ON the bank of Manhattan’s East River stands an unprepossessing memorial to graffiti artist Keith Haring. Painted on a fragment of concrete wall, it shows blue doves circling above replicas of Haring’s exuberant images. And below, scrawled in dayglo colours is a simple epitaph: “Kiss, Kith, Keith. All are ephemeral.”
On the surface none of this has very much to do with Gerard Zlotykamien’s Ephemera. But the whimsical imagery wantonly gracing 40 or so walls in Johannesburg and one in Cape Town, have something unmistakably Haringesque about them, in effect anyway. Like the American master of personal intervention in public spaces, Zlotykamien uses the streets as a studio and urban edifices as his canvas. And like Haring’s work, his fragile, ghost-like forms are like image poems, shadows of the moment and lingering monuments to the fleetingness of it all.
In South Africa with his agent, the dapper Christoph Maisenbacher, the French-born Zlotykamien is no stranger to life’s fragility. As a child he spent much time alone in a darkened room, escaping the bombs of World War Two. When he emerged from his haven – eyes unaccustomed to light – he could see only shadows for a long time. And over the years he has translated war psychosis on to walls.
“We chose this country because in many ways the situation here resembles what happened in Europe 50 years ago, in terms of its contradictions and the need for reinvention and reconstruction”, explained Maisenbacher during a whistlestop tour of some of the sites.
Responsible for documenting the Pochoer graffiti movement in France during the 1980s, Maisenbacher serves as Zlotykamien’s conduit and confidant, translating the imperatives behind the hermetic artist’s compulsive need for cultural intervention.
“An artist cannot be a spectator, he must perform in the arena where the contradictions are most potent and where life and art converge,” he explains. “Each individual must be useful to something – must construct, not destroy. That is the reason for art.”
These days Zlotykamien refuses to put principle into practice in France, (“there is so much ignorance there now”), even though his official artistic debut was made through the 1983 Paris Biennale.
Instead, from 1991 to 1992, he chose the former East German town of Leipzig – caught in the midst of post-cold war contradictions for his “disruptive moments”. Johannesburg, with its residue of authoritarian order and its ongoing propensity for physical enclosure, also proved the perfect site. One of Zlotykamien’s favourite targets was that pillar of South Africa’s tertiary education system: Wits University. He left his minimalist trademark on Senate House. The next day, he discovered it had been erased. Yet, a faint silhouette remains, in seeming defiance of the edifice’s otherwise untarnished surface. And across the road from the university his shadowy forms still dance and flicker against a backdrop of concrete and barbed wire.
“The people who live behind that wall cannot see out. They cannot see how it has been enlivened,” says Maisenbacher. “In a way the walls are more alive than the people who occupy the space behind them, than the people who pass by. Yet those that do see the works begin to treat them like familiar friends. They interact with the images and miss them when they are gone.”
He adds: “Although South Africa is in the throes of transformation it is still clinging to an old sense of order. Certain acts are only permitted in certain areas. Transgression of the boundaries is forbidden. Yet in the urban thoroughfares this control is impossible.” Which is why Zlotykamien targeted Bertrams, Braamfontein and Soweto, avoiding the manicured enclaves of Jo’burg’s northern suburbs. Much of Cape Town also proved too pristine.
“It was all so neat,” recalls Maisenbacher. “For Gerard it was primarily a place of reflection, not action or intervention.”
But in Johannesburg Zlotykamien’s disruptions were as much about catharsis as provocation – a personal exorcism as well as a means of enlivening dead spaces. The process, he explained, was not unlike that which a sportsman undergoes – a physical and emotional draining. When it was done, he moved on, never returning to the previous wall.
But Zlotykamien’s shadows remain and throughout Jo’burg they have become an integral part of the0urbanscape. Quirky yet poignant, idiosyncratic yet strangely universal, they provoke a multitude of responses. One passerby has remarked that they remind her of Hiroshima, another of the Boipatong massacre. Some say they are like childhood scribbles, others say like dreams … a little absurd, seemingly fleeting, yet lingering in the psyche long after they are left behind …