Rauhan, kulttuurin ja aktivismin  

verkkojulkaisu

Painting: Mark Waller, “Mabopane Highway revisited” (2017), oil on canvas. Photograph: Mark Waller

"Art in its purest form is resistance. Art in its purest form is from the heart and it connects with people. It brings people together,” ~ Macklemore

How to process the violence and beauty we see all around us, the constant clash between them, the horror of how so much life is lived in contrast to the splendour of the world and – sometimes – of what we can achieve? It’s an eternal theme that occupies us all in one way or another, now and then. It’s also familiar to anyone involved in the arts who stands against wars of aggression or acts in solidarity with people suffering violence and oppression. There are degrees of distance: the closer we are to harsh realities, the more they colour our lives and inform how we represent the world and express our responses to it in some artistic, creative sense. That proximity, or closeness, is a messy, disparate, unruly mix of the physical and psychological, temporal and spatial. But in trying to process this cacophony we are also straining to get beyond it, to make the too-good-to-be-true true.

I’m not sure I would have become involved in painting if I hadn’t gone to live in South Africa. South Africa, with all its world-changing history of struggle, the ‘miracle’ of its liberation from apartheid oppression and the rose-tinted promise that held, the grinding dissonance of the ideal and the reality. I was familiar with that disparity long before coming to live here, but could only explore it more fully through day-to-day experience – living with my young family in rural and urban townships, trying to survive on piecemeal freelance writing jobs, and now a precarious though more settled existence on the northern edge of Pretoria.

Up close, the ideal-reality dissonance plays out in mundane daily life, where the neat statistics of South Africa being the most unequal country in the world are chaotically revealed in the abrasive clash between rich and poor, those that have something and those that have little or nothing. The glaring inequality you see all around is the sand in the engine that thunders onward, shrieking and agonising. It’s also there in the silence of humiliation, insult and disregard that colour and shade so much of the interaction between people confined and warped by racialised wealth and poverty. And it’s expressed, directly and indirectly, consciously and subconsciously, in violence. The patriarchal war on the bodies of women and girls, the murders that go hand in hand with robbery, kidnappings, car hijacks, and the violence of car and minibus taxi accidents, around which small crowds gather to rubberneck the horror. The worst scenes stick in my mind: the body of a schoolboy, partly covered by cardboard, lying at the side of an intersection in Pretoria’s Soshanguve township as the oblivious morning rush went on all around; body parts spread across the Mabopane highway by a shredded vehicle that the minibus taxi I was in slowly weaved around; the news story of a baby abandoned in a ditch, found by some guy, raped and then again left to die; the weekly stories of girls who didn’t make it home after school, their partly-clothed bodies found days later on some stretch of rubbish-strewn wasteland. Violence is there too in anger and protest when people who’ve had enough of the lack of services close roads with burning tyres, pelt passing cars with rocks.

Brilliant orange-red mountains, green and violet-grey veldt and valleys, vast sunset and dawn skyscapes of yellow, blue, maroon and emerald green in myriad values that frame the city, the townships and the expanses of veldt between them. And people, when not hurled around by ‘market forces’ or crushed when life goes wrong. Beauty is not just there in the natural environment but in the interactions of people within it.

How to process this? I took to painting as a way to try to express all the anger and frustration, the tension and sense of injustice I see all around me. I couldn’t live here and not try to convey it in some way. I didn’t paint or draw much before and never learned to. But one day nine years ago, I felt I’d had enough and bought oils and canvases, brushes and palette knives and set to work. I wanted to try to show what it feels like to experience the intensity of beauty and pain I encounter or hear about every day. This was more therapeutic than anything else, self-medicating with paint.

As I started, haphazardly, incompetently, on a path of slow trial and error learning, the idea grew of painting abstract landscapes as a way to explore how life feels here and, being here, how the world looks. At its most simple, the landscape is the context for everything: sky, land – the first elusive, constantly changing, colouring the terrain; the second, our hard reality, where we live and die. All sorts of different ideas sprang out of that, including very basic notions of ideal, reality and the intermix of the two (and, politically, idealism and materialism). But also ideas of resistance, the turmoil of struggle against wrong and cruel conditions. Almost any mood can be contained within a physical landscape, and resistance can take any form, from tangible action to solitary introspection.

My abstract landscape artwork also takes different forms, at times including figurative elements and perspective or doing away with them altogether. Some deal more obviously with the landscape as an exterior, while with others, the landscape is an interior one, an inner space, an emotional response to a situation or unfolding catastrophe. Abstract painting of this kind is also open to all sorts of interpretation, and I’ve little idea if the intention I started out with and developed in any particular painting strikes a chord with anyone. I post inadequate photos of it on social media but otherwise let the work pile up. Once one piece of work is done, I move on. Each painting is done out of a sense of anxiety, frustration, anger, or catharsis. I don’t know if it’s going anywhere or works just that it’s the only way I have found to examine how it feels to exist here and to see the rest of the world from this perspective.

Resistance and protest art has a long and celebrated history in South Africa. The protest art of the anti-apartheid struggle created images that resonate in current protests. The more exploratory work of artists working during and after apartheid, which we could call resistance art, draws on European traditions of impressionism and expressionism to portray many facets of racial and class oppression and opposition to it. This is explored in the wonderful book The Apartheid Mirror (2007). I try to probe ideas of resistance in abstract landscapes. While much of the initial impetus for this is a response to the reality of South Africa today, I never think of my efforts as bounded by some national context, but try to use the abstract landscape format, or parts of it, to respond to other things through being where I am, whether the war against Palestine or the toll of the covid pandemic, often triggered by a line or idea in a poem, song or book. The more abstract a piece of work is, the more open it is to interpretation, which could, I hope, range beyond the initial intention of the work. The aim, though, is often to distil the idea of resistance, to express it in its most stripped-down state through contrasts of light and dark, tone and colour, even the

use of titles, to gain a sense of spiritual traction from damage, harm and suffering to move forward. That is the ideal, at any rate, and the source of this obsession with paint.

Art and politics are not separate. Even the most seemingly politically disassociated artworks reflect, consciously or subconsciously, a relationship with the world, what we think about it and how we act in it. This is not politics in the narrow, other-sided sense of parties, policies, and votes but in its broader, more inclusive sense of all human activity seen in totality as a contradiction-ridden (dialectical) endeavour, and how it shapes our ideas of freedom and how we conceive the ideals we pursue or think we do. I have in mind Marx’s point that “The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity.” This, in some ways, answers the “Why” of resistance. But why is art in its purest form resistance? What’s the point, beyond the need to protest against and end the ongoing and expected atrocities of late-stage imperialism? Maybe it’s because this resistance looks beyond immediate circumstances, beyond the anxieties and horrors of the now, to a more profound idea and an apperception of distant freedom.