You're an engaged artist. Does your work reflect a vision of South African society ?
Gavin Younge: South Africa is part of a globalizing
world. In speaking of the trauma suffered by both sides in the conflict we
called the ‘border war’ I remark less on the actual events and inevitable
casualties, than on the psychological effect of all
atrocities on people like
myself, who, in not being part nor responsible, know that we are capable of
these acts.
You wrap and cover your sculptures and works in vellum, recreating
the shape and form or placing a symbol within
this new skin. Is this visual
expression and writing, present in all of the creations that you show in Paris,
part of
a period in your artistic journey or has it always existed?
G.Y: The short answer is that I pioneered the use of vellum.
Like all things we think we own, or have given birth to, a disruption
is necessary.
So I also work with other materials. To begin with, I had to find a tannery
that still knew how to prepare skins for
parchment in the old fashioned way.
It was not something I had seen or heard of. I looked the process up in a book
and then
visited tanneries to see if it were possible to produce wet skins because
I wanted to ‘give the drum back to Europe’ for a show
in Copenhagen
(Container ‘95). The exhibition showed works from 95 port cities to highlight
Danish sea trade. It seemed an
appropriate opportunity to speak of notions of
Western superiority. I covered German car doors with African goatskins and
sent
them back to Europe. Part of my own ‘sea trade’.
You're also a well-known video director, what do you wish to
demonstrate with your video "curating the waves"
that the French public
will discover ?
G.Y: Curating the Waves is a meditation on African wars
and the persistence of memory. Four distinct sites are evoked:
the private swimming
pool as a cypher of colonial space. It is here that the first ‘drowning’
takes place—the enamel mug,
ubiquitous drinking vessel of Africa, is first
seen floating as after a shipwreck. Beneath the friendly waters of the family
pool, chlorine blue and full of sounds of children playing, we see the drowned
mugs mount up in shoals. Swimming pool
voices have been replaced by the steady,
but ineffectual heart beat of the pool cleaner. Disaster is imminent and no
amount
of cleansing will avert it.
The second site is the seabed—the cypher of colonial exploration.
The enamel mugs sway lifelessly in the current.
Images from the road between
Cuito Cuanavale and Menongue in southern Angola, course through the capillaries
and arteries of the littoral zone. This is the first break point in the sequence
and serves as a prelude to the disaster
to come. The bombed and strafed trucks
litter the sides of the road, reminders of when South African troops
invaded
Angola in the 1980s.
The third site is literature—the cypher of colonial expansion.
As in the image of 'swimming pool voices' (voices heard over a wall),
these
books offer only snippets of information. Together with the drowned computer,
they stand for all that is lost. The enamel
mugs are a metaphor for thirst in
the arid landscape of South Africa—in their sunken state they realize their
function to excess.
In the final sequence the viewer is returned to the surface
and the solitude of a Cape beach on an ordinary weekday.
Today, the image is omnipresent everywhere, either contemplative
or narrative. You appeal to intellect to understand
your work. Don't you fear
that the use of this expression will discourage the non-initiated ?
G.Y: A well-known German gallerist once told me that my
work was ‘too African’. I think he meant for European tastes or
sensibilities.
I don’t take offence. Much contemporary art is boring—at least my
sense of contemporary art envisages the
existence of a contemporary political
consciousness. We worry too much about celebrities and, in South Africa, who
will be
the next president. I’m happy to make drums in my little village.
How do you consider the western art scene ?
G.Y: Too many videos. However, I greatly admire the work
of Annette Messager and Rebecca Horn. In fact I admire the work
of most artists
whose works I have seen in Paris, London, Lyon etc., but I am truly bored by
the infantilizing tendencies of, say,
Tracey Emin. Her work, that is. I approve
of her being drunk on TV and behaving badly. This is very western. When one
is
famous, one can act outrageously or ‘stylishly’. Take Christian
Boltanski. On the Tate’s website he says that he teaches his
students to
‘wait and hope - there's nothing else you can do… when you have an
idea, you can do it in ten minutes.
' The ‘western art scene’ is so
politically correct, he is probably right. As an artist, one can only hope to
be discovered.
My thesis was called The Mirror and the Square. It was about
the avant-garde and how abstract art came to be associated
with freedom and the west, and realism with Stalin and the Nazis. In fact, it
is still pretty much the case, especially in England
where one finds the Stuckist Group fighting over the Turner Prize. It fascinates
me that top museum directors like Nicholas
Serota can keep their job after admitting to fraud in the purchase of museum
trustees’ work.
(Chris Ofili’s work
entitled The Upper Room).
In the history of art, Paris has been the city that can't be
ignored. Today you are exposing your work here.
Is this of major importance
for you ?
G.Y: Sure, I’m over the moon about it. Paris is good
with its museums and its cemeteries. I always visit Père-Lachaise and
the Pompidou, but not in that order. I’m crazy about cemeteries and I am
making a new work called Alyscamps
(after the famous necropolis in Arles). It
will be premiered by La Noire Galerie in Paris, the city of the catacombs, and
that
is immensely pleasing to me.