Humour is subtly present in most of Carl Becker’s works currently on show at the Karen McKerron Gallery, writes Alex Dodd
There’s nothing like taking a look at something familiar from a different angle. A mere change of vantage point can entirely reinvent a thing to which you’ve grown innured. New life. It’s simply not what you thought it was before. In Carl Becker’s paintings and pencil drawings that something is the city of Johannesburg.
Becker has forsaken the distant, deluding postcard views of a sparkling Johannesburg from the north. He hasn’t even got snagged on the distinctive flashing red Coke sign of Ponte Tower that, in a delightfully ironic twist, has taken on the iconographic power of a Statue of Liberty or an Eiffel Tower. Rather, Becker images Johannesburg from the south. The blocky Jo’burg skyline, not far removed from that of any other major Western city, is suddenly just a backdrop. Foregrounded are the strange wastelands that surround the minedumps- those odd humps of earth that embody the essential mythology of this entire city. The periphery takes centre stage. The outskirts become the big story.
Becker spends days wandering about the dumps with his box of tricks like some oddly displaced 19th-century landscape artist on a fieldtrip. “In a sense I actually come from the tradition of romantic landscape painters,” says Becker. “They were my precursors.
“I’ve been looking at Jo’burg for a long time. I did my first drawings in Jo’burg in the Seventies,” he says. “But I’ve had a very discontinous painting career. I left painting when I left art school [Rhodes University] for the first time in 1980. I was disillusioned with it, so I did all sorts of things – got into activism and opstuk – doing media work in the days of the United Democratic Front [UDF] and stuff. I designed the logo for the UDF.” Laughter that is intended to say a lot of things – not all funny.
It’s a quiet kind of laughter that seems to lurk inside Becker – an amusement at the surrealism of his own and others’ circumstances. This humour is subtly present in most of the works that are currently on show at the Karen McKerron Gallery. But it peppers images that are epic in content. Vast trajectories of time and space play themselves out through small human gestures. Sometimes the landscapes become abstract territories in which Victorian ladies, African warriors, women with buckets on their heads, miners and magnates stake their turf and tussle over things. Human forms are dwarfed by vast stretches of space and time. Huge waves of history render individual importance comedic. Humans are little and almost cartoon-like in Becker’s work.
It was when he returned Johannesburg in 1991, after completing his master’s at Rhodes, that Becker began engaging with the landscape of the mine dumps with all their strange magnetism. “I suppose I feel ambivalent about this landscape,” he says. “I have a sort of sentimental attachment to it. I grew up in Bedfordview; I live in Yeoville. My father used to work in Germiston. But there’s no real reason for sentimentality. It’s also quite repellent. I think it has to do with the mine dumps representing our history. They represent for me Jo’burg’s uniqueness. Otherwise it could be some middle-American city. Except it isn’t. It’s just too decaying.
“There are all those dumps along the M2 East which is actually the original Main Reef. If you drive along there you realise it’s changing all the time. Somebody in some office somwhere has got a programme, but we don’t know what it is. Things disappear in the landscape. I go away and return a few months later and something will have gone. Entire dumps disappear. But as those things get taken out, you suddenly see views you haven’t seen before.
“I drive along and don’t really know who the mine dump belongs to. I’m probably not really allowed there. But I come across these weird shapes and discarded objects – ruins. Prefabricated houses – with people living in them – that used to be the mine manager’s office. It’s really weird. You come across these unexpected things. It’s a really dislocated landscape that set off a whole train of thought: dislocated objects that have these weird histories. Nothing is solid.
“Because I tend to go on my own, it’s vaguely scary. I don’t know who I’m going to come across. But you don’t actually see anyone. It’s strangely unpopulated. This one time I came across a hut. Somebody was living there. I went back a few days later and I checked the person who was living there carrying his firewood and we said, ‘Howzit.’ It struck me that his life seemed kind of rustic and pastoral in a way. Visually it had references to previous 19th-century things. I am very intrigued by the idea that there’s this whole high-tech urban thing going on. There we are using the Internet and stuff and at the same time there is this person with his firewood … I find that really interesting.”
The exhibition of Carl Becker’s work runs at the Karen McKerron Gallery in Johannesburg until December 15. Tel: (011) 704-2537