SAFELY BEHIND BARS, INTRUDING

Colonial Patterns and Territorial Rites
in white South African middle class suburbs

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1. FIELD SPACE

• “There is an understanding that he, who arrives first at any given locality, is the master of it as long as he chooses to remain there, and no one will intrude upon him without having previously asked and obtained his permission”  (Malmberg 1980:92).

The explorer Charles Johan Andersson was surprised at this state of affairs when first traveling through the Damaras region in 1850s South-West Africa.  The human body itself is the first mark of territory.  It occupies the field.

The space surrounding the video installations is laid out with white ceramic tiles.  This is a symbolic marker of the space they occupy.  The viewer’s body is intentionally confronted with a choice: to enter or not to enter?  To step upon the artwork or not step upon it?  To enter into dialogue or to refuse participation?  As soon as a space is defined, we pay attention to it.

A field is a choice of perception, the desire to focus one’s attention on one place.  Not to be mistaken with a space of domination, a field is not only a delineated piece of physical or conceptual territory, but a web of interacting meaning and events. One field can contain many others, or be part of many others.   A boundary could in this sense be defined as an inability to form links; a boundary is a split in consciousness which prevents the linking of one field with another.

These terms of course have their origins in human agricultural history.  Any space which is ‘owned’ or appropriated by perception can be called a field.  The term is used across the art / science divide and harks back to Einstein’s theory of relativity, including more recent theoretical models such as cybernetics and general systems theory.  Since all of these approaches deal with questions of space and time, territoriality is a particularly interesting question (Scheflen 1976:ix).  This was the beginning of a modern relational consciousness which has striven to increase human awareness of the grey areas between the black and white world view of a positivist / modernist understanding.  In cultural theory this view underlines the postmodern and postcolonial projects.

This research paper will focus on one geographical field in particular: the suburban dwellings of white middle-class people in South Africa, particularly in Johannesburg.  It explores the extent to which security and boundary fences, always a part of the white South African landscape, can now come to be seen as a vital marker of white South African visual culture.  This statement has deep political implications.

South Africa is a society in which the black working class and its unemployed and unemployable cohorts continue to bear the brunt of apartheid’s historic inequities, and this scenario promises to be the experience for generations to come.  Whites, on the other hand, now enjoy the benefits of those disparities in its post-apartheid formation, albeit in the increasingly gated, if relatively safe, suburban neighborhoods they have always occupied.  (Farred 1997:66)

Those who can afford to be safe, can overwhelmingly do so due to historical privileges which enable them to afford such security devices.  Of course, it is precisely the historically privileged (one might as well say ‘whites’) who most fear the attack of violent criminals (who are often perceived as ‘mostly black’).

In the past, through apartheid propaganda, blackness in South Africa became the embodiment of danger to whiteness, danger to the preservation of a 'pure' culture or 'pure' way of life.  It is an unfortunate fact that some people still consciously feel that way.

What is less easy to understand is why these feelings exist, and are perceived by some to be growing, others to be subsiding in the post-apartheid political landscape.  First, there is a long European tradition of association between darkness and all things threatening.  Second, the black bourgeoisie is gaining economic power as it grows, threatening white employment stability and the white middle class way of life once artificially supported by apartheid.  “Keeping (black) danger out has become an obsession, and spaces are made and used in ways which reflect these fears”  (Robinson 2001:184).

In postcolonial countries as well as in Europe and America the colonization process has left us with an historical legacy in which whiteness connotes wealth and the claiming of power.  In South Africa today it connotes something more:  fear for that wealth and the safety which preserves it. “White urban dreams are nightmares of anxiety, of danger and loss of self – if they emerge at all, that is, from beneath the everyday rituals of security, shopping, television, sport, travel” (Robinson 2001:168).

Fear takes the form of the other, the perceived threat to wealth and prosperity, but by fearing, white people 'other' themselves.  They become prisoners of their own culture, symbolised by the security fence.

There are great similarities between the notion of a territorial field and the frame in painting, or the window in photography.  Video is a two-dimensional medium. Yet it captures motion fluidly, effortlessly transcending time and space. It therefore seemed to be the most appropriate medium to explore these concepts of space and spatiality.

The video artist Pippilotti Rist believes that video, by presenting the illusion of spatiality on the tabula rasa of a flat screen, deconstructs the notion of dominating central and dominated peripheral spaces.  Video opens up new fields, the only centre being the person who is looking.  This helps the transition from binary to relational, postmodern ways of thinking.  "This kind of non-hierarchical space . . . acts as a remedy; it helps to open up your principal space: your mind and body.  You may wish to imagine as many 'real' spaces as you can, but you can also open up your own primary space and expand it, so that you no longer return to a closed personal space"  (Phelan 2001:71).

What Rist is advocating here is an opening of the imagination which can lead to a dissolution of a period of personal stagnation.  Of course this is easier said than done.  The poem on this page was written on my return to Johannesburg in January 2003. I had moved back in with my parents home in a white urban area, where the houses are surrounded by fencing and walls with spikes.  It introduces many of the themes and metaphors which have pre-occupied me throughout the year.

Mostly I think of the work as sculptures, or stage sets referring to the suburban mundane.  The viewer becomes  the performer in these ordinary interior situations: a shower, a washing basin with mirror.  They become extraordinary through the play of light (video projection, spotlights, natural light) which they are built to reflect or let through. The low lighting and the bright light of the video are vital to the description of their three-dimensionality, as is the sound. The rest of the room is as dark as possible.  A sacred space is created in which the codes of daily life no longer apply.

In the conceptual tensions and contrasts which after purity attempts to create, blue sky, blue paint, and water signify transgressing and opening spaces.  Security fencing, graveyard fencing and obsessive compulsive washing are read as motions imposing segregation on the mind.  One could draw an analogy between the fluidity of video imagery, the water, and the dissolution of the binary distinctions.

After purity is a video projected on an open shower door.  Viewers can walk through the doorway.  It is neither inside nor outside.  Armed and ready makes use of a usually reflective surface: the mirror.  We expect to come towards ourselves when looking into a mirror, to see our world and ourselves in reverse.  The concept plays with these expectations of space and subverts the idea of the screen, mirror, window or frame.  It questions our position: who is looking?  Who is self, who is other?