The Road of Excess. Ingrid Winterbach
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exposure and attention. Scarcely seven or eight years later, his notebooks were exhibited in Amsterdam, where he spent a few months at an artist’s residency. Some of his most recent work is being exhibited in Barcelona. Already, he is represented at Documenta. His notebooks are in English, with words and phrases in Dutch, German and Spanish; just an incidental phrase here and there from his mother tongue, Sesotho.
Mosekedi has rounded facial features and soft, dark skin. The palms of his hands are white. His thumbs are fleshy, as are the insides of his long fingers. He talks softly, with a slight accent. Doesn’t say much. The whole night he occupies himself with a small digital camera. Takes shots of the parking area and the night sky. He’s vegetarian. Drinks fruit juice.
Aaron can see how his blackness, his cultural impenetrability, his slight aloofness – could make him massively attractive to Europeans. Because he is difficult to place and talk to, people want to embrace him and be noticed by him, linger in his presence, pamper and caress him, kiss him on his smooth, soft black cheeks.
He seems to take all of it in his stride: the attention, the success, the exposure.
Jimmy Harris is a different matter. Comes from some godforsaken southern suburb on the Rand, Aaron guesses. Of average height, but corpulent. Flabby flesh under the big T-shirt – with soft breasts like those of a woman. An unhealthy complexion (greenish skin tone). His hair’s been bleached straw-white (quicksilver in the moonlight). Nasty little mouth and small, suspicious eyes. Not a pretty boy. Not someone you want to embrace, like Moeketsi, or whose cheeks you’d like to caress, or whose soft body heat you seek to absorb. Jimmy doesn’t say much, but the few comments he does make are without exception critical and dismissive. He’s clearly determined to contradict every statement made in his presence, question every assumption. Between one enormous bite of steak and the next, he rejects most of the art being produced in the country as “modish posturing, the work of opportunists, foppish fools, vacuous attempts at meaningful content”. When Aaron asks him to name a few examples, he waves him away with an irritated hand gesture, laying purposefully into the chips on his plate.
Harris is a meat-eater and Mosekedi a plant-eater. Harris works his way through a steak of unimaginable size while Mosekedi consumes gallons of fruit juice. Harris is a nail-biter, too; his nails are bitten to the quick, Aaron notices.
Aaron’s the one who has to keep the conversation going. (Damnation upon Knuvelder. May he burn in the how-manyeth circle of hell along with all the other traitors. Why subject him to this? Is it deliberate? To purify him, help him – force him – to shed the burden of his ego? Test him first, then reward him? Or is it just plain thoughtlessness? Knuvelder doesn’t do anything thoughtlessly. He’s far too calculating, too crafty for that. Too set on his own designs, his own profit.)
Where do they come from?
Jimmy comes from Langlaagte (Langlaagte – in the shadow of the mine dump!) and Moeketsi from a township somewhere in Mpumalanga.
And what are they currently busy with?
Moeketsi’s doing video and digital camera, but he’s also drawing and painting. Jimmy does mainly video and installations.
He asks them about the artist’s residencies they’ve both come back from.
Moeketsi did a digital project in Berlin, drawing and painting too, while Jimmy busied himself with video work in Oslo.
And, he carefully asks, how did they come to know Eddie Knuvelder?
Both of them had met him a year or two ago in Amsterdam.
(That was when Aaron was struggling with his kidney. The time he almost didn’t make it. When death was busy in the room next door like a manic patient in striped yellow pyjamas. When, like a beached fish from the effects of chemotherapy, he lay on the couch in his studio, thinking he would never work again.)
And do they know if their work’s been selected for Knuvelder’s exhibition in Berlin?
Probably. It’s been a long time since either of them had any contact with Knuvelder. (Hope wells up. Maybe all is not lost. Although he actually knows. He knows.) It’s clearly not something either of them is losing any sleep over. If it’s not Berlin, then it’ll in any case be Tokyo or New York. Not at all fussed, it seems, about whether they count among the five selected (favoured) artists. If it’s not this exhibition, it’ll be the next one.
Moeketsi Mosekedi has an upcoming exhibition at Knuvelder’s gallery and Jimmy Harris exhibited there just a month or two ago. Aaron thinks: he must not postpone it any longer. He must pin down the exact date of his next exhibition with Wanda or Zelda, as Knuvelder said he should.
He realises he shouldn’t have let himself in for this. Nothing good can come of it. He does not feel well disposed to them. Rancour is what he feels. He begrudges them their success. (Especially Jimmy Harris. The self-satisfied dog.) It grieves him to witness their youth and energy. The fact that Knuvelder holds them in his favour is like a thorn in his flesh.
Neither of them asks Aaron about his work. They express no desire to visit his studio. They clearly have no interest in seeing any more of the city or getting to know it better. When Jimmy’s not eating, he’s checking his cellphone for SMS messages. Moeketsi’s still busy with the digital camera. He takes pictures of the table; of the food in different phases of consumption.
Aaron groans inwardly. Oh, God. His injured kidney hurts. His bones feel porous. At more than one point he considers standing up, excusing himself, and walking right out of the restaurant, leaving the two of them to their own blasted devices. He’s Knuvelder’s lackey and he knows, without a shadow of doubt, that this will do him no good at all. Whether or not he does this favour for Knuvelder, the result will be the same. He wants to go home and unplug his telephone. Let the dead bury their own dead. Let Knuvelder and his two pig-hoofed nymphs take the work of these two fuckers to every corner of the earth. Let them parade with it like whores in full public view wherever they wish. Could he be bothered? No.
*
After dropping the two of them off at their guest house, Aaron sits for a long while in his studio. He stares at the work he’s been doing over the past few months. Looks at it long and hard. In this time, after his illness, he’s been working with renewed intensity. He has, in this new work, finally made things he can identify with.
He has succeeded, he thinks, in keeping two conflicting elements in a state of equilibrium: the formal order, and a burlesque use of images that threatens to overthrow this order. His subject matter has been stripped down to a few elements: a disembodied head (rolling down a hill with a staring eye); bloodied fists; shields; a wall; the sea; a table; an upside-down ladder (Jacob’s struggle with the angel); the hand of God that doubles as the hand of the painter; the naked light bulb (another comic-strip motif). Apocalyptic imagery. A flood with drifting heads: a self-portrait and the faces of his parents and brothers, the heads frequently stylised, reduced to little more than a staring eye. Everything partially under water, swept away by the flood. Death by water. Cadmium reds and pinks. The works form part of a series of paintings he calls “End of the World”. Large canvases. He’d studied Uccello and Signorelli’s depictions of the flood. In a separate work, Signorelli’s portraits of the doomed are replaced with Aaron’s own head, and the disembodied heads of his brothers. A piled-up heap of human debris: drastically simplified, deliberately heavy, awkward shapes; fingers and bones; chopped-off penises. Comic, chaotic, raw; inspired also by the static monumentality of Piero della Francesca’s battle-scene frescoes. A primary palette of cobalt blue and cadmium red, with a few black and white accents. Tactile forms. All of this he has achieved. All of this Eddie Knuvelder was unable to see – or chose not to see.
Burlesque figures and apocalyptic visions. His new work is rawer, cruder, weightier, more real.
He thinks: painting is an old, an archaic form. It’s a physical process. Like a blind man in a dark room, making an object from clay. Tangible. Earlier he’d felt that he was moving horizontally across a great plain; now he feels he’s going down a narrow but deep shaft. Mining a smaller surface more deeply. It’s been a laborious process. He’s had to move through layers of the self