Last night the fuckin’ goat kakked on my head,” says Andre Laubscher in a philosophical tone surprisingly devoid of malice. But this is part of the process, or what one might call “method art”.
Laubscher, Peter van Heerden and a goat called Skommel recently spent seven days and nights living in Durban’s Bulwer Park where they creating a makeshift laager from the variety of junk and detritus they foraged. The week culminated in two gripping nocturnal performances of Bok, the site-specific physical installation where Van Heerden, Laubscher and Skommel literally laid their bodies — together with those of several recently deceased animals — on the line. The strange ritual was captured by filmmaker Brad Schaffer who has ingeniously distilled the grand scope of Bok into a skin-tight documentary whose obsessive close-up style is as implosive as the work it documents is explosive. The film forms part of the Bok installation — the final chapter in the 2006 Young Artists’ Project on show at the KwaZulu-Natal South Africa Gallery.
On the surface they make an odd couple. Van Heerden is an angry young artist with a master’s degree from the University of Cape Town, while Laubscher is Valiant Swart’s “mystic boer” come to life: wizened, white-bearded, leather-skinned and with the air of an ancient guru. Yet they are perfect foils for each other. While Van Heerden has plenty to say about masculinity and identity, it is Laubscher who somehow embodies these abstract notions. Though it is Van Heerden who is the creator and central character in the tortuous audio-video performance, it is Laubscher who grounds the existential psycho-drama in solid earth. After all, he says, he is “just a farmer”.
When asked how he became involved with high-concept, brutal physical performance art he simply points at Van Heerden — who is busy attempting to affix a giant boerewors to a washing line — and says: “That’s all his fucking fault.”
Since it is the stated intent of Van Heerden’s work to deconstruct white, male, Afrikaner identity in contemporary South Africa (a section of Bok sees the artist hypnotically repeating the ritual of “eis, Klippies, Coke, BOKKE!” with increasing lunacy), Laubscher is an interesting conundrum. He resembles the stereotypical Afrikaner of the Eugene Terre’Blanche mould to such an extent that he is often mistaken as a rightwinger by those who think they have a sympathiser for their racist convictions, only to be frightened off by his passionately progressive views. Indeed, Laubscher wholeheartedly endorses Van Heerden’s pithy distillation of Afrikaner history in South Africa into “voortrek, draadtrek, saamtrek [trekking, wanking, congregating]”. “My work,” says Van Heerden, is my small way of trying to get everyone to “saamtrek”.
Yet Bok is by no means an Oprah moment — the intellectual underpinnings of the piece take a distant back seat during its performance. Violent, visceral and wracked with distress, fury and pain, after 45 minutes Van Heerden’s naked body is a heaving mess caked in mud, blood, lime, sweat, salt and faeces.
In the grotesque final scene Van Heerden, draped in the Union Jack, auctions off lumps of meat from the goat, which has been decapitated with a chainsaw. The bleeding chunks of flesh symbolise murdered freedom fighters, such as Gideon Scheepers, The Cradock Four and the Pebco Three. Removing a chunk from the washing line, Van Heerden pounds it ferociously with his hammer, tosses it into a brown paper bag and holds it aloft crying: “Right! Who wants Biko? What offers?” A black hand shoots up and its owner moves forward to collect his prize. “How much?” he asks. Van Heerden looks contemptuously at the dripping bag before flinging it at the buyer saying, “Ag fuck it, you can have it for free.”
Though there are distinct echoes of Brett Bailey’s theatre of provocation, Van Heerden’s work steers clear of the supernatural to keep its rigorous focus on raw reality. The element of radical purgation in the work is reminiscent of Stephen Cohen, yet even though Van Heerden’s métier is masculinity and murder, not fetishes and fucking, he could take a leaf from Cohen’s book by removing his work from the art gallery context and taking it into public space where his “cathartic dialogue of resolution and reconciliation” would attain an even more death-defying edge. Performing Bok before an audience of, say, boozed-up Blue Bulls fans, would probably be infinitely more risky than anything David Blaine could ever conjure up.
Peter van Heerden’s exhibition Bok runs at the KwaZulu-Natal South Africa Gallery until June 4. The closing ceremony will be performed at 6pm at the gallery at 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, Durban. Call (031) 202 3686 for more info.
Van Heerden will perform his work in progress 6 Minutes on May 26 as part of the Red Eye initiative at the Durban Art Gallery. The performance aims to depict 140 mock executions in the gallery space. This will culminate in the branding of the artist at the Durban Art Gallery, Durban City Hall, Smith Street, Durban. Call (031) 311 2269 for more info.