Abstract of the Commemorative lecture
Meeting the World Halfway (A Johannesburg Biography)
The act of looking is always an act of construction.
I have lived in Johannesburg all my life. My schools, university, houses and studios have all been within a six kilometre radius of each other. My work has drawn images from the city, and been influenced by the history of the city. In this lecture I will retrace a dual history – that of the city, and that of my own formation as an artist – showing how key elements of my attitude towards image-making have come from the specific experience of growing up in the city over the last 50 years of its existence. Johannesburg is a city characterised by that which is hidden. The city’s raison d’être is the gold in the ground beneath it. The city has been made by excavation, its landscape shaped by the mines and their tailings. The constant changing and erasure which characterise my drawings are echoed in the excavation and archaeology needed to understand the city. A lifetime of drawing becomes a process of understanding the city in which I have always lived. It is also a city which, like all gold rush cities, has been made up of immigrants and is defined by cosmopolitan variety. The very strength of the city and its two great citizens, Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela, attest to the strength and necessity of mixed histories, cultures, and understandings. The activity of creating meaning in the world from contradictory and disparate elements is integral to the ways in which I put together both images and narratives, and exemplifies my belief in the power of productive misunderstandings and mistranslations.
The changing political history of the city shows that the immediate and larger world is never a given, but always being remade. The world is a place of provisionality and change, rather than of fact. This erasing and changing is central to my work.
The lecture will take us through the personal, family and artistic construction of my worldview, trying to track how a particular person is both formed by his experience of the world, and in turn makes another world shaped by it.
