Profoundly South African

Should photography draw attention to a specific space and time or is seeking to capture universality a more venerable undertaking? A conversation between esteemed South African photographers Jo Ractliffe and David Goldblatt (held at the National Gallery in Cape Town on Wednesday 25 February 09) was inadvertently hinged on this question. Goldblatt played the role of interlocutor and described the discussion as a “regression.” The process saw him interrogating the trajectory of Ractliffe’s career from past to present and culminated in an introduction to her recently published book.

Entitled Terreno Ocupado, Ractliffe’s most recent body of work assembles emblematic photographs of contemporary Luanda. Nevertheless, she explained that the images aspire to something transcendental. By way of example, she drew a connection between the overalls she photographed on an Angolan roadside and T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” In contrast, Goldblatt was more concerned with the work’s response to the particular social reality it depicted. The sample of work exhibited at the event (which included the ironically-named Shack on the Boa Vista Cliff) portrayed crumbling makeshift dwellings in Luanda’s slums.

What makes Ractliffe’s work interesting is the fact that both hard reality as well as universal aesthetics are at play. What’s more, given the subject matter of her recent work, this dichotomy is fiercely conflictive and far more profound than the difference of opinions that was at the centre of the conversation. Ractliffe’s slumscapes are framed in a way that brings aesthetic balance to what in reality is a horrific environment. From a distance, these black and white images are beautifully textured while up close we can identify offensive piles of rubbish. The experience raises the more significant question of how misery can be pleasing to the eye.

Clicks:

• Terreno Ocupado at Warren Siebrits
• ArtThrob Review

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A profoundly South African bumper sticker weaves its way through Gauteng traffic on route to Tswane. While ascribing social characteristics to skin-colour or nationality is backward, there appears to be some truth to the fact that we all dance to the tune of money.

Clicks:

• Money Race: IOL Inequality Survey Article
• Do the Math: Gini Coefficient

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It’s the mid-70s and a French philosopher and historian by the name of Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984) has just hammered out a book concerning the birth of the prison system. The work tracks the evolution of the social and technological mechanisms used to entrench dicipline in Western Society. His ideas serve up an effective theoretical means of understanding the dystopian world conceived by George Orwell in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Moreover, Foucault has devised a philosophical matrix through which the existence of Big Brother can be perceived in familiar contemporary contexts.

Discipline and Punish asserts that we live in a state of perpetual imprisonment, drawing connections between the mechanisms of law enforcement in modern society and the panopticon. A type of prison building dreamed up in the Eighteenth Century, the central characteristic of the panopticon was that the guards could observe prisoners while prisoners were unable to see the guards. The bottom line was that the prisoners never knew when the guards were looking. Fewer guards were needed, costing taxpayers less money. Everybody was happy.

Needless to say, Foucault would have drawn profound conclusions concerning the evolution of enforcing the speed limit on South African roads. Once upon a time, traffic cops crouched behind bushes and cables were intermittently stretched across roads in unexpected locations. When it was discovered that the income generated by speeding fines was not commensurate with the cost of conducting these stealth operations, the government turned to the panopticon method, slapping up signs like the one above.

As there were no cameras to go with the signs, people quickly realised that there weren’t any guards on duty. Big Brother was caught napping and all the mice came out to play. When the cameras arrived, the farmer’s wife raised her carving knife and speeding vehicles broke wildly to avoid persecution. However, they remembered where the cameras were located and formulated a strategy of slowing down in all the right places.

In a flash, the intuition of South African drivers sped to the lofty philosophical heights of Foucault. These days, even in unfamiliar territory, the collective consciousness of drivers around you makes it clear when there is trouble ahead. Nevertheless, the panopticon approach may not have been completely exhausted. Empty green boxes perched on metal poles might just do the trick. For the time being anyway.

Clicks:

• Horse’s Mouth: Foucault Quotes (Wikiquote)

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A profoundly South African sign that commuters pass as they shuffle onto metrorail trains. Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 - April, 11 2007) would have approved. The American novelist and social commentator contemplated the mess that dangerous weapons make during his involvement in the Second World War. Held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Vonnegut took shelter in a meat factory during the infamous bombing of the German city in 1945. He emerged to find piles of rubble and death.

Vonnegut later drew on his experience in Germany to create a novel entitled Slaughterhouse-Five. An exploded narrative that skips backwards and forwards in time, the book is laced with science fiction and provides a gloomy picture of war. Published in 1969, it was was embraced by readers who were puzzled and drained by America’s Vietnam blundering. Around the time it hit the shelves, polls in the United States indicated that only 33% of the nation supported pursuing a complete military victory.

Vonnegut concocted a distinctive brand of hopeful pessimism in his literary contributions to Planet Earth. His final work, an exhortation of the Bush administration entitled Man Without a Country, sees him soaring the lofty peaks of intelligent insubordination. “What can be said to our young people,” he writes, “now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?”

Clicks:

• Man Without a Country Extract: Custodians of Chaos

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“President Thabo Mbeki, I am fed up, really fed up, of seeing my beloved family, after all these years, still suffering because of full-scale corruption, fraud, maladministration, unprofessional services, and unfair labour practice in the Western Cape, where officials just don’t care a damn about our rights!”

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