Opening Speech: CONSTRUCT

NELSON MANDELA METROPOLITAN ART MUSEUM

Before I begin, I should make it clear that my credentials as a photographer are not illustrious. I went from Instamatic to Digital in a seamless and dilettantish way without ever coming to serious grips with the arcana, physics and chemistry that make photography and photographs the domain of a particular kind of techno-aesthete.

I hope that does not disqualify me, or you (if this description is a familiar one), from being appreciative and informed bystanders to the art and craft we often take for granted.

Like all children of the 20th Century, I have been brought up with the photographic image as a transparent and natural means for how I construct my world. We are all photographic cognoscenti in this sense; we do not need an oracle or even a lowly hermeneutist to show us how to read the two-dimensional world of photographs.

From our first readers, we are subjected to the codes and conventions of graphic images. We learn, probably before we can read, that scale and overlap and haziness and detail and focus and texture and colour are coherent parts of a fiction that nevertheless taps directly into our lived experience. We learn to suspend or re-negotiate disbelief in the incredible and to construct, deconstruct and re-construct the two dimensional language into immediate and convincing experience.

All pictorial conventions go through a process of establishing credibility. Painting before about 1400 was a weird and idiosyncratic assemblage of disconnected strategies for creating a coherent pictorial space. With the re-invention of linear perspective, those strategies became obsolete and the conventions of one- and two-point perspective took over; to be learned and assimilated into the visual vocabulary.
We don’t need to remind ourselves of the process; it is as natural as the sense we make of the real world seen through our very peculiar and somewhat chaotic optical faculties.

In coming to terms with the photography on this exhibition, it is, I think, useful to consider the history of the medium over the past couple of hundred years. Much like the development of painting as a means for making sense of the complexities of the world, photography has come a long way. The early Topographical painters in South Africa, painters like Cornwallis-Harris, Thomas Burchell and Thomas Bowler used painting as the means to an instructive end. The point about Cornwallis-Harris’s animal paintings was that they served to introduce the European reader to the exotica of the African bush. I say was advisedly because that point has, obviously, become obsolete. Now what we see is a painting style, including some rather dubious wildlife (from the Natural History point of view) that is very far from topographical and very much a part of a quirky and stylistically identifiable Art World. In other words, we look more for Cornwallis-Harris than we look for information on the Sable Antelope.

Photography has been doing much the same thing. Rooted in naturalism and narrative though it may be, we nevertheless see old daguerreotypes for what they now appear to be; historically fixed, strangely dislocated, self-revelatory, again, idiosyncratic - long before they can function as information. It would be wrong, therefore, to imagine that there was ever a time when a photograph was somehow devoid of the intervention of medium. Take a typical photograph from Life Magazine, c. 1958, of, say, Marylin Monroe and ask yourself if it is just the hairstyle and the identifiable persona of the woman that makes the photograph so historically embedded.

What I am getting at here is, that while we may take photographic images for granted (transparently), the second they move off the screen of our everyday and practical circumstances, they very profoundly and characteristically present themselves as separate, odd, strange, other. They bristle, in fact, with the business end of the Art World: the capacity to re-locate and re-construct how we understand ourselves and our environment.

Roger Ballen, to take an elegant example, has made a considerable name for himself as a narrative photographer. His 1994 collection, Plattelanders, is remarkable for its ironical view of a subculture of South African society and I suppose one should say that it is primarily narrative or topographical in content. But while we may look with alarm or amusement or recognition at the oddball characters who inhabit Ballen’s artistic world, we are also looking at Ballen - at the character, predelictions, sentiments and prejudices of the artist. I guess that is why it is possible to value the photographer and not just the lens or the film that he or she uses. Inevitably, there is the process of discrimination, choice, selection that makes the grey and dislocated semblances of the world resolve themselves into realities that live a double life as things in the world (as Kant says, In der Welt sein) and things in the hinterland of the Art World (in das Pinotek sein).
In the work on this exhibition, Ballen goes beyond documentation almost entirely to make images that resonate from scenes and sources that are already manipulated and then manipulated further through the photographic process.

This accelerated dislocation from narrative and topography to a more self-conscious, art-relevant, non-discursive sub-text is a characteristic of most of the work on show this evening. I believe that the elaboration invites a level of engagement that justifies the work in the context of an exhibition that examines a post-documentary re-visioning of the photograph.

Like Ballen, some work with direct documentary or narrative bases such as in Dale Yudelman’s poignant film footage of the Home Affairs fracas, or Berni Searle, Abrie Fourie and Nomusa Makhuba’s introspective and allegorical explorations of self or in pieces that demand an engagement with the manipulation of reality such as Zander Blom’s Brixton House installations and Jacques Coetzer’s wrecked chairs in their desolate landscapes. The overriding feature of these works is their capacity to transcend the assumptions that are habitual responses to the photograph as a true reflection – the instrument that “does not lie” – and to coerce the viewer into a richer and more recondite engagement with the processes and personality of the maker.

I learned a lot from seeing this exhibition. The most important thing is probably the evidence that it contains of the dissolution of stereotype. The photograph leaves the small frame and becomes a partner in a wider language of installation, moving stills, shifts in scale, dimension and text. The viewer is obliged to re-position and to take stock of his assumptions. Brent Maistre’s composite landscapes and Barbara Wildenboer’s elaborate sculptural montages shift the ground from documentary to staging. The “slice of life” or “mirror to nature” becomes, as Susanne Langer put it, the Presentational Object – capable of eliciting, enticing and seducing both the senses and the imagination.

I congratulate the artists who have participated in this exhibition but especially I commend the thinking and chutzpah that have driven the curators, Heidi, Jacob and, locally, Emma to realize this project. Also the Director and Staff of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum. Port Elizabeth is privileged indeed.

The Exhibition is now open. Thank you. - Greg Kerr, 5 February 2009