A Morning with Manfred Zylla by Erdmann Contemporary

a morning with

MANFRED ZYLLA

george white

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Introduction It is customary for interns working at Erdmann Contemporary to research, design and write a short book as a lasting legacy at the gallery. The content of this book is conversational and based directly on an interview I conducted with the artist Manfred Zylla at his home and studio after I accompanied him on his daily swim to the Sea Point Swimming Pool in Cape Town. Before the interview, I had read a gallery publication, Manfred Zylla art & resistance, seen one of his works at the Iziko South African National Gallery and met him faceto-face once or twice at the gallery. I had never been to South Africa before coming to work as an intern, so I knew very little about the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history. I was born in 1996; two years after Apartheid ended; and grew up in London, clueless of South Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s postApartheid struggle. I studied Urban & Regional Studies at Cornell University for a year, and I am currently between universities. I shall return to higher education in August when I go back to the United States to study History of Art at Vanderbilt University.

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The Day On 13th April 2016, a warm sunny autumn day, I set out at around 10 am to accompany the well-known German-South African artist Manfred Zylla for his daily swim. We got into his car, a 1970’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle, and proceeded to drive to the Sea Point Swimming Pool, where Zylla swims in winter when his local pool in Observatory is closed. Before getting in his car, I had only met Zylla briefly on a few of his frequent visits to the gallery to talk with Heidi Erdmann, and by phone. I had done some research into his artworks and who he was to prepare for the interview. In the car I asked him whether he felt South African yet and why he stayed if he disliked the political situation so much during Apartheid. His answer let me see directly into the being of this extremely driven, well-spoken political artist. “No I am not a South African. I am a citizen of the world. I don’t speak Afrikaans, although now I wish I had learned. I left once, but I had to do something, even in my own way.” Zylla is a force unto himself, active both in Germany and in South Africa, using his art to provoke people and governments into introspection, if not immediate change. Sea Point Swimming Pool is a striking locale. Its turquoise waters are set in front of the dark, royal blue ocean. The pool is filled with filtered seawater and is kept at a constant 21ºC. The water lapping over the sides and the sound of the surf create a calm sense of serenity. It is beyond easy to see why Zylla chooses to swim here.

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“I’m probably going to do ten laps, maybe half an hour” I sat in the shade to avoid going a very British shade of red and watched as the artist swam back and forth while I nervously prepared my questions. As my pen ran out of ink, Zylla got out of the pool and told me he was going to do some exercises on the outdoor gym equipment next to the pool and that he would invite me for vegetable juice after. I accepted and sat until he was finished. We went to his favorite juice bar and he ordered two smoothies with spinach. We sat and chatted with a man who said he was from Lucca, Italy, even though it was blatantly obvious he wasn’t. Zylla told me not to throw away my paper cup because he would use it later. I remembered that he is an -8-

avid environmentalist and that, for him, throwing away a single-use paper cup would be a sin. We said goodbye to the ‘Italian’ man, and walked back to his yellow Bug, where I took a photo of him with his prized car.

“In Germany, this car would go for tens of thousands of Euros” He drove us to his house in Observatory, twenty minutes away from the pool. The alluring Cape Dutch house is painted an elegant shade of vermillion, with white quoins and details. Zylla even managed to paint a mural of the devil in the small roundel above the bay window. This is the house he had lived in onand-off for over thirty years; the same house outside which he was attacked. He showed me the scar on his wrist where the attackers had sliced open his -9-

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arm. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I thought I was going to die, there was so much blood pouring out like this.â&#x20AC;? He mimed the spurts coming out of the scar with his other hand. After such an attack, most of us would consider moving as far away as possible from where it happened. Not Zylla. He buckled down to make his house even more homely. He repainted and added the exterior murals on the front and in the courtyard. He currently lives in his studio. On one side of the room is his bed; on the other is his easel where his latest work, Facebook

Droppings, was taking shape. Facebook Droppings is the third work in his current series of drawings on paper using watercolor pencils. All the figures in the work were inspired by images from his Facebook Newsfeed.

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The house is very clean and extremely tidy. It has high ceilings and original hardwood flooring and is a true gem of the colonial Cape Dutch style. Zylla proceeded to show me the rest of his home; it was very obvious that this was the home of an artist. He is surrounded by his work in every room. In the main bedroom, where a young female tenant was staying for a few months, a large nude portrait of his wife when she was very pregnant hangs next to the door. Two works from the Apartheid era hang in the hall, and in the kitchen/living room hangs a large multiple portrait of his friends. He described - 13 -

how he made it: when one of his friends came over, he would sit them down and paint their head onto the large canvas. When the next visitor came, he turned the canvas 90º and painted them adjacent to the other heads. What resulted was Friends, a fascinating organic work consisting of different heads at different angles. In addition to the vast amount of art on the walls, Zylla also has a storeroom, where even more works reside. We went to his outdoor courtyard to conduct the interview. He showed me his outdoor shower, where he had painted quite a profane scene on the half-wall surrounding it. “Is that…?” I asked hesitantly. “Yes, a blowjob,” He replied nonchalantly. The man, at 77 years of age, still has a sense of humor. He said that taking a shower outside in summer was so much nicer than inside. He pointed to the roof, where there is a solar panel. “In summer, I save so much money by never turning on the conventional geyser.” I remembered once again that the man I was talking to is extremely ecologically friendly. ***

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We sat down in his outdoor courtyard to conduct the interview. During the half hour I talked to Zylla, I learned a great deal about his influences and his motivation and driving force behind his work. His life is not about producing many works to make large sums of money and he wonders “how must it feel for people to have all the wealth, seeing the poverty every day.” He just wants to live a humble life and to “live OK” and not have to worry about having to pay his bills.

“I just want to live OK” When I asked him what his favorite classical artwork is, Zylla told me he didn’t have one, but that he goes to museums in Germany to sketch. “I love these old German painters, Holbein and Dürer and I love Hieronymus Bosch, Breughel, those Dutch painters. You’re only allowed to go in with pencil, no water, no liquid allowed into the museum.” He told me about how the Impressionists inspired him from when he first started painting landscapes with his friends in Germany. He looks back at his early work and longs to return to the looseness his work had back then. On contemporary art, Zylla said that he admired and liked the painting of Paul Grendon, a South African photographer and painter with whom Zylla worked closely. Zylla is also influenced greatly by contemporaneous events, upon which his art commentates. For his work: Beer, Bombs, Beer, Bombs, Beer, Bombs – fall –, he was inspired by a picture sent to him by his daughter of the Munich Oktoberfest 2015 and by the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Iraq and Syria arriving in the city at the same time.

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The Bundesregierung (Federal Government) made special allowances to ensure that Oktoberfest could still take place without hitches. Zylla recognized how perverse it was to have refugees and tourists thronging to Munich for completely different reasons. On the one hand there are people running for their lives away from the bombs, and on the other, you have people going on holiday to enjoy several pints of beer. The juxtaposition of the two antithetical groups struck a chord with Zylla and he went on to produce Beer, Bombs as a social commentary. During Apartheid, Zylla would also comment on the daily atrocities and violations of human rights he witnessed. In 1985, Michael Miranda, an elevenyear-old relative of his wifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family, was shot dead by the Railway Police for allegedly throwing a rock. In a separate incident, soldiers hid in boxes to trick children into coming and looking, before shooting them as well. These - 16 -

incidents made Zylla “very, very angry and [he] couldn’t really enjoy this country at all.” In memory of the young Michael Miranda, Zylla created the work Death Trap. I

“For me, art is a kind of meditation” He seemed to me to be a very spiritual man who has a sense of duty to do what he can to combat injustices in the world. He has an acute awareness of his own mortality and has started to sense that he is working more slowly than - 17 -

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he used to. Zylla told me about how he was part of a metaphysics spiritual group, where he meditated and discovered certain things about himself. Today he continues his meditation in a different form: his art. Manfred Zylla has been a strong advocate for environmentalism which stemmed from his time in the countryside painting landscapes after the Second World War in Germany. He has been fighting for social and environmental justice his whole life and he told me that his dream is to get away from everything: maybe live in a small village or on an island. Painting landscapes “satisfies the person within” – and he considers it to be a political issue as well. Beautiful landscapes are disappearing at an alarming rate all throughout the world. The government of South Africa wanted to carry out hydraulic fracturing for shale gas (fracking) in the Karoo. Zylla understands the importance of such wilderness, so in protest he made the painting Fracking in the Karoo, which targeted oil companies and the government for wanting to permanently alter the beautiful landscape the way he had permanently altered his beautiful landscape drawing.

“I’m definitely searching for new inspiration” I very much enjoyed my morning with Manfred Zylla. He is a down-to-earth artist who is not at all pretentious; he says what he thinks, and does what he says. I appreciated his generosity with both his time and the vegetable juice.

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- Cover photo: Beach near Sea Point Swimming Pool, © G.A. White - Spread pp.4-5: Sea Point Swimming Pool, © G.A. White - Image p.8: The artist swimming, © G.A. White - Image p.9: The artist and his VW Beetle, © G.A. White - Spread pp.10-11: Home of the artist, © G.A. White - Image p.12: The artist in his studio, © G.A. White - Image p.13: Friends, © M. Zylla - Image p.16: Beer, Bombs, Beer, Bombs, Beer, Bombs – fall –, © M. Zylla - Image p.17 Death Trap, © M. Zylla - Spread pp.18-19 Fracking In The Karoo – before and after © M. Zylla

To read the full interview transcript, please check Manfred Zylla’s artist’s page on the Erdmann Contemporary website.

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ERDMANNCONTEMPORARY 84 Kloof Street, Gardens, Cape Town 8001 T. 021 422 2762 | E. galleryinfo@mweb.co.za - 22 www.ERDMANNcontemporary.co.za