We talk of “subcultures” in a positive tone, expressing the potential of a kaleidoscope multi-culture to be vibrant and stimulating rather than its danger to come apart at the seams of its component parts. Difference does not equal opposition, and there’s a place in the sun for everyone.
An intriguing visual microcosm of the complex issues surrounding identity-formation in contemporary South Africa is Blur, the thought-provoking ensemble exhibition at Durban’s NSA Gallery. Featuring the work of photographer Brigitta Garland (accompanied by Kevin Payne’s verse) and Langa Magwa’s sculptural installations, the show’s power lies not in the separate qualities of it’s two halves, but in the manner in which they share the same space.
Blur is an experiment in radical juxtaposition: two profoundly different states of mind are placed within a neutral space with the result an unstable and unpredictable thing. Will they mesh, blend and blur into something greater than the sum of their parts or remain stubbornly separate, glowering suspiciously at each other from opposite sides of the room?
One half of the exhibition consists of Magwa’s scarred and burn-marked animal skins, while Gaylard’s photographs depict pretty white people at play in Durban’s ritzy nightclubs. Magwa’s work engages the problematics of black identity in modern South African society by utilising the motif of scarification – “ritual scarification, not body-mutilation fashion statements”, he points out.
His Swazi grandfather having changed his name to a Zulu one after marrying his grandmother, Magwa’s father married a Xhosa from the Eastern Cape. Growing up in the Cape, the other children laughed at him because of his facial scars. When he became repeatedly ill, a doctor told Magwa’s parents he needed to go back to Durban where he was scarred on the joints of his arms and legs, and his medical problems came to an abrupt end.
For this reason Magwa believes “it is important that these traditions do not die. As we all become more Westernised these customs are dying out. But they are integral to how we see ourselves and see ourselves as belonging. Without them we’re just faceless strangers in the crowd.”
Working with goat skins, which he burns and marks in traditional fashion with sharpened reeds and thorns, the raw violence of Magwa’s technique and art is a powerful reminder to tribal and ethnic groups the world over to preserve their identity in the face of all-devouring consumer anonymity. One of the most explicit statements he makes in this regard takes the form of a cowhide with a barcode brutally seared into it.
Examining subcultural identity of a wholly different stripe are Gaylard and Payne, whose photographs and poetry reflect “clubland in Durban at the end of the 20th century as seen by two hedonistic post- apartheid whites”. Making no bones about celebrating the excesses of a self- indulgent, privileged and bourgeois lifestyle, Gaylard and Payne’s Vinyl Diamonds installation is a shameless paean to narcissism and shallow pleasures of the night. The pictures consist in the main of snapshots of skinny white girls posing self-consciously in the pop-arty environs of the trendy Crash nightclub.
These images are accompanied by the pretty poetry of Payne, which he describes as “extreme and obsessed with romantic sexuality”, but its overripe imagery doesn’t quite live up to this breathless claim. “Amongst the cascading electronic hum/swirling around the batiks and gumpoles of a millennial drinkhole/the local whities dance from dusk to dawn/a red body/throbbing with a swaying, swinging, clicking/right hand/entered the abstract language of the night” he writes in poem for a red dress.
Together, the photographs and the poems form what the artists pretentiously call “static cinema”. Yet this pretentiousness is necessary: there is no attempt to hide or defend it, it is simply there as part and parcel of the whole deal.
Separately, Magwa, Gaylard and Payne’s exhibitions would only raise a one- dimensional kind of interest. But, juxtaposed as they are and placed within the broader context of the society they all share, they raise some of the most interesting and relevant issues that lie at the heart of the complicated business of being South African. Can we be one but not the same; different but the same; love our neighbours; be separate parts of a harmonious whole; respect our differences but blur into an overarching unity?
Or are the dividing lines of identity so deep that reconciliation is a myth and the best we can hope for is a kind of robust, repectful distance and live and let live? Perhaps a swirling, strangely flavoured stew of all of the above? Who really knows, but, as the little packet of Hulletts sugar next to my cup of NSA coffee reminds me, “Life is a journey, not a destination”.
The exhibition is on at the Durban’s NSA gallery until June 3