M.O.L 30 - SPOOKY Ashraf Jamal Column

M.O.L 30 SPOOKY

Ashraf Jamal

True to form, Roger Ballen’s contribution to the Venice Biennale was dark and spooky. Titled ‘Theatre of Apparitions’, it was inspired by drawings on the window of a South African women’s prison. In effect, illuminated images are projections of an incarcerated prisoner’s inner life, because, of course, no matter how policed we are, we possess worlds which no panoptic system can contain.

We believe, after Freud and Lacan, that our unconscious realm too can be mapped, that no territory exists which cannot be monitored, controlled, monetised. Psychographics plays an important role in the manipulation of our desires, which, digitally, are converted into likes. This is because desire too has become a commodity. For Ballen, however, life cannot be commodified. No system can contain us. The unconscious will forever remain the uncharted final frontier.

Ballen’s ‘Theatre of Apparitions’ is, as the title suggests, a ghosting. Monochromatic, a void infused with light, Ballen’s illumined boxes – fenestrated, suggesting windows – remind us that no attempt to contain the world – how we see and frame it – can control the fathomless depths of being – our hungers, yearnings, fears, doubts, hopes, appeals. We are, by nature, creatures that crave. A ‘hungry ghost’ inhabits us, devours us, leaves us forever unfulfilled and unresolved. This is for the good, especially now that we have re-entered a bleak mid-winter – a time of bigotry and hate, worse, nihilism.

Ballen has always understood what we proverbially dub ‘the dark side’. However, he has been persistently misunderstood because of this assignation. In his monumental book, Ballenesque, he reflects on his process and journey as an artist. The emotion he triggers is ‘pathos’, ‘a quality that causes people to feel sympathy and sadness. It evokes a deeply felt pain, and is an inherent part of the human condition; we all know we will eventually die. To reveal this emotion in a photograph is to get to the core of our existence’.

This understanding is not merely macabre, or grotesque, two reductive aspersions typically directed at Ballen’s work. Rather, the artist reminds us of the inescapability of death, and as such our mortality. He is not interested in parading human fallibility, but projecting states as real as they are otherworldly, the better to assert the fact that we are not reducible to, or solely defined by, our mortal coil. Indeed, notes Ballen, ‘It has become apparent to me that all forms of life have a unique spirit. If we become a spirit after our short stint on earth, then it is not inconceivable that everything that has ever lived will become an apparition. The universe is a very big place, so there should be room for all’.

This is a wonderfully generous view of our fallen state. That Ballen returns, here, to the ‘apparition’, must surely help us to understand his achievement at the Venice Biennale – a vision of an afterlife, as afflicted as it is benign. It is the uniqueness of being that Ballen celebrates – no one is generic, or typically typecast, despite the fact that today we unscrupulously choose to do so – instead, in Ballen’s world we each possess our profound singularity, a singular beauty and peculiar demons. After all, there should ‘be room for all’ in this world and the next.

That said, Ballen is no believer in God, in any orthodox religious system. His sights are wholly focussed on the underworld within this world, the unconscious that undergirds the conscious realm. If his photographs possess an uncanny, often eerie, unsettlement, it is because they force the viewer to reconsider what is seen and known and presumed to be the case. Ballen disrupts a conventional optic, forcing us to understand the surreal within the purportedly ‘Real’. Because, of course, ‘Reality’ is a construct, and, as such, can be psycho-graphically manipulated – which it is, most strikingly in South Africa in 2014, when the now disgraced and defunct company, Bell Pottinger, chose to shift public awareness away from governmental corruption by introducing the counter-view – White Monopoly Capital – which subsequently would become a viral rallying call that would destroy our nascent democracy.

My point? That we are parasited at every turn, that opinions are never innocent, that life is profoundly complex, and that art’s great vocation is to express this complexity.

This is Ballen’s vocation. His works occupy ‘a visionary, alogical, and amoral universe where good and evil exist side by side without excluding each other. Beauty does not correspond to the former, nor ugliness necessarily to the latter. It is a place where even beauty and ugliness are still – or even now – blurred together’. It is the coexistence of benign and malevolent worlds which, for Ballen, we cannot ignore. The enormity of his gift to South Africa – splendidly showcased at the Venice Biennale’s South African Pavilion – is that of someone who has deeply understood our historical, political, and all importantly, psychic perversity.

I say this with due diligence – South Africa is a sick country, sick in heart, sick in mind. What Ballen offers, by way of a response, is a generous yet unflinching gaze. He is no voyeur, though many, at odds with his fascination with aberration, fail to recognise that his photographic eye is unwaveringly focused on the distortions we hide away. It is an eye trained against our misbegotten celebration of a democracy which, at the very start, was destined to be abused. That Ballen recognises that good and evil occupy the same bandwidth, should surely alert his audience to a radical ambivalence built into the photographs. But what is especially remarkable is that Ballen refuses to live wholly within an inescapable ambivalence – the root of our perversity, our immorality – but seeks to champion ‘a visionary, alogical, and amoral universe’.

This last axiom defines the artist. An outsider, he is best equipped to reveal our rank innards. His ‘Theatre of Apparitions’ is his more enigmatic, obtuse, and haunting approach. Perhaps because Ballen, in an international forum, has chosen a more broadly applicable aesthetic and vision. After all, we are all haunted, everywhere. That we have no name for our inner suffering and dread, accounts for why we cannot wholly know ourselves – why we are fundamentally, existentially, estranged from ourselves. Therein lies Ballen’s ‘pathos’, therein human suffering, which, in the hands of an artist who is unafraid, can prove a strychnine consolation – but a consolation all the same. Spooky, his work certainly is, but it is kind too, and tender, and soulful, and oddly pure, despite its corrupted and contaminated core.