In his exhibition with his partner Claire de Jong, Wayne Barker endeavours to be both sacrificial offering and high priest at the altar of truth
Alex Sudheim
Several years ago, on a cold winter’s night in downtown Johannesburg, I spent a few nervous hours with the vanguard of the South African avant-garde at a place called FIG. A shabby, abandoned Troyeville tearoom had transformed itself into a temporary crucible of the unstable edge of the young and the restless indigenous art faction and, in equal amounts of pomposity and irony, called itself “Famous International Gallery”.
The eery, divine comedy of the Mud Ensemble provided a suitably schizophrenic sonic backdrop to the horde of cultural terrorists, intellectual poseurs and angry existentialists swimming an awkward breaststroke through the oceans of conflicted cultural identity and crap wine. Actually, there was also a hell of a lot of free Absolut Vodka on offer – yet more cause for caustic refelctions upon corporate manoeuvres to colonise “cool” – which made Wayne Barker’s contribution to the show all the more (im)pertinent.
Up the road from the FIG was the Jumbo Liquor Store – prime supplier of sauce to the Troyeville Bohemians – whose mascot was a ludicrous pink fibreglass elephant. At some stage somebody had ripped off and absconded with the creature’s ears, causing it to attain an air of vulnerability painfully at odds with the rictus of its goofy grin. For his part of the exhibition, Barker simply dragged the hapless, earless animal down the street and installed it in the gallery.
Then, later in the evening, when the Absolut started forming a wicked cocktail with other malaises, Barker developed a sudden and violent dislike toward Rian Malan and began hurling insults and wild punches at the writer. The combined inertia of elephant, anger and alcohol climaxed in a classic expression of that famous dictum: “Only by making a beast of oneself does one forget the pain of being a man.” Except, in Barker’s case, one could say: “Only by making a beast of one’s art does one forget the pain of being a man.”
And, though this particular incident took place years ago, there remains some slender connection between it and Barker’s new show, in collaboration with his bride-to- be, Claire de Jong, which opened last week in Durban’s NSA Gallery.
For one thing, several of the large, sensual works which comprise Lost & Found are made of the shredded remnants of books exhumed from a recycling plant where they were seconds away from becoming toilet paper. I can’t help observing that this is somehow continued evidence of Barker’s sadistic revenge on the book as bogus cultural object – back then he was taking slugs at writers, now he’s masquerading the corpses of books like some atrocity exhibition of literature.
He laughs, but insists that this is far too arcane an interpretation of his latest work, which, he says, simply represents “a shift from the personal to the political”. To him, the lovingly mutilated books, like just about everything else in the show, represent the simultaneously gentle, yet blunt flow of history. The shredding and glueing of the book-carcasses also represent the parallel formation and destruction of memory.
As De Jong points out, it is significant that works contain either “covers and no content or content and no covers”. In exquisitely subtle fashion this suggests the bereftness which tugs at the heart of the exhibition – one is in a permanent state of incompleteness, searching either for a cover or a content to make one whole. Life seems to leave one lingering in a constant imbalance between losing one thing while finding another, and vice versa. As Barker reveals: “In the last nine months I’ve lost both my father and my brother, found Claire and had a baby. This show is really just about all that personal stuff.”
Though acerbically laced with references to the incongruities of South African identity, the works Barker has created with De Jong are indeed a poignant departure from his more famous “political” pieces. These, such as the notorious Pierneef and Zulu Lulu series, saw the self-described “honky who was almost trying to deny art and turn into theatre” unearthing and subverting the terror and absurdity of the old South African ideological apparatus.
Never one to treat works of art as separate, removed entities, Barker’s own identity has always been intrinsically wrapped up in that of his work, embodying all the savage contradictions of the age in which he lived. In equal parts horror and humour, playfulness and devastation, nihilism and morality, Barker endeavoured to be both sacrificial offering and high priest at the altar of truth.
And, in his latest works, this dialectic is still strongly in evidence. While the found objects of shoes, books, skulls, dolls, toy trains, an impala head and, in a sense, even De Jong herself represent the forward propulsion of life, it is the more ineffable sense of loss which weighs the heaviest. One of the most modest installations of the exhibitions consists simply of a child’s inflatable swimming tube suspended above a plastic bucket and spade. It suggests an innocent, carefree moment of youth spent blithely playing by the seaside, yet to Barker it is “fucking tragic”.
In Lost & Found, as in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Barker and De Jong have collected the rubble of life and distilled from it a self- effacing poetics of one of its most basic yet complex inconsistencies.
Lost & Found is on show at the NSA Gallery in Durban until June 22