SAFELY BEHIND BARS, INTRUDING

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

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INTRODUCTION : THE LANDSCAPE

• Landscape art and landscape writing in South Africa from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth revolve around the question of finding a language to fit Africa, a language that will be authentically African  (Coetzee, 1988:7).

Intellectually, this project emerges out of the microcosm of the South African political landscape to make observations about the macrocosm of human territorial behaviour.  The video installation after purity deals with an obsession with cleaning and purification, both ethnic and religious.  It places the white male body in an unconscious ritual purgatory of water.  The colonial fence patterns which surround him here also appear in armed and ready, in which human strength is compared to security fencing.

This article investigates the western civilising obsession with keeping the inside in and the outside out.  It deals with the boundaries between open and closed spaces, focusing on the human territorial impulse.  Every human being “has a personal space halo, notions of property in land, a willingness to defend areas of ground, and limits to the range of his activities”  (Malmberg 1980:318).

The French psychoanalyst Henri Lefebvre considered a ‘psychoanalysis of space’, believing that space should be conceived around the body and all its needs, especially subconscious needs  (Robinson 2001:164).

In his highly perceptive essay The city, the cinema : modern spaces, James Donald analyses the colonial mind of our direct cultural ancestors, the Victorians.  One of its primary features is

• an Enlightenment terror of darkened spaces, the illegibility of men and things.  The aim of this tradition has always been to eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny and, above all, the irrational.  The logic of this politics of transparency, surveillance and social pedagogy has become familiar since it was meticulously unpicked by Foucault (Donald in Jenks 1995:85).

To radically simplify Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish:  1.  Power operates through surveillance.  2.  Surveillance is the ability to control by the act of looking.  3.  Power therefore is based on a relationship between who can look and who is forbidden to look, between who remains seen and who unseen.  Looking itself is an invasion of personal space and therefore the first act of conquering.

Psychology has taught us that the logical mind cannot accept messy spaces.  It requires simple answers and finds emotions like fear very complicated to handle.  It seeks a guilty / not guilty verdict, a choice between yes or no.  That is what conquering is about – the absolute rule of the rational mind.  Yet the unconscious mind rejoices in being messy. 

I began with ideas, and through various decisions along the way, produced artworks which are or are not reflective of those ideas.  The rational meanings we seek as artists are seldom to be found in the messy spaces we delve into. Artistic communication emerges from a personal need to speak out.  Often we do not even know why.  One seeks to reveal one thing and in the process reveals something entirely different. 

The academic style is concerned with being impersonal.  Where I have included personal examples, diary extracts, poetry and images, it is to provide an alternative means of reading, in which the multiplicity of personal meanings and contexts might at least enter the reader’s awareness.  Perhaps this will dissect the singular reading / s of the work and expose its web of sections and intersections.  I also created the website and the interactive workbook at www.secure.ms11.net with the intention of providing a non-linear version of this text.

Having befriended many black intellectuals at university I had lulled myself into a false sense of culture.  On my return to Johannesburg, I realized that I had been living in a privileged world.  Of course I knew that class still divides our country along racial lines.  Yet I had begun to believe the image on television of everyday social interaction between people of different colours.  I found this was simply not the case.  I was a white male and would always have to contend with that in my lifetime.

“All white occupancy, which started with the Dutch settlements in 1652, is contained under the rubric of colonial expansion.  Because this project was so indelibly marked by the plunder, exploitation and oppression of the indigenous peoples, to be a white South African is to be contaminated by this experience.”  (Farred 1997:72)

The whole of Johannesburg seemed to have turned into one big sacred fortress, at once dangerous and decorative.  Or was it a prison?  To me it all depends on which side of the bars you are.  We imprison ourselves.

I began my research with an interest in popular South African perceptions of class and the relationship of these observations to perceptions of beauty.  Personally, I began once again a search for my own group as well as individual identity.  The resulting work reflects a fascination with the processes of becoming and forgetting, the processes wherewith most video art is associated: memory and the making of meaning.

I sought a pattern do describe my origins. What I found was the security fence and a largely uninvestigated and unquestioned aesthetic heritage.

• It begins with the fence.  . . .  The enclosure shapes the sanctuary by setting it aside, by putting it under special law and by handing it over to divinity.  In a sanctuary nothing is so old as its fence and nothing is so necessary.  The holy places are named after their enclosures”   (Trier 1942:232 in Malmberg 1980:91). 

I grew up in surrogate colonial havens like Kensington and Primrose Hill which had nothing to do with the London burroughs they were named after. Within these suburbs, among the oldest in Johannesburg, one of the marked features of colonial architecture is that the fences share the same patterns.

I began by documenting these patterns like an alphabet of symbols with unknown meaning. I also began sleeping less and less at night.  Already an insomniac, this was bad news.  The smallest noise, and I would not be able to sleep until the dawn.  I often felt like I was under surveillance, or that I had to watch myself very carefully in case I forgot to lock a door or ventured into an unsafe neighborhood.

In speaking to other white people about their political position, I found confidence, even arrogance, often white guilt – but mostly fear.  This fear was also my own.  I felt that through healing this aspect of myself I could produce  something which might touch other people who no longer noticed their own voluntary imprisonment.  The political theorist Grant Farred writes that the white South African mode of thinking can only be changed by “transforming the culture of white confidence into a culture of postapartheid civil accountability.”  (1997:76)  This investigation is such an attempt.

My investigation focused on the culture of security as ‘our’ shared white culture, as a set of imported ethnic markers and symbols.  My desire for some sort of heritage led me to search for a suburban visual culture, and this in turn led me to delve into history.  An apartheid era publication makes an interesting, if perhaps contentious point in this matter:

• “The situation we are faced with today in South Africa is actually nothing new – by inference therefore, it should not be a cause for excessive alarm.  Indeed, the more one looks at our past for purposes of comparison with the present, the more one becomes aware of how little has really changed.  Many of the problems and dangers facing the early settlers of Dutch and English extraction are almost exactly similar to those confronting us today.”  (Leonard 1:1988)

I discovered a similar quest to understand the meaning of a current white South African identity in the work of Brett Murray, Kendell Geers, Mandy Conidaris and William Kentridge.  I will discuss only the latter here.

Kentridge was one of the first to define a language of symbols which described in liberal political terms the white South African experience. I must admit my indebtedness to his pioneering of rambling-rose security fences in the pattern of a 1950s suburban gate, most recently and markedly in the animations for the multimedia opera Confessions of Zeno.  It is an excellent symbol for South African bourgeois hypocrisy and the historical interplay between the decorative and the dangerous in fascist cultures.

Human psychological boundaries and that which we hold ‘sacred’ are in constant threat of violation.  In South Africa today, white middle class citizens see the boundaries of their homes as increasingly fragile.  This emanates on one level from the post-apartheid situation.  On another level it is a reaction to contemporary social movements towards the dissolution of the Cartesian duality and western binary modes of thinking, ie. human and land, master and slave, white and black, mind and body, inside and outside, mine and yours, self and other.  On a primal level, this can be reduced to the duality between purity and the danger of defilement, cleanliness and dirt, or the tension between transparency and obscurity.  These are all experienced in a body during one lifetime.  The body is the first mark of territory.

In 1931 the Swedish countess and novelist Karen Blixen buried her lover Denys Finch-Hatton near her coffee farm in the Kenyan Ngong Hills. Blixen’s insecurity about the safety of Finch-Hatton’s grave grew continuously.  At first it was marked with a circle of white stones, then some white poles, then a British flag. Later a memorial monument was built by his classmates at Eton (Bunn 2001:93).  This evolution of space serves to vivify the presence of an absent body.