Alex Dodd
It is Tuesday midday. We are driving along the N1, returning to Johannesburg after taking in Jo Ractliffe’s End of Time show in Nieu Bethesda. It’s hot and the road seems to go on forever. Attention is anaesthetised by an immensity of nothingness – nothing but the blank Karoo landscape and the road ahead.
Then a strange sight hooks itself into my curiosity. “Is it an old sack or is it a pig?” I wonder. For a while I am reassured that what I am seeing is only the illusion of a dead pig – a piece of old hessian silhouetted against the sky through the bakkie’s windscreen. But as we pick up speed the dread builds. “Pig or sack? Pig or sack?” I start ruminating out loud, as in some twisted game of “I spy”. Then in the seconds as we pass the bakkie, it’s there, as clear as daylight: a closed bakkieload of dead pigs. Their eyes small and blank, their mouths open, their flesh expansive, pink and soft- looking. I am appalled at the brutality of this fact. Look at the man driving the bakkie and marvel at his insouciance – wonder how his conscience can stand it.
Strange meditations on a dead pig – odd thoughts in response to an odd exhibition. Were it not for Ractliffe’s haunting donkey images I don’t think I would even have blinked an eye. But having driven nine hours to Nieu Bethesda to see an exhibition that tackles personal responses to death and loss through the oblique subject matter of three donkeys shot dead on the side of the freeway, it is somehow hard not to be affected by the pigs.
“What I wanted,” Ractliffe had told me the day before in an attempt to articulate her intentions behind the show, “was an emotive response, whether a slight unease or a slight sadness.” Ractliffe’s images evade direct interpretation or even immediate response, but return in your dreams, or at odd moments when you least expect them to.
Her current body of work, End of Time, consists of two billboards in the landscape near the turn-off to Nieu Bethesda featuring a giant black and white photograph of a donkey; a repetitive series of black and white images of the N1 from Cape Town to Johannesburg taken through the car windscreen every 100km; a giant black and white photograph of a dead donkey that hangs opposite the road inventory images in the Ibis Gallery; a colour photograph of Ractliffe’s dead dog in his grave projected from a lightbox set into a staged floor in a room leading off the main gallery space; two videos of donkeys projected against a church wall opposite the gallery.
Ractliffe’s work is accompanied by two texts: the first a fictional recreation of events around the real-life death of the three donkeys written by Mike Nichol and the second a piece about loss and longing written by Brenda Atkinson, a kind of eulogy to accompany the picture of Ractliffe’s dead dog.
“It all started three years ago in January 1996 when I was coming home from Cape Town to Johannesburg,” says Ractliffe. (The road inventory images were taken on that journey.) “Between Beaufort West and Richmond I saw this carcass on the side of the road, stopped the car and there were these three dead donkeys that had been shot. I stood there looking at them and it just seemed very bizarre – a really strange kind of gratuitous violence. I’ve always associated donkeys with the Karoo. They seemed to be a constant part of the landscape that remains innocent in the way that you look at it because it’s unchanging.
“While I was looking at them on the side of the road, this car pulling a caravan came driving past. A really stereotyped image – middle of the Karoo, midday, this flat landscape, this car pulling a caravan coming past. It had a blow-out as it passed me. But I didn’t see it. It was just this pah! sound, like a gunshot. In that moment I felt implicated in something and I didn’t know what it was, but it was like something crossed over in me and I felt foreign. I just became hooked on this event … I couldn’t find any information at the time. Certainly nothing specific.
“My dog died a year later in 1997 and for completely unknown reasons I suddenly felt compelled to go back and find the site of the donkeys again. I suppose to make sense of it – as if I would find something, but of course there was nothing. And then eight months after that, in August 1997 there was a series of articles in the Cape Times about farmers threatening to shoot donkeys and evicting karretjiemense off their land …”
For a while Ractliffe speaks about the karretjiemense – the gypsies of the Karoo, about people’s livelihood being taken away from them when their donkeys are shot, about donkeys becoming the focus of a particular kind of cruelty. But before I have witnessed the show in its live totality, I have an instinct that Ractliffe’s work has less to do with karretjiemense, Karoo farmers and the objective universe than it has to do with her own subjective world and her response to death.
But what I cannot understand is why she has chosen this remote vehicle instead of something in her immediate urban life to emote on issues of loss and longing. Why the donkeys? What is behind this obscurity?
“I was interested in personal narratives in terms of my own compulsion around longing and loss,” says Ractliffe, growing more passionate, “and especially in terms of landscape and memory. That thing of not feeling at home in the world in a particular way. Always suspended in some kind of doubt about what you can claim as yours or your history here or where you fit in here.”
The artist is most fiery when speaking about photography in this country and the development of the documentary tradition that has been the principle form here for decades. South African photography has always been credited more for its realism and political functionality than for its creative clout.
“It’s a very particular tradition which I think perpetuates all sorts of assumptions about what photographs are … I’m interested in foregrounding what’s outside the frame. So it’s not like you look at this and it imitates the world and you think this is reality. It’s not reality. Everything is a mediation. Everything is about point of view – about position. Really what this exhibition is about is not in the work, it’s between the works in a funny kind of way.”
On the opening night Ractliffe and Nichol read the words of the book out loud. “When I was younger, I would boast about my memory; I tried to remember everything like it was happening in a film. Later I photographed every dead animal I saw,” reads Ractliffe, establishing a strange and necessary intimacy. Nichol’s text is detailed, almost journalistic, operating in antithesis to the obliqueness of Ractliffe’s images.
“The Chev was cruising, the men drinking from cans of beer and passing a bottle of brandy between them. They weren’t going anywhere, just cruising through the darkness, drinking, talking about maybe hitting off to the city for some good times for a few days …” It is almost as though the images fail to deliver the expectations the text sets up. They are at odds with the furnished intensity of Nichols words. This is no newspaper article with explanatory pics to accompany the text.
The pictures work their own alchemy. And it isn’t until the opening night that the power of the relationship between the various components of the show really hits me. They are works that need to be viewed in relation to one another. For it is in their complex totality, in their contradictoriness, that the emotional impact registers. The tension between the emptiness of the bland documentary-style road images and the rich, textured quality of the image of the dead dog acts as an emotional trigger. The haunting image of the dilating donkey’s nostrils projected on the church wall in the moonlight somehow impacts on one’s perception of the giant image of the dead donkey hanging inside the gallery. While the video runs a weighty silence settles over the Ibis Gallery as every one of the 160 or so people who have journeyed to be here tries to make sense of the sad, mournful images before them. Each component, with its distinct and deliberate photographic style, seems to deepen the impact of the others.
I am reminded of Ractliffe’s words: “I didn’t want my work to be didactic. I didn’t want to take the politics of this on in any particular way. I wanted to stay in the form in which I work which is quite bleak, quite furtive. Working around the issue rather than getting into it. I like making work that really is about making a space for projections. Either you think this work is boring and you walk away or you get interested enough to look beyond the blandness or the edge of nothing, where a lot of my work sits. I want to stay working in that way.”