HYPHEN AND SPLICE

If hysteria was the pathology of the exasperated staging of the subject – of the theatrical and operational conversion of the body – and if paranoia was the pathology of organization – of the structuring of a rigid and jealous world – then today we have entered into a new form of schizophrenia – with the emergence of an immanent promiscuity and the perpetual interconnection of all information and communication networks.                                                          Jean Baudrillard (1988: 26)

When Picasso painted Still Life with Cane Chair in 1912 he made a profound contribution to the conversation of art that still resonates today. By combining found material and elements from the media into the painted surface, Picasso effectively breached the barrier between the real world of the viewer and the represented world of the image, heralding the emergence of Synthetic Cubism. Picasso’s hybrid of collage and painting included a clipping from a newspaper that stated “the battle has began”, knowing that the foreboding tradition of painting was under attack, and that a shift was underway in the evolution of the medium, challenging the way human beings perceive things to be, and providing a reservoir of artistic material for decades to come. Cubism incorporated the politics of the canvas, picture frame, and surrounding walls, in effect socializing painting. So too, an emphasis on the multidimensional and conceptual thinking, including the influence psychoanalysis and existentialism, altered the way we see the perceived genius of the artist, asking the question: what is in a name, other than signifying cancellation?

Asha Zero is a painter reverse-engineering these once-anarchic, now-traditional Avant-Garde ideas, hard wiring established Modernist perspectives to suite the needs of a ‘post-postmodern’ world. The numerical digit ‘Zero’ being a pertinent replacement for the authors name, Zero’s reinterpretation of identity and representation in the context of the information age finds an association with Francis Picabia’s Cacodylic Eye (1921), where the artist had his studio visitors sign a canvas on entering, not allowing for one single signature to be credited as the maker of the artwork, composed around a huge eye gazing back at the viewer. Parallel to the estrangement of the author, the use of body parts, particularly mouths and eyes, is a mechanism echoed in all Zero’s work, describing the almost prosthetic, cut and paste identities that humans adopt in contemporary society. Reminiscent of George Bataille’s theoretical method known as the Exquisite Corpse, Zero in affect creates a discursive ‘body’ for the current post-industrial information age. Similarly, in Erased De Kooning Drawing (1953) painter and collagist Robert Rauchenberg took the notion of identity, discourse and representation a step further, deleting the subject in his artistic inquiry entirely, revealing more informal considerations based on the absence and ambiguity of the author, concluding his thoughts by erasing a drawing by Willem De Kooning as an act of art in his own name, at once communicating the primary concerns of collage: intertextuality, appropriation, and juxtaposition.

Subscribing to historical collagist practices, notably the work of Dadaists such as Hana Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, and Kurt Schwitters, Zero confronts the medium of painting based on contemporary conventions such as schizophrenia, pastiche, anxiety and erasure. All under the guise(s) of imitation, artifice, and anonymity, Zero takes a cue from Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual art practices and Andy Warhol’s Pop Art wit, approaching painting on the same conceptual grounds as collage, depicting the everyday spectacle of human habituation in the urban sprawl of the modern city. Zero becomes a cipher, an indecipherable title containing no gender or name, the personification of collage: a cyborg. Borrowing from everyday media sources to construct detailed, photo-realistic compositions (trompe l’oeil), Zero presents the status quo of the Global Village as a bricolage, made-up of found objects (objet trouvé) and constructed bodies, using newspaper headlines, various street art elements, billboards, posters, album covers, fashion spreads, and print ads as pertinent social content.

Delivering layered facsimiles and masked captions from ground zero, Zero stumbles upon the defunct and deteriorated relationship between the original and the representation. Where humans once consumed media, it now consumes us, and Zero presents the remnants of this memory, pooled experiences faded and used, somehow tolerating the extraction of intelligible bits of information. Rather than being direct representations from some distant ‘original’ source or ‘authentic’ subject, Zero’s paintings are processed transcripts of lost and found representations, which have lost the agency of ‘origin’. The notions of memory and history are treated in an archaeological manner, mediated and weathered into the surfaces of the urban landscape, peeled back by Zero to reveal the remaining strata of our mediation, all too often hidden from us, or simply ignored and forgotten. “The informational function of the media today would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia” (Jameson, 1999:20). Zero finds keepsakes from the fragmented landscape of the city – its histories and geographies incomplete – in order to piece together portraits of its cyborg citizenry, blip culture, raising relevant doubts about the Human Condition.

Saturated in the synthetic culture of the 80s, steeped in Punk and Indie Rock, Zero has a penchant for the appropriation of middle class consumer appetites. Forgetting and indoctrination being the staple of the day, the working class ideology of the Apartheid proletariat gave Zero special insights into the power of propaganda and marketing, and the social programming of the minority white population. In this sense, Zero’s paintings take advantage of the value of deception, equating perception with deception, perversion with reversion, at all times being unsympathetic towards any political agenda. Zero samples glitches and iterations from mediocrity, remixing scraps Xeroxed or stolen from popular culture, numbing as they stimulate, rendering the information age as bits and pieces, hyphens and splices, scratched and scrambled. If Pierneef were alive today, Zero’s portraits would be the landscapes he would paint.

This approach to the present day by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage. Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as a elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way. It cannot therefore be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by its own formal power, but rather merely to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions, the enormity of the situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience. 

                                                                                   Frederic Jameson (1993: 21)

When viewed from a distance each painting appears to be hyper-realistic visions pieced together from discarded or found media parts. When each of the many segments are appreciated for their individual surface qualities, ranging from topological interactions to hijacked typographical vectors and dirty grunge-inspired textures, they display abstract expressionist tendencies, marking a sea-change in the context of Modern painting. Simultaneously multiple and singular, Zero’s paintings dictate impossible exchanges between different surfaces in a continuous sedimentation of information.

Zero’s own ambiguous identity poses a similar question, where the authenticity of the author gives way to the representation of the brand; a sentiment relayed by Guy Debord (2004:12) when he states: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”. With this simulated sense of Self Zero plays with the unsolicited aesthetics of the street, in an overwhelming image economy, a contrived society continually referencing itself, feeding off of itself, inviting one to consume. Zero’s paintings illustrate the sales agenda of the Global Village; so pervasive that it almost does not need the consumer anymore. The world is no longer about good or bad, black or white, ones and zeros; it is no longer binary, it is anarchic based on technologies that currently dictate the resolution of reality and the ‘deresolution’ of the body. Everything is transferred and transmitted under tragicomic circumstances, making room for the entropic madness of the machine aesthetic that Futurists such as Fillippo Marinetti envisaged being the culmination of mankind.

The reason I'm painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do... If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There's nothing behind it. 

                                                                                                                           Andy Warhol

We are all Burroughs’ cut-ups, disposable, interchangeable, random. As passive consumers, compiled identities, and poster egos, most people are bored and nobody wants to change anything, shape it, form it, and translate it into a form of expression. It’s all about imitation, consumption and manipulation, and the only way to arrive at something relevant is to combine elements together, just as Zero does. This boredom is symptomatic of the lack of difference and Otherness in the world. Zero is the only relevant symbol, Zero’s cut-up images are a sign of the times, products of the system. Much like Gustav Courbet, Zero is a realist for the times, a traditionalist conveying the contemporary message of Zeitgeist in Babel, manifesting what it means to be human in the composite landscape of website hits and dots per inch, at all times leaving the debate open and playful.

Alongside contemporary artists such as Gajin Fujita, Takashi Murakami and Barry McGee, Zero draws attention to a society in a state of terminal identity, where the neurosis observed in the everyday becomes the norm. Marshall McLuhan referred to this neurosis as ‘narcosis’ (2001:45), which is an analogy used to describe our addiction to the media and our indifference towards it, linked to the idea that human beings and culture are paramount to a reproductive organ for the media and technology. Zero executes this narcosis through transient and ambiguous mergers of realism, naturalism and abstraction, somehow incorporating small pieces from just about every discursive structure in painting since the Renaissance. Silence and noise find common ground here, where the cosmetic fabrications of the media are expressed through hybrids of texture, colour, and pattern; chimeras that lead to continuing discussion on painting.

Micro Cluster Picnic progresses past Manichean binaries, in a post-hyperrealist realm that is inadvertent towards humanist or capitalist polemics and politics, differing from previous exhibitions, say for me (2008) and macro soda text hits (2009). As the world grows ever smaller, proximity being equal to promiscuity, Zero chooses anonymity over autonomy. Embodied and embedded, disassembled and reprogrammed, Zero’s paintings contribute more than just the sum of all parts, unfixing signifiers, stirring up turbulence, entangled in alienation and artifice to establish a clear-cut message. By piecing together counterfeit truths that can be bought over the counter, Zero makes the distinction between the authentic and inauthentic obsolete, perhaps exposing the only ‘truth’ left. History, identity, representation, culture, and the like, no longer teeter on the opposition between good and evil, or even tinker on the pitting of evil against ‘evil’, Zero simply makes such distinctions null and void.

Text Copyright © Shane de Lange 2011.

Image Copyright © Asha Zero 2011.

WRITING AND INDIFFERENCE, UPENDING THE ORDER OF OTHERNESS

"Venerated Villain (Kenosi)", 2011

If there is a constant to chaos it is dualism; where two Manichean halves clash. The vying of the irrational against the rational makes Africa the perfect breeding ground for chaos, where conflict, war, violence, and poverty in the wake of decolonization, global capitalism, and the resurgence of pre-colonial tribalism simultaneously condemn and validate oppression. It is from this ‘tragic-state-of-affairs’ that corrupt and totalitarian powers contest for ownership over a multifaceted and layered geography. Within this paradigm small pockets across Africa are attempting to find recourse towards identifying themselves, in many ways reversing the voyeuristic gaze of the West, becoming voyeurs of the West and vanguards of their own culture, in the process finding rootedness; a story of difference, and the indifference that prevails to destroy it.

Frank Marshall is a photographer who dissects the question of representation in Africa by focusing on a special outcropping of Heavy Metal subculture in Botswana. He does so from a formal photographic stance and as a sub-political statement, constructing an image of the Renegade as a pretense to the avant-garde. Heavy Metal is a divergent subculture, and its quasi-nihilist tenets seem to have developed into an uprising in Sub-Saharan Africa, provoking those myths and stereotypes that sustain the borders of supposed social order, dummy-revolutions, and apparent power struggles; all under the guise of victimhood in the shadow of the post-colony. What the so-called ‘Batswana’ Heavy Metal community is nurturing in Botswana is merely one of many encouraging microcosms of change sprouting all across Africa. The diverse manner in which this change is happening exhibits how the continent is calibrating itself to the demands of the Present and the obligations of the Past. With the Batswana, Marshall has taken it upon himself to document this process unfolding, one individual Motswana at a time (‘Motswana’ being the singular to the plural ‘Batswana’).

Bound by the Moon, 2011

Marshall tentatively situates himself as a mediator chronicling the assimilation of Heavy Metal by a group of Batswana rebels creating an emergent rootedness in a geography where tradition, politics, and tribalism create sensitive grounds for expression. These Renegades are almost thespian in their unconscious re-reading of post-colonial hauteur. This ‘performative’ aspect is a dominant theme in Marshall’s photographs; where the Machiavellian world of Heavy Metal meets the Manichean world of Colonialism, uniquely displayed in each individual Motswana portrait.

Such sub-cultural insurgences supply alternative lifestyles that veer from long-debated post-colonial concerns that either views subculture as a luxury of the First World or the corruption of the Third World. But such insurrections are anomalies attempting to deal with the challenges of Modernity, and the Batswana community does so through pure idiosyncratic rage in keeping with the idiom of Heavy Metal.

"Death", 2011

Increasingly, these subversive apolitical, non-traditional caucuses establish themselves unobstructed by the moral and political predicaments created by post-liberation, often corrupt leaderships in underdeveloped democracies. Although many subcultures exist in seemingly developed African states such as South Africa, this particular fraternity in Botswana is provoking a unique polarity-shift between the West and its perceived Other, allowing for a greater sense of belonging and fellowship amongst the Batswana Heavy Metal community, geared towards a confrontation with the persuasions and dysfunctions of Globalization and Capitalism. The Batswana take advantage of the spectacle cherished in Heavy Metal lore, parodying the larger Spectacle created by the ‘powers-that-be’, turning the notion of ‘Otherness’ on its head. The Batswana become voyeurs of the old oppressor; the West becomes the fetish, a novelty in light of the outsider status of Heavy Metal in Botswana.

Marshall’s portraits of the Batswana pose important anthropological questions about the nature of cultural effigy, specifically relating to pop culture, consumerism, and the topology of post-decolonial machinations. The stigma surrounding Marshall’s Renegades in their own local community also reveals a greater cultural chimera: they are the oppressed, steeped in the tactics of the oppressor, conveying this fact through skulls, scars, and chains that ironically put them on the fringe of their own society. Despite this, the Renegades keep with Heavy Metal’s primary archetype, envisaging a ‘new’ kind of African male: damaged yet intimidating, at the end of it all, with nothing to lose, subverting the system with his anger and indignation. 

"Morgue Boss (Rock Phex)", 2011

 
In terms of demographics, Heavy Metal has historically been associated with those of Caucasian, male, patriarchal, Christian (by proxy anti-), and Eurocentric persuasions. The dissimilarity is obvious, but the one key similarity here is that ‘Metalheads’ stem from the lower working class, giving insight into the socio-economic strata of each Motswana, whom relates to the blue-collar working-class roots of Metal, its origins in Rock and Roll during the 1950s, and its connotations to the Hell’s Angels, all working against the system to find an original identity. This influence can be traced even further back to the machismo of the Wild West era. Africa being the ‘new’ Wild West, the Renegades parade themselves in leather boots, pants and jackets, jeans, studs, and homemade belts made from bullet shells; a material articulation of rebellion to say the least.

In this way, the Batswana have annexed unclaimed cultural territory, seizing a sense of authenticity and ownership, in turn upending the order of ‘Otherness’ by ‘colonizing’ a Western subculture. In this context, visibility equals worth, where music is a material currency, and performance is an unmasking agent revealing the West as a perpetrator of inauthenticity. To ‘colonize’, based on the humanist pedestal of Greco-Roman ethics, leading into Christian moralism, Eurocentric narcissism, ending in Modernist utopianism is negated by the primal, pagan, pre-Hellenistic tribalism, tolerating the Batswana to embrace a ‘cult of Dionysius’ as it were; representing the marginal folklore of Heavy Metal regardless of ethnicity, simply because it speaks the language of tragedy. 

"Dead Demon Rider I", 2011

Tragedy is an intrinsic art form based on human suffering, offering pleasure to its spectators. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers mainly to the Ancient Greek dramatic traditions that play a pivotal role in the determinism of Western civilization, and by proxy Colonialism. Marshall accentuates this sense of tragedy by acquiring theatrical elements through Spectacle, temporality, and iconicity, illustrating the evolutionary strides in the post-colonial mindset from rebels, to revolutionaries, to Renegades. In this way, Marshall actively mythologizes the Batswana, teetering on the fringe of fantasy and reality, bearing witness to the manner in which Heavy Metal is adopted and adapted in Botswana.

The historical significance of Marshall’s portraits is further emphasized by formal considerations of tone, color, and one-point perspective, using ambient picture planes, differentiated focusing and a distorted depth of field. His formal engagement with the street, and the African urban environment in particular, turns his portraits of Motswana individuals into ‘visions’, achieving a vivid painterly effect outside the confines of the artist’s studio. In this light, it seems ironic that Marshall’s cult-like visions can only be accessed through the tragic social rites of the gallery, occultist in its purist form. Marshall’s photographs are vocal about depicting a community marginalized by society, blurring the boundaries between liberty and fraternity. Marshall’s Renegade’s have found a semblance of an answer by co-opting Heavy Metal, finding a substitute for the lack of answers produced by the Post-colonial enquiry, permitting them to embrace anything that popular culture finds unacceptable, proving the manner in which Africa is calibrating itself to an increasingly homogenized world. 

"Loyal to None", 2011

Text Copyright © Shane de Lange 2011. 
 
Image Copyright © Frank Marshall 2011.

BETWEEN THE SYSTEM AND THE STRUGGLE

The Bang Bang Club is a tagline baptized upon a group of politically active photographic journalists who chronicled the intense social upheavals during the early 90s, nearing the end of the Apartheid era in South Africa. The group had four key members: João Silva, Greg Marinovich, Kevin Carter, and Ken Oosterbroek. Other noteworthy photographers, such as James Nachtwey, Abdul Shariff, and Gary Bernard, often accompanied the Bang Bang Club but always remained peripheral figures. Working within the volatile atmosphere of the time the Bang Bang Club documented scenes that were normally beyond the comprehension of the often-uninformed population living in Apartheid stricken South Africa. They were most prolific from the time when Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 to the first non-racial Democratic elections in 1994.

The nomenclature surrounding the groups’ title has many roots. Originally, the name Bang Bang Club was appropriated from an article in Living magazine called the Bang Bang Paparazzi, describing the actions of few intrepid photojournalists who would impulsively enter the surrounding townships of Johannesburg, commonly regarded as a no man’s land, capturing images that announced to the world that the sugar-coated façade of Apartheid was in actual fact a reign of terror governing the country. The term Paparazzi was thought to be a misleading description of the groups’ intentions, hence the slight alteration to club, which also allows for an ironic play on the abbreviation “BBC”. The name can also be derived from the township culture itself, where residents would use the phrase "bang-bang" to describe the all to common violence within their communities, literally referring to the sound of gunfire.


Greg and Kevin are the only South African’s to have been awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for their respective photographic achievements. João and Greg are the only surviving members from the original four, and are co-authors of the autobiographical book titled The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War (with a foreword written by Archbishop Desmond Tutu). The book is based on selected experiences and fragmented memories linked to the now vintage, highly collectable photographs of the Bang Bang Club. The book establishes how close friendships developed between the four members in trying to deal with their own psychological and moral dilemmas during the civil unrest. The dedication that the Bang Bang Club expressed towards their craft led to a lot of emotional turmoil and many close encounters with death, eventually leading to the passing of two members. Ken was killed by crossfire during a gunfight between the National Peacekeeping Force and African National Congress supporters in Tokoza in 1994 (Greg was seriously injured during this event). In July of that same year Kevin committed suicide, barely three months after South Africa’s first democratic elections.

The photographs taken by the Bang Bang Club from this period form the foundation of the book, and are crucial historical artifacts that bear witness to the struggle, oppression, and conflict that became convention at the time. The images also suggest the internal conflict experienced by the members of the Bang Bang Club, each having to respond to the pendulum flow of their ethical responsibility to take the pictures rather than intervene in the situation based on moral obligations. The predicament of witnessing tragic events without attempting to prevent them because the published images would help to expose the larger terror was the bonding factor for all the members of the Bang Bang Club. Their attempts to remain unaffected by switching-off emotionally can also be seen as symptomatic of the times.


The Bang Bang Club fell outside the idyllic social norms dictated by the hegemonic Apartheid regime. They were, however, insiders trying to reveal the real events behind the scenes that kept the sovereignty of everyday Apartheid life from crumbling. The day-to-day atrocities helped conserve the extremely comfortable means that the dominant minority white population saw as their birthright. For the most part the crimes committed by the Apartheid state were beyond the limits of public knowledge, and so too the majority of whites were content with their ignorance towards what was actually going on. By capturing indicting photographic fragments the Bang Bang Club helped create global awareness about the stomach-turning successes of Apartheids social engineering.

João and Greg took most of the vintage images illustrated in the book. Nearly all the photographs taken by João and Greg captured the rising tensions that resulted in many violent clashes between Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) and Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). As the title of the book suggests, the photographs reveal a hidden war, secretly choreographed by the Apartheid government, in which thousands of people were killed in the build-up towards the 1994 elections. The photographs are small pieces of a larger puzzle that reveal a political strategy designed to create a volatile environment, tailor made to make the ANC look like a terrorist outfit attempting to start a civil war.


The unrest was primarily situated in the three hotspots of Tokoza, Sebokeng, and Soweto, where the bloodshed caused by hostel factionalism between IFP and ANC supporters caused bloody clashes that were clearly linked to dominant political intentions. This disruptive and reticent form of propaganda took advantage of people’s strong convictions regarding traditionalism and tribalism, evidenced by the spikes in aggression when negotiations began.
The orchestration of this hidden war by the Apartheid regime was a failed attempt to disrupt inevitable political change. The Bang Bang Club photographs offer direct, factual accounts of this planned disruption, with some images perfectly framing government controlled security police alongside Inkatha hostel dwellers in Zulu attire attacking ANC held territories. The arrogance of the Inkatha hostel dwellers, who saw themselves as an elite caste of Zulu warriors, was encouraged by the government and used against other Black factions in the hopes that the White minority may regain control in the chaos. The images taken by João and Greg unveiled the sinister intentions of the Apartheid government, broadcasting this message across the globe.

The segregation of the Inkatha-Zulus in to fortress-like hostels created a microcosm of civil war in the townships, reminiscent of an Orwellian scenario where the state is ever present. This was a war of identity, a manner of subverting one identity in order to find a new identity; one that could deal with the immanent changes to come. Ethnicity was a huge issue in this development of a new cultural identity capable of fostering in a different South Africa where all citizens could be seen as equal, and difference was respected. A new sense of multi-cultural, national pride was key, but this did not fall in line with the fascist-like Nationalist Party’s political agenda. Thus the Apartheid government was a third force in the hidden war, secretively pulling all the strings. The Bang Bang Club documented these activities first hand, thereby aiding the increasing movement of anti-apartheid sentiment, and eventually leading to a peaceful transition towards independence.


The Bang Bang Club turned photojournalism into an art form, going to extraordinary lengths to capture the horrors that still reverberate throughout South Africa. Without their artistic efforts the violence and poverty brought about by the Apartheid regime may not have been as intensely protested. The international headlines created by their photographs introduced the world to the scarring events circa 1990 to 1994. The demise of Apartheid and the birth of Democracy in South Africa was a tumultuous period, and life-threatening opportunities to photograph history-in-the-making were plentiful. Resultantly, the Bang Bang Club regularly made the headlines both locally and abroad, bringing them fame and celebrity. The recent cinematic adaptation of the Bang Bang Club book, and Silva’s much publicized, near fatal landmine injury in Afghanistan, have attracted more public attention.

The physiological and psychological impact of the violence juxtaposed with their acquired celebrity is an important factor to consider in relation to the Bang Bang Club. They acknowledged a lost generation caught between the system and the struggle, witnessing immense pain and suffering. They sacrificed their lives to get the story out, shooting real, happening, life in South Africa. In this way, the Bang Bang Club comprised a special breed with different wiring to the rest of us. But that did not make them better equipped to deal with the circumstances after a day of shooting.


Although South Africa is still plagued with many socio-economic and political issues, those days of civil strife are thankfully over. The painful memories remain and there is still much to recover and much to improve. The photographs taken by the Bang Bang Club are a testament to the collective memory of a country that has miraculously avoided civil war. Democracy is still raw here. By positively directing the ignorance, voyeurism and spectacle of a nation towards the international spotlight the photographs of the Bang Bang Club are wartime relics, political artworks, and important historic documents there to remind us of the wrongs that can be achieved when political ideologies turn towards the despotic and tyrannical.

The Rooke Gallery is the sole representative of the Bang Bang Club’s vintage photographic material, which inspired The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War. All the texts in the Bang Bang Club book are pieced-together memories, based on specific photographs that are available for purchase from The Rooke Gallery. All the images used in this text were taken from the official Bang Bang Club site.
Copyright © Shane de Lange 2011.