Gavin Younge [Cradle Snatcher] an exhibition of photography, painting, drawing and sculpture
9 SEPTEMBER to 3 OCTOBER 2010
CIRCA on Jellicoe
FOREWORD MARK READ
Jou ma se landscape 2010 Rope light, neon 205 x 165 cm
The Everard Read Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Gavin Younge. This new body of work is centred on a part of our country that is close and dear to us (The Cradle of Humankind); not withstanding his well-known artistic iconoclasm, we nonetheless gave him free rein. Somewhat shockingly he came up with the idea of treating the Cradle and its surrounds as a landscape—a landscape that had been foraged upon, changed, altered and re-interpreted from many different perspectives over a very long period of time. What shocked us most, was his focus on coprolites—fossilized dung. He had come across the work of Lucinda Backwell, a respected paleontologist at the University of the Witwatersrand who had done some work on this lithified fecal matter. Her findings related to ancient hyena droppings in which, believe it or not, hominin hairs were present. This led Younge to make some direct drawings of hyenas on paper that offered visual meditations on plasma glucocorticoids (obscure stuff, but if measured, they can be valuable in evolutionary ecology, conservation biology, and animal welfare). His direct style of drawing is applied to acrylic and emulsion paintings that address, in layered fashion, aspects of the physical landscape as an inconstant amalgam of Iron-Age settlements on one hand, and prison tattoos on the other. This weaving together of the story of Nongoloza (well-known highwayman who founded the 28 gang on the goldfields in about 1900), and aspects of the physical landscape, with its chicken houses and pylons, is a feature of these works. He also presents photographs from the In Camera series, and an impressive collection of ‘fossil’ cameras that he calls the Foster Gang. This ‘family portrait’ of the infamous brigand and his mates, brings to mind their last days holed up in a cave awaiting the arrival of ‘Peggy Foster’, the proto-typical gangster moll. This saga is only hinted at in the title of the vellum cameras poised on their spider-like tripods. This is Younge’s forté, to treat history as a story not yet fully told. Thus we have his galloping quaggas, eloquent of a recent past, and yet somehow fictional. In ‘restoring’ this extinct species, Younge asks us to think about our world knowing full well that change is not only inevitable, but also desirable. Well known as an academic (giving papers on Cape Slavery at Stanford University in 2009) and producer of several large-scale publicly-sited sculptures in Cape Town, Younge has in recent years exhibited mostly in France. In 2000 he was one of 50 artists invited by the Mayor of Paris to mark the Arte Povera movement between 1970 and 1990. His Workmen’s Compensation, first shown at the Market Gallery in 1981, was exhibited alongside the work of Barry Flanagan, Jeff Koons and Tony Cragg. Since that time he has staged three solo exhibitions in France—most recently in 2007 and 2009 in Paris and Nantes respectively. These followed exhibitions in Stuttgard, Cologne, Beijing and Nïmes. This year, he is represented on both Godby’s The Lie of the Land landscape exhibition, as well as Lamprecht’s Twenty sculpture exhibition at Nirox. The new work has been created specially for our new, iconic exhibition venue, Circa, and Younge’s fragile, and seemingly ethereal works in vellum will contrast, and complement Pierre Swanepoel’s organic architectural voids. His work often embraces, or hints at absence—we are sure that everything, from his laconic neon work Jou ma se landscape to his large-scale photographs of members of the 28 gang will provide a distant, but nonetheless engaging soliloquy on a remarkable tract of land.
Note: As far as dimensions are concerned, these are given in the following order—Height, Width, Depth
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In Camera (Plover’s Lake, Cradle of Humankind) 2010 Colour photography, Lightjet print on archival paper 59.6 x 84 cm
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IN CAMERA GAVIN YOUNGE The title ‘In Camera’, refers to the secret legal process meaning ‘in the judges chambers’, as well as the participatory framework that includes the apparatus in the making of the photograph. Both enjoy a long, but separate etymological trajectory through time. Cameras are of fairly recent origin and are considered to be machines, or apparatuses for the making of moving or still images. There is no common cultural agreement on what constitutes a ‘good’ camera. Point-and-shoot, instant, and the Holga have all been used to good effect by professional photographers. Pin-hole photography dispenses with the need for a lens. Emmanuel Radnitzky’s (Man Ray’s) photograms did away with the need for a negative. The cameras featured in these ‘assisted landscapes’ are among the best, soon to be outdated, fossils available: the Hasselblad 500c (the old, take-me-to-the-moon classic), the Nikon F1, Canon 7D, and Canon IXUS. The photographic images are themselves enigmatic and sealed entities. Both reveal instances of allogenic succession (external human intervention likely to bring about species adaptation). One image was made at Sterkfontein, the other at Plover’s Lake, both in the Cradle of Humankind. The portions of land indicated in the photographs are in themselves obsolete. Like packaging around a highly prized item, these portions of landscape are unimportant. However they have been worked upon; they lie in readiness for some future discovery. In a term, they are pregnant. Their titles indicate their provenance at the Cradle of Humankind, an area imbued with substantial mystique. The roofs of some of the ancient caverns have weathered away leaving the fossil-rich breccia exposed—one can literally find a jawbone sticking out of the lithified sediment. Redolent with the possibility of finding examples of taphonomic pathways, the photographed grasslands point to some re-visioning, either as part of a re-wilding exercise, or simple landscaping. However we remain more interested in what might lie below. Thus the true nature of ‘nature’ as we observe, survey and eventually topo-cadastralize4 it, lies in what it contains/conceals. Not unlike the 2008 unearthing of Lee Berger’s Australopithicus sediba.1 This was an extraordinary discovery, not only in terms of the completeness of the fossil remains (one adult female and a juvenile male), but also because of the relative recentness of the discovery. Fossil hunters have been scouring the dolomite caves and fissures, with great success, for nine decades. The discovery in 1947 of a hominin skull, reliably dated to 2.8 million years ago (MYA) ignited popular and scientific imaginations. Further discoveries, right up until the present, led to the area being declared a World Heritage Site in 1999. In the catalogue for his latest curatorial venture, The Lie of the Land—Representations of the South African Landscape, Michael Godby writes ‘Gavin Younge focuses on the agency of perception in his image of three cameras, all of which “see” their subject in slightly different ways, which he reproduces in vellum as if to suggest the obsolescence of this form of representation. Placing his cameras at the Cradle of Humankind, moreover, Younge connects them with the fossils deep in the landscape in a significant extension of archaeological time. But the obvious intervention on the surface of the landscape suggests a more recent history, successively of farming, archaeological discovery, landscaping as parkland and, currently, re-wilding to integrate the Cradle into the ‘natural’ environment.’2 Notes 1 Prof. Lee Berger of the The Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research (BPI) at the University of the Witwatersrand is credited with the discovery of two partial hominin fossil skeletons at Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind. Some scientists believe that A. sediba represents a transitional form because it shares many physical traits with early hominins. The discovery was publicly announced at Maropeng in April 2010. 2 Michael Godby (2010) The Lie of the Land. The Iziko Michaelis Collection/Old Town House, p. 134.
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In Camera (Sterkfontein, Cradle of Humankind) 2010 Colour photography, Lightjet print on archival paper 59.6 x 84 cm
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In Camera (N14, Cradle of Humankind) 2010 Colour photography, Lightjet print on archival paper 59.6 x 84 cm
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Here, as in medieval art, vellum is used as a medium for recording traces of a memory as persistent as it is a fantasy. Maud de la Forterie, Paris, 2009
Flight Delayed 2010 Vellum, oxhide, plywood, polystyrene 65 x 184 x 55 cm
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distant catastrophes DAVID BUNN Angola was the final horizon over which the terror of South African state militarism appeared. For thousands of young white conscripts, and their African opponents, it was also the scene of catastrophic emotional and physical wounding. Even today, a decade after the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, to say ‘Angola’ is to conjure up a time of pathological, horrific warfare exported to civilian populations, and in most conscripts, a profound, far-reaching guilt about their involvement in genocidal state aggression. Even for the most extreme South African officers, who completed their Angolan service with apparent relish, and for whom crossing the Cunene River was a first step towards later atrocities, Angola was debilitating. Gavin Younge has concerned himself with the problem of violence and representation for almost two decades. As one of South Africa’s most innovative sculptors, he has explored the traces left by violence in society at large. In our country, it is as though a catastrophic wind has been blowing a long while, and we stand now in the eerie calm after its passing, confronting an endless, sandstone landscape of distorted Aeolian forms. For sculptors like Younge, representing the effects of this mutilating force requires a variety of expressive languages, and an indirectness of approach. Excerpt from Prosthesis---Artwork by Gavin Younge the Decade 1997–2007. La Noire Galerie, Paris. 2007, pp. 29–30.
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‘roughly sutured’ JILL BENNETT Like Doris Salcedo’s, Younge’s work is concerned with traces—with the transformation of places and things. His work is sometimes noticeably depeopled: a circle of bikes with no riders, … Frequently Younge shoots objects, animals and bugs in place of human subjects. David Bunn has noted, however, that he does not use his symbols to stand in for human suffering in any straightforward way, even as images of dilapidation and the struggles of small creatures seem to read as metonyms for the larger damage. Rather, I would suggest, he is, like Salcedo, less concerned with metaphor than with metamorphosis … In the Memorias exhibit he included a work comprising roughly sutured vellum animals along with other images of birds on fragments of wood, covered with vellum and layers of varnish which Bunn has evocatively related to the ‘nacreous layers of meaning that accumulate around an original wounding event’. This phrase might also call to mind Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios for its use of hewn skin and stitching to cover over signs of life—like a kind of regrowth on a wound that remains in place. In Younge’s work, as in Salcedo’s, damage is revealed through processes of regeneration. Excerpt from Jill Bennett’s paper ‘Material encounters: approaching the trauma of others through the visual arts’. (2000). Revised and published in Bennett, J. (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Quagga Project 2010 Vellum, polystyrene 10 units, each unit 120 x 125 x 33 cm
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VELLUM GAVIN YOUNGE There is something rude, even shocking about animal skin. As clothing it has been used throughout time, and in widely differing social circumstances—from feral to high fashion. It is also ideal as a support for painting . Between 1444–1519 the Flemish painter Alexander Bening and his associates produced a Book of Hours of Queen Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Spain. They used natural inks, tempera, and gold on vellum. The semi-opaque vellum gave the pages of their manuscript a glowing luminosity. I first worked with this material in 1995 when the late Billy Mandindi and I were selected for an exhibition in Copenhagen. The idea was that all participating artists would exhibit in shipping containers—Mandindi presented four paintings and I presented four, vellumencased car doors. On that occasion, I had painted images on the vellum surface. I am attracted by metaphoric associations which flow from the tanning process (depilant phase using lime), and by the recuperative associations of (medical) stitching. Thinking back to the school playgrounds of my youth, the severity of a wound (and consequently the degree of honour earned) was counted by how many stitches were needed to close the wound. Since vellum is organic in nature, I prefer to think of a process of ‘stuffing’, rather than of ‘covering’. Although the sutures might point to an arrival point, they are only parts of the journey. The skin appears to shield and preserve these memory objects, but in fact the skin replaces them. David Bunn writes: ‘Younge has begun to explore questions of historical trauma by inverting the relationship between the wounding event and its trace. Instead of the cast, or empty tower, being a record of systematic force, his recent work reveals a fascination with regeneration, and the nacreous layers of meaning that accumulate around an original wounding event. Thus signifiers of violence, like symptoms or scars, also distinguish the hurt over time. Sit Down Benny (and Achtung Cabra!) are meditations on this idea. While not referring directly to violence, memory, and trauma, this new sculptural language is itself suggestive of the body, and of skin as an inscriptive surface. In fact, skin marked and stretched, with calluses and wounded ridges, roughly sutured or healed, is that surface most revealing of the history of force in apartheid South Africa. It is in this sense, the surface upon which the torturers appear to write: they leave their mark on the skin, while at the same time wanting to probe beneath it’. Excerpt from Prosthesis—Artwork by Gavin Younge the Decade 1997–2007. La Noire Galerie, Paris. 2007, pp. 32–3.
Turkana Boy 2010 Vellum 136 x 37 x 31 cm
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TURKANA BOY GAVIN YOUNGE Turkana Boy is the common name for KNM-WT 15000, the nearly complete skeleton of a 12-year-old (or possibly 9-year-old) Homo erectus who died 1.6 million years ago. It was discovered by Kamoya Kimeu, a member of Richard Leakeys’ paleontological expedition to Lake Rudolf (now known as Lake Turkana) in 1984. In this re-visioning, the African child is shown as a vellum mannequin prior to being subjected to a process of taphonomy (being cast in metal). The project that gave rise to many of the works on exhibition and referred to in this publication, is centred on the historical stratification and hybridity of a post-colonial landscape—the Cradle of Humankind in Gauteng, South Africa. The project is facilitated in part by members of the Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. This meant that I met Richard Leakey on one of his rare visits to South Africa. On hearing that I was an artist he remarked ‘Ah, so we’re both involved in telling stories’. I took this to heart and the project embraces artistic interpretations of human intervention on the Gauteng landscape over a relatively long time line.1 The project assesses the impact of powerful historical currents on a stretch of land ‘between’. In its first reading, several million years ago, proto-humans lived a precarious existence in the area north of present-day Mogale City. Several hundred thousand years later Achuel people lived there until they were displaced by so-called Middle Stone Age people and later by Iron Age people. The Po, weakened by the Difaqane (strife between the Pedi, Po, Kwena and Bafokeng peoples, also in the early 1800s), were displaced by Mzilikazi in 1827. Alliances with the Boer-led South African Republic in later decades led to an impressive mountain range being named after a Po chief (Magaliesberg). Sensing betrayal, Chief Mogale took his people south to Thabu Nchu. Fifteen years later they re-purchased their lands from the then President, Martinus Pretorius in 1863.2 Thirty-six years later the Transvaal was a war zone between Boer and Brit. Gold had meanwhile been found in 1881 and lime blasters began pillaging the dolomitic (CaCO2) outcrops in the area now known as the Cradle of Humankind. Their activities simultaneously revealed and destroyed fossil evidence of Africa’s provenance as the cradle of humankind. This invasion scarred the landscape and brought together a gathering storm of expedient and rough men united only in their quest for money—in a way giving new meaning to the pioneer paleoanthropologist C. K. Brain’s maxim that ‘man was the hunted, and not the hunter’.3 1 Relatively short if one considers that 300 million years ago, what we call the continent of Africa was joined to other continents in a super continent known as Pangea. 2 See Hilton-Barber, B., Berger, L. (2002) Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind. Cape Town, Struik. pp. 38–9. 3 Brain, C. K. (1981) The Hunters or the Hunted?: An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Turkana Boy 2010 Cast bronze 136 x 37 x 31 cm
WRITING THE LANDSCAPE GAVIN YOUNGE The following paintings have their origin in a research visit in February 2010 to Swartkrans, Cooper’s, and Plover’s Lake (three of the Cradle of Humankind sites) under the guidance of Christina Steininger of The Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research (BPI) at the University of the Witwatersrand. The paintings comprise thick textural imprints (a reference to the electric power lines that intrude on the managed landscape, chicken houses, and so on). Two of the paintings feature hide-shaped pieces of vylene onto which tattoos worn by members of the 28 prison gang have been transferred. As we shall learn later in Maud de la Forterie’s text (see pages 38 and 39), Nongoloza, the leader and instigator of the 28 prison gang first rose to prominence on the goldfields of the Witwatersrand. I consider his story, and the tattooing of gang lore on their bodies, a form of ‘writing on landscape’. The prefix to the title ‘Molo-Rainbow’ can be read as a reference to the overprinting of the Nguni language on a Sotho/Tswana settlement, much as was the case during the Mfeqane (1827). Water, shown by the wavy lines, is considered a ‘cooling’ medium among the Sotho/Tswana.1 The second painting in the pair also comprises thick textural imprints (a reference to ring marks on furniture and the physical appearance of stone-walled houses), and several skeins of a deep red oxide colour. The Molokwane Iron Age Village lies nearby and dates back to the fourteenth century. The area covered by the stone walls is approximately five square kilometres, making it the largest stone-walled archaeological site in South Africa. With a population estimated to have reached 10–12,000, it was the largest settlement in South Africa at the time. The area was occupied for six to seven generations by Iron Age Bakwena Bamodimosana Chiefdoms from the early 1600s.2 The ruins include the remains of stonewalled dwellings arranged hierarchically around a central enclosure. The direct, and highly improvised style of these paintings is inspired by a viewing of the work of French artists, Guy Ferrer (Everard Read Gallery,1999), and Gérard Gasiorowski (Carrée d’Art, Nimes, 2010). 1 Hilton-Barber, B., Berger, L. (2004) Field Guide to the Cradle of Humankind. Cape Town, Struik Publishers, p. 38. 2 Pistorius, J. C. (1992) Molokwane: An Iron Age Bakwena Village, Early Tswana Settlement in the Western Transvaal. Cited in Barber & Berger 2004.
Molo-Rainbow 2010 Acrylic on canvas, vylene 120 x 200 cm
Molokwane 2010 Acrylic on canvas, vylene 120 x 200 cm
Tin Taung 2010 Acrylic and emulsion on canvas 140 x 170 cm
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Sediba Sediba Acrylic and emulsion on canvas 140 x 170 cm
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Upper image Crocuta Crocuta Cathexis 2010 Oil and acylic on 100% cotton archival paper 114 x 187.5 cm
Lower image Fecal glucocorticoids 2010 Oil and acylic on 100% cotton archival paper 114 x 187.5 cm
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FOSSIL HAIR LUCINDA RUTH BACKWELL Ancient human hair has been of interest to archaeologists since the nineteenth century, when in 1860 Peter Browne examined mummy hair from South America. A few years later the archaeologist Pruner-Bey identified pigmentary and structural variation between Egyptian and Peruvian hair specimens. Until now, the oldest known human hair was from a 9,000 year old Chinchorro mummy, from a cemetery site located on a beach in Arica, northern Chile. Permafrost, ice, elevated salinity, waterlogged anaerobic acid bogs and arid environments can all conserve hair keratin for thousands of years, but besides a few fur impressions, fossilised mammalian hairs are exceedingly rare. The best-known examples are from fossil carnivore faeces (coprolites) from Late Palaeocene (~59–56 million years ago) beds in China, Siberian permafrost deposits (~50,000–17,000 years before present), and Miocene Dominican amber (~20–15 million years ago). The cuticular scales on hair can vary between mammals in several ways, and can be of taxonomic significance, thus aiding identification. The hair structure of mammals found with prehistoric humans has enabled the identification of red deer associated with the Neolithic ‘Iceman’ from the Alps, and fox in the form of a fur armband on the Iron Age Lindow bog body. Scale position in relation to the longitudinal direction of the hair may be transversal, longitudinal or intermediate. Scale patterns can be varyingly petal-shaped, wavy, mosaic or transitional. The scale margins may be smooth, rippled or frilled, and relative to hair width, the scales may be large and few, or many and closely packed. Independent of characteristic scale patterns, cross-sectional shapes and longitudinal features of the medulla can also be of taxonomic significance. Based on these features we have identified fossil hairs of probable human origin preserved in a hyaena coprolite from the Gladysvale cave fossil site at the Cradle of Humankind. The coprolite is part of a brown hyaena (Parahyaena brunnea) latrine preserved in calcified cave sediment dated to the Middle Pleistocene (~195–257 thousand years ago). This time period covers just before modern humans emerged, and overlaps with the existence and end of Homo heidelbergensis. The hairs could have belonged to either of them, or to someone not yet recognized. The fossil hairs from Gladysvale represent the first non-bony material in the early hominin fossil record. This find supports the hypothesis that hyaenas accumulated—by means of scavenging—some of the early hominin remains found in cave sites, and provides a new source of information on Pleistocene mammals in the Sterkfontein Valley. Dr Lucinda Backwell is a member of the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research, School of Geosciences, and Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
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PREDATORS GAVIN YOUNGE Crooks and ne’re-do-wells are infamous on the Gauteng goldfields. Rich pickings levitate scoundrels to the top of the scum-line. William Robert Clem Foster was one such. Born in 1886 in the Eastern Cape, he enjoyed a good education, studied mine surveying, but went on to murder five people, three of whom were policemen. According to Rob Marsh he formed a tryst with a man called John Maxim, and together with Foster’s brother, Jimmy, and a man named Jack Johnson, they set about robbing the American Swiss Watch Company in March 1913. They got away, packing their burglar gear and spoils in the left luggage facility at Cape Town station. In 1913, this cost them two pence an item. Foster, however, didn’t have change for his gold sovereign and he promised to return to repay his debt. He became a marked man, and in the ensuing police chase, detectives from the CID linked Foster and his brother Jimmy, as well as Maxim to the crime. They were arrested and each of the three men was sentenced to 12 years’ hard labour. Whilst in goal, according to Marsh, Robert Foster married a ‘dark-eyed beauty’ named Peggy. The trio were moved to Pretoria Central Prison but escaped within nine months and teamed up with a 22-year-old ruffian called Carl Mezar. For three months from July to September 1914, the Foster Gang, as the trio became known, went on an orgy of robbery and violence. In July they attempted to rob the Boksburg North branch of the National Bank, killing an onlooker in the process. They then successfully robbed Roodepoort Post Office, followed by a second post office robbery at Vredendorp. The subsequent robbery at a large liquor outlet in Doornfontein led to nine deaths— precipitating the most intensive manhunt the South African Police had ever conducted. The gang was tracked down to a house in Bezuidenhout Valley but a Detective Mynott was shot dead during the confrontation. The Foster Gang sought refuge in a cave in Kensington hills that Foster had known as a boy. In September 1914 a police search party discovered the gang’s hiding place. Without reinforcements, they couldn’t flush the men out, so they sealed the entrance to the cave with boulders. Tear gas proved ineffective. In the morning, Foster called out for his wife Peggy. Half an hour after Peggy Foster had entered the cave, Foster spoke to the police once more. He wanted to say farewell to his mother and father and two sisters, who were waiting nearby. A few moments after Foster’s family had left the cave, three shots rang out. Edited excerpt from Marsh, R.. The Foster Gang: 1914. Available on line at http://www.africacrime-mystery. co.za/books/fsac/chp2.htm
The Foster Gang 2010 Vellum, bamboo, linen thread Dimensions variable. Five elements, tallest is 164 cm high
I love the way you’re breaking my heart It’s terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly thrilling I love the way you’re breaking my heart Although you’re gonna ruin it It’s heaven while you’re doin’ it I love the way I feel when we kiss You’re terribly, terribly, terribly, irresistible Sigh to me, and lie to me, you really know how It’s gonna hurt tomorrow, but it feels so good now So darling, just keep playing your part Take your time and really finish that you start ‘Cause I love the way you’re breaking my heart! Peggy Lee (born Norma Deloris Egstrom, 26 May, 1920) Songwriters: Alter, Louis; Drake, Milton. © Sony/atv Tunes Llc
Peggy 2010 Vellum, resin cast, bamboo 180 x 130 x 86 cm
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DEEP MAUD DE LA FORTERIE (translated from French by Mike Dickman)
The works of Gavin Younge criss-cross the traumatic wounds of a South Africa at the very edge of perception and emotion. Sculptures and installations call out to the viewer, giving glimpses of aspects of suffering, often conveyed through the use of vellum; metaphor for a body and the skin on which the wounds and scars of a society with a painful past can clearly be read. As we approach, the shift from a visual to a more comprehensive perception takes us unawares. The visual gives way to feeling, the familiar is obliterated in the intimate, and beneath the most ordinary object is the spectre of a memory that is not our own and that we cannot share but only lightly touch: something ethereal. The role of the intimate The use of skin, vellum, forcefully evokes the suppressed, the intimate, and points to what surrounds and yet is beyond us. History is taken up again in familiar situations—an emotional charge, sustained largely by the recurrent use of vellum, pervades Younge’s work. Vellum is essentially both noble and organic and suggests the skin: an essential reference for all who lived under the Apartheid regime; a veritable writing surface on which were imprinted the traces of devastation, the stamp of events. Like excrescences, [or] repositories; memories of a historical period now over. Opaque yet transparent, vellum covers as well as camouflages; it protects and conceals. In the space between the visible and the hidden lies a duality that Younge explores, layer by layer. In his work Gilet de Sauvetage (not exhibited) intimacy is shown in its raw state and in its most visceral form: the internal organs … Made of roughly sutured vellum that invokes the metaphor of surgery and healing, these three life buoys become fragile vectors of somatic states of duration and human frailty. The import of this work differs for each viewer as each recalls a history that is ‘other’ yet well known; one whose manifold ramifications can be grasped by anyone who can understand them: for instance, a system of dysfunctional politics where personal enrichment is prioritised at the expense of the poor in another work he called the Two democracies. Thus, in the words of David Bunn, the works invoke both ‘distant catastrophes’ and the impossibility of representing them in their entirety. Invoking the departed: the spectral dimension Suggest so as to better represent: such is the fruitful credo in which Gavin Younge steeps himself in order to deal with the underlying themes of his work—trauma, devastation, war, political violence, loss and reconstruction—so many fragmentary visions of History and Remembrance. He uses visual metonymy to present serious works with a definite emotional vocabulary far removed from frontal representations where the trauma is continuously replayed. His domain is that of feeling and perceptions. There is no need to show atrocities to assess their disastrous effects. In a more subtle mode, through the use of vellum perceived as a veritable process of regeneration, Younge ‘stitches up’ our vision and makes us see the extent of the damage.
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This approach gives rise to a typology of disappearance central to which is the part played by the ghost of what was, but which no longer exists today. Younge’s works thread their way through the ghosts and spectres of Memory, giving voice to secondary witnesses, the most everyday inorganic objects. Well known as a video director, in Forces Favourites he films scenes of devastation caused by the war in Angola, a war in which South Africa actively participated, but records only what is on the periphery: buildings pitted by gun fire, a countryside laid waste, burnt out military vehicles scattered about. Violence and trauma here are not embedded in either body or verbal testimony. The camera simply records ways of living in a world that has become foreign. Reversals, diversions Other works, such as strips of parquet on which birds are depicted, stigmata of an ornithology closely associated with the colonial intellectual tradition, provide more information about this war. Younge painted these after visiting a gutted house and it was from these ruins that he extracted the wood in order to give full expression to its prosaic testimony previously hidden under the rubble. He then wrapped them, covered them, re-covered them. These works are commemorative prostheses; prostheses of regeneration; post–traumatic prostheses. Half opaque, half transparent, vellum conceals the wound while at the same time showing the original scar, filling and padding: what is full evokes the void. Absence Though Younge has multiple uses for vellum, its potential is never exhausted. Leather combines two opposing characteristics, being both archaic and luxurious. He manipulates it with great respect and is inspired by its rich symbolism in evoking political violence perceived on the domestic level. In his major work Quagga Project, that extinct species of zebra, has been moulded and gathered together in a herd; a galloping mass that seems to float in the air. Absence becomes presence and the reconfiguration is transformed into a reminder of their existence. These quaggas resist the extinction of a memory of fauna and flora of which no trace now remains. Simple but effective. Younge’s oeuvre does not only bear witness to the march of History—the works forge memories that are painfully neither his own nor ours.
This essay, and the following one entitled ‘Skin’, where first published, in French, in Deep Skin, 2009. Grateful acknowledgement is made to Nathalie Codjia-Miltat of La Noire Galerie, Paris, for permission to reproduce them here.
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SKIN MAUD DE LA FORTERIE (translated from French by Mike Dickman) ‘The human body is a battlefield to which it would be good for us to return. It is now the void, now death, now putrefaction, now resurrection.’ Antonin Arthaud They are hieratic, frontal, and glorious. No harsh distortion of reality interferes with direct confrontation with the camera in these photographic portraits of black men on white backgrounds in soberly structured compositions. This series of portraits, all taken from the same angle, are presented without any artifice, deliberately detached, as though in conformity with the plastic codes of documentary photography, such as might have been practised by August Sanders or Walker Evans between 1920 and 1930, when they attempted to give an account of the men of their time both in their individual dignity and in their social context. These men, bare-chested, as though exposed to the world, are uniformly frozen on a evanescent background which allows space only for a discreetly effective aesthetics as though devoid of any narrative content and expressive signs. Here, the succession of angles rejects any attempt at too controlled a composition preferring the route of an encounter that is direct, certainly, but nonetheless distant in its sober frontal presentation. Individuality and psychology no longer feature. Didn’t Walker Evans, after all, envisage the photographic portrait as a genre in which ‘there is no attempt to capture the reality of “the real person” by claiming to see through the social mask the individual shows the world, but, rather, to examine that mask just as the person is prepared to wear it’? For Younge, the tattoo is nothing but a mask. Like subtle banners, the tattoos of these men—Daniel, Andrew, Frank, Shafiek, Cornelius and Samuel—are displayed yet also hidden, thus giving Younge the freedom to take possession of his preferred object of contemplation, the body, or, more precisely, the skin, a veritable surface for the writing of past history. For make no mistake: Gavin Younge is not only a photographer and it is the physical envelope that captures his attention for what it reveals of the most hidden and profound—its history. The body as a site of conflict—the skin as recording surface of a culture of imprisonment In his Number 28 series, Gavin Younge—without making any claims—describes, notes and displays the skin as a site of both conflict and conquest. For although they are easy to read, these photos are nonetheless subversive in the sense that, far from being frightening, they show only fragmentary glimpses of the violence they contain. These men are South African ex-prisoners who have endured punishment for rape, drug dealing, murder or robbery. Their tattooed skin bears the stigmata of a culture of confinement, now engraved on the most intimate parts of the body and shared by all. Do we need to be reminded that South Africa is a country with one of the highest rates of detention and punishment in the world? Here imprisonment is accompanied by very high levels of violence invariably exacerbated by the presence of gangs which are widespread and extremely powerful. Their complex hierachical organisational structures, forged partly on the mines in the nineteenth century, enforce strict behavioural and disciplinary codes and a certain prison culture.
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The tattoos of the six men indicate that they belong to the most influential and most notorious of all the gangs, the 28s, that exist side by side with the 26s and 27s. The corporal medium serves as a kind of organic theatre revealing to those in the know the gang to which an individual belongs, as well as his rank, and past history. The 28s, like other gangs, comprises leaders and subordinates. The higher ranking ‘Officers’ offer protection to the more vulnerable ‘Catamites’ in exchange for a variety of services, mostly of a sexual nature. One can thus read between the epidermal lines a liturgy of domination and submission, a tacit proclamation of a system of fiefdom as harsh as it is brutal—the law of the strongest as an expression of ‘masculinity’. Between Myth and History, presence of a corporal geography Though the symbolism of ‘male’ domination attached to the body does, of course, echo the history of the Apartheid system where skin colour sealed the fate of coloniser and colonised, Younge’s work extends the limits of this first parallel by exploring the duality found in the interstices separating the visible from the hidden, and, more specifically, History from Myth. While featuring the human figure in its totality in this photographic series, Younge paradoxically has recourse to metaphor to suggest the body as a living repository of the memory of a past that is over but which has a lasting echo. Younge here begins a veiled portrait of the figure of Nongoloza, central figure in the founding of the 28 gang, whose history, like the vellum the artist employs throughout his work, is both opaque and transparent. A historical character with a turbulent career, he has acquired a mythical status in the eyes of prisoners who, even today, cannot pronounce his name without emotion. Indeed, Frank, whose photograph we see here, claims to be one of the 8 reincarnations of Nongoloza, who was born at the end of the nineteenth century. Charles van Onselen, in his biography, A Small Matter of a Horse, presents a man with a life full of contradictions, twists and turns. He became a highway robber partly as a result of the increasing injustice of the early system of racial segregation. The white farmer for whom he worked accused him of stealing his horse and then forced him to work for two years without pay to compensate. Having nothing to lose, Nongoloza fled and formed a gang of criminals. Later, while in captivity, he founded the 28 gang and formalized the complex structure based, paradoxically, on strict precepts derived from colonial military hierarchy.
Van Onselen also describes the importation of the prison system into South Africa at
the end of the nineteenth century when no penitentiary system was yet in place. From the earliest years of colonial conquest, prison played a central role in controlling the population. African men whose only ‘offence’ was getting caught without the identity document known as the Pass were indiscriminately incarcerated with criminals. These men then found themselves enrolled in gangs and had to negotiate with 28 gang members for necessities and protection granted in exchange for various services and sexual favours. Because of the system of migrant labour and single sex hostels, the mining industry, highly developed at that time, pretty much closed its eyes to homosexuality. Nongoloza, a two-faced Janus, proved to have an ambiguous relationship with the colonial system, and even adopted certain structural systems. Nothing of this remains preserved in the living memory of today’s gangs however. Nongoloza, is generally venerated and praised to the skies even though he symbolises the height of cruelty, for oral history in prisons (there are few written records) accords him supreme status in the Black struggle
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Andrew ‘Bones’ Jacobus 2009 Colour photography, ink on cotton paper 195 x 112 cm
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Cornelius ‘Whitey’ Noto 2009 Colour photography, ink on cotton paper 195 x 112 cm
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against white oppression, both on the mines and in society at large. Legend has it that he preserved the set laws of the 28s by engraving them on a rock, which he later re-inscribed on the hide of the bull that had been the centre of the sinister banquet and then carried them around tattooed on leather. Tattoos: living memorial of an oral legend It is easy, when considering this legend transmitted over more than a century, to oppose written history, the permanent records preserved on paper, in books, and the oral tradition inscribed in the form of tattoos on the surface that is the skin. Already in Native to Police, a sculpture presenting Apartheid laws in the form of immovable blocks, Younge sought to disentangle the complex links between History, Memory and Text, the latter having the capacity to rewrite the first and preserve the second (Memory). This is also shown in CA 1, where the artist ‘rewrites’ the names of Cape Town railway stations in Xhosa, a utopian translation of what could have been a very different reality. Aren’t all attempts at reversing the course of History the rewriting of it? The tattoo represents another option that Younge is quick to make use of. In the series Rooiland and the one called Feral Acts (not exhibited), he reproduces the tattoos photographed in situ on the bodies of ex-prisoners on hides. Thus his preferred medium is skin as an ever-renewed organic material for recording diffuse memories. For more than ten years he has been producing empty chrysalises, wrapping roughly sutured objects in skin so as to better stitch together our perception. Here, as in medieval art, vellum is used as a veritable surface on which to paint, a medium for recording traces of a memory as persistent as it is a fantasy. This return to a fertile source of inspiration like a focus drawn directly from a certain reality leads to a subjective rereading of a volatile history, a history that is perpetually being revitalised. One might say, Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Though far removed from the precepts of Magritte, some tattoos are not at all saying what they seem to be saying. The tattoo ‘DAD’ stamped on Daniel’s shoulder, for example, is not a reference to tender paternal feeling: like History, which is constructed of time as it passes, it refers to ‘Day after Day’. On the other hand, the message is sometimes unequivocal, leaving no room for misinterpretation, as in ‘Out Law’. Between these extremes cluster certain representations the sense of which cannot be grasped without recourse to the tale of Nongoloza. Who, indeed, would recognise in a dog’s collar the allusion to the one Nongoloza wore as a trophy, made from the teeth of his victims? Nongoloza’s ghost pervades even the remotest of areas so that every sign, even signs such as the clenched fist salute, the preserve of high-ranking ‘Officers’ as well as other
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signs of hierarchical status, seem to issue from his famous figure. The identity forged in the prison environment is revealed, in code by means of a simple sign. Codified identity, projected identity: focus on what is small and hidden Drifting somewhere on the eddies of the gulf separating written from oral History is the idea of a plural identity comprising the codified, the projected and the fantasised. The legacies of History are not always expressed with perfect political grandiloquence: prosaic, even minor, their meeting weaves a parallel discourse where these elements combine to express this multiple identity. Younge clearly interests himself in these small, seemingly insignificant details that reveal so much, and he gives full rein to their stifled voices, those of tattoos, certainly, but also those of the most trivial everyday objects, so common that they attract no-one’s attention. In the Springbok series (not exhibited) —–named after the eponymous South African radio programme—he focuses on the best seller records (LP recordings) sold during the early 1970s, the most evil period of the Apartheid era. At a time when it was impossible to enter the prisons which were ruled with an iron hand by the military and racial segregation was at its most rampant, musical compilations outdoing each other in vapid sentimentality abounded. What featured on the covers? Half naked white women in languorous poses as though detached from a regime that kept them in a subordinate position. Under the title South African Tops we find international musical hits such as Don’t Cry for Me Argentina. Younge says not a word about such astounding sentimentality: the vellum covering these disc jackets says it for him. Ultimate metaphor of regeneration and healing, it plasters over the wounds of a scar that is actually well and truly visible, a living guarantee that the memory be preserved. In somewhat labyrinthine fashion, Younge stalks up and down the tracks and paths on the heights of a protean past that changes shape depending on who observes it. His work, that encourages reappraisal and realization, points a finger at a History whose consequences permeate South African society even today. He records its slightest traces and offers us lines of interpretation—lines we may choose to follow or not. He also probes large-scale political tools such as the penitentiary system bequeathed by colonialism and still largely in use today. For if gangs continue to exist because of the social structure in prisons and the part played by prison in the widest sense, are they not an ideological reaction to a society that is still unequal, a society where the rate of criminality is abnormally high? To questions such as these a response is found beneath the skin in a body of work that itself shifts as though propelled by the traumatic wounds of a South Africa in a profound state of change.
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Frank Jacob 2009 Colour photography, ink on cotton paper 195 x 112 cm
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Daniel van Wyk 2009 Colour photography, ink on cotton paper 195 x 112 cm
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Samuel Hendricks 2009 Colour photography, ink on cotton paper 195 x 112 cm
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Shafiek Abrahams 2009 Colour photography, ink on cotton paper 195 x 112 cm
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PUBLISHED September 2010 by CIRCA Gallery 2 Jellicoe Avenue Rosebank Johannesburg cassey@circagallery.co.za www.circaonjellicoe.com © Gavin Younge, CIRCA Gallery
PRINTED by CED PRINT G7 Sable Square Cnr Bosmansdam & Sable Road Milnerton Cape Town Gavin Younge [Cradle Snatcher] ISBN 978-0-620-47352-1 PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS Gavin Younge: pp 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10–11, 12, 14–15, 16, 18, 20, 26–7, 28–9, 30, 35 Vanessa Cowling: pp. 22–3, 24–5, 32 Photography on pages 40–1, 44–7 Gavin Younge DoP, assisted by Vanessa Cowling ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research, artistic production, and exhibition was made possible by the generous financial support of the National Research Foundation, the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts, Everard Read Galleries, and the UCT Research Committee. The artist takes this opportunity to thank each of these entities for their support of his creative research. GAVIN YOUNGE WOULD ALSO LIKE TO THANK (in no particular order) Mark Read Glenda Younge Cassey Delissen Monique Howse Tony Meintjes Mike Dickman Nathalie Codjia-Miltat Maud de la Forterie David Bunn Jill Bennett Janni Younge Kevin Shenton Charles van Rooyen Shannon Brand Mboneli Gobelani Sandra Kloppers Michael Godby Orms Pro Foto Lab Maxwoods Colleagues, Michaelis School of Fine Art Ghuthaifa Titus Nizaam Maasdorp Rhosigns Christina Steininger Lucinda Backwell Daniel Galloway Richard Kane