/ 18 May 2010

Koloane’s city in motion

‘If there is ever an African form of metropolitan modernity, then Johannesburg will have been its classical location,” writes Achille Mbembe in Aesthetics of Superfluity, his influential essay on the “Afropolis” that is Jo’burg. Unlike others who fix Jo’burg in its apartheid past, Mbembe proposes we see it as a city in motion.

What does a superfluid city look like? David Koloane offers one view in Twenty Ten and Other Things, his new solo exhibition of drawings and prints that brings to the fore the artist’s decades-long exploration of the frictions and fictions of the inner city of Johannesburg.

Drawing might appear as an odd choice with which to record temporal and spatial simultaneity. Compared with hip contemporary mediums such as film, video and computer imaging, it may seem hopelessly outmoded. Koloane’s canvases present an “exploded view” of the gridded city, which becomes fluid and transient. They are an evocative metaphor for the superfluidity of the contemporary African urban landscape.

In his multilayered collections of lines and swirls Koloane — like Mbembe — does not simply depict Johannesburg but re-enacts the process by which the city continually comes into being. There is a feeling of expansion, contraction, implosion and stillness. The rules of city planning have become open to improvisation and the grid upon which the city is mapped ripples and patterns shift.

This sense of life in motion, of how the city is continually written and rewritten, becomes a way of signifying the social agents and underlying subjectivity behind the process.

As Mbembe suggests, the post-apartheid metropolis in general, and Johannesburg in particular, is being rewritten in ways that resemble the operations of the unconscious: “Metropolitan built forms are themselves a projective extension of the society’s archaic or primal fantasies, the ghost dances and the slave spectacles at its foundation.”

Amid the vertical planes of high-rise buildings and the low, earthy pulse of street life that dominate Koloane’s vivid works, figures appear. Privy to every level of the city/canvas, they crowd the streets, bleeding into the architecture surrounding them or emerging suddenly, like the fleeting face of a stranger frozen momentarily in the window of a passing taxi.

Conveying a layering and compression of time, space and place and an ongoing negotiation between reality and fantasy, Koloane’s works refuse to be herded into categories of style. Like an electric-era Miles Davis, he employs a familiar syntax that draws on art history references — from township art to abstract expressionism — but constantly subverts our expectations. His works are high, low, slippery, wild, pensive, moody, mystical, sermonic, ecstatic, always on the move, in the swim, bathed in some electricity-conducting effluvium.

Nowhere is this electrifying sense of improvisation more apparent than in Diskiology, a new body of work that takes on the soccer mania sweeping the country. Here in a series of large-scale charcoal and pastel drawings, Koloane depicts players in action — legs spinning, kicking, dancing and flailing in wild circular movements. At once enigmatic and playful, archetypal yet futuristic, they recall religious mandalas; they evoke stop-frame animation and the freeze-frame techniques of television playbacks. This is as much a celebration of the poetics of the games as it is a critique.

At a time when the emphasis in soccer is increasingly on individual success and goal scoring, Koloane’s depictions are a potent reminder of what makes soccer beautiful in the first place — creativity, innovation and teamwork combined with genuine autonomy and inventiveness. It’s a message that Safa would have done well to note before they offered to cough up R1-million for every goal Bafana Bafana score at next month’s Fifa World Cup.

Twenty Ten and Other Things is on view at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, until May 27