Lauren Shantall
She’s this year’s Vita award star and everyone wants a piece of her, myself included. With our interview at the announcement bash at Sandton’s Civic Gallery constantly being interrupted by fans, photographers and friends – I start to wonder why Jo Ractliffe isn’t enjoying the limelight a tad more. But no, a somewhat overwhelmed Ractliffe doesn’t seem to like the attention.
She’s equally down-to-earth about the ways in which her R20 000 prize-wining video installation Love, Death, Sacrifice and so forth may be received. “Someone said `is this about sex?'” she says smiling. “If that is what it’s about when you look at it, or if it’s about relationships, or if it’s about the everyday, or if it’s about simply what it is … If you think it’s beautiful that’s fine with me. And if it irritates you and you think `oh fuck it’ – well, that’s yours. It’s not mine.”
To produce the 12-minute looping sequence that captured the judges’ favour, Ractliffe initially filmed her imagery on a hand-held video camera, then edited it together with student Karyn Bosch. For the sound, Phillip Miller – composer of the incidental music for Yizo Yizo and The Man Who Drove With Mandela – looped slowed down snippets of real sound together with a sample from an Ennio Morricone track.
The resulting piece offers no easy answers. The interplay of context-less images, which flit across four television screens, is difficult to read conventionally. I ask the artist whether she thinks the work may prove mystifying to viewers not used to engaging with film in this way.
“If people are looking at it and thinking `what does it mean?’ they are not going to get anywhere. But if they allow themselves to get seduced … I wanted to make something that was beautiful, that had pathos, that was poetic. That you could just drift into without having to try and work it out.
“I think in some ways the strategy of this work is actually quite similar to the strategy of Shooting Diana (an earlier work), except Shooting Diana was in stills. You would look at things and they would be anomalous, they wouldn’t be able to hold your attention. In some ways this work sits somewhere between an ironic thing and something that I would call desperately sincere. It’s a sincerely felt work, I think, in terms of my intention. It wasn’t my intention to be clever. I wanted to be real. But really what it is about is association and projection.”
Ractliffe has said of her work that she is interested in what sits “outside the frame”, in what is not seen. “I don’t like closure in my work … I like the idea of something being open-ended and not fixed, and demanding for the viewer. It’s about setting up sites for projection more than anything else.”
Her videos and photographs tend to elicit an emotive response in their open-ended elusiveness. This has attracted critical approval both in South Africa and abroad. “I’m not interested in confessionals” Ractliffe explains.
“I’m not interested in who I am particularly in terms of making art. But I am interested in the things that seem to touch me in other people’s experiences and in my own. I know it’s trite. It’s trite, to say a kind of universality. In some ways that is to assume your work can be universal. But it is about ordinariness. It’s about nothing, actually …”
But, of course, Ractliffe’s “anti- narratives” say something. That “nothingness” as she puts it is precisely the point.