscure postmodern faith in pluralism. It can be said that our society is a binary singularity trying to cope with a supreme lack of difference in the world. With the lack of any Other, Zero is the only symbol that can distinguish and support the One. Zero’s self-denying pseudonyms are epitomized and controlled by two counterfeit brands called Roadvisionkilltoiletries and Mobilediscoetcetera. These brands form the corpus of his ‘collectives’ and subvert, or even invert, capitalistic processes of institutionalization. Corporations and institutions are mechanisms of representation that allocate purpose, meaning, and identity to things. Zero’s cut-up images are fragmented products of this system: a homogenized societal husk in the wake of a specific brand of modernism that has turned into the spectacle of market capitalism. Zero’s corporations are ventures that externally and conceptually compliment his painted images, and clone, even mock, the fictional basis of multi-national corporations, humanism, globalization and the like.

Various traits, both conceptually and formally, from Modernist movements such as Cubism, Dada, and Futurism can be found in Zero’s work. He openly admits to the influence of Dada poster art and often mentions the conceptual approach of Marcel Duchamp, specifically regarding his embrace of the anonymous, unpredictable and unknown factors in life. Following Duchamp, Zero’s images are ambiguous, and honest. They use capitalist, consumer orientated tricks and fibs to suggest many possible truths. Zero’s collectives are mutated electrical digital mechanical monsters that grow sporadically. They reveal a polemic of reality and simulation that entails an existence bent on instant communication and infinite consumerism. By painting his collages as realistically as he can, and re-representing already highly mediated imagery, sourced from tabloid magazines, children’s books and the like, Zero makes a serious comment about society as bricolage; a world that has lost any sense of the real.

Zero’s paintings are portraits that have been pieced together from the appropriated features of media icons and cover models that many people desire to be. His paintings are self-portraits and portraits of the viewer; they depict everyman and the overman. Such portraits make one aware of the various cultural masks that people need to wear in order to be accepted in society.

As a constructed and abstract entity, Asha Zero is a parody on consumer brands and capitalist politics. His ‘collectives’ are both the object of consumption and the subject that produces. His paintings are deliberate satirical reproductions of collages by pseudo characters that ‘exist’ in a sequenced and controlled world-wide domain.

Zero plays with contemporary societal issues, where Orwellian concepts no longer teeter on the opposition between good and evil, but tinker on the pitting of ‘evil’ against ‘evil’. Zero shows us his dreams of a sublime digitised and Xeroxed space that has developed from over-communication and an addiction to the media. In Zero’s world we are all impostors living the illusion of a man-made human-condition that is decaying from its own processes of modernisation. Asha’s ‘collectives’ attest to this universalistic paradigm of drone nations, cloned identities, and ultimately ones and zeros.

THE ANTICUBE MANIFESTO

Anticube is an idea that views the cube as the symbol of humanism and the west. The cube can be seen as a signifier for notions such as idealism, logic, rationalism, progress, homogenisation, globalisation, and most importantly, humanism. Anticube situates the traditional, typically modernist, art gallery as a concept and a space that epitomises the totalitarian worldview that has evolved from humanism. It does so by emphasising the context of an exhibition-as-happening; an abstract construct in a solid architectural space. Art can also be viewed as one of the key humanistic disciplines. Anticube is an attempt to deconstruct the white voided cube of the gallery, specifically in relation to the artworks that give it purpose, and are, in turn, given value through the gallery. The gallery is the centrepiece of the exhibition; a kind of factory for meaning and value. The gallery is a cathedral to humanism. Anticube achieves this message by using and appropriating institutionalised and established styles, drawing inspiration from a variety of interweaving sources, and often opposing disciplines, specifically modernist movements such as Dada, De Stijl, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, juxtaposed with postmodern trends such as Art Brut, Neo-expressionism, and graffiti. Modernism can be viewed as an era where humanism reached its pinnacle, and where the concept of the ‘human’ and ‘mankind’ reached its final narcissistic development.

The cube is the embodiment of functionalism and formalism; the symbol of modernism evident in the works of such modernist artists as Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Sol Lewitt, Kurt Schwitters (Merzbau), Piet Mondrian, M.C. Escher, Donald Judd, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, and Josef Albers to name a few, all of whom have influenced the concept of Anticube. Anticube dissects the assent and dissent of humanism, particularly in relation to western societies death drive for power, knowledge, truth, and the abstract, evident in the modernist belief in progress, formalism, and functionalism. In this way, Anticube tweaks modernist perspectives to encompass the entire gallery space. Instead of being limited to the dimensions of the frame or the picture plane, the gallery is incorporated into the artwork, as the artwork, where it can be said to implode on itself. The beginnings of an interplay between inside and outside (inclusive and exclusive) begin here, where the modus operandi of Anticube can be established; that is, as a deconstructive operation that dissects and infects, injects and ingests, regurgitates and emancipates the picture plane by emphasising the hyperbolic issues surrounding such mechanisms of supplementation as ‘beyond’, ‘post’, ‘new’, ‘now’, and ‘then’.

There is nothing new, subversive, or original about Anticube, and it announces this fact. Anticube is aware of its dependency on the modernist anatomy that it is trying to subvert; a schizophrenic resolution at best. Anticube attests to a space that exists in the ashes of human moralism, in the aftermath of utopian entropy, where good and evil are petty and archaic archetypes, and evil is pitted against evil, making dualisms and boundaries obscure and irregular. Anticube’s ethos can be described as “Nilfunct” (nihilism, non-function), where the distinction between prophylaxis and virulence fades away and the indifference towards the other becomes acute. Anticube is both a postmodern criticism and homage to modernism. This schizophrenic embrace is a pastiche of orderliness, of structure and fragmentation, of pattern and randomness, which can only be described as posthuman.

By placing these ideas in the context of the gallery, Anticube stresses the incestuousness of the grid and the promiscuity of the cube, which can be seen as an analogy to the virulence of the global village and information based society. Anticube is also a reaction towards present communicative trends in street art and new media. It is an amalgamation of various disciplines comprising the so called fine arts, graphic and interior design, illustration, graffiti, and new media to name a few. This is a perspective that tries to expose the voyeuristic and panoptical intensity of western ways of seeing that tends to boxed-in and put things in their place; where boundaries are constructed, lines are drawn, and dualisms and hierarchies are created. Anticube expresses the cube as an attitude of bleached out indifference, a moratorium of the present that illustrates the limbo of postmodern living, waiting for the arrival of the posthuman. New technologies are only accelerating the human drive to extinction, and Anticube exploits such extentions.

Anticube is a paradoxical attempt to bring into context the whole ‘idea-of-art’: a discipline that has documented the history, ideology, domination, and narcissism of ‘mankind’ and humanism. Anticube celebrates and mourns the culmination of humanism in modernism. The artworks that are exhibited in Anticube, which comprise of drawings, paintings, and animations, play a pivotal role as constructs in this meta-narrative of humanism that is monumentalised in the form of the gallery (the cube). Anticube breaks-down the architecture of the cube, and it is itself a deconstructed cosmology that is very much under construction. Anticube is inseparable from the cube because of its opposition to it. This is why Anticube can be said to tell a story of dualism, revealing a mythology based, media orientated, technological world of instant access and communication. It reveals the anatomy of communication and the consequences of gaining access to the cube. This alters the notion of universalism in a western sense, exposing it as just another form of imperialism. In a traditional sense, to be human is to wear a mask. Being branded human is the process of the cube. Everything that can be understood as traditionally ‘human’, such as Christian moralism, heterosexual establishments, and patriarchal institutions, are at an end. Many of the conceptual drawings in Anticube attest to this idea, and the geometric abstractions of the paintings literally apply this posthuman perspective to the cube. Anticube suggests the posthuman notion, stemming from postmodern discourses such as feminism and post-colonialism, that the ‘now’ is a situation of ‘nihilation’, and the ‘new’ is a premise for annihilation through the indifference of the ‘human gaze’. In Anticube the only question that matters is whether to choose the path of ‘nihilation’ or annihilation in lieu of the universalism and hegemony of the west, modernism, and humanism.

Following from this perspective Anticube rekindles the already mundane ‘anti-art’ scepticism towards the art market, specifically in relation to industry standards such as the hierarchy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, or the dualism between craft and fine art. This further questions the notion of ‘anti’ or the idea of the avant-garde, and how this has all become seemingly ‘traditional’ and institutionalised. In a sense Anticube is an ‘anti-anti’ that laughs at its own pseudo-schizophrenic position within the system that it tries to deconstruct. In this way, the influence of graffiti can be viewed as ‘low art’ (excluded/outside) used in the ‘high art’ (included/inside) environment of the gallery. The dualism between traditional and non-traditional, authentic and inauthentic, established and non-established becomes ubiquitous and ambiguous. This approach also suggests notions of urban and rural, which lead to greater social, economic, geographical, and political dualisms such as; orient and occident, One and Other, rich and poor, et cetera. Such hierarchies can be attributed to the actions of ‘man’ in ‘his’ attempts to conquer ‘his’ epistemology and succeed ‘his’ own ontology; a confused dream of progress, colonialism, and mechanisation blindly moving towards a ‘beyond’ that can never be reached without some form of sacrificial mutilation, auto-amputation, and ultimately suicide.

The odd characters and creatures (mutants) that accompany the grid in Anticube are represented partly to emphasise the story of dualism and partly to depict the posthuman. In some ways the characters, which are also inspired by much African art, inhabit Anticube as Other or alien, but they can also be viewed as ghostly or demonic. All these concepts find common ground in the taboo and deconstruction, which can be understood as a stipulation made by humanism and the west: humanism can never escape it’s ‘post’.

Anticube is thus a reference to issues indifference and difference, hybridisation and mutation, absence and presence, et cetera, in a bleached out and augmented ‘global village’. Anticube is not about action or reaction, it is not about questioning or criticising, it is not about rash pseudo-revolutionary statements and egotistical claims to reinterpretation. Anticube is about being random and ordered, inside and outside, transparent and flickering. It represents the illogical and disordered normalcy of the One, and presents the ‘resentiment’ of the Other. This is an unveiling of the indifference towards difference that the west possesses, and the indifference in difference that the Other experiences when the mask of ‘man’ is handed down to ‘them’ by the One. It is a present suicidal suggestion on the ‘beyond’ and how it will be in the absence of the Other.