FINE ART: Brenda Atkinson
WALKING into Roger Palmer’s exhibition Buttock and Tongue, some visitors might find themselves wondering where the art is. The strategic invisibility of Palmer’s work is a necessary part of its eloquence. Part photography, part drawing, part text, the work is not only discovered, piece by piece, but also sneaks up and discovers you.
British-born Palmer, who also teaches fine art at Glascow University, has been engaged with the invisible codes of South African colonial history for over a decade. Although not solely a photographer, he has used the medium of black-and-white photography to explore the language of colour in a country that has, for decades, functioned in political monochromes.
Buttock and Tongue – named from the original Dutch language components of the word “biltong” – is, as the title obliquely suggests, about the significance of the antelope in South African political iconography. It unpacks the coded layers of an animal, and a symbol, that might easily be overlooked for its misleading banality.
Language, history and memory are the intimately knitted, artfully unravelled premises of this show. Palmer has discovered that of the 409 British Railways steam trains that serviced Great Britain’s Eastern, North Eastern and Scottish regions, 40 were named after species of South African antelope. Of these, 29 appear in the Collins English Dictionary, and Palmer has inscribed their names on the gallery walls in a litany of seemingly bland repetition.
But it is the repetitive nature of the works that allows their significance to emerge. By miming the omnipresence of the antelope insignia in South African history, by redrawing the links between the colonists and the colonised, these deceptively understated works underline the cliche of evil’s banal forms.
Alone on a white wall, there is a photograph of what appears to be a landscape – blurred, arid – and what appears to be an antelope’s head superimposed on the photo, engraved into the glass that covers it. But the landscape turns out to be the ocean, seen through the window of the train to Simonsberg in Cape Town. The “whole picture” is a recent photograph taken from inside the train, focusing on the antelope etched into its window.
The photograph teases the viewer’s visual – and political – perspective. The initial, comforting association of landscape and antelope is, after a while, refigured as the discomfiting misrecognition of imposed political codes.
Palmer’s decision to place his textual interventions around the arched walls of the main gallery, above the viewer’s line of vision, cleverly maintains the thematic continuity of the works, both preserving the nuance of the empty space and suggesting the space as a train tunnel.
But what draws the viewer into the tunnel is a pencil drawing of a crest on one of its far walls. The drawing is copied from Arrival Form B1-55, issued to all non-South African citizens entering the country. Again, the familiarity of this piece of apartheid symbolism, bearing the ironic legend “Unity is Strength”, is made strange within the exhibition’s context. The two antelope, reared up on either side of the crest, become sinister accomplices in the visual language of a ruthless national regime.
Buttock and Tongue, with its eerie sanitisation of language, flesh and form, offers itself as an exercise in neutrality, and that is its ruse. Hunting for the works themselves, and then for their layers of meaning, we learn that we ourselves are the hunted, haunted by a history whose language we have not yet properly learned.
Buttock and Tongue is on at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery until June 3