Peet Pienaar speaks to fellow-artist Judith Mason
Iwent to see Judith Mason on a cold, murky day, and spoke to an artist who seems to have been quietly observing from the sidelines of the art world for quite a while. How would I contextualise her? I know her well, and know that what I know of her is just the tip of an iceberg. The only way I can speak about her is to share a few things I think about her.
She is one of the only truly wise people I know, someone with an incredible knowledge and experience in art and life. Someone who stretches the often safe field of painting and sculpture into a challengingly critical medium. Through her accessible approach she has the ability to move a broader art audience to get interested in content, and has made it easier for a lot of people to engage with contemporary art.
After going through an intense experience living with Judith in Dal Josafat in Paarl – deaths, murders, attacks and death threats, to catalogue a few – I can’t help sinking into a completely at-home feeling when entering her home overlooking False Bay in Simonstown.
In what ways do you feel the work on your current exhibition is different from your previous work?
I’ve lightened up as regards painting, I’m painting lots of casual pictures that amuse me. I’m painting fairy-story images for a book for my godchild, and on the other hand I’m making small conceptual pieces as a means of meditating on a number of stories that came out of the truth commission and which have generated a number of paintings in their own right. So, on the one hand it’s all very much a disciplined attempt to grasp some of the historical courage that people have shown, and on the other hand it’s simply playing with paint and amusing myself – a sort of schizophrenic thing.
In what ways has the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] informed your current work?
I have a problem with political art in that I think that artists ought to perhaps pay their taxes or do other things that are more advantageous politically. But I’ve always had a great regard for heroic art that commemorates grand gestures. In these two stories I came upon, the two gestures were so grand. Two people were allowed – just because of other people’s bad behaviour – to exhibit superhumanly beautiful, courageous behaviour, and that’s what attracted me there.
I’m chronically fascinated by politics. I’ve been a riveted spectator of the TRC and all the writings around it, following it as much as possible. I’m ambivalent about certain aspects of it, but the history-gathering process is extraordinary, and the decency some people have been able to show is extraordinary, and if I weren’t able to paint or express my own response visually, I’d still be fascinated by it.
I think it’s the most important thing happening now, and the tragedy of it is I think people are bored with it – they’re made to feel guilty and reproached, and they just want to walk away from it. Maybe it’ll take us 10 years to log into our history, like I should imagine it would have taken that long for Vietnam vets to be able to understand their own history without their self-protective evasions getting in the way.
What is your personal interest in the TRC?
I was a cowardly old lefty. I did stupid little things around the edges of the struggle, and I never had either the guts or the faith to think that I would see South Africa free. I was one of many South Africans who were locked into a sense of inevitability about it, and part of my need to deal with it is out of gratitude for living long enough to see the change; even though the change is scratchy, it’s not smooth, but a number of my friends didn’t make it. I’ve got a number of friends in the old Liberal Party, of which I was a member, who died one way or another during the tough years, and I have certain problems with shame about slipping around on the side-lines and surviving when they didn’t.
I understand for the first time in my life what people mean by survivor guilt, and I think a lot of us do suffer from that, like SADF [South African Defence Force] guys from Angola, feeling guilty that they’re alive when some of their comrades were dead. And I would imagine that this applies in every war everywhere. I’ve never understood it emotionally, but I think the place that a lot of privileged South Africans find themselves in is much the same place. It gives you a depth of understanding about psychological processes you might have dismissed before as being precious or neurotic. And they’re real.
Where do you see yourself fitting into a South African art context?
I don’t think I do. I think, to my disadvantage and to my advantage, I really have been on the sidelines. I illustrate and respond to things more than having my own overriding vision. I admire artists like Norman Catherine and others who have a sense of the world. They see it in a particular way.
I don’t. I just seem to respond. I’m very much more passive and I also find it difficult to relate to a lot of present-day academic concerns. Partly because I’m too old to bother, and partly because I am critical of some of the things; but my criticism could be based on ignorance or on genuine gut feeling that the emperor’s new clothes factory is operating as usual.
I haven’t got a niche into which I fit and I haven’t got any ambitions other than to do a painting that knocks me off my feet. I work all the time I’m not taking the dog for a walk or watching TV. More and more the only thing I want to do is stay in the studio and play. So I’m in a sort of little by-way.
I’m getting pretty evangelical about beauty in painting again which is against quite a lot of the stream. And I’m remembering – this might be the onset of severe old age – modernism with more and more affection. I’m looking back at modernist artists who used to intrigue me whom I’ve neglected because we were so bombarded by the PR for post-modernism and the rest of it.
I’m now going back to the very quiet discipline of “sit in the studio and think your own thoughts” thing. I haven’t got any expectation of anything other than earning a living by painting in a fairly modest way, which is what I do and which gives me a lot of pride.