Barend de Wet

b y k a t h r y n s m i t h

b a r e n d d e w e t

Barend de Wet Published to coincide with the exhibition Barend de Wet: Green

SMAC Art Gallery, Stellenbosch | 30 September 2010 – 28 November 2010

Exhibition curated by Baylon Sandri, SMAC Art Gallery

Author: Kathryn SmithCo-author ‘Museum of Temporary Art’: Francis BurgerResearch Assistant: Francis BurgerDesign and Layout: Natascha MostertEditorial and Production Coordination: Marelize van ZylEditorial Assistants: Jean Butler Kerry Redelinghuys Catherine VisagieGallery Photographers: Garyth Bevan Robert Hofmeyr Alex Wilson

Published by SMAC Art Publishing 2010De Wet Centre, Church Street, StellenboschTel: (021) 887 3607Fax: (021) 887 [email protected]

ISBN: 978-0-620-48580-7

© 2010 SMAC Art Gallery (Publishing)© 2010 Writers (Essays)© 2010 Artist (Images of artworks)

Fine art printing by Creda Communications (PTY) Ltd, Cape Town

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored on or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the above-mentioned publisher.

CONTENTS

introduction 11the 1980s 22the 1990s 60

the museum of temporary art 112the recent and the now 118

conclusion 130biography 187

selected exhibition history 204notes 224

sources cited 232selected publications 234

folded diploma in fine art, university of cape town 1985 | paper

11i n t r o d u c t i o n

During a career spanning almost thirty years, Barend de Wet has operated with stunning agility in the interface between contemporary art, material culture and social networks. He is everywhere and nowhere at once, constantly testing relationships and perceptions, and epitomizing Damien Hirst’s opinion that artists are always ‘on their way to work’.1 A consummate aesthete, his oeuvre has encompassed traditional media, craft skills and fanatical hobbyism, as well as productive collaborations. His signifying system calls attention to a canny, applied awareness of the New Realist and Conceptual traditions, as well as post-conceptual forms; a sustained interest in what is known, not unproblematically within the South African context, as ‘transitional’ art; the conventions of aesthetic formalism; artisanship versus practical naïveté; and the legacy of Duchampian mischief. Sidelined by the contemporary art historical canon, his influence on contemporary practice is pervasive, and innate to many positions in current art. He is a trickster; obdurate, contradictory, wilful and generous in equal measure. The art world needs him, but finds him difficult to ‘manage’, and so relegates him to a furtively powerful position of the ultimate artist’s artist. As Douglas Gimberg has so cogently put it, it is more important and surprising that someone like De Wet could exist than anything he’s specifically made or done.2 Throughout his career, De Wet has consistently opened up spaces of possibility for future creative action in a context of production with very specific, local conditions.

INTRODUCTION

12 b a r e n d d e w e t

For many, Barend de Wet exists as myth. This has had the unfortunate consequence of an understanding of his remarkable artistic work (and by extension his legacy), remaining vague and inarticulate. By his own insistence, art is inseparable from life, and that the kind of art he makes “is art, and nothing else”. On the face of it, this suggests a position in opposition to much contemporary art, which is partial to multi-referential and discursively rich interpretations. It would also suggest that a criti-cal reading of his practice should be framed as an ex-tension of De Wet the man. Once described as “…the roustabout Bukowski-from-Boksburg” (Karon 1992), what we believe we know about De Wet’s recreational antics is true for those who know it. And this is about as much as one should say, or at least, this is as far as I am prepared to go.

This is the first monographic publication dedicated to De Wet’s practice. Its primary aim is simply to docu-ment; to draw together the diverse and poorly docu-mented threads of a richly textured career, an attempt surely flawed by virtue of its position in opening up the field of inquiry. The last significant publication to profile De Wet was Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal’s Art in South Africa: The Future Present (1996), an anthology that featured many of De Wet’s contemporaries. Galva-nized by the energy of the years between the two Johan-nesburg Biennales, Williamson and Jamal’s vital book was published the same year De Wet declared his res-ignation from the artworld.3 Unfortunately, the artworld took him seriously, and he has been conspicuously ab-sent from the two key anthologies of South African art to be published in the last six years.4

If we consider his career as being defined by pre- and post-resignation periods, we realise these are of more-or-less equal duration, marked by the lucky number thirteen. The first period, 1983 – 1996, spans his first formal art qualification to his resignation, which coin-cided with the birth of his son Ben. The second period, 1997 – 2010, brings us up to the present, and Green,

his first major solo exhibition in more than a decade. We can only imagine and hope that the next thirteen years will be as rich, and that De Wet will continue to test the limits of playfulness, possibility and taste.

A critical decision was made to limit the focus on De Wet’s cult of personality, which as mentioned above, is writ large. Instead, the focus is placed on his oeuvre in as simple a way as possible, as a chronological narrative expanded by critical and theoretical reflection. This is not to place focus on a sense of ‘progress’, but in a ca-reer that has embraced such a range of media, skills and lifestyles all in the name of art, it is important to remind ourselves of the seriousness of De Wet’s endeavour. What emerges here is a clear set of concerns articulated through relationships of productive tension between ma-terials, process and ideas, and one in which art’s sacred cows are unceremoniously bludgeoned more often than they are compassionately put out to pasture.

But how exactly do you attempt a considered, theoreti-cally informed survey of an artist who shuns intellectual interpretations of his work, and about whom the news-papers (and gallery gossipers) can’t help but describe in hyperbole? For a personality the size of De Wet’s, you can be sure that for every story he can recount, some-body else has a story about him. These stories span the range from inspirational to libellous, and as such, have extremely limited value in a critical appraisal of an oeuvre. ‘Not true!’ I hear those readers familiar with De Wet’s antics retort. ‘You’re making a false distinction between the artist and work, which contradicts his most fundamental position that declares the complete imbri-cation of art and life!’ Fair enough, but I contend that while this is a supremely difficult task with respect to De Wet, maintaining a critical distinction between an art-ist’s life and their work is essential to avoid clumsy, psy-cho-biographical interpretations where creative gestures function symptomatically, rather than being approached as the product of a critical imaginative capacity. This position has been tested constantly and vigorously dur-


ing the research and writing of this book, and what I hope emerges is a more complex understanding of how the art=life=art position functions in De Wet’s practice. Certainly a continuous fluidity between art and everyday life is not only maintained but encouraged, a veritable revelling in the mundane, but there are points of clear distinction too, no matter how subtly the lines might be drawn. He may assert a strictly WYSIWYG position (what you see is what you get), but actually offers quite obvious pointers to a less superficial set of concerns (this is not to say that the superficial is not rich territory to explore).

As Orson Welles points out in his superlative F for Fake (1973), the skill of the illusionist is to get you to con-centrate on the one hand so you cannot see what the other hand is doing. De Wet is about mischief and play-fulness, but he is also about skill, formalism, aesthetics and honesty. Brutal honesty, particularly about what he finds lacking in contemporary practice, which, when all is said and done, is about the pursuit of experiencing things anew. For De Wet, it is not about whether ‘some-thing’s been done’, but who has done it – or is yet to do it – best.

This book is divided into slices of time – the 1980s, the 1990s and the present – in order to make the mate-rial more practically manageable, but also to provide an opportunity to focus on iconic or otherwise significant works that marked shifts in De Wet’s thinking. Consid-erable time was spent researching and compiling a se-lected exhibition history, which is presented alongside a brief biographical synopsis of key events. Tracked with a critical awareness of his pre- and post-‘resignation’ phases in the back of our minds, and an observant eye for recurring iconography, materials and processes, this approach allows for the inevitable overlaps and fluid-ity of ideas that cannot be completed, contained or ac-counted for by a neat, linear history.

The central tenet of this essay follows De Wet’s deep

investment in objects, suggesting that his work finds as much resonance in theories of creative play as it does in dialogue with artists associated with Dada and its later affiliated discourses of Neo-Dada, New Realism, and others. This prompts a consideration of the rela-tionship between formalism and conceptualism, and by extension, modernist and postmodernist positions, and how these are reflected in the context of recent South African art, with De Wet as the primary focus.5

Some associated ideas and forms are invoked, including aspects of object relations, play and performance, hap-tic looking, colour, craft, ‘transitional’ art, and the rela-tionship between the privacy of the studio and the pub-lic display space of the gallery (or similar site). Of the numerous viable possibilities, three key texts do double duty here, guiding my discussion and serving as a foil against which to test some of these ideas. Hal Foster’s edited anthology The Anti-Aesthetic (1983); D.W. Winni-cott’s Playing and Reality (1971) and Brian O’Doherty’s Studio and Cube (2007) are instructive with respect to De Wet, and prompt a veritable constellation of associa-tions and references that spin out in an ever-widening network of signification. But in the interests of trying to maintain focus in what could easily be a much more extensive study, it is up to the reader to take these ideas and test their suitability and longevity for themselves.

There is a tendency to frame contemporary art from South Africa produced prior to 1994 in relation to no-tions of ‘resistance’ (in the political sense), and work produced post-1994 within broad postcolonial terms, privileging the politics of memory, history and identity. Certainly there is great value in this, but not to the ex-clusion of other discursive possibilities. With respect to the ‘resistance’ canon, which has played an influential role in how artistic practice prior to South Africa’s po-litical turn has been interpreted and historicised (and legitimated), I am convinced we do not yet have an ad-equate historical understanding of how experimental practices in South African art from the 1960s onwards


fit into this picture.

Elsewhere I have attempted to track the distinctions between terms like ‘avant-garde’, ‘conceptual’, ‘contem-porary’ and ‘experimental’.6 Because they share certain characteristics we apply them to certain practices (like De Wet’s) relatively interchangeably, but they remain critically distinct. De Wet is often categorised as an avant-gardist, and I’d like to spend a little time teasing out the implications of this assumption in the present.7

Hal Foster’s notion of the anti-aesthetic, as a response to the discursive shifts brought about with the postmod-ern turn is what makes it possible to still refer to De Wet as an aesthete. While it may seem anachronistic to invoke this early text, which set the terms for the dis-course of postmodernism in the visual arts, it is hard to ignore its relevance with respect to the evolution of De Wet’s oeuvre, moving as it does between formally con-sidered, object-based work through to performance and populist forms and back again, as well as its sustained currency, despite so many declarations of postmodern-ism having reached its sell-by date. Not to mention that its publication coincides precisely with De Wet’s first formal qualification in 1983.8

As Foster has pointed out, avant-gardism is the ‘ideol-ogy of the transgressive’ (Foster 1983: ix) and is closely associated with modernism. As a discourse, modernism was about progress and crisis, about a utopian drive and the dynamics of breaking with past forms. A funda-mentally disciplinary project, it privileged the ‘purity’ of individual art forms (according to what it understood as their ‘inner logic’) and the autonomy of culture in gen-eral. It defended itself against kitsch and the popular. While these are valuable ambitions, and point to why we still entertain modernism as ‘official’ culture, the conse-quences of this value system were dire. Culture (and art) were reified, rendered elitist, which in turn provoked an avant-garde of revolt and anarchy in the form of Dada first, followed closely by Surrealism.

Repressed in late modernism, the return of avant-garde’s anarchic ‘revolt’ in postmodern art is evident in the reaffirmation of a critique of representation (Foster 1983: ix). As Rosalind Krauss points out in her influ-ential text for Foster’s anthology, ‘Sculpture in the Ex-panded Field’, postmodernism practice “is not defined in relation to a given medium…but rather in relation to the logical operations of a set of cultural terms” (Foster 1983: ix). The object of art itself must change to ac-commodate a reconsideration of forms (painting, sculp-ture etc.) not as historical categories but as transformed practices (Foster 1983: xii).9 Works (unique, symbol-ic, visionary in modernism) become contingent texts, opened up to multiple readings and new complications like polyvalent subjects, the destabilization of master narratives, and the difficulty of oppositional positions in consumer culture.

Postmodernism’s heterogeneity and relativism is often understood as an apparent plurality. If postmodern-ism is understood as a reactive position against mod-ernism, then it follows, as Foster suggests, that there should be as many forms of postmodernism as there were modernisms. And where to position ourselves now that postmodernism itself is declared dead and we are contending with the supermodern, the altermodern, the post-postmodern? If anything, ‘modernism’ has the du-bious honour of possibly being one of the most prefix-abused words in cultural parlance.

Foster holds that postmodernism is not pluralism. Posi-tions are marked by political affiliations and historical agendas and as such, postmodernism cannot represent the ‘end of ideology’, as not all positions in culture are open and equal.10 Postmodernism does not represent a ‘clean break’ with modernism, but rather an interface between old and new cultural and economic models, “the one not entirely autonomous, the other not all de-terminative.” (Foster 1983: xi)

As Foster points out, the standard tactic is to set up


postmodernism as populist and modernism as elitist, and take up a position either way. As such, they be-come oppositional rather than relative. In its popular un-derstanding, postmodernism becomes associated with ‘tradition’, particularly within architecture.11 Thinking in postmodern terms this means a radical reconsideration of aesthetics.

Foster accounts for how the reactionary model of post-modernism suddenly becomes a ‘false normativity’ thus: in postmodernism’s return to ‘tradition’, modern-ism is reduced to a style; condemned or excised en-tirely as cultural error. The model of ‘lost traditions’ set against modernism is thus akin to another ‘master’ plan imposed on a heterogeneous present.12 As an alterna-tive, he insists on an oppositional postmodernism, “a practice of resistance” (Foster 1983: xvi) – what he refers to as the ‘anti-aesthetic’.13 This is a postmodern-ism of resistance “concerned with a critical deconstruc-tion of tradition, not an instrumental pastiche of pop- or pseudo-historical forms, with a critique of origins, not a return to them. In short, it seeks to question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations.” (Foster 1983: xii)

Foster is careful to stress that the anti-aesthetic as a rubric is not to be understood as a negation of art or representation ‘as such’. As much as Dada may have declared itself anti-art, in this very declaration it embodied modernism’s revolutionary hope of an “emancipatory effect… a space beyond representation” (Foster 1983: xv). Within this model, “we are never outside representation – or rather, never outside its politics”; the anti-aesthetic is not a sign of modern nihilism “which so often transgressed the law only to confirm it – but rather a critique which destructures the order of representations in order to reinscribe them.” (ibid.)

If we accept, as Foster so sensibly argues, that the anti-aesthetic “marks a cultural position on the present”

(Foster 1983: xv), that is, that the network of ideas concerning the aesthetic are outside of/beyond/without history, his model is infinitely transposable onto the networked, post-industrial, globalised, information age we currently find ourselves occupying. Now, as then, subjective taste is inevitably threatened by mass mediation, and models of universal vision undermined by ‘other’ cultures gaining visibility. The anti-aesthetic signals a practice that is cross-disciplinary in nature, sensitive to cultural forms engaged in politics or rooted in a vernacular – that is, forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm. It is precisely the deep-seated resistance of Foster’s model, anchored in his approach to aesthetics and coupled with his taking up of vernacular forms, which is so powerfully evidenced in De Wet’s work, particularly his sculptural work of the 1980s and his later object-based practice.

Despite the obvious relevance of the previous discus-sion, to which I adhere, De Wet’s resistance to academ-ic interpretations of his work must be taken seriously, not simply because he takes this position, but because speculating on his motivations prompts an interesting critical enquiry. His strategy of declaring everything as art creates enormous freedom, but also runs the risk of negating the very category (art) it seeks to associate itself with. It is also a kind of disclaimer: by already setting up the fundamental conditions by which the object or idea should be judged, he exonerates him-self from critical engagement. As such, his sculptures, performances and other activities always seem to refer back to themselves. There is a paradox here: modern-ist self-reflexivity vying for priority against a vigorously postmodern destabilisation of the distinctions between high and low culture, elitism versus the vernacular, con-ceptualism versus artisanship and so on. Through tech-nical and formal sleights of hand, De Wet has managed to maintain autonomy for himself and for his practice. This is a critical point around which my thinking consist-ently turns.


modular sculpture | 1981 | cardboard | dimensions variable | michaelis school of fine art, university of cape town


With respect to his choice of media, De Wet is a poly-glot. Anything that could be applied to the materialisa-tion of an idea is considered. There may indeed be an economic factor in his choices, as he works with readily available and found materials, but he embraces bronze alongside cut-up cardboard boxes salvaged from the lo-cal supermarket. He has produced sculpture in welded steel, bronze, plaster of Paris, wood, cardboard, alu-minium, polystryrene, found objects, pasta and his own body.

Drawing and printmaking are not absent from his prac-tice. Drawing is constant, located in notebooks, em-ployed in the design of tattoos, or invested in the acqui-sition of a new device, like the rolling ruler with which he compulsively fills pages with geometrical patterns and forms. Perhaps it is printmaking that De Wet has employed with least enthusiasm, although if an accom-plished and lyrical collection of small woodblock prints I viewed in a private home are anything to go by, we are the poorer for it.14

The apparent ease with which he moves between prac-tices is deceptive. Despite the intrinsically conceptual drive behind his work, much of it is hand-made utilising learned skills, regardless of the intuitive way De Wet seems to absorb these skills into his technical lexicon. He is clear about discovering the form and motivation for a work through a deep immersion in process. “I never know what I’m doing when I start”, he says. “It comes later.” There is something almost Zen-like about this, an analogy which would seem at odds with De Wet’s more excessive behaviour, but tug away at the layer of super-ficial interpretation (it does not offer much resistance), and alongside labour-intensive processes like crochet, embroidery and mastering intricate yo-yo manoeuvres, the presence of a drawing object called a Buddha Board in De Wet’s home makes sudden sense. It is a simple object possessing a simple magic. Consisting only of a panel covered in water-sensitive paper, a brush dipped in water and drawn across the surface leaves deep,

black lines in its wake, which slowly fade into nothing. Over and over, the board is inscribed and then returns, as if by magic, to a tabula rasa state. A superficially mute object that possesses infinite and invisible layers of previous inscription – the ultimate unseen palimpsest – the Buddha Board (which I initially dismissed as an unforgivable pseudo-spiritual tchotchke) reveals its sig-nificance, in the most unlikely and unexpected of ways.

Through time-consuming process, De Wet is able to de-termine the most direct way to get from the proverbial A to B. The consequence of this apparently contradictory situation is that what results may seem unbelievably ob-vious or literal, if not facile. But ultimately, it reveals a profound self-confidence, what Brett Murray has point-ed out is ‘obvious’, “not in its pejorative sense but rather in the sense that this describes the simple and profound effortlessness of his conceptual and formal constructs and the clear linear extension of a formal language and of personal iconographies.”15

This ‘obviousness’ is embedded in his use of everyday objects in his work, a perhaps unavoidable consequence of which is the monumentalisation of the banal. But look more closely at his collections, of hats, shoes, specta-cles, plastic hold-alls, games, knives, pipes, pens, pat-terns, fishing tackle. These objects begin to signify in a different, more profound way. He wants us to look again at these things that populate our lives, to appreci-ate their aesthetic presence and understand their sym-bolic economy. It approaches the curatorial. As Murray reflects, “there is always a clear, precise and unyield-ing consistency binding all of his practice. By specific choices he shines a light on the uncomplicated things around us, things overlooked. These choices are made with an eye for simplicity, design and popular history and driven by an idea that in choosing them (or making them) he imbues each with a coolness and profundity. They are presented as extensions of himself.”16

His paintings, disregarded by Braam Kruger as “oop-


sidaisy-look-what-I-painted-with-my-son-today…plainly awful”, have always been abstract or graphic in style. You might be forgiven for thinking that Kruger’s dis-missive statement motivated De Wet’s ‘Folded Paint-ings’ (See page 149), which invert surfaces, secret-ing the ‘image’ and turning them into sculptures. This may be true if De Wet had any sense of shame, which he doesn’t. His thinking is far more instrumental: large canvases don’t fit into a bakkie when moving house, so fold them, and thus produce something else entirely. His ‘knittings’ rework old paintings and other suitable flat forms by covering them in multi-coloured layers of knitted textile. There is an imperative to rework the sur-face, but not at the risk of completely hiding what lies beneath.

As Lin Sampson (1989: 48) has noted, De Wet’s “hard and constant fight has been against Good Taste”. He has an alchemical capacity to render the spaces in which he works (and here I include his body and physical appear-ance), as meticulous arrangements of unlikely colours, surfaces and textures that are consummately functional and visually arresting. He identifies and frames the aes-thetic strength of quintessentially local brands, patterns and craft techniques, and revels in the global irony (and unmitigated visual pleasure) of cheap plastic imports and their identification as both characteristically Afri-can and Asian. The importance of his live/work spaces, and the objects with which he surrounds himself, cannot be underestimated; they function as critical influences within his formal art production, and become more or less visible depending on whether you view the work in space where it is made, versus where it is ultimately displayed.

‘Home is where the art is’ remains one of De Wet’s most enduring maxims. His claim for art’s status and location as ‘home’ is at one with his insistence on the total im-brication of art and life. I am not setting out to offer an in-depth psychoanalytic interpretation of De Wet’s ar-tistic position, and I certainly mean to avoid psychobio-

graphy as far as possible.17 However, the longer I spent considering De Wet’s oeuvre in its entirety, the more the central ideas of influential object relations theorist D.W. Winnicott (1896 – 1971) insist a potentially interesting and productive transposition from the realm of analysis into art practice. De Wet’s artistic processes, particu-larly with respect to the creation of – and mediation of experience via – objects, is enriched when read through Winnicott. But critically, it also serves to show us some-thing of ourselves, how our relationships with objects in the world provide pleasure, and in turn, how our inner lives, our imaginaries, are galvanised by our interactions and our experience, with and through objects (and by extension, people and events).

Arguably one of Freud’s most vital intellectual heirs18, Winnicott’s style is characterised by clearly articulated ideas, humility and subversive optimism, evident in his notion of juvenile delinquency as an act of ‘hope’, one of many gestures towards the ‘true integration’ that he regards as the goal of each individual. For Winnicott, the prime condition of individual and cultural health is what he refers to as ‘creative living’.

Of course, within clinical psychoanalysis, these ideas have specific bases and are generally applied within the context of treatment. However, art theory has profited greatly over the last century from applying aspects of psychoanalytic theory to the interpretation of art practice and its products. Early feminist work loved to hate Freud’s phallogocentric position, and the voices of Melanie Klein, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous offered exigent alternatives. Later works positioned within discourses of ‘otherness’ and identity embraced Julia Kristeva’s body of thinking around abjection, melancholia and estrangement. Questions of subjectivity, particularly within screen- or photo-based work, is often productively approached via Jacques Lacan’s complex interface of gazes, subjects and mediating screens. Deleuze, Guattari and Žižek complete the litany of psychoanalytically-focused theorists taken up by art’s discursive realm,


able to offer cogent assessments of visual culture from industry to post-industry and the present, with its full catastrophe of mapped, interfaced, networked, estranged, embodied, image- and information-saturated and ecologically threatened subjects. Winnicott’s voice is conspicuously absent from all this, which is a strange thing given the zealous embrace of recent art forms that prioritise relational or dialogical interaction as aesthetic and conceptual strategies19, of which many recognise play, risky or otherwise, as a primary feature and value.20

You can make art from anything. And it can mean anything. My art is like a magnet that arranges metal filings in patterns. It creates patterns in the mind of the viewer. It’s like a catalyst that gets you thinking. It’ll be different with everybody, and dif-ferent also from what I as artist think about it, or intended. But it’s the same thing. Conceptual art has a long tradition that began at the start of the twentieth century with Marcel Duchamp. It’s not

shocking anymore. And I don’t want to shock. I’d rather shift boundaries, concentrate on where you can draw the line between what is art and what isn’t. (De Wet cited in Van Bosch 1997, my trans-lation)

Winnicott’s theories of creativity and play offer a remark-ably useful lens through which to consider the subcon-scious life of the forms with which De Wet is playfully engaged. Consider his ‘home is where the art is’ analogy alongside the title of a posthumously published collec-tion of essays by Winnicott, entitled Home is Where We Start From (first published 1986). The peripatetic De Wet is adept at making ‘home’ wherever he finds him-self, shaping each space as an extension of, and often literally as, his art practice. Where he starts from, that is, a point of origin, is a space of his own design. Con-flate Winnicott’s title and De Wet’s aphorism, and you get something like ‘art is where we start from’. Which seems as good a place as any.

Barend de Wet

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