Kay Hassan, winner of the biggest prize in South African art history, talks to Alex Dodd
‘I am reclaiming the mask from Picasso,” says artist Kay Hassan, sitting among the paper scraps and ripped-up relics of commercial images that were once whole and powerful. “I am reclaiming the mask from Miro, from Matisse, from Braque and all those modern masters who have used it. I see those very same masks in the city around me. We carry them with us all the time.”
The paper trash that covers his studio floor is in fact Hassan’s chosen medium. Yet it is somehow hard to believe when you see the images he creates from them.
They may be made of sheets of paper ripped from billboards and haphazardly stuck to the wall like things of little value, but they have a gravity that far outweighs the flimsy, temporal scraps from which they are made.
Although crafted from Coca-Cola, Black Label and Castle adverts, the human forms in Hassan’s work are somehow ancient and archetypal, like the epigrammatic characters embodied in the wooden African masks being flogged on Johannesburg street corners.
Although their features are general and undefined, their gestures are strangely personal and deeply, instinctually human. They stand there communicating in strange landscapes that could be desert, could be ocean.
One thing is for sure; it is a world without borders, beyond nationalism, beyond boundaries.
Hassan’s landscapes could perfectly illustrate a science fiction novel by Ursula le Guin, who envisions a new planetary order beyond ego-driven divisions. Strange and superbly ironic that it’s Coke and Castle being used to represent such a universe.
Hassan recently won the much-drooled-over title of DaimlerChrysler South African Contemporary Artist 2000, a dazzling new award launched with the aim of raising the profile of South African art both at home (a notion which Hassan has passionately questioned throughout his career) and abroad.
This is the first time the corporation has focused on creating an award to promote excellence in art, worldwide. The esteemed jury included New York/Berlin-based Documenta XI art director Okwui Enwezor; Martin Hentschel, director of the Wurttemberg Art Society; Marilyn Martin, director of the South African National Gallery; and Lallitha Jawahirilal, a professor at the University of Durban- Westville. Valued at a whacking DM100 000 (with around 300 000 local schmackeroonies you can kiss that garret goodbye), the prize is a seriously hearty vote of confidence, drawing further international attention to the high standard of art emerging from South Africa.
As part of his prize Hassan will be holding a solo exhibition in Germany and will be studying either there or in the United States. His current Johannesburg studio, though, could be mistaken for an abandoned factory. Hidden in the industrial no man’s land of deserted warehouses, a stone’s throw from the Oriental Plaza, you could drive past the Bag Factory – better known as the Fordsburg Artist Studio – without blinking. If you didn’t know, you’d never guess that this unassuming structure is the creative home of some of South Africa’s foremost artists: Sam Nhlengetwa, David Koloane and Joachim Schonfeldt, to name but a few.
As a non-profit organisation, the Bag Factory provides artists with studio space, in an environment intended to stimulate the exchange and flow of new ideas.
It is this space, and others like it, that Hassan celebrates as his most powerful influence. He has spent his life working in vibrantly communicative environments where artists draw upon each other’s knowledge and experience.
“This sort of environment helps a lot because you become open. You don’t become scared. You start to develop a kind of confidence,” he says.
Although there are flecks of gray amidst his locks, Hassan is one of those rare human beings who seem to retain a child’s spirit of freedom and liquidity.
A light animates his face as he speaks: “Under this collectivism you discover yourself. Africa has always been like that. In the township you find that the community sense really exists. If someone dies each and every house in the area will donate R10 towards the cost of the funeral.”
Hassan has been nourished by this collective ethic throughout his career. He speaks with love about the deliciously global brew of relationships he established working under printmaking guru SW Heyter at the prestigious Studio 17 in Paris; about the resonances from that time that carried through into his residency at the Schule for Gestaltung in Basel, Switzerland.
Closer to home he credits the Tupelo Workshops, held annually in Broederstroom, where brothers like Durant Sihlali, David Koloane, Pat Mutlao and Sam Nhlengetwa come together for a few weeks to work on their art. But it’s when he talks about his time spent at the artists collective at Rorkes Drift – once a bloody battlefield – that the sparkle really dances in his eyes.
“Rorkes Drift opened my eyes. It was there that I started to appreciate life. And art is about life,” he says. “Rorkes Drift was the only arts training centre which was open for us at the time. It was a kind of Christian centre, but once we moved in we started developing ways of not going to church. We had our ways of doing things .
“People came from different parts of the country. There were even students who came from Namibia – people like John Mafangejo. I was there with Pat Matloa, Bongi Dhlomo and Sam Nhlengetwa.
“Sam was in second year when I was in first year and they used to help us a lot, sharing techniques, encouraging us to develop the way we looked at things. It really opened my eyes.
“The teachers at Rorkes Drift were from all over the world and the way they did things – the way they thought – was really different to our local kind of situation.
“It was in a rural area, 45km from the city – an isolated environment – and the training was intense.
There used to be a bus once a day. Life was very slow compared to life in the city. You find that, once there, you have to change your rhythm. At times the thought would enter my head: ‘Oh shit, I gotta get back home. What am I doing here?’
“But it was a really great environment because you notice things which, living in the city, you just don’t notice.
“Living in a concrete jungle and growing up in a township is a very different kind of a situation. We were crowded and cramped. Then suddenly, in a rural area, you’ve got time to look at the sky. You see cows. You listen to mbaqanga music.
“That sort of environment really works on you. You become very, very sensitive.
“The people in the village nearby used to invite us to their mud houses and brew traditional beer. My mum was a brewer, and when there were rituals in the township they used to brew. But in Rorkes Drift they were brewing almost every day. Every weekend they’ll brew – because the men don’t work.
“We’d sit in the kraal with very old people and, coming from the city, we’d sort of forget the importance of our culture and they would re-educate us – make us aware. When you drink in a kraal you drink in a calabash, but never from the same calabash as an old person. There were rules we had to learn.
‘At times they would roll some marijuana. Coming from the city you don’t see old, old men with gray hair doing that. It’s taboo. But when I started seeing that, I thought this is really great . So we really learnt and discovered ourselves. It’s the kind of environment every art student should have access to.”
The DaimlerChrysler jury had this to say: “Hassan’s work is exemplified by his gifted ability to bring to his art the language of the principled individual position, a search for the connection between the private and public, political and artistic, sociological and psychological.
“His sensitive and poetic investigations into the fraught context of the traumatic historical past make even more acute the necessity of art as part of the ongoing national conversation in South Africa’s pursuit for spiritual renewal and political and social transformation.”
It’s all true of course, but Hassan would perhaps put things differently. Perhaps the true power of his art lies in one statement. “I am not angry,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever been angry.”
Coming from where he does, that places him in a rare position in the world.