Maggie Davey
Outland by Roger Ballen (Phaidon)
Roger Ballen’s new book of photographs has been published by the venerable British art publishers, Phaidon Press. Roger Ballen recently sold a second batch of photographs to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Roger Ballen sold precisely one picture in South Africa in his nearly 20 years of living here. Why don’t South Africans like Roger Ballen’s work?
The photographs in Outland include some from Ballen’s controversial Platteland book; the picture of the drooling twin men, Driese and Casie, for instance, is the second picture in the book. This picture, which is on display at MoMA, is the picture critics point to as an example of a Gothic tableau, manipulated by Ballen for his art. Ballen replies emphatically: “No! These are our cousins, examples of man in transition. In any serious photographic work, whatever the artist produces is a self-portrait. South African defensiveness [about the work] is as a result of a lack of looking at photography. There is a low level of looking at visual art in South Africa.”
It has been said, with some justification, that had Ballen portrayed another marginal socio-economic groupin all their sad get-ups, there would have really been trouble. Yet there was a certain satisfaction (not admitted to in polite society) in finding members of the alleged master-race represented in this way. This subtext added irony to Ballen’s work. Yet Ballen is more of a surrealist than a documentarian, requiring only that the image satisfy his artistic impulses how ever contradictorily that image may be read.
The first picture in Outland is from Ballen’s early book, Dorps. It is an exquisite composition of the front door of a house in Hopetown from 1983. Further into Outland, the interiors of these small dorp houses make an appearance, unpeopled, yet humane; Ballen’s vision is comic too. The photograph of the teenager with a glass eye from 1994 comes close to being an anthem.
Ballen’s work for some time now has been interactive. It is comic and absurd; Samuel Beckett gone to the circus in a small town. The faces are the ones though that we have come to expect from Ballen, sometimes slightly more alive, but mostly those same sad, depleted and poverty-stricken folks from Platteland. Instead of sitting there, they now interact with Ballen. Masks make an appearance, sometimes grotesque, sometimes childlike. So too do a variety of pets, including one Brian’s pet pig which the municipality wants removed from his house.
Ballen grew up with Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy pictures on the wall of his mother’s picture agency in Manhattan, and his art owes much to their surrealism. The misshapen feet (Puppy Between Feet, 1999) are reminiscent of the surrealist George Bataille’s series of photographs of toes, and indeed Bataille’s refusal to accept an aesthetic morality is keenly felt in Ballen’s work.
Yet Ballen is still the ringmaster in his alarming circus of misfits and odd beauties. He still declines a social responsibility in his art. In post-apartheid South Africa, can there be a more aggravating stance?
The exhibition of Outland opens at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg on Sunday March 25