Asha Zero "numberrs" by Fred de Jager

asha zero - numberrs Solo Exhibition 2012 2012 numberrs Virtual Landscapes

Catalogue of works

5-21

2011 Micro Cluster Picnic Introduction to Micro Cluster Picnic

2009 macro soda text hits Asha Zero macro soda text hits

Fragments of Memory: Asha Zero and the Walking Dream

Sublime Confusion

2008 say for me Better left unsaid

Sanford S. Shaman

Shane de Lange

Antoinette du Plessis

Gus Silber

Delphi Carstens

Antoinette du Plessis

Asha Zero and the acts of cancellation Sanford S. Shaman

Quotations

33 34

ASHA ZERO Resumé

A selection of work: 2010 - 1996

36-37

2012

numberrs Virtual Landscapes

Sanford S. Shaman

Asha Zero, a painter of the virtual landscape, is an artist whose work deals with the notion of ambiguous identity and disguise. Indeed, even the very nature of this artist’s painting is concealed by disguising it as collage. But acrylic paint is the medium, and the subject is collage - a technique rooted in the early modernist reaction to the imitation of reality in painting. Ironically reversing the very raison d’être of collage, Asha Zero’s paintings appear to consist of bits of reality when in fact they are the result of the painterly imitation against which the early collagists reacted. This ironic reversal cancels out the viewer’s initial response, and these two effects – reversal and cancellation – are key to Asha Zero’s oeuvre. And although this work may be grounded in certain modernist issues, it is nevertheless a focused response to the nature of society in the age of information – specifically the online culture that increasingly defines our world and the manner in which we interact and engage one another. In this new group of paintings, which are titled like computer files, Asha Zero delves deeper into a theme that has always been central to this artist’s work - the phenomenon of virtual social networking. Of particular note here is the focus upon the role of ‘multiple identities’. Constructed from selected edited details, these are the virtual identities that online social networkers assume, often under the guise of an alias or pseudonym. According to Zero, an online identity ‘needs to be invented... . It needs to be coded.1’ Noting that, ‘… on the internet … you can be anyone you want to be’, the artist characterizes the ‘Asha Zero’ alias as, ‘… very cyber … like an avatar on the internet’.2

Jacques de la Villeglé 1926 #74 rue de Bretagne 1979 Décollage 64.4 x 76.7cm | 25.4 x 30.2"

Roy Lichtenstein 1923-1997 HOPELESS 1963 Oil on canvas 112 x 112cm | 44 x 44" credit: © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

‘<KWI XRX> + V TUBEZ’, ARHXXEVZ, BYCTRRRM, FXAX_ and ‘C B X’, the compositions include a shapely female and/or a muscular male torso suggestive of uploaded photographs that project a sexy online identity – regardless of the ‘reality’. To emphasize the contrived nature of these physiques, Asha Zero tops them off with mismatched heads in much the same way that holiday-makers poke their heads through comic cut-out boards depicting exaggerated muscle men and voluptuous bikini-clad females. And while the mismatched heads and bodies of comic cut-out boards and other pre-computer imagery generally were never meant to be perceived with credibility, their digital counterparts exist within a virtual landscape and function within a different realm of credibility. A virtually contrived image can enter another dimension and take on its own virtual reality - its own credibility apart from the real world. This is a key point vis-à-vis this oeuvre, because through the use of both illusion and multiple identities, Asha Zero succeeds in creating in a separate reality similar to virtual reality. Like a pop-culture super-hero, Asha Zero can be seen in a distinctive costume that creates a unique masked identity. This use of a signature outfit in conjunction with the artist’s ambiguous identity injects a performance aspect into the work, further attesting to its often discussed ties to Dada and neo-Dada. The Asha Zero ‘uniform’ - hood with Mickey Mouse ears, Plastic Man style sun-glasses, and a ‘bling’ dollar sign - is a tongue-in-cheek take on typical super-hero headgear, mask and chest symbol. That this is intended to satirize the double identity of comic-book superheroes, is underscored by a self-portrait showing a

The games that people play projecting such virtual identities – through the manipulation of information and images - are what interest Asha Zero. Asserting that one’s ‘virtual life basically takes over’, Zero notes that, ‘If you look at Facebook for instance, you can see in mass culture, how your second identity, your Facebook identity is pretty much becoming your prime identity.’ Highly controlled and often contrived, the second identity reveals only that which the real identity chooses to reveal. As one critic wrote, ‘Online presence is always a staged performance.3’ Like the art of Asha Zero, a virtual identity is not always what it seems to be. A metaphor for this state of affairs, Asha Zero’s paintings and particularly the illusionistic rendering of collage can be read as analogous to the contrived and manipulated projection of multiple identities. The fragments that comprise an Asha Zero composition - often a collection of disparate body parts - are like the partial images and edited bits and pieces inserted into categories and fields to create an online identity. In many of the more recent paintings, Asha Zero fills the compositions with a multiplicity of images like, eyes, ears and mouths to simultaneously bring into play a suggestion of the network itself. Often, as in the recent paintings, ‘_____’ , ‘ZX.V_F_//’,

Giorgione 1478 -1510 The storm 1507-1508 Oil on canvas 82 x 73 cm | 32.3 x 28.7" credit: DEA / G. NIMATALLAH

masked, Mickey Mouse eared Asha Zero flexing huge humorous cartoon style muscles.4 Frequently worked into the compositions, the artist’s image in this costume is found in the new works titled, ‘_____’, X_RXIZ and ‘ZX.V_F_// ‘. According to the artist, all of the Asha Zero paintings are considered to be either portraits or landscapes – although emphasis is placed on keeping the distinction between the two ambiguous. The extent to which one may distinguish between portrait and landscape in an Asha Zero painting is a function of the tension between the figure and the background. In all of Asha Zero’s paintings there is an exchange - a push-pull effect between the figure and the background. But in paintings like ‘C B X’, FXAX_, MUX, X I X_ and particularly many earlier works, the fragmentary elements are arranged into a distinct single figure – perhaps a portrait of an alternative identity or an invented character - that stands out from the background (the landscape). In many other works, however, the figure is less prominent, and the ambiguity between the figure and the landscape assumes a more assertive role. And even when it doesn’t, what appears to be part of a figure is simultaneously part of a poster or a sticker on a wall and therefore part of the landscape and vice-versa. It was this tension between the figure and the landscape that sixteenth century artists like Giorgione and other precursors of landscape painting adjusted when they diverted attention away from the figure(s) by dramatically moving back the point of view to emphasize the landscape. In the mid and late twentieth century a number of sharp-focus realists, as well as Pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein, moved the point of view way-in on the subject in large-scale paintings of cropped images and extreme close-ups. But for Asha

Zero, it is not only a matter of readjusting this tension, but rather keeping it in a state of flux, so that it shifts back and forth, or as the artist says - ‘flickers’. Asha Zero constructs these landscapes with graphic elements from city streets – the signs and advertisements, graffiti and stickers, and the constantly changing posters that are pasted over other posters and torn away to reveal glimpses of the past. It is an urban landscape in which fragments of the past and the hidden re-emerge onto the present and the visible, evoking the mid-to-late twentieth century works of French and Italian décollage artists who also cultivated street graphics. Creating large compositions from layers of posters and advertisements that they tore from city walls, décollage artists like Mimmo Rotella, Raymond Hains, and Jacques de la Villeglé emphasized ripping away layers (i.e., theirs was not an additive process but rather subtractive) to effect an interplay between the uppermost layer of posters and the lower layers. This is precisely what Asha Zero depicts in these trompe l’oeil paintings of collages – or more accurately trompe l’oeil paintings of décollages. In Asha Zero’s paintings an additional layer characterized as a ‘third or fourth layer’ - is imposed by the virtual landscape. And as Zero explains, within these works there is an interplay between the virtual landscape and the real landscape. This is the result of the artist’s virtual capture of real world elements which are then altered by design programs, and ultimately released back onto the real landscape through the painting process. When asked to describe how Asha Zero arrived at this painting process, the artist responded, ‘It’s almost like linking. When you go online, and you google something - you follow links … and you link and you link. Where you end up is totally unrelated to where you started.’

Foot notes: 1 Asha Zero, quoted from a recorded interview with the author, July 16, 2012. Unless otherwise noted, all Asha Zero quotes cited in this article are taken from that interview. 2 Asha Zero, quoted in Antoinette du Plessis, ‘Asha Zero marco soda text hits’, Asha Zero - marco soda text hits (Cape Town: 34 Long Fine Art, 2009), 2. See also: <http://vgallery.co.za/34long/ashalondon09 asha_catalogue_final.pdf>. 3 iAk, ‘Online Social Networking: Does it Promote Friendship or Cause Alienation?’, Yahoo Contributor Network (September 23, 2008), para. 16, <http://voices.yahoo.com/online-social-networking-1961412.html?cat=49>. 4

See: <http://www.twistedpress.co.uk/artists/Zero.html>. This image can also be found incorporated into a number of paintings, including _ S _ _ _ P_ (2009) and Trim Trom Turf (2009). The flexing biceps is an image that occurs frequently in the Asha Zero iconography, and is depicted in various stylistic attitudes.

Mickey Mouse eared Asha Zero flexing huge humorous cartoon style muscles.

_____ 2012 acrylic on board 150 x 120cm 59.1 x 47.2"

X I X_2012 acrylic on board 45 x 32cm 17.7 x 12.6"

opposite page ZX.V_F_// 2012 acrylic on board 80 x 70cm 31.5 x 27.6"

X_RXIZ 2012 acrylic on board 150 x 240cm (diptych) 59.1 x 94.5"

Y_X_ 2012 acrylic on board 70 x 80cm 27.6 x 31.5"

1111 FXAX_ 2012 acrylic on board 41.5 x 25cm 16.3 x 9.8"

<KWI XRX> + V TUBEZ 2012 acrylic on board 70 x 80cm 27.6 x 31.5"

1313 PLUZZ 2012 acrylic on board 60cm 23.6"

opposite page

1515

RTX 2012 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm 17.7 x 17.7"

MUX 2012 acrylic on board 41.5 x 25cm 16.3 x 9.8"

ARHXXEVZ 2012 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm 17.7 x 17.7"

1717 > 2012 acrylic on board 60cm 23.6"

C B X 2012 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm 17.7 x 17.7"

1919 _CMX//_KI 2012 acrylic on board 120 x 100cm 47.2 x 39.4"

2121 opposite page BYCTRRRM 2012 acrylic on board 80 x 70cm 31.5 x 27.6"

RUCVVMS_B 2012 acrylic on board 70 x 80cm 27.6 x 31.5"

2011

Introduction to Micro Cluster Picnic Shane de Lange

Francis Picabia 1879 – 1953 Cacodylic Eye 1921

Raoul Hausmann 1886 – 1971 ABCD 1924

If hysteria was the pathology of the exasperated staging of the subject – of the theatrical and operational conversion of the body – and if paranoia was the pathology of organization – of the structuring of a rigid and jealous world – then today we have entered into a new form of schizophrenia – with the emergence of an immanent promiscuity and the perpetual interconnection of all information and communication networks. Jean Baudrillard (1988: 26) When Picasso painted Still Life with Cane Chair in 1912 he made a profound contribution to the conversation of art that still resonates today. By combining found material and elements from the media into the painted surface, Picasso effectively breached the barrier between the real world of the viewer and the represented world of the image, heralding the emergence of Synthetic Cubism. Picasso’s hybrid of collage and painting included a clipping from a newspaper that stated “the battle has began”, knowing that the foreboding tradition of painting was under attack, and that a shift was underway in the evolution of the medium, challenging the way human beings perceive things to be, and providing a reservoir of artistic material for decades to come. Cubism incorporated the politics of the canvas, picture frame, and surrounding walls, in effect socializing painting. So too, an emphasis on multidimensionality and conceptual thinking, including the influence of psychoanalysis and existentialism, altered the way we see the perceived genius of the artist, asking the question: what is in a name, other than signifying cancellation? Asha Zero is a painter reverse-engineering these once-anarchic, now-traditional Avant-Garde ideas, hard wiring established Modernist perspectives to suite the needs of a ‘post-postmodern’ world. The numerical digit ‘Zero’ being a pertinent replacement for the authors name, Zero’s reinterpretation of identity and representation in the context of the information age finds an association with Francis Picabia’s Cacodylic Eye (1921), where the artist had his studio visitors sign a canvas on entering, not allowing for one single signature to be credited as the maker of the artwork, composed around a huge eye gazing back at the viewer. Parallel to the estrangement of the author, the use of body parts, particularly mouths and eyes, is a mechanism echoed in all Zero’s work, describing the almost prosthetic, cut and paste identities that humans adopt in contemporary society. Perhaps a call-back to Georges Bataille’s theoretical method known as the Exquisite Corpse, Zero in affect creates a discursive ‘body’ for the current post-industrial era. Similarly, in Erased De Kooning Drawing (1953) painter and collagist Robert Rauschenberg took the notion of identity, discourse and representation a

step further, deleting the subject in his artistic inquiry entirely, revealing more informal considerations based on the absence and ambiguity of the author, concluding his thoughts by erasing a drawing by Willem De Kooning as an act of art in his own name, at once communicating the primary concerns of collage: intertextuality, appropriation, and juxtaposition. Subscribing to historical collagist practices, notably the work of Dadaists such as Hana Höch, Raoul Hausmann, and Kurt Schwitters, Zero confronts the medium of painting based on contemporary conventions such as schizophrenia, pastiche, anxiety and erasure. All under the guise(s) of imitation, artifice, and anonymity, Zero takes a cue from Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual art practices and Andy Warhol’s Pop Art wit, approaching painting on the same conceptual grounds as collage, depicting the everyday spectacle of human habituation in the urban sprawl of the modern city. Zero becomes a cipher, an indecipherable title containing no gender or name, the personification of collage: a cyborg. Borrowing from everyday media sources to construct detailed, photo-realistic compositions (trompe l’oeil), Zero presents the status quo of the Global Village as a bricolage, made-up of found objects (objet trouvé) and constructed bodies, using newspaper headlines, various street art elements, billboards, posters, album covers, fashion spreads, and print ads as pertinent social content. Delivering facsimiled captions from ground zero, Zero stumbles upon the defunct and deteriorated relationship between the original and the representation. Where humans once consumed media, it now consumes us, and Zero presents the remnants of this memory, pooled experiences faded and used, somehow tolerating the extraction of intelligible bits of information. Rather than being direct representations from some distant ‘original’ source or ‘authentic’ subject, Zero’s paintings are processed transcripts of lost and found representations, which have lost the agency of ‘origin’. The notions of memory and history are treated in an archaeological manner, mediated and weathered into the surfaces of the urban landscape, peeled back by Zero to reveal the remaining strata of our mediation, all too often hidden from us, or simply ignored and forgotten. “The informational function of the media today would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia” (Jameson, 1999:20). Zero finds keepsakes from the fragmented landscape of the city – its histories and geographies incomplete – in order to piece together portraits of its cyborg citizenry, blip culture, raising relevant doubts about the Human Condition. Saturated in the synthetic culture of the 80s, steeped in Punk and Indie Rock, Zero has a penchant for the appropriation of middle class consumer appetites. Forgetting and indoctrination being the staple of the day, the working class ideology of the Apartheid proletariat gave Zero special insights into

the power of propaganda and marketing, and the social programming of the minority white population. In this sense, Zero’s paintings take advantage of the value of deception, equating perception with deception, perversion with reversion, at all times being unsympathetic towards any political agenda. Zero samples glitches and iterations from mediocrity, remixing scraps Xeroxed or stolen from popular culture, numbing as they stimulate, rendering the information age as bits and pieces, hyphens and splices, scratched and scrambled. If Pierneef were alive today, Zero’s portraits would be the landscapes he would paint. This approach to the present day by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage. Yet this mesmerizing new aesthetic mode itself emerged as a elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way. It cannot therefore be said to produce this strange occultation of the present by its own formal power, but rather merely to demonstrate, through these inner contradictions, the enormity of the situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience. Frederic Jameson (1993: 21) When viewed from a distance each painting appears to be hyper-realistic visions pieced together from discarded or found media parts. When each of the many segments are appreciated for their individual surface qualities, ranging from topological interactions to hijacked typographical vectors and dirty grunge-inspired textures, they display abstract expressionist tendencies, marking a sea-change in the context of Modern painting. Simultaneously multiple and singular, Zero’s paintings dictate impossible exchanges between different surfaces in a continuous sedimentation of information. Zero’s own ambiguous identity poses a similar question, where the authenticity of the author gives way to the representation of the brand; a sentiment relayed by Guy Debord (2004:12) when he states: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”. With this simulated sense of Self Zero plays with the unsolicited aesthetics of the street, in an overwhelming image economy, a contrived society continually referencing itself, feeding off of itself, inviting one to consume. Zero’s paintings illustrate the sales agenda of the Global Village; so pervasive that it almost does not need the consumer anymore. The world is no longer about good or bad, black or white, ones and zeros; it is no longer binary, it is anarchic based on technologies that currently dictate the resolution of

reality and the ‘deresolution’ of the body. Everything is transferred and transmitted under tragicomic circumstances, making room for the entropic madness of the machine aesthetic that Futurists such as Filippo Marinetti envisaged being the culmination of mankind. “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do... If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” Andy Warhol

Zero’s paintings contribute more than just the sum of all parts, unfixing signifiers, stirring up turbulence, entangled in alienation and artifice to establish a clearcut message. By piecing together counterfeit truths that can be bought over the counter, Zero makes the distinction between the authentic and inauthentic obsolete, perhaps exposing the only ‘truth’ left. History, identity, representation, culture, and the like, no longer teeter on the opposition between good and evil, or even tinker on the pitting of evil against ‘evil’, Zero simply makes such distinctions null and void.

We are all Burroughs’ cut-ups, disposable, interchangeable, random. As passive consumers, compiled identities, and poster egos, most people are bored and nobody wants to change anything, shape it, form it, and translate it into a form of expression. It’s all about imitation, consumption and manipulation, and the only way to arrive at something relevant is to combine elements together, just as Zero does. This boredom is symptomatic of the lack of difference and Otherness in the world. Zero is the only relevant symbol, Zero’s cut-up images are a sign of the times, products of the system. Much like Gustave Courbet, Zero is a realist for the times, a traditionalist conveying the contemporary message of Zeitgeist in Babel, manifesting what it means to be human in the composite landscape of website hits and dots per inch, at all times leaving the debate open and playful. Alongside contemporary artists such as Gajin Fujita, Takashi Murakami and Barry McGee, Zero draws attention to a society in a state of terminal identity, where the neurosis observed in the everyday becomes the norm. Marshall McLuhan referred to this neurosis as ‘narcosis’ (2001:45), which is an analogy used to describe our addiction to the media and our indifference towards it, linked to the idea that human beings and culture are paramount to a reproductive organ for the media and technology. Zero executes this narcosis through transient and ambiguous mergers of realism, naturalism and abstraction, somehow incorporating small pieces from just about every discursive structure in painting since the Renaissance. Silence and noise find common ground here, where the cosmetic fabrications of the media are expressed through hybrids of texture, colour, and pattern; chimeras that lead to continuing discussion on painting.

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Micro Cluster Picnic progresses past Manichean binaries, in a post-hyperrealist realm that is inadvertent towards humanist or capitalist polemics and politics, differing from previous exhibitions, say for me (2008) and macro soda text hits (2009). As the world grows ever smaller, proximity being equal to promiscuity, Zero chooses anonymity over autonomy. Embodied and embedded, disassembled and reprogrammed,

Untitled 2011 acrylic on board 27 x 17 cm | 10.6 x 6.7"

opti c / ha * * cter mobbb 2011 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm | 17.7 x 17.7"

surplus ( adventure ) 2011 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm | 17.7 x 17.7"

Safari Tronn 2011 acrylic on board 150 x 120cm | 59 x 47.2"

2009

Asha Zero macro soda text hits Antoinette du Plessis

After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies into space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. McLuhan (1964:3) macro soda text hits follows his 2008 debut solo show, say for me, at 34Long Fine Art in Cape Town, South Africa. The show expands the visual and technical concepts first presented in say for me into an inventive exploration of identity, consciousness, reality, knowledge and information in the digital age. McLuhan’s more-than-fifty-year-old concept of technology as an extension of the human central nervous system, and his anticipation of consciousness as the next frontier open to colonization by electronic media, seem to reverberate in the staccato hypertext of information pasted up, torn down, pasted up, torn down in macro soda text hits. Asha Zero is an assumed identity, underscoring and exploiting identity/anonymity as instable, impenetrable concepts, with or without the documents issued and demanded by officialdom. On a metaphysical level, no one knows who or what a human being really is, or is capable of. In cyberspace, anyone can be whatever they choose and so-called real life is not much different. In Asha Zero’s own words, his name “has become my brand as well as my identity … a very cyber kind of thing, like an avatar on the internet, where you can be anyone you want to be. But it’s not meant to be a synonym for anyone else. It’s just my name” (Silber 2009:13). Typical of Asha Zero, he simultaneously asserts and denies collective identity/ consciousness. The same ambiguity he claims for himself, he claims for his painting. Describing his youthful forages into stencilling, stickering and street culture as little more than adolescent fun, he acknowledges their residue in terms of techniques and in terms of visual thinking

on the run, snatching, altering and juxtaposing images and ideas. With impunity he appropriates and shreds images from the work of his contemporaries like Banksy, Koons, Blek le Rat and Shepard Fairey, then recycles them into barely decipherable facsimiles.

inevitable and subliminal, with no regard for high or low, significant or short-lived, as Asha Zero’s paintings mutilate, manipulate and reconstitute the cyber-urban mix by way of its antithesis: careful planning, durability, profound contemplation, slow, skilled craftsmanship.

His work has always been informed by his immediate surroundings, from the relatively rustic suburbia in which he grew up to 1980s skateboard culture, student life and mass propaganda in pre-1994 South Africa. Exposure to the work of international Pop and Street artists during his undergraduate years was seminal, but his creative direction was primarily determined by his experience of intense media bombardment – images from billboard advertising, internet, television, mobile phones – in crowded urban spaces. In cities around the world, workers replacing yesterday’s layer of ads and news with fresh information is a daily sight. Defaced subways with multiple deposits of advertising posters applied one over the other, leaving a palimpsest chronicle of events long forgotten yet still there, fascinated him. Not only the images, but also the scratches, tears, remnants of colour and splintered messages half lost with age. Yet, despite the plentiful references to Street art in Asha Zero’s work and his own early forays into the streets that associate him with the genre visually, his chosen medium of traditional paint positions him as an outsider conceptually.

Acrylic paint is his chosen vehicle for this conversion, and his signature is the meticulous painting demanded by compulsive attention to detail. With fine art training at tertiary level, particularly in drawing, printmaking and photography, he has opted to make paint his medium and once again, McLuhan comes to mind: the medium is the message.

Many great 20 th century art works, literary and visual, understood human communication with the environment as a ‘stream of consciousness’, an ongoing, shifting mental ‘narrative’ on countless levels, mediated by perception, assisted by language and senses, emotional awareness, cultural conditioning, intelligence. All the ways in which humans exist in the world, changing and hybridising as inventions and applications of increasing technological complexity shift borders between being and non-being, self and other. In our time, technology has changed beyond recognition not only the human central nervous system but also the natural and non-natural worlds, and the points – domains, fields, realms – where these three meet. Consciousness has left behind its definition as a ‘stream’ with its associations of continuity and predictability, flowing like water or rising like vapour. Human awareness now is determined by disruption. Sporadic, throbbing, broken, flashing, amputated moments; bytes and bits, icons and pixels. It is this disrupted awareness that Asha Zero captures.

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Collage as a truncated spatial scheme, denying the dimensions of space and time, graffiti as a fact of urban life and the physical human form in virtual overload are Asha Zero’s central metaphors. Cityscapes are spontaneous collages: billboards, signposts, scribbles, stickers, signs and slogans fighting for nanoseconds of anonymous attention. Cyberspace as a bright playground darkly stalked by identity thieves and virtual friends provides him with an inexhaustible reservoir of images, some instantly recognizable, others irretrievable and unintelligible. Fusion is

The medium is NOT the message in Asha Zero’s work. The two terms are separated, soon-to-be-divorced when the viewer recognises paint as distinct from collage. The message(s), if there are any, are no more than fragmentation, breakup, random signals, dancing dots. The medium is paint, and it comes as a surprise, once again, to realise that Asha Zero, whatever else he may or may not be, is a surprisingly traditional painter. His choice of paint as medium and the human body as subject matter are pre-eminently traditional, some might even say old-fashioned. It is his coercive treatment of the body and the limitless spaces he allocates to it that is fresh. So different, so appealing. Dismemberment and reconstitution of the body are equally potent and simultaneous in most of Asha Zero’s works. Torn, stencilled, debased, repeated, virtual, remembered, imagined, branded, remixed – the human body never relinquishes its central position in his work, calling to mind other artists, other times; Picasso, Picabia, Hanna Hoch, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, Richard Hamilton, Jean Basquiat. As his impersonations of the composite urban backdrop have intensified in complexity, Asha Zero’s works have increased in scale and his palette has acquired a voltage it did not quite have before. Bright is juxtaposed with powdery; contrast gives way to amalgamation. The greyness of exhausted city walls flicker up close with bright colour embezzled from cyber space, insatiable like a fast food addiction. Dissipated bits of text, disjointed and disjointing, increasingly assault fragmented images in serial recall of the digital processes integral to Asha Zero’s preparatory work. He stores and retrieves virtual images in a computer archive and much of his planning is done on graphic software. His abundant use of copy and paste, one of the internet’s most common practices, is evident in repetition of identical elements like eyes or mouths. Identical in simulation of mass media’s relentless overload hitting urbanites daily, yet each accorded unique attention in the painting process. McLuhan (1964:150) envisaged survival in the information age as a form of hunting and gathering not that much different from the way primitive people stalked their prey. Asha Zero lies low, camouflaged, dataflaged, patiently painting his quarry.

Ibbi Micro 2009 acrylic on board 150 x 120cm 59 x 47.2"

Bibliography De Lange, S 2006. ‘Oncefamousdeadartists’ Asha Zero. Pretoria: MAPzar, PO Box 38 Groenkloof. Du Plessis A 2008. ‘Better left unsaid’ in say for me Exhibition catalogue:4 – 6. Cape Town: 34Long Fine Art. Manim, J 2009. ‘Asha Zero. Meaning in pieces’ in One Small Seed (15) June-July-August:24-27 McLuhan, M 1964. Understanding media. London: Routledge Classics. 2006 reprint. Shaman, SS 2008. ‘Asha Zero and acts of cancellation’ in say for me Exhibition catalogue: 8 – 10. Cape Town: 34Long Fine Art. Silber, G 2009 ‘Zeroing in on the zeitgeist’ in Business Day, Friday 20 March:13

Antoinette du Plessis is a freelance writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She holds a Master of Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand.

R Lever 2009 acrylic on board 120 x 100cm | 47.2 x 39.4"

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M S T H 2009 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm | 17.7 x 17.7"

Trim Trom Turf 2009 acrylic on board 45 x 45cm | 17.7 x 17.7"

Fragments of Memory: Asha Zero and the Waking Dream Gus Silber

Sleep is the deep blue ocean that claims our bodies at the end of a hard day’s life, drawing us into the welcoming waters that cocooned us before the shock of birth. But even as we lie adrift in the darkness, our minds are hard at work, turning, churning, grappling with the undercurrents of anxiety and desire that we keep well-hidden during our waking hours. Asleep, blissfully liberated from the grip of conscious thought, we craft free-form collages from fragments of memory and experience, and the movies we see in our head seem as real as life itself, even as we are dimly aware that we are dreaming. Then the tide lifts us towards the light, and we crawl our way back to shore, trailing behind us the tangle of storylines and vignettes that are washed away by the first cold waves of day. It is the job of the artist to remember our dreams for us, to cast a net upon the waters and re-assemble reality from the atoms in a grain of sand. Luckily, we all dream alike these days, because so much of what we dream is the same as what we breathe: the oxygen, the ambient noise, the Fifth Element of Media that seduces us, that defines us, that drowns us in its embrace. Once, a distant age ago, we chose our media with care and consumed them at leisure, slowly turning pages, finely tuning frequencies, quietly settling down to suspend our disbelief by the glare of the silver screen. Now, media choose us. Now, media consume us. Now, we flip and flick and click and tap and tweet, our pulses tripping to the tattoo of too much information, some of which we skim, some of which we discard, some of which we pretend to save for later, as our eyes glaze over and our hearts pound to the panic that we might miss something in the rush. What we can’t absorb, what we can’t understand, we store in the bank of our subconscious, where it spills out and spends itself as our nerve-ends twitch to the noise. Into this world of the waking dream, this world of things half-seen, half-heard, and half-remembered, was born an artist whose given name has given way to a name that seems itself to have been plucked from...a videogame? A Punk Rock band? A James Bond movie?

itself well to the school of art that we shall henceforth know as Zeroism. Put it this way. If Asha Zero were a musician, he would make his music by gathering snippets and samples of the beats and rhythms and songs that caught his ear, and then instead of mixing and mashing them on his Mac, he would play each note on a real instrument. Asha Zero does that with clippings and cut-outs from magazines and newspapers and the Net, piecing together the collage with the obsessive dedication of Dr Frankenstein in his lab, and then, even more obsessively, replicating the result with meticulous acrylic brushstrokes on board. But let us leave aside the technique for a moment, the trick of the eye that lures you to look closer and then jump back with a double-take: This isn’t a paper collage, it’s a painting! Because the real message in the medium is the mix of media that the paintings themselves portray. Here are beauty ads and barcodes and cartoon characters and dress-up dolls and propaganda leaflets and speech bubbles and computer cursors and skeletons and starbursts, slapped together on grey walls dripping with graffiti, and then scratched and torn at in what appears to be a desperate attempt to get to the meaning beneath the multiple layers.

Kwi XRX (Lonely Technician) 2009 acrylic on board 80 x 70cm | 31.5 x 27.6"

But the meaning is right there on the surface, in the isolated, cut-&-pasted eyes and ears and lips that are a recurring motif in Asha Zero’s work. We look without seeing, we hear without listening, we talk without communicating, drawing on our deeper senses to make sense of the world around us, the world of media colliding and piling up and bouncing back into space, the world that only makes sense when we are fast asleep, or when the artist holds up a mirror to our minds and dares us to wander inside. Welcome to the world of Asha Zero. Welcome to the theatre of your dreams. Gus Silber is a journalist, author, and scriptwriter based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He writes on art for a variety of publications.

Asha Zero. But there is nothing random about that name because it is perfect in the punchiness of its pop culture branding, and its aura of Zen discipline, and it lends

Radio Snake 2009 acrylic on board 120 x 100cm | 47.2 x 39.4"

Sublime Confusion Delphi Carstens

Sidestepping attempts at deciphering meaning, Asha Zero is a dynamical process - an assemblage of heterogeneous elements maneuvering their way through contemporary culture. Like graffiti on the surface of the zeitgeist, Asha Zero’s depictions are embedded fragments of code. In trying to decipher them, we are led astray. Asha Zero offers us cryptographs of the ordinary. The organs of culture - mouths, eyes, ears, appendages and signs- are disassembled from the media-scape and re-programmed. Fused together, these altered signifiers become a nomadic machine cruising through the avenues of simulation, passing through underpasses of the subconscious and illuminating the dynamic processes inherent in artistic production. Despite their camouflaged meanings, Asha Zero’s images are smart guides for the tragically hip; viral operators that hack the familiar, injecting it with exploratory probes that mine for new figurations and possibilities. The question isn’t one of identity. The imagery of Asha Zero is scrambled code and the artist is more singularity than singular entity. There is no one referent – Asha Zero is like a meshwork, a multiplicity, a ‘machine’ (whether mechanical, organic or conceptual) producing other ‘machines,’ a pattern continuously coalescing new patterns as it scouts ahead. Deterritorialised tags and fragments of media-flesh, torn edges and peeling layers, flayed cartoon icons and deconstructed toys tug at us like catchy ring-tones. Like eroded snippets of pop-songs channelled through rusty circuits, they decay into ecstatic industrial sound as we turn up the volume. Intuitively testing the breaking points, limits, possible combinations, figurations and fusions of the materials and conceptual processes inherent in the dynamics of artistic production, Asha Zero is the itinerant or ambulant who does the legwork with paints and brushes. Determined to follow the flow of images as a matter of pure productivity and not simply of conceptual posturing, Asha Zero has created a virtual continuum wherein each depiction is more than the sum of its parts – each meticulously crafted fragment brims with virtual life that escapes the boundaries of the surface. The space occupied by Asha Zero is not a conceptual framework filled with empty theory, but a diverse multiplicity inhabited by different fragments of coding – each of which occupies a topological space of its own. These works are immanent instead of transcendental. The line of flight 1 extends beyond abstraction and essentialism, combining theory and practice in a dynamic chaos of repeating patterns. Static diagrams are incapable of describing dynamic reality, so Asha Zero chooses to unfix and complexify images, presenting them as strange attractors that infiltrate

the surface of the ordinary, stirring up turbulence and engendering self-organisation. Events and objects that may seem insignificant in their banality take on a new significance in these glitch-maps of transformation. Asha Zero’s mythos of alteration and burification is a response to a culture enthralled by it’s own artifice and image-production. Caught up in a turbulence of transitions and phase-changes, ontological certainties are being scrambled and distorted by continued environmental, technological, economic, social and political upheaval. Asha Zero presents us with bitmaps of our uncertainty. More than mere emblems of social deconstruction, they could perhaps be described as engineering diagrams that depict the dynamic flow between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ that the contemporary world offers us and the peculiar new possibilities that beckon there. As both artist and artisan, Asha Zero embodies the ‘abstract machines’ conceived by 20th century philosophers Deleuze and Guattari 2. These ‘machines’ are bifurcations that blossom in the turbulence of chemistry, biology or history, producing new patterns. Self-assembling from organic or mechanical processes (or from combinations of these), cultural, ontological, biological and mechanised machines, as Deleuze and Guattari conceive them, are all assemblages of parts in energetic flux. They coalesce out of the dynamic chaos of an environment in perpetual motion. Following this line of flight, Asha Zero’s hand-painted bricolages are in themselves machinic assemblages 3 , components of larger self-assembling conceptual and material processing devices. Deleuze and Guattari’s term, Machinic phylum, best describes the manifold or reservoir of possibilities that Asha Zero’s creative output inhabits. Conceived as a storehouse of self-organising principles, nonlinear stabilization and diversifications that chemicals, genes or artisans are capable of tapping into, the phylum is successfully hacked whenever a machine is assembled. A window onto the phylum has been opened when, for example, a foetus begins to develop or a novel idea incarnates itself into a cultural product like a painting, an equation, an experiment, a text or a technological artifact. It is a question of seeing matter in flow and in variation.

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Perceiving the flux requires a subtlety of craft as the phylum resists being seized or constrained. Asha Zero has managed to overcome this resistance by scrambling the question of identity and combining construction with deconstruction. Each work brims with the ironic awareness of instability and the recognition that the artist both resists control and, simultaneously, can never be fully in control.

Asha Zero coalesces a space that our current language and conceptual baggage has trouble articulating. This is not a space of suicidal crashes but rather one of fortuitous accidents. In Asha Zero’s machinic depictions, the artist fuses with the engineer and pop-culture synergises with quantum physics. The results are images of chemical turbulence as familiar objects are sucked through the menacing slipstream of technology and transformed into viral agents of hazardous possibility. Brought together out of turmoil, randomness and unease, Asha Zero’s depictions are icons of sublime confusion. They reveal a new position - that of an artist as a strange attractor or virtual machine. Endnotes 1. The term ‘line of flight’ is used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe an instance of thinking and acting ‘outside the box.’ By following a ‘line of flight’ an artist may attempt to escape limitations, constrictions or categorisation, creating what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘smooth space’ - a space where any sort of action or conceptualisation is possible and unobstructed. The opposite of ‘smooth space’ is ‘straited space’ where options for movement and creativity are limited to rigid strata and uniform lines of thought and action. A thorough explanation of this concept can be found at http://www.linesofflight.net/linesofflight.htm. 2. French philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, political resistance and art. Their most popular books were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Critic and philosopher Antonio Negri called A Thousand Plateaus ‘the most important philosophical text of the 20th century.’ Their experimental style and extreme radicalism defies even postmodernism and has made them difficult to classify. Nevertheless, their philosophy can be said to follow a very specific type of realist ontology whereby objects and concepts are given their identity not through transcendental essences, but rather through dynamic processes – material, energetic or otherwise – that are immanent to the world of matter and energy. 3. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Gauttari use the term machinic to describe a type of working relationship among the varied elements defined by the word assemblage. In their terminology, the assemblage itself is not opposed to either mechanical machines or organic bodies but encompasses and includes both. A ‘machine’ or ‘machinic assemblage’ could be a lichen, a language, a painting or a computer. The key word, however, is relationship. A ‘machinic assemblage’ is a dynamic process and a multiplicity; not a singular or static entity or process, but one that is constantly shifting and adjusting itself as it responds to its environment or is, in turn, the object of a response or process.

Delphi Carstens lectures in Humanities at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa and is a writer and activist specializing in culture and technology.

2008

say for me Better left unsaid

Antoinette du Plessis

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors ... Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing ... Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death? Attributed to Jorge Luis Borges The paintings of Asha Zero – his real name, one amongst many – are not what they seem. In a subversive, almost illicit way, Asha employs painting to challenge the ways in which awareness is smashed and grabbed in the fiercely self-effacing visual environment of our time. This printed catalogue renders invisible the most significant piece of information about say for me: the painterly, real quality of the works. Their material substance.

Picasso 1881-1973 Still life with a caned chair 1912 mixed media Musee Picasso Paris France © DACS / Giraudon / The Bridgeman art library

They are not collages, photomontages, derelict billboards or yesterday’s posters. They are paintings. Most viewers do a double take when they realize this, as the aspect of careful, premeditated, laborious hand painting makes an essential difference to the way the work is perceived. In our post-post-modern age of utter information overload, visual and textual, instant recognition has become a feature of almost everything, including art. This is the interface within which Asha operates. With pokerfaced intent, he embezzles the multi-faceted language of collage to comment on exactly that: deception as a modern mode of visual communication. And he goes further: he simulates scars, torn edges, scratches and erasures, the inevitable wear and tear of images on walls and in consciousness, thereby incorporating time, the mysterious dimension, into his work. Having grabbed collage as his visual language, Asha creates, intentionally, a particular ancestry for his work, as most artists do. He exploits the historical roots as well as the futuristic appeal of collage, reputed to have originated in 1912 when Picasso created Still life with a caned chair, an image as challenging as it was foreboding to traditional painting. Colour reduced to near monochrome, it combined elements from the commercial world – oilcloth printed to resemble a cane seat and newspaper fragments – with oil paint to depict objects from several broken angles simultaneously. The introduction of collage as a radical painting practice marked a decisive moment in Picasso and Braque’s cubist period. Fuelled by dissatisfaction with stale painting conventions and a desire to express with immediacy the turbulence of their age, they shaped

collage into a visual system of exceptional resilience. It was of course no coincidence that their working out of this fractured, multifaceted visual language happened together with the popularisation in Europe of Einstein’s theory of relativity, first formulated in 1905, which demonstrated the previously unimaginable notion that time and space were relative concepts – perceived only in relation to the perceiver, never in objective neutrality, and Freud’s ideas of psychopathology and neurosis, published in The interpretation of dreams in 1900, which hypothesized the human mind as a complex energy system, constantly interacting with its immediate socio-cultural environment as much as ancient unconscious instincts. In all respects, the twentieth century shattered concepts of unity and stability; pictorial unity had to go too. The durability of collage as a language and as a method is not difficult to explain: it is inexhaustibly flexible, immediate and available, it mixes media old and new with impunity and it merges aspects of highly sophisticated as well as unpretentious visual environments. It appears everywhere in the commercial sphere. Its inherent irreverence, its vehemence and multiplicity gives its appearance in a fine art context a look that remains avant garde and political, like an angry scream. It is the dialogue of fragmentation, of ferment, of ingenuity and dissent, though astoundingly, it can as easily become the language of sentimentality and nostalgia. Central to Asha Zero’s artistic ancestry are the photocollages of legendary Berlin Dadaist, Hannah Höch, an early, almost visionary critic of male domination and of military, industrial and colonial supremacy. With references to mass culture similar to those of Picasso, but more concerned with sociopolitical subversion, in the hands of Höch and her companion Raoul Hausmann, cubist collage morphed into the dissatisfaction of Dadaist photomontage. Their work was seminal to Dada, the anti-art, antiestablishment ‘movement’ (some prefer to call it ‘spirit’) aimed at exposing the catastrophically aggressive hegemonic order of mid-century Europe. Höch’s photocollages typically mix fragments and signifiers into all but random combinations, and by this very lack of meaning provoke disquieting visual connections. Like Höch, Asha often includes magazine-derived images of women in his work, thereby commenting, or omitting to comment on, idealization/objectification – appalling absurdity – of women in the media. His unceremonious treatment of body parts demonstrates just how pornographic commercial visual culture actually is, how bereft of discernment, without casting a moral comment on its production nor its consumption. His references to Hannah Höch and Dada as a way of protest or non-protest in a dehumanising social environment puts his work in line with that of

contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu’s collaged works, lifted to cult-status by Saatchi of London. Mutu’s work deals directly and scorchingly with colonialism and misogyny. She superimposes cut-out body parts from popular and pornographic magazines on pages from medical textbooks, no less objectifying, no less debasing. The results are painfully evocative, so horrible and so beautiful one cannot look away. In contrast to Mutu’s collages, Asha’s work has the added dimension of real paint, lovingly, obsessively applied in time-consuming processes, bestowing the respect and dignity of concentrated labour on the wounds and pockmarks of time. His painting process begins with a carefully planned composition, drawn onto board. Some areas are masked, hand-painted over, and allowed to dry. The masks are carefully removed to expose raised edges of acrylic paint. He repeats this process several times to produce built-up layers of paint. Various texturing effects like cut marks, paint splatter and smudging are applied to simulate the distinct, physical qualities of torn paper. Wangechi Mutu Ectopic pregnancy 2004 glitter, ink, collage on found medical illustration paper saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artistswangechi_mutu.htm

The surfaces of Asha’s paintings consist entirely of acrylic paint on board, simulating the ‘de-collaged’ traces of torn-away posters on city walls, evoking time in the lingua franca of paint.

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Hannah Höch 1889-1978 Da-Dandy 1919 collage Private collection Giraudon / The Bridgeman art library

zansi nib 2008 acrylic on board 80 x 70cm | 31.5 x 27.6"

mouse over text 2008 acrylic on board

das 2008 acrylic on board

sambi 2008 acrylic on board 100 x 120cm | 39.4 x 47.2"

60 x 45cm | 23.6 x 17.7"

100 x 120cm | 39.4 x 47.2"

Asha Zero and acts of cancellation Sanford S. Shaman

Asha Zero – the very name connotes cancellation – intentionally cancels out the viewer’s response to his graffiti-inspired collages through the subtle revelation that these works are actually meticulously rendered acrylic paintings. Coming to age in an era of cancellations, Asha Zero was in his teens when apartheid was cancelled out, and he watched as the value structure of his school’s Christian national education system crumbled. While Aids was cancelling out immune systems on a global scale, the Soviet Union and East Germany were also cancelled. And amid fears that computer-based systems and great amounts of data would be cancelled out, the new millennium was ushered in. Twenty-one months later, 9/11 cancelled out New York’s tallest structures. Art history also provided Asha Zero with plenty of examples– modernism and post-modernism are replete with acts of cancellation. One of the bench marks was Jean Tinguely’s 1960 Homage to New York, described as ‘a huge construction whose sole purpose [was] to destroy itself in one glorious act of mechanical suicide.’1 At Documenta IX in 1992, Joseph Kosuth cancelled out two corridors of 18th and 19th century sculpture in Kassel’s Neue Galerie by covering them with drop-cloths printed with philosophic quotations. Kosuth then rendered the quotations incomprehensible by cancelling out selected words. Among the most influential of artistic acts of cancellation, however, was Robert Rauschenberg’s erasing of a de Kooning drawing in 1953. At a time when an artist’s unique style was synonymous with his or her ‘inner’ personality, this act – regardless of Rauschenberg’s intent – was a symbolic cancellation of the identity of one of modernism’s seminal figures. Asha Zero – who has cancelled out his own identity – evokes Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning, albeit unintentionally, in the title of his 2005 painting, erase the heart of the question. But what makes Rauschenberg’s gesture particularly relevant to this discussion is that it has been characterized as the ‘simultaneous unmaking of one work and the creation of another.’2 Asha Zero achieves the same result, but very unlike Rauschenberg, does it through illusionism. When in 2000, Asha Zero set out to make a Duchampian gesture by creating a painting that would fool the viewer into thinking it was a collage, he turned to illusionism. In so doing, he rather unintentionally stepped squarely into the tradition of trompe l’oeil. Trompe l’oeil (to fool the eye) refers to a work of art so realistic, the viewer is deceived into believing the art is actually that which it represents. Considered to have originated in 5th century BCE Greece, trompe l’oeil has been described as ‘both witty and serious …[and] a game artists play with spectators to raise questions about the nature of art and perception.’3 One of its basic operatives – key to understanding the oeuvre of Asha Zero – is that trompe l’oeil necessarily

involves deception followed by revelation. Ironically, if the trompe l’oeil artist is too proficient, the revelation may never occur. There are those, for example, who never discover that Asha Zero’s ‘collages’ are actually paintings. He tells of an acquaintance who condescendingly inquired of a friend if Asha Zero was still making ‘those collages’. “They are paintings,” the friend replied. The conversation persisted until the friend finally succeeded in explaining that all the components in Asha Zero’s works are actually painted.4 For Asha Zero – unlike the self-proclaimed trompe l’oeil painters whose websites are scattered throughout the internet – trompe l’oeil is not an end unto itself, but rather a device he uses to achieve more philosophical ends. He embraces illusionism to reverse the very nature of collage, which according to the noted critic, Calvin Tomkins, enabled artists ‘to incorporate reality into art without imitating it.’ Tomkins explains that, ‘For the modern artist who rejected illusionism, who wanted his creations to be ‘real’ objects instead of imitations of the real, it was a marvellous tool.’5 Conversely the paintings of Asha Zero seem ‘to incorporate reality without imitating it’, when in effect they are intentional imitations of reality. More than anything else, the significance of the paintings of Asha Zero is their ability to effect this ironic reversal. A discussion of this association with trompe l’oeil has yet to find its way into the fascinating body of literature that has been building up around Asha Zero. The young critics and writers who follow his work prefer a new rhetoric – describing his paintings not as trompe l’oeil, but rather as ‘facsimiles’, ‘interactive, transmedia processes’, and ‘documents of an information age that is numbed by the schizophrenic sensory experience of city life.’6 Focusing on his imagery as a metaphor for the ‘semicommunication’ of the new millennium, the current discussion of Asha Zero’s work explores his choice of fragmented material as reflective of both the way we communicate and our increasing ineptitude to engage one another. And indeed Asha Zero points out that ‘the whole feel’ of his work is ‘a product of the PC, cell phone text and camera, [and] flash animation ‘culture’, (if we can call it that)’ 7 The layered scraps of banal images he intentionally selects to form his paintings are analogous to the layers of virtual scraps with which we construct our day-to-day lives.

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Historically, the possibilities of collage were expanded by Robert Rauschenberg who aggressively pushed its boundaries. For Rauschenberg, collage was ‘another means to reproduce the non-order that characterized the life he saw around him.’8 Half a century later Asha Zero creates faux collages in response to the impersonal and anonymous world created by the ‘pseudoorder’ of the information-based technologicalsociety that he sees around him.

This response is not limited to only the faux collages. An important aspect of Asha Zero’s oeuvre is also the cancellation of his own name. Described as ‘an artist of shifting identity,’9 Asha’s Zero’s real name remains unknown. More than merely a pseudonym or nom de plume, ‘Asha Zero’ is an alter-ego, which is not unusual within the history of art. What is unusual is that, unlike the alter-egos of Duchamp and Max Ernst, there is no known identity to which we can connect up Asha Zero. Even Shane de Lange who has written extensively on Asha Zero says that he has known the artist for years and still doesn’t know his true identity.10 A further comment on our techno-society, this posture of anonymity evokes the alter-egos, aliases, and ‘nicknames’ of spammers and scammers and the virtual identities that define internet ‘culture’. It is also suggestive of the ‘tags’ used in graffiti, yet another important influence for Asha Zero. Shane de Lange poetically explains how the anonymity of this work is a metaphor for the nature of today’s urban life-style: This is a schizophrenic space that Zero relates to in an equally schizophrenic fashion through his use of various guises. He plays with various aliases in an attempt to negate his own identity, choosing anonymity over autonomy. Zero delivers a perspective of a downloaded reality in the midst of a smoldering consumerist society which has a special affinity to the techno-organic space of the city, where the individual merely becomes a cipher in a buzz of cellular automata. Spectacular culture has saturated the globe in a haze of electronic media that brings traditional modernist notions of identity into question.11

This play of guises forms a developing mythology, which like his painting is grounded in ‘a pastiche matrix based on erasure and entropy.’12 Developing around the early exhibitions, the mythology includes three additional personas who, with Asha Zero, make up two ‘collectives’ – Roadkillvisiontoiletries and Mobilediscoetcetera. ‘Aliases’ of Asha Zero,13 they are Broop Nook, Whatsnibble, and appropriately, Eraser Clench. De Lange has called them posteregos’,14 an ironic reference to advertising’s ubiquitous poster-boys and poster-girls – the ‘im-posters’ and egos-imposters who charge the twenty-first century way-of-life with their own brand of anonymity. Currently more rhetorical than anything else, the Asha Zero mythology of aliases is a work-in-progress that stands as a conceptual component to interface with the more tangible aspects of his painting. The aliases of Asha Zero read seamlessly among those of anonymous spammers like Seven muir, random Kristoffersen, Memphis Yagi, Most Exclusive, heshel jean-cha, and Wladmir flock. Scores of e-mails arrive daily from them and other spammers on such subjects as Interesting Item Number: U7727z,

Quotations

casino_bonus, Yougotta have this, and Re: (no subject). In many respects Asha Zero is just as virtual as they are – certainly just as anonymous. Like them, no one knows his true identity. It was cancelled out in 1999 when Asha Zero was born on a skateboard somewhere near the Johannesburg airport. Little wonder that cancellation is at the very crux of the art of Asha Zero.

What do you enjoy most about working in collage? Well… I don’t work in collage, I work with the idea of collage. I’m interested in the methods of sampling and translation and, I suppose, re-interpretation of found material. These images are paintings, paintings made to resemble collages. Printed, pixelated, highly mediated, mass media images are translated into the medium of acrylic paint. I reckon I enjoy the “building blocks” nature of collage. It’s sort of like Dadaist lego.

1 Calvin Tomkins, Off the wall, Robert Rauschenberg and the art world of our time (New York: Penguin, 1983:163) 2 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ‘Robert Rauschenberg Erased De Kooning drawing 1953,’ Making sense of Modern Art, www.sfmoma.org/msoma/artworks/93.html

Who or what influences your work? I guess a strong influence has to be popular culture. ... More specifically, popular culture as presented by the media, like magazines or billboards and street advertising, album covers, gig posters etc. Then all of this stuff is influenced by art school training, electronic music and urban street culture. I was involved in skateboarding for many years.

3 National Gallery of Art (Washington), Deception and iIllusion: Five centuries of trompe l’oeil painting, www.nga.gov/press/2002/exhibitions/deceptions/walltxt.htm 4 As related to the author during an interview with the artist, November 23, 2007 5 Tomkins (1983:87)

If your work was transferred into music, what would it sound like? It would probably be something like “Plaid”, maybe a little bit of “Autechre” or Beck’s “Odelay”

6 Shane de Lange, ‘Asha Zero,’ SAarts emerging, (September 14, 2006) www.saartsemerging.org/2006_09_01_archive.html 7 A s h a Z e r o , q u o t e d f r o m a n e - m a i l t o t h e a u t h o r (November 28, 2007)

interview with Asha Zero: http://revolution-daily.com/asha-zero-interview/

8 Tomkins (1983:87) 9 Melvyn Minnaar, ‘Exhibition: Collages, proof that small can be smart,’ Tonight, Cape Times,(November 23, 2006) www.tonight.co.zaindex.php?fSectionId=356&fArticleId=3558035

“Asha Zero’s work is not as it first appears to be. At first glance it is very easy to believe that the artist has created a collage or photo montage, however on closer inspection it becomes apparent that his work is formed from a technique of laborious handpainting.

10 De Lange (September 2006) 11 Shane de Lange, ‘Lost in the post,’ Shane de Lange, http://nilfunct.blogspot.com/2006/11/lost-in-post.html 12 D e L a n g e , ‘ O n c e f a m o u s d e a d a r t i s t s , ’ A s h a Z e r o (Map – South Africa, 2006) 13 De Lange, ‘Lost in the post’

Zero’s oeuvre recalls dilapidated street billboards, layered with truncated images and fragmented human features stripped from their original context, suggesting a fascination with fragmented identitiesZero is after all the artist’s pseudonym- and serving as a comment on the visual saturation prevalent in public spaces.”

14 The term ‘poster-egos’, appears in the unpublished version of this essay, ‘Once famous dead artists’ by Shane de Lange. The published version, ‘Oncefamousdeadartists’ uses ‘flattened and pixilated egos’ instead of ‘poster egos’. See Shane de Lange, ‘Oncefamousdeadartists and http://www.mapzar.org/artists/asha_zero.asp

http://bonhams.com/auctions/16484/lot/83/

Resumé

ASHA ZERO ( 1975 - )

Qualifications

National Diploma (Fine Art) Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) Majors: Drawing, Printmaking, Photography

Solo Exhibitions 2004 2008 2009 2011 2012

Winner in Hawaii, OUTLET, TUT, Pretoria, South Africa say for me, 34 Long Fine Art, Cape Town, South Africa macro soda text hits, Solo Exhibition 34 Long Fine Art, Cape Town, South Africa micro cluster picnic, Solo Exhibition Rooke Gallery, Johannesburg numberrs, Solo Exhibition - Pertwee, Anderson & Gold, 15 Bateman Street, London, UK

Group Exhibitions 2004

Far and wide,curated by Gordon Froud, Absa Towers, Johannesburg

2006 Beeldspraak, project curated by Gordon Froud and Chris Diedericks includes The imposter, University of Johannesburg The collage show, curated by Michael Taylor,Whatiftheworld, Woodstock, Cape Town 2007

Twogether , 34LONG FINE ART, Long Street, Cape Town FACE, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town REVEAL, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town AWAY, MAP ZAR, Richmond, Northern Cape

2008

REAL IS ME 08, Art fair, Amsterdam, Netherlands Face 08, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town Scope Art Fair, London White Noise, Black Rat Press, London FOUR, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town URBAN ART, Bonhams, London

2009

London Art Fair, UK Decade: Highlights from 10 years of Collecting for the Sanlam Art Collection, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth, George, Durban Dada South?, South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa Group 09, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town

2010

COOLSTUFF, 34FineArt, Cape Town, South Africa NEW, 34FineArt, Cape Town, South Africa

2011

THEN : NOW, 34FineArt, Cape Town, South Africa SALON / locale, Bertram House Museum, Cape Town Modern Art Projects (MAP), University of Johannesburg Art Gallery ARTMONACO’11, Salon d’Art Contemporian | Côte d’Azur, Monaco ADDICTION, a collaboration - Open Books exhibition, iART Gallery/BLANK Projects, Cape Town ENSEMBLE, 34FineArt, Cape Town Urban Art Show, Belgrave St Ives Modern and Contemporary Art, UK Joburg ArtFair, Rooke Gallery, Johannesburg

2012 Relate, 34FineArt, Cape Town, South Africa New Arrivals, 34FineArt, Cape Town, South Africa Delft project, Joburg ArtFair, Rooke Gallery, Johannesburg

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Publications

· Zero defies definition: artist plays with issues of identity and reality Pretoria News, 26 October 2004 · Three artists and some heat Pretoria News, 24 November 2005 · Small can be smart Cape Times, 23 November 2006 ( The collage show ) · Say for me, Exhibition Catalogue ISBN 978-0-620-40475-4 2008, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town · macro soda text hits, Exhibition Catalogue ISBN 978-0-620-44699-0 2009, 34 LONG FINE ART, Cape Town · Graphic manifesto by Asha Zero : A Look Away, Issue 14 Quarter 1 2010 · Micro Cluster Picnic, Exhibition Catalogue text by Shane de Lange 2011, Rooke Gallery, Johannesburg · numberrs, Exhibition Catalogue ISBN 978-0-620-54286-9 2012, 34FineArt, Cape town · ashazero.co.za/news.htm - online media links

skarzzikang 2010 acrylic on board 40 x 30cm | 15.7 x 11.8"

Stripper 2006 acrylic on board in artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s frame 43 x 32cm | 16.9 x 12.6"

Disco 2003 acrylic on T-Shirt

a selection of work: 2010 - 1996

module picnic 2009 acrylic on board 15 x 15cm | 5.9 x 5.9"

mobile disco etcetera all star number 5 2006 acrylic on board 27 x 17cm | 10.6 x 6.7"

Muscle Hugger 2002 acrylic on board in artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s frame 60 x 75cm | 23.6 x 29.5"

Untitled 2000 acrylic on board in artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s frame 44 x 44cm | 17.3 x 17.3"

Untitled 2001 acrylic on board in artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s frame 50 x 45cm | 19.7 x 17.7"

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Say hello to the getalang gong 2001 acrylic on canvas 35.5 x 25cm | 14 x 9.8"

Untitled 1996 mixed media on paper (detail)