GORDON CLARK The Outcome of Turner Adams
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This catalogue is published on occasion of the exhibition at Commune.1 Gordon Clark The Outcome ofTurner Adams 31 January – 28 February 2013 Commune.1 64 Wale Street, Cape Town, 8001 t: 021 423 5600 e: info@commune1.com w: www.commune1.com © 2013, Commune.1 and the artist. No part of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the authors and the gallery. Printed on Matt Art Typeset in TradeGothic
DON’T (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 159cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Gordon Clark The Outcome of Turner Adams 31 January – 28 February 2013
an altar boy with aspirations of becoming a priest
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“And the boy becomes a man, and the man carries two half-worlds within him; representing both, he is neither. He is stark; his story etched with blatant fury; emblazoned and unmask-able.�
MISSTER, TAKE MY PIT-TURE
Natasha Norman
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A friend and I like to walk the Muizenberg promenade and beach on New Year’s Day. He, armed with an impressive-looking digital camera snaps away at the moments of human delight, childhood abandon and colourful chaos that so typifies the scene. We skate (illegally) along the modernist divide between beach and recreational lawn where the ‘tsotsies’ and fashionable adolescents hang out; the boys with their arms draped over their beautiful girlfriends, flashing toothless grins [1] at one another. A chorus of “Misster take my pit-ture” breaks out and my friend performs the missing link to their afternoon of fashionable ambling: the photograph. I have often walked the New Year’s Day beach and it never ceases to amaze me how eager that young generation of Cape Flats dwellers are to have their picture taken. Rarely do they insist on seeing the digital photographic preview. Most of the time it is the posing and the satisfying click of hypothetical digital shutter that is all they require. “Portrait photography has three key agencies”, I tell my first year students, “the agency of the subject as the content of the image, the agency of the photographer’s relationship to the subject and the agency inscribed by that image’s consumption in a contemporary artworld.” The latter point alludes to the co-creative labour of late-Capitalist society [2].
Gordon Clark recounts his meeting of Turner Adams at a gang peace rally by way of introduction through Ernie Lastig Solomon. Soloman is a former gang boss with whom Clark had just completed making a movie about life growing up in the Cape Flats. Clark says he was initially struck by Turner’s physical appearance his tattooed face and body and secondly by his openness to sharing a childhood story: of singing in the church choir for six years with aspirations of becoming a priest. Turner was born in an area known as District Six, a large plot of land situated at the foot of Table Mountain that was bulldozed to the ground during the apartheid era in accordance with the Group Areas act. With the destruction of his neighbourhood, Turner’s family and friends were forcibly moved out of District Six and splintered off into different locations - some friends were never seen again. This early trauma had a big impact on Turner’s life, his career of crime and prison life. At the time that Clark met Turner in 2012, he was re-entering society after 24 years in prison. Clark recalls that, “In conversation I mentioned that I would be interested in collaborating with him, in making images about his life. This idea was met with great enthusiasm.” This enthusiasm in being photographed reminded me of the young gangster imitators on the Muizenberg promenade. What is the New Year’s Day youths’ need to be photographed, I ask myself? An answer emerges: a desire to be seen.
I suspect that these young men and women on the Muizenberg Promenade understand more fully than do I, the co-creative need to be imaged in order to exist in a society defined by the consumption of pictures [3]. And particularly to be imaged in a South African context whose history denied the right to a self-proclaimed or self-performed visual identity in the official state arena [4]. The trauma of a community ripped from their ancestral homes by a racist ideology made law, is remembered and lived out daily by each new generation. Indeed, the spaces or memes (elements of a system of behaviour passed on by imitation [5]) that define a young Cape Flats dweller’s reality was established by a violent act of abandonment and destitution by a governing law. It does not seem that irrational then that a model of living against that law has taken hold in that community: to adapt and struggle in defiance of a system both racial and economic that marginalised and abused their existence. To be a gangster is to seek identity in a space outside that historic law. To belong. And that urgency to belong becomes a life or death sentence when they enter the prison system to become a number. Turner Adams was a boy of fifteen when he first entered the South African prison system. A proliferation of tattoos scaring his whole body are testimony to the following 24 years of violence that was inflicted upon his person and that he in turn inflicted upon others. A fellow inmate, Erefaan Jacobs explains in the 2001 BBC documentary by Clifford Bestall that he felt nothing in tattooing his face because he did not believe he would ever have a life outside of prison again.
The Numbers Gangs is a particular system of prison gangs unique to South Africa made up of the 26s, 27s and 28s. Each order is described by a secret lore of codes defining honour, respect, rank, duty and authority. Towards the end of the apartheid era in South Africa, Pollsmoor prison (the most infamous centre of the Numbers Gangs) was in a state of anarchy. The Numbers Gangs took advantage of this and controlled the prison through violence, murder and terror such that the wardens were too afraid to be among the prisoners [6]. Recently, through the efforts of UCT’s Centre for Conflict Resolution and other initiatives, attempts to reconcile and rehabilitate the inmates of Pollsmoor has led to a dramatic decline in the number of assaults within the prison [7]. However, the influence of the Numbers Gangs has succeeded in spreading beyond the prison walls. “Prisons are not a closed system; while offenders are incarcerated in prisons, most are eventually released. Therefore, what happens to prisoners inside prison has a direct impact on the community,” notes the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Conflict Resolution, an institution that runs the Prisons Transformation Project. [8] I WILL BE WILLING TO DIE FOR THE NEXT GENERATION, reads one of Turner’s tattoos, markings that he describes as a roadmap to his life [9]. Prior to his release from Pollsmoor Turner participated in Chris Malgas’s rehabilitation workshops and in my discussions with Clark it is clear that Turner is greatly concerned about the future of the children in his old neighbourhood and about the cycle of violence that can change the
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fate of a boy like himself. He found himself raping and hurting just as he was raped and hurt [10]. Subjected to a gang code of the strictest secrecy for so many years, it appears that for Turner the ability to be represented in Clark’s images is an opportunity for him to confront the past outside of that secrecy.
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I have spoken with Gordon Clark at length about his process of collaborating with Turner. He remarks, “In the case of Turner Adams I am collaborating with a real person not an actor. His performance is based on memories of events going back 24 years that impacted his life. The motivation for the performance has a slightly different foundation to a normally acted out scenario, however you are still witnessing the results of a performance.” A performance that was very much determined by Clark’s moment to moment engagement with Turner. After collecting Turner from his home in Lavender Hill each morning, Clark would spend the time in the car assessing Turner’s mood and starting a discussion about where to shoot for the day. Clark has worked in a similar way in the past with the late painter, Leon Botha in a series titled Who am I? – Transgressions. Clark is acutely aware of the history of exploitative photography in South Africa under the guise of the ethnographic or anthropological pursuit of the ‘Other’ from behind the lens. Through his previous photographic collaborations he has sought to confront this photographic history head-on in an attempt to redetermine the role of the documentary photograph. As a result, Clark’s images have become defined
by a narrative constructed in close discussion between photographer and subject with particular resonances created through the final depiction of person, place and objects in the image. A particular example of this can be seen in Back to School (2012). Turner is depicted at a bus stop in the now grassland area of District Six with the newer city centre developments visible behind him. He holds the hand of a young schoolboy who looks up at him with a mixture of awe and pity. A potential comment on misspent youth or the unwanted citizen is brutally evoked in the abortion posters on the dustbin and bus shelter. The image is a complex evocation of past and future. A revisiting of Turner’s past in a neighbourhood destroyed by a racial law: the protégé, that next generation Turner is “willing to die for,” and himself as the product of a particular historical time and space. Clark recognises that his choice to work with Turner was motivated by the challenge that Turner presented to him as a person. Both men shared the childhood experience of rebelling against a system that was forced upon them and subsequently both were subject to a correctional facility between the ages of 12 and 14 that left an impression of isolation and wanting to belong on both of them. Subsequent to this shared experience they were exposed to vastly different experiences determined by their differing race and the opportunities afforded by that fact in an apartheid system. Clark as a white South African was exposed to numerous positive role models, Turner as a coloured South
African had substantially more limited options. At the onset of the project, Clark recognised what he calls a ‘synergy’ between them based on their dialogue during a test shoot that convinced him the relationship between him as photographer and Turner as subject would be one of collaboration. Clark recalls that, “Turner was clear on how he wanted to present himself against the background of his past. For some photographs he would be naked and others not depending on what we were trying to communicate through the construction of the image. From a technical aspect I chose to use a 4x5 film camera so as to achieve the optimum detail required to read his tattoos and how they related to a specific composition.” [11] In Memos of Old Playground the incredible degree of detail in the texture of the cut wood, the burnt pine needles the colour of Turner’s hair and clearly visible tattoos enable the work to become a marked commentary on the degree to which an individual’s embodied experience of the social and physical world shapes their psyches. For Turner, his historic sites of memory are consistently defined by a deliberate destruction by governing forces. In a recent symposium held at the Braunschweig University of Arts in Germany, South African born artist Candice Breitz commented on working with people in the production of an artwork as a question around the nature of participation in making artworks. She recognises in her own practise that as individuals we exist in a ready-made world, that the self is a morphing entity in response to external
influences that portraiture is able to preserve, to make manifest in a platform created by the artist. It is the way this platform is used by participants that is perhaps the moment of a subject’s selfdetermination [12]. Clark’s choice of a non-digital, medium format photograph for this series defines a particular relationship between Turner and the ‘memory locations’ he chose to be represented in. The longer exposure times of the photograph engender a more static portrayal that offers, what Rael Salley has observed in the work of Jared Thorne, a distance of agency. Rather than being rendered vulnerable by expressions of a fleeting nature, the sitter is given the space to “return the gaze from a position of agency.” [13] The resulting photographs confront a viewer with the minute details of Turner’s body and its relationship to the symbolically chosen location. All the locations in the shoots are ones that Turner had occupied at one time or another prior to his incarceration. “Misster take my pit-ture.” Perhaps participation is not emancipation. This desire to be imaged and consumed by an artworld is arguably a further subjugation of Turner to the currency of representation in our economy. Or perhaps this series of portraits images a society in obscurity through the agency of one subject, the new-found agency of Turner Adams. Turner’s testimony is one that addresses the cycle of violent social belonging in his community. Gordon Clark articulates this through a collaborative art
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process that seeks to challenge the violence of representation [14] inherent in a documentary photography tradition. Natasha Norman is an artist and writer who currently lectures on contract in the Visual and Art History department at Rhodes University and University of Cape Town. She completed her MFA at the University of Cape Town in 2011.
Footnotes:
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[1] Cultural habit of having front teeth removed. See this article by Fran Blandy in the October 2009 Telegraph titled ‘Cape Town’s passion gap: sexual myth or fashion victimhood?’ (online) http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/6268127/ Cape-Towns-passion-gap-sexual-myth-or-fashionvictimhood.html [Accessed 8 May 2013]. [2] This is the idea that Capitalist consumers are now participating in the creation of content and experiences for economic consumption. The debate here is whether this participation in content creation is emancipatory or the ultimate subjugation. See John Banks’s 2013 article ‘Cocreative Labour’ Journal of Cultural Studies (online) http://ics.sagepub.com/content/12/5/419.abstract [Accessed 9 May 2013]. [3] The scopic drive in contemporary society is closely linked to capitalist consumerism as
identified by theorists Guy de Bord from the international Situationist’s Movement, Jean Baudrillard and to a certain extent in Marxist writings. [4] A study of Colouredness as an identity is explored in Mohamed Adhikari’s 2005 Not white enough, not black enough: racial identity in the South African Coloured community. Athens: Ohio University Press/ Cape Town: Doubel Storey Books. [5] This idea is referenced from Michael Smorenburg’s 2013 essay The Outcome of Turner Adams via Memes that was printed in the catalogue for the exhibition at Commune 1 Gallery in Cape Town, 31 January – 28 February 2013. [6] Alan Little’s BBC documentary Killer’s Don’t Cry directed by Clifford Bestall and screened in 2001.
[7] Centre for Conflict Resolution. 2001. The Prisons Transformation Project: an overview. (online) http://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/archive/ prisonproject/overview.html [Accessed 09 April 2013] [8] Ibid.
something that Gordon Clark clearly addresses in his collaborative process with Turner Adams as the subject of his images. See Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. 1989. Representing violence, or “how the west was won”. The Violence of Representation: Literature and the history of violence. Ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. London: Routledge. 1-26.
[9] In conversation with the artist Gordon Clark (2013). IMAGES [10] Turner admits this in a 2008 Frontline World documentary South Africa: Inside the Cycle of Rape reported by Elena Ghanotakis.
New Years Day 2012 at Muizenberg. Photographer Alistair MacRobert.
[11] Ibid.
Back to School. 2012. Gordon Clark.
[12] Salley, Rael. 2013. ‘I who speak here am.’ Art South Africa vol 11 issue 3 (online) http://www. artsouthafrica.com/?article=965 [Accessed 05 April 2013]
Memos of Old Playground. 2012. Gordon Clark.
[13] Personal notes from attending the Between the Lines Symposium North, Braunschweig, Germany. Website: www.betweenlines.co.za. [14] Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (1989) recognise that violence is located at different places in cultural production, that symbolic practices enable one group to achieve a form of dominance at any given place or moment in time. The symbolic practices of representation are here inferred to have an inherent violence in the fact that a subject is dominated by an authoring agent. As I have discussed, this is
THE OUTCOME OF TURNER ADAMS VIA MEMES Michael Smorenburg
“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
This study reveals infectious ideas, memes, and their outcome on one man and his community under their influence.
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Memes are the elements of a culture or system of behavior that is passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, such as imitation via fashion, colloquialisms and other aspects of culture. Through these memes, Clark seeks to put aside all of the understood political, economic, racial and other bewildering ‘noise’ related to his subject; electing to go to the nub and uproot the drivers of what holds his subject in their grip. Many artists have explored similar themes of despair, cruel fate, and hand wringing askance for direction but most approach from a philosophical, cultural, or political stance. However, a few have sought to make sense of their subject through a science. This thesis looks to the granular elements of culture that have Clark’s subject in its grip; it ranges far and wide in its probing to find the
shackles and keys that hold us fast. Clark first introduces us to young Turner Adams through the lens of an unknown photographer 40 years past. The angelic boy stares intelligently back at us holding that neat respectful silence so typical of the sepia-drenched children snaps of the late 60s. The boy’s spirit is revealed in that simple dog-eared flimsy; a spry wide-eyed cherub with unmarked skin radiating health and vitality. In the image it is clear he was posed by a doting parent who managed to capture and keep the promise he represented. This image offers a fortuitous point of departure to study the outcome of the man who would face so much trial in the intervening years. In his study of Turner, Clark reveals those granular influencers that might equally have steered any of our lives were we thrust into his circumstances, in the concept of ‘memes’, the cultural equivalent of genes (pronounced in the same manner). At first sight, an understandable chorus goes up from those watchful for exploitation of the maligned: “Why don’t you leave him alone?” The short answer is – no, he does not want to be left alone. Clark’s own formative years were superficially a reflection of Turner’s, made up of a few good influences; but mostly negatives like derelicts, drug taking, alcohol. But critically, where Turner was born of an established community and into a mixing bowl of seething frustration and destitution, pure luck moved Clark a stone’s throw from
Johannesburg’s Hillbrow to neighbouring Norwood. Turner’s life has been dominated by prison and gang life. Of course - he too has a family, children, siblings, parents and friends – people who deeply fear for him, and whom he equally wants to protect. The path Turner has walked continues to cause a tangle of conflicts within him – as he earnestly yearns to break the cycle he finds himself in. Yet circumstance always draw him back to it. Both young men, Turner and Clark, of similar critical pubescent age and of an era, met destinies that are now poles apart. Turner escaped the bedlam of tenement flats to prowl the streets for survival, while Clark gained a new mentor at a critical age who changed his life by demanding more of him. Fate and fortune drove him abroad, onto Hollywood, where his “African-ness” gave him status and unusual opportunities flowed. These allowed Clark to metamorphosize in anonymity, until virtually unrestricted travel compelled him to delve into every corner and culture of the world. Turner’s outcome is very different. At first glance a watcher would stereotype him as terror incarnate. Just that appearance alone ensures his excommunication from the economy, a state where prison is infinitely more familiar and a place where he wears the rank of a man. Clark is cognizant that his own success in America very much depended on him having a clean slate, with no peer group to draw him back to bad habits. Turner, like a man forever welded into the masked-ball or fancy-dress of his incarceration,
with every inch of visible skin etched with clearly jail originated chop; can never become ‘out of character’. The chances of his community accepting him are fleetingly limited; while those very communities are rife with habituation and old temptation. The diversity of human circumstance, personality, and experience, means that no single individual or locale can represent or epitomize a whole group. In this regard, the Cape Coloured community of Cape Town is as diverse as any other group on the planet – with its heroes, villains, paupers and geniuses. But, there is a place, an epicenter one might say, where circumstance has created a distinct sub-culture – that is the quintessence of the Cape Flats; an area roughly between the Table Mountain Peninsula and Africa’s hinterland on the one side and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans on the other. In it you will find people of the sea. Turner’s bloodline heralds from every seagoing nation: the love-children of subsistence ocean harvesters and Khoi-Khoi peoples, both huntergatherers who were originally inhabitants of the land on which they merely dwell as tenants today. It is the ancient culture to which many are now seeking to attach and reinstate their identity, using the vehicle of revived ritual conceived to draw the young away from the gang lifestyle. The seed of the Cape Flats germinated on different ground than its people are found today. Just off the main city centre of Cape Town there stands a bald hill where unkempt waist-high grasses partially
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obscure the foundational ruins of an abandoned suburb. Perhaps through cruel irony, this nonexisting suburb might well be the only in the world known as a number – 6 – District Six. And so it also came to pass that so many of the suburb’s sons became a number too. A number instead of a name within the penal system of the nation, and a number by default and for self preservation within the infamous number gangs of the South African Correctional Services. The axis of “the number”, a collective-noun for the three gangs it encompasses: The 26’s, The 27’s, and The 28’s, pivots on Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison, a stone’s throw from the Cape Flats and with its tentacles reaching out to all other facilities. 16
It is a home-from-home for its inmates; it is a place where brothers link their bonds. In their ageing wisdom, ex-convicts are heard to observe that the institution of The Number is a Trojan, a malware of mind and deed, a ‘gift’ that has borne nothing but bitter fruit and a gruesome harvest. The practical, biblical, and political meanings and interpretation of the sins are well known to us all, and need no expansion. But there is an emerging new scientific angle that may well be more searching; its consequences amplifying the pernicious and pressing social ill at hand. This aspect manifests in both the literal DNA ‘hardware’ of the populations affected, and of course in the memetic, or ‘brain software’, aspects of the culture, something we’ll look at more closely later.
Let us first consider the more nuts-and-bolts DNA aspects, as it provides an analogy to the theme at hand. The ‘more advanced’ mammals, and particularly humans, are constituted by more than our physical bodies. We are equally and increasingly on an evolutionary scale; the product of our own perceptions. We are deeply influenced by our environments and by what we see and are exposed to, to the extent that an analogue to the gene is clearly at play; it is called the meme. In Turner’s case the indelible expression of memes left to themselves during endless hours incarcerated with nothing to otherwise occupy the mind (as Clark reveals in most of his images) have corroded themselves across his body in prison graffiti. It is an outward corrosion, as visible as rust slowly etching its destructive signature across a junkyard. It is the uniform that can never be removed and the rank of the individual cuffing him to the system. It is the micro-revelation of the Trojan – an ‘incentive trap’ of status always drawing on him like some heavy unseen gravity – forever sucking him deeper into the Numbers, into the scheme that intends for its initiates to live out a lifelong devotion. To understand the potent explanation (via memes) of Clark’s study, a short deviation is required. This well understood physical process of viral infection is an analogy for what perpetuates Turner’s life-path: parasitic ideas, not physical germs, hijacking the brain – ideas that many literally die for – evidenced by the tattoo across his stomach announcing “Willing to die for the next generation”, even though dying, like coughing and sneezing, is
not particularly in the personal best interests of Turner. The concepts of freedom, justice, truth, religion, patriotism and, of course, gangsterism, are all toxic infectious ideas that do not necessarily promote the best interests of the individual, yet there’s something in them that hook all too many of us. But, we must burrow even deeper to uncover the fundamentals at play. What is a gang if it is not an idea, an acceptance, a lifestyle and adherence to an authority? Put another way, for a gang to grow gangsters they don’t personally need to breed children-gangsters; gangsterism is not genetic, it is memetic. Every day, hungry children on the street run errands for the gang bosses, earning morsels as pay. This is their apprenticeship and by their late teens they expect to ‘graduate’ into the prison system. And so it is that, each day, our prisons receive ample new and well-prepared inmates with limited gang affiliations. But, years later, the gangster meme emerges from prison fully metastasized into a new body, skin stamped and labeled with gang writing, with gang attitude, with gang affiliation and adherences. Around and around the cycle goes in the community, drawing 72% of all males aged 16 to 26 into its ranks. Clark, whose formative life as a pre-pubescent so superficially matches features of Turner’s young life of upheaval, avoided the full-blown infection by the truly negative memes (of gangsterism), while Turner went down that path for 24-years and more. The observation of the mechanisms at play do, however,
bear some similarity. Although expressed in a different way, without perhaps the analytical detail of this project, the elders within Turner’s community have come to many of these conclusions: that something is tragically amiss with their communities and the path their children and legacy, 3 or 4 generations down the line, are on. They are looking back to their past, willing and teasing an answer from it in the hope that they’ll find the foundation all communities need in order to anchor themselves. Humans tend to hark backward, past our parents and to our pedigree. We take strength from these roots – measuring ourselves against the best characteristics that each have offered up in history. As hinted at, collectively, supportive memes cluster to become memeplexes; racism, religion, and gangsterism are manifestations of memeplexes. And this is where our journey must embark – to strip the man naked and take him back to his roots, to juxtapose his formidable self and appearance against the skyline of his fallen Eden. Turner is photographed naked, unashamed and unabashed; there is nothing to hide. The only cloak of modesty he pretends at is ink-stain; garlands and splatters of tattoos emblazoned large and etched into his most privy places – so openly displayed because they are so central to the theme. Beyond its superficial similarity to Clark’s history, Turner’s case, however, is entirely in line with the path mapped out for his marginalized sub-culture.
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When Turner rebelled, he rebelled against white culture, and played directly into the path of his own ‘Cape Flats’ culture’s careening drift and tumble during that era. The path inevitably led Turner to prison, where he became marked as a Number. The prison-style tattoos that he aquired on the one hand give him rank within the prison system, but are also deeply at odds with society on the outside. Society on the outside lacks any socio-economic catch-net.
robbers living in caves near Kwazulu-Natal’s Pietermaritzburg a hundred or more years ago. The numbers themselves, 26, 27, and 28, hark to the original splintering of the original gangs, and their associated specialties of robbery, fraud or violence; and their peculiarities of negotiation and protection rackets. The operation of the gang and its ritual far outstrips any simplistic concept laypeople might harbour; they are immensely organized and deeply entwined with rite.
As you look at the tattoos, appreciate that they are virtual prison bars imposed by The Number gang, intended to entrap and travel with Turner wherever he ventures. Beyond prison walls, they intend to make Turner a fish out of water. But, even if we could peel off the jail chop, and recondition the accent, and alter the behavior, and release the individual from the physical and figurative prison, could we break the cycle and redirect it?
And so, it is against this backdrop of a bizarre and chilling ruthlessness of organization that we must return to our objective here – to understand “The Outcome” through Clark’s lens.
Uninitiated as we all are to the gang experiences that marked Turner’s life, we cannot begin to appreciate the complexities and rituals that first hooked him and then locked him in. Considering the numbers gangs are central to this study, here is a brief overview of the magnitudes at hand: the number system has a potent discipline and grip on its members; it is grimly akin to a fanatical religion and cult in many ways; it is something aspired to by the young, paid for by the early adults, and regretted by the elders. The origins of the Numbers is steeped in obscurity, stretching back to tales of a band of highway
As touched on throughout this essay because it is so key to understanding it, the memeplex of the gangs has many fundamentals in common with religion and particularly with religious cults. Survivors of cults (those who have thrown off the immersed cult lifestyles) will all remind us that it is the daily rituals of the cult - the daily prayers and affirmations, the daily instilled fears and distrust of out-group individuals or cultures – that keep the members of the cult obedient. Memes, like software, come with ‘anti-uninstall’ applications. Most schooled in one of the Abrahamic religions will instantly resonate with the truism of the ‘uninstall’ concept. When someone questions an aspect of the belief system, the anti-uninstall meme goes into overdrive; it takes deep offence. The uninstall meme takes umbrage, it becomes hostile and belittling of the assumed ‘accuser’, it blows the
simple question up out of proportion reckoning it an attack on the entire religion. It forces the individual to walk away – lest the small question take root like a cancer and unseat the entire memeplex. Community is like a pool of water; one cannot jump in without getting wet and absorbing some contagion that may be within it. In Turner’s society the unavoidable meme that he faces day-in and day-out, is crime to survive. When democracy was first proposed and then manifested in 1994, with eight cellmates at his back, Turner looked out through the bars with hope, these bars are echoed in ‘Incarcerated’, anticipating a change that the dice had finally rolled in his favour. Things did indeed change, dramatically; his cell gained 40 new residents, eight cramped hardliners in a cage increased to 48. The magnitude of the issue is significant – in a city the size of Cape Town, which numbers around three million individuals – already approximately 300 000 have come to The Number through the prison system. At last count South Africa’s entire National Defense Force numbered just 76 800. We need to consider the implications when 10% of a first world city is a Number and are probably influencing countless more. People talk and they make up their minds. Rumours of a political agenda were whispered through the prison and carried out into the populace. There was speculation that there were power groups neutralizing the perceived threat that Turner’s people posed to the new status quo. Now 300 000
Numbers gang initiates believe this marginalization to be true, 300 000 who each influence a wife, a parent, multiple children and neighbours. Rumors do matter, they matter a great deal when vast chunks of populations take them on. Ultimately, The Outcome is a study of perception and prejudice. Prejudice is a strange thing; without context many will leap to the conclusion that Turner is being exploited. Here, Turner’s own opinion must carry more weight; he insists that ignoring his existence and plight is perhaps the final and greatest violation left to be visited upon him. Revealing his story in these terms delivers hope. That these despair-ridden works will inevitably find their way through sanitized, well- appointed exhibition halls, makes their very existence that much more necessary. The Outcome is not a propaganda ploy to elevate nor denigrate the realities of one aspect of life in the Cape Flats, it merely seeks to place in perspective the undeniably terrifying reality that so many members of the Cape Town community have been through. If we neglect to get to the bottom of what holds more than a third of a million of our immediate neighbours in its grip, then we neglect them outright.
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“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
The Outcome of Turner Adams EXHIBITION IMAGES
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HOMELAND
Memos of Old Playground (2012)
Hard Rock (2012)
Home Coming (2012)
Homeward Bound (2012)
The Pope of District 6 (2012)
District 6 (2012)
Back to School (2012)
The Gladiator (2012)
IN EXILE
Both Sides of the Fence (2012)
Life Under the Bridge (2012)
From Above (2012)
Inner Circle (2012)
Balancing Act (2012)
I’ll Die for the Next Generation (2012)
Incarcerated (2012)
Discarded Icons (2012)
Spiral Down (2012)
Trophies and other semi-precious ornaments (2012) detail left
Luck of the Draw (2012)
Abstract Truth (2012)
Like a Fish out of Water (2012)
Facing my Demons (2012)
Freedom (2012)
DON’T (2012)
Foursome (2012) detail right
Gladiator (2012)
SUMMER HOLIDAYS
Predator or Prey (2012) detail right
Rubber Axe (2012)
Camouflage (2012)
Summer Holiday (2012)
Looking Back (2012)
Cornered (2012)
Summer Holiday: Me, Rene and Mommy (2012)
Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2012)
Embryo (2012)
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The Inspector (2012)
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Recycle (2012)
LIST OF WORKS
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In Exile
Homeland
Both Sides of the Fence (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 141cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Memos of Old Playground (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 143cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Life Under the Bridge (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 142.5 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Hard Rock (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 141cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
From Above (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 142cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Home Coming (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 148cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Inner Circle (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 150cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Homeward Bound (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 141 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Balancing Act (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 144cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
The Pope of District 6 (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 148,5cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
I’ll Die for the Next Generation (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 142 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
District 6 (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 142cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Incarcerated (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 143 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Back to School (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 148cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Discarded Icons (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 143cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
The Gladiator (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 133cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Spiral Down (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 142cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Trophies and other semi-precious ornaments (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 154cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Rubber Axe (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 142 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Luck of the Draw (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 146cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Camouflage (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 144 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Abstract Truth (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 142 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Summer Holiday (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 143cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Like a Fish out of Water (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 144cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Looking Back (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 145 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Facing my Demons (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 154cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Cornered (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 154 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Freedom (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 147cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Summer Holiday: Me, Rene and Mommy (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 150cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
DON’T (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 159cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 144 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Foursome (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 220 x 220cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Embryo (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 146 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Summer Holidays
The Inspector (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 100 x 100cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Predator or Prey (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 144 x 120cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
Recycle (2012) Lightjet on crystal archive paper 120 x 148,5cm Edition of 6 + 2AP
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Gordon Clark would like to thank...
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Louis Joubert Vincent van Graan Pieter Badenhorst Photo Hire Greg Dale Leigh-Anne Niehaus George Reeves design and help Mike Smorenberg Framed by Orms Jerome Adams (Orms) Hilary Dollman (Orms) Lauren Smit Cara van Riet Riette van der Walt Annelien Moerdiyk Ernie Lastig Solomon Turner Adams Lauren Clifford Holmes Avron Letto Williams Emma van der Merwe Liza Dyason Joachim Melchers Mike Ormrod David Lurie Props to the Stars Dennis Sprong Sam (the shark) Nic Turton Framed by Orms (Anton and team)
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