Carine: I would like to start my questions with an attempt to elucidate the way in which your thinking with regard to postmodernism and postcolonialism relates to your practice of art making. Firstly, in your writing, you posit the notion that since postcolonialism is predicated on Eurocentric discourses (of both the Enlightenment, in an easy negative sense, and Deconstruction in a more complicated, but also negative sense) the position of the ‘other’ is a dangerous one for artists and theorists alike to take up. Obviously though, the ‘taking up’, or engagement with this position of the ‘other’ need not be simple or straightforward. Artists such as Yinka Shonibare, Thembi Goniwe and Bearni Searle have all utilised representations of themselves as ‘other’, but in modes fraught with ironic and subversive twists. This point gives rise to two questions:

To what extent do you believe artists who engage actively with the notion of the ‘other’ as a means to confront the Eurocentric gaze, are succumbing to the conditions set by Western discourse? Is there any way to avoid this?

In your own work, you frequently take up the position of what I would like to call an ‘ultra-self’ – a figure of excessive whiteness, endowed with an uncanny ability to do violence to the body (references to guns and boxing) and the mind (references to madness and delirium). I call it ‘ultra-self’ because of a recurrent return to images of yourself that dramatise your position as, in my reading, a white man alienated by your empowerment and disempowerment by parties external to yourself – governments, cultures, discourses and so on. Can you give us more insight into how the interplay between representations of ‘self’ in your work are informed by, or make ironic references to, representations of ‘otherness’? In other words, where and how are you positioning yourself in the field of ‘self-and-other’, and why?

Johan: For me, it is not constructive to attempt to challenge the conditions of western discourse by wittingly occupying the position of the ‘other’.

Firstly, i2 agree that the performance of ‘otherness’ need not be a simple, straightforward engagement. However it remains just that: the performance of ‘otherness’. In this it is also at once the antidote and the poison. Let me clarify. The performance of ‘otherness’ is never purely a masquerade; it is a role that at once both describes and delimits the various noetic possibilities that may be established through the discourse of western ‘sameness’ and its contestation, namely, ‘otherness’. In this way, the role-assignment of ‘otherness’ is neither a natural phenomenon nor a neutral, arbitrary business. It is always a relation of power structured according to the logic of a particular form of knowledge. In the simplest terms, to occupy a position of ‘otherness’ is to do so always in relation to ‘sameness’. But, by whose ‘sameness’ will we define ourselves? By which common denominator will we determine ourselves to be part of a specific group and at whose expense will this illusion of coherence be maintained, in other words: who will be excluded from ‘our’ group?

Furthermore, to view ‘otherness’ as purely a masquerade is to impose some kind of Sartrean narrative of ‘pure’ alterity on humanity in general: where we are all willing ‘others’ at one point or another for each other. Viewing ‘otherness’ as purely a masquerade makes of ‘otherness’ a natural distancing or alienating occurrence in the affairs of humanity in general (not to mention that ‘otherness’ then becomes a negotiable social position inhabited ‘freely’ by its various occupants). It should also be remembered however that the kind of ‘otherness’ i am referring to is not a division that can be drawn simply along the axis of the subject/object duality in western philosophical thought.

No, the ‘other’ i speak of is rather the procedural investment of certain forms of human knowledge - and its articulation as shared socio-cultural values - with negative disciplinary value. It is always a shifting relation of power. Therefore it is never wholly manifested in values such as race or gender or any other physical characteristic of the ‘self’: the binary relationship between ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’ is more a functional way of knowing the world that predetermines the accordant possibilities for the eventual production of our knowledge of the world. When we perform ‘otherness’ we enact it within the limits of certain greater socio-historic epistemes, and thus, with certain hermeneutic possibilities are already in place. To put it bluntly, there is nothing foreign about ‘otherness’ to the western discourse of ‘sameness’: we may say, in deconstructive terms, that it is already present in the western discourse of ‘sameness’ from its outset. Therefore we cannot sever ‘otherness’ from ‘sameness’, as these values exist in a functional relation to each other.

Thus, in answer to your first question, i believe that the occupation of a position of ‘otherness’ may show certain incoherence within the western discourse of ‘sameness’. However, i do not think that this proof of incoherence fundamentally undermines the discourse of western ‘sameness’, it remains trapped by the very logic that it seeks to displace and which has necessitated such an oppositional response to begin with. i believe the only way to avoid this impasse is by rejecting the functional power of the ‘sameness’/’otherness’ dichotomy as the only means of knowing ourselves and the world we inhabit. We must do the impossible and at least attempt to think outside the proverbial box, so to speak.

With regards to the idea of the ‘ultra-self’ posited by you, i think that there is a fundamental misreading if one views it as a reaction to external forces. Firstly, if this figure has the power to do damage or to perpetrate acts of great violence, it is not because what is represented is in any way external to myself. It is the ‘more than me’: the ‘I’ and the investment of that ‘I’ as a ‘meaningful’ entity according to certain structural ideas - what you correctly term the ‘ultra-self’. But it is the ‘I’ gone insane from its confrontation with, what i consider to be, the pinnacle of the sublime: the confrontation between the ‘self’ and the ‘self’ at the moment when its gaze turns inwards. It is the realisation that the self and the world is one and the same (something like that moment in Being John Malcovich where Malcovich enters his own mind - only to find himself confronted by an endless array of other John Malcoviches that structure his whole perception of ‘being’). In this much it is also the complete negation of any transcendence in the western sense. But in another more positive sense, it is the appearance of an endless amount of new beginnings that may be seized. This is my demon: the realisation that i am always first my own ‘other’, before i project it outwards.

Carine: In an obvious sense, the proposition that postmodernism is a kind of ‘Trojan horse’ flies in the face of what many postmodernists would have us believe. You seem to suggest that while postmodernism is intent on providing agents outside the traditional Eurocentric discourses with acceptance and validity, it thereby catches them in a basic dilemma of having to either accept this acceptance within the rules determined by the Eurocentric politics of postmodernism, and therefore having to constantly perform their ‘otherness’, or yet again risk being sidelined by virtue of not being ‘readable’ enough as (prized) ‘otherness’.

By making this argument, you are in effect ‘uncovering’ something within postmodernism. You frame your position by arguing for a “Foucaultian reading of ‘otherness’ as a disciplinary sign fore-grounded by a eurocentric ‘will to truth’ still exercising its authoritative power on postcolonial societies and their discursive products”. However, by necessity, you are yourself in the process of legitimating a reading of discourse and culture – both in your writing and your art. I am referring here to your invocations of American consumerism, and the Intifada (among others). Can you elaborate on the role of this ‘will to truth’ in your own ‘unmasking’ dynamic? Are you self-consciously making reference in your artistic work to the necessary irony of ‘uncovering’ political/discursive tensions?

Johan: i realise that while i argue certain critical propositions about discourse and culture i am actively constructing other ‘legitimate’ approaches to the reading thereof. This is one of the great impasses of late twentieth century western discursive practices in general. Western disciplines ranging from art, medicine, science and even religion, have all been subsumed by the question of what to place inside the void once its presence becomes patently self-evident. As if placing something there could fill it, shut it off and isolate its insistent silence from our everyday life. For me, the void is the space of exteriority that questions all notions regarding discourse and culture as coherent structures. Perhaps here my reading of Foucault has informed me the most: if a knowledge can ask “what am i not?” and hear a reply uttered in even the most provisional of terms, then it has succeeded, on a very human, pragmatic level, to silence the void momentarily. Western forms of discourse have continuously attempted to construct for itself a space of seeming exteriority – something like Plato’s Idea or even Levi-Strauss` structural approach – that could fill the void (in this way also assuming that we are not part of the void). For me, one must accept the silence of the void as answer enough. In my own work this acceptance of silence manifests itself as something much akin to a state of paranoia turned inwards: it is no longer ‘they’ who undermine me, but rather, it is the ‘I’ who undermines the ‘i’. i realise that am already present in every question i ask and every answer i receive. Only when the ‘I’ accepts silence as an answer enough, will it be at one with the world - which is exactly what it cannot do. Therefore, one may say, the situation is a “necessary irony” in my work.

Am i saying that governments, cultures or individuals cannot be held responsible for the suffering of others? Not at all. But it is because people mis-recognise their attempts to fill the void, as ‘truth’ or as ‘meaning’, that they can be held accountable for the suffering of others at all. This is perhaps my greatest problem with postmodernism: while postmodernists speaks about ‘relativity’, ‘plurality’, ‘the loss of meaning’, ‘multiculturalism’ etc, postmodernism as a socio-cultural and economical system seems bent on including everyone and everything into its scope as if it were an dealised neutral space. One may even say that postmodernism assumes it is the void. However, as recent critics of postmodernism such as Ziauddin Sardar have shown, postmodernism is not without its own particular socio-cultural and economic agenda(s).

Carine: In your body of work, it sometimes appears as if you have two modes of working. There is, on the one hand, the building of complex images/objects by means of found objects, wrapping and bronze casting. On the other hand, there is also the somewhat minimalist mode of working with reduced colours as occurs in the “Square Dance” video and the “Violence and Happiness” prints. In some of the later works, however, the two modes seem more integrated (as in the “i am no one installation”). Could you give us more insight into why these two modes exist within your work, and how the process of ‘combining’ them came about?

Johan: Both these modes of working are essentially the same for me. However, they are also indicative of different phases in the development of my art career thus far. The more sculptural mode of working grew out of my pre-graduate studies at the University, where i was forced to choose between painting and sculpture as subjects. i could never understand the distinction made between different art forms, as if certain art forms have the ability to ‘speak’ in specific languages closed-off from others. Initially, however, i felt the need to explore physical space more, and thus chose sculpture as my field of study. On an autobiographic level, the later combination of different modes of art making is simply a way for me to collapse the seeming distinction between art-forms, and also, the various narratives attempting to keep these separations in tact. On another level, both these modes of working are centred on the notion of ‘identity’ in art. The earlier sculptural works were an attempt to negotiate some kind of equilibrium between my own identity as a white male South African artist raised in a system where the notion of ‘high’ art still informed much of art education, and that of myself as a human being intrinsically opposed to any such easy systematic classification. However, these earlier sculptural works contained within their seeming ‘postmodern’ pluralism an element which would become more pervasive as i grew more confident with myself as an artist: they were already infused with a general kind of anti-postmodern pessimism that now forms the basis of much of my art. Constant references to violence, capitalism, sickness and death within the context of a contemporary global postmodern society, are all evident in both the sculptural and the minimalist modes of working you referred to.

Carine: For many artists, the choice of medium is central to their oeuvre. By focussing on a limited range of materials, artists are often able to extend their creative vocabulary by ‘mastering’ the challenges of a certain medium. In your case, however, there are a number of media employed – from sculpture to video, from installation to performance. In every case, I get the sense that this is exactly not an attempt to ‘master’ the medium. Rather, there are other things at work behind your choice of medium, such as intertextual references that are medium specific. Here I am thinking specifically of the reference to Joseph Beuys’ “I Like America and America Likes Me” in your performance “Enfantada”. Even the references to Abstract Expressionism in your painterly works are replete with commentary on artistic subjectivity. Can you elaborate on the significance ‘media’ has in your work?

Johan: i am not sure what it means to ‘master a medium’. What are the politics of such attempts at ‘mastery’? What can one gain by excluding certain ideas from your oeuvre? When i can answer these questions for myself, perhaps i will become more sympathetic to this idea of ‘mastering a medium’. Rather, for the moment, i attempt to draw from existing mediums and sources in order to combine them freely, but not without motive. Though this position seems to be ‘postmodernist’ in origin, it is actually borne from a position to the contrary. For me postmodernism presents nothing new in art practice. Art and culture in general could in any case never be contained inside those restrictions that postmodernism seems so intent on reacting against. Stated differently, if postmodernism, and i quote Eagleton1 here, “mimes the formal resolution of art and social life attempted by the avante garde, while remorselessly emptying it of its political content”, then my work is an attempt to politicise even that form of postmodern mimicry/pastiche. So the images, mediums and ideas i use in my work are all derived from their particularity to certain forms of modern and postmodern art and culture as ‘western’ in origin.

Contextually, the different modes of art-making i employ are rooted in the work produced by artists just preceding and during the rise of pop art in the sixties – what is generally considered to be the advent of postmodernism and the ‘end’ of modernism in western art. In the case of the wrapped objects, one could say in sculptural terms they are ‘neo-dada assemblages’. They refer on a very obvious level to the early works of Christo: the wrapping of various objects in layers of different materials such as plastics or canvass that are stained, painted and glued together, then combined with other cast found objects such as Kentucky Fried Chicken, cheetahs, images of Nelson Mandela, toasters etc. However, for me the objects i combine with these wrapped objects have a different meaning than just that of being ‘everyday’ items. They are globally recognisable images of South Africa - images like Nelson Mandela and African wildlife, for example. For me, there is also a tension not only between the various objects I use in my ‘combines’, but also within the various traditions presupposed by them as ‘aestheticised’ objects. In this regard the trolley is a particularly significant symbol for me (one that i would like to pursue in future works still). Here in Gauteng one often sees people pushing trolleys, stacked with various items, ranging from newspapers, clothing, boxes and old tyres, around in the cities. Mostly these stacks of ‘scrap’ are wrapped tightly using rope and plastic - these vendors often sell their bundles of scrap to various companies for recycling purposes. As far as i am concerned these works are Christos in (cultural) transit. However, in South Africa, these ‘works’ are actual expressions of the lives of individuals living in a contemporary consumer society, and not just some wry postmodern commentary thereon.

On the other hand, the more minimalist mode of working you referred to earlier, is based on the work of the abstract expressionists just preceding the rise of pop art. From colorfield painters such as Rothco, i extracted the idea of large-scale works that overpower the viewer by their sheer expansiveness as a single field of colour, and thus, attempt to induce some kind of spiritual experience. From the gestural painters such as Pollock, i took the idea of subjective spiritual investment in an artwork through the actions of the artist – which also accounts in a round about way for the reference ‘last stand’ of high art. By combining pop-art, abstract expressionism, and performance art, i attempt to articulate a certain incoherence within contemporary art making practices: for me, pop art or even dada was not the beginning of something ‘new’ at the expense of something ‘old’, it is the moment where western ‘high’ art and the narratives which supported it, attempted to invade everything, not because ‘the centre could not hold’, but rather, because it was expanding.

When i make a work such as the i am no-one installation all these references come together as a subjective response to my greater context as not only an South African artist, but also a human being: ‘wrapping’ the canvass in layers of my own blood, vomit, plastic, paint, combining it with various other art historical elements, as well as, various other objects’ that speak about the ‘real’ experience of my everyday life – a panel of glass broken at home, blankets, stolen road signs, a broken chair etc. What appears to be a formal painting/sculpture is in fact the site of my own personal experience of various actions and ideas that shape my world. It is not an attempt to establish something universal in art, but rather to define some personal space where no neutral space exists at all. In this regard blood and vomit as main ‘colouring’ mediums work well: nce the viewer recognise the use of these mediums in the artwork, their response to the artwork as being a neutral space is disturbed.

Carine: I am particularly intrigued by the motif of ‘expulsion’ in your work – present in the vomit and blood (a liquid that has held a long fascination for you). Obviously, associations with the abject immediately enter with the use of such material. However, you persistently introduce not only the substances themselves, but also references to how they were produced into the work, and descriptions of them (in the case of “Spookasem”, for example). What is the significance of the references to the process of expulsion?

Johan: To return to an idea articulated earlier, the notion of expulsion is aligned with the realisation of the ‘ultra me’. It is the exorcism of the ‘I’ that always attempts to structure the world according to its self-reflexive gaze – the gaze that always reifies the ‘I’ at the expense of its ‘others’. Those moments where i am confronted with buckets of my blood, or when i vomit uncontrollably after periods of ritual fasting interrupted violently by overindulging in liquids, that is when i realise the void concretely as myself. But, this realisation is never a lasting one. It is eroded slowly by my return to the grey areas of consciousness. Only the ritualistic re-enactment of this moment gives it lasting shape and something like ‘meaning’ - for it is after all an encounter with the complete absence of meaning in any western sense of the word - in my life. The descriptions of the processes and mediums used in the artworks are there to establish at least some platform from whence viewers can access ‘meaning’ for themselves in these works: once again, to be confronted by a purely abstract red painting is one thing, it has its own aesthetic history, politics etc, but to know that it was made from human blood or by the ritualistic expulsion of red Sparletta cool-drink is to undermine any pure formalist reading thereof. We are all made from bone, flesh and blood. We have all been sick, felt ill, been physically scarred, and so the act of expulsion is not the reification of some higher form of ‘aesthetic consciousness’ - it is just the articulation of our self-doubt when we are confronted by the void in a very physical real sense. The processes, or rituals, by which i reach this stage, those are my own. But the base activity of expulsion, that is the common thread that the viewer responds to. Thus, the description of the process of expulsion and the media expelled that accompanies the work, serve a two-fold purpose: it introduces the notion of the ritual into the work and it serves to make the work more accessible to the viewer.

Carine: From your work, it is clear that in some instances you take up a persona – that of the jester, the invalid and so on. I find in all of these excessively dramatised parodies of radical subjectivities – in other words, beings that are difficult to contain within the rules of the rational, or at least the socially acceptable. Your references to artists such as Joseph Beuys, the writings of Georges Bataille, and the music of Eminem, seem to support reading a fascination with the liminally positioned individual. Is there a kind of Shamanistic impulse behind your work, a desire to bring about an implosion of fixity? Can you elaborate on these personae and their significance to you?

Johan: For me the shaman presents something unique in human cultural history. Firstly, shamanism as a practice is not confined to any one cultural history. Though we may know shamanist practice by many different names, not all of them positive I might add, shamanic practices can be found in the history of humanity virtually everywhere - Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, North America and Australia, have or have all had their own forms of shamanic practice particular their cultural history. Furthermore, the shaman as an individual is never exclusively bound by anything: the shaman is never bound by gender, race, a sense of morality other than their own, life and death, matter or spirituality, or even greater societal distinctions based on notions such as the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’. In fact, shamans were ‘chosen’ on the basis of that ‘transgressive’ capacity – the ‘insane’ were often chosen to become shamans, for example. In my own reading, the power of the shaman is exactly that: a freedom to move, to transgress and to collapse all the forces that shape humanities ‘self’-conception in general. Also, shamans were able to access both the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ during their trances in order to heal their patients. In this way the energies of life remain interconnected - to heal its wounds is to admit it and to repair imbalances as they occur.

With regards to my interest in ‘liminally’ positioned individuals in contemporary society, i believe that diverse contemporary ‘performers’ ranging from Ingrid Mwangi, Franko B, Mathew Barney, Steven Cohen, Eminem, Diamanda Gallas, Tom Waits, the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and even Marilyn Manson, to name but a few, may still perform roles as shamans in society: some of them being representative of ‘white/red’ shamanism and others as ‘black’ shamans (that is, shamans that access the underworld in their search for healing). Shamans have always been performers capable of shifting their identities and thus unleashing great energies within their respective communities. However, shamans simultaneously occupy liminal and seminal positions within any society: the shaman is liminal in the sense that they are never wholly part of either the everyday community or the spiritual world. That is exactly what makes the shaman a seminal figure in the general affairs of life: because shamans are not exclusively part of anything, they have the ability to function as a bridge between the different values that create, sustain or destroy life. We need to recognise the power of seemingly ‘liminal’ individuals to collapse our sense of ‘self’, but more than that, we need to recognise that these individuals are not liminal, they simply cannot be said to exist within such well-defined structural spaces as presupposed by the liminal/seminal dichotomy.

Does this mean that i believe that states of alterity or various other projections of liminality are necessarily shamanist in origin? No. In this way the various personae i ‘take up’ are all projections of a shifting identity – not only as it refers to the notion of the shaman but also as it refers to projections of my ‘ultra-self.’ The conflation between the two readings of these personae is a deliberate action on my part. There is a deeply complex relation that exists between the ‘ultra self’ and the shaman that needs to be acknowledged if i am to remain clear of championing shamanism as some ‘pure’ form of subjectivity, untouchable by the narratives of various cultural, political and economic practices. Stated differently, though i believe that certain individuals may have shamanic capacity, the position of ‘liminality’ they utilise in order to access this capacity may remain presupposed by notions of alterity particular to themselves. Thus, when you consciously attempt to inhabit the position of the shamanist, you may be attempting to do so through the pre-text of the ‘ultra-self’. Though i have great respect for the work of Joseph Beuys for example, i believe he often uncritically conflated the shamanist with the ‘ultra-self’. In this way his articulation of shamanism remained trapped by its use of a pre-text determined by ‘enlightened’ eurocentric narratives such as ‘the primitive’, the nature/culture dichotomy, the artist as a uniquely gifted individual etc. For me shamanism transgresses all boundaries, even those that make the articulation of shamanism possible within a specific cultural context.

Carine: It is impossible to resist the question of where you see yourself in the artistic context of South Africa, so I will ask it. Even so, I would like you to give an account of the specific events/instances that guided your articulation of this position. Here I am referring to exhibitions/publications that in some way attempt to establish a South-African art poetics, or aesthetics.

Johan: i was born in 1976 – the year of the Soweto riots. On a personal level, even though i was born on the ‘in’-side of the oppressive Apartheid barbed-wire fence of ‘whiteness’ and ‘Afrikanerdom’, this has always informed my position as a South African artist. For me 1976 was the year of spillage – when the people of South Africa spoke out against oppression en masse, creating a rupture through which chaos and incoherence could enter the illusiory unity of South Africa. However, this creation of chaos and rupture should be an ongoing process - even now in a post-Apartheid South Africa. People must be free to speak for themselves, always. Having grown up in a system where the oppression could at least be recognised for what it is - the institutionalisation of illusory fixity and coherence in order to further specific economic, politic and social agendas - to becoming an adult where these definitions seem to have become blurred in a contemporary global society - and still finding people bogged down by the shackles of neo-imperialism and other contemporary narratives of domination, I realise that there is still much that needs to be done in South Africa and the world in general. The revolution never stops. But it should always start with ‘self’-doubt: this is the great ‘pre-text’ that flattens all difference – the oppressive ‘I’ that cannot ever see the world in its diverse multiplicity because it remains separate, alienated and wholly self-perpetuating. But here is the problem: we cannot displace fixity only to re-institutionalise it in another, modified, form. In this regard the problem with the practice of art in a contemporary South African, and a contemporary postmodern global context, is not that it is too free, it is not free enough. The revolution should not start by calling the troops into action, but by dispersing them completely.

In this regard South African art cannot attempt to ‘return’ to any values or even to ‘re-construct’ contemporary art from the ruins of past art practice, in either a western or and African historical sense. Here I have a major bone to pick with most local art competitions, cultural festivals, art publications and the infrastructures that directly or even indirectly support the logic by which these ‘events’ function as platforms for contemporary art practice – in their own way universities, technikons, private institutions, and even the state, all play a part in sustaining the validity of these ‘events’ as the means by which we separate the wheat from the chaff. I am sick of the ‘good’ art/ ‘bad’ art dichotomy – whether this assertion of value is based on eurocentric/afrocentric attitudes makes no difference to me. Does this mean we should all make ‘non-art’ art or that the state and private industry should not support the arts at all? No – if there is funding for the arts it should be given freely, and, if we produce art, we should do so without any ‘aesthetic’ restrictions. Otherwise we still pay homage to the idea of art as a structured system - whether it concerns aesthetic or other neo-capitalist considerations. Art, like any discursive form of knowledge and practice, should never be viewed as fitting neatly into the box. Let it spill out, boil, overrun the pot and stain the stove.

In terms of local influences that have shaped my work, artists such as Minette Vari, Kay Hassan, Steven Cohen, Sue Williamson, Jane Alexander, Peet Pienaar, Candice Breitz, Santu Mofokeng, Zwelethu Mtetwa, Diane Victor, Willem Boshoff, Jan van der Merwe, Moses Seleko and Kendell Geers – to name but those who come to mind immediately - have all influenced my own approach to art-making in a South African context. Also, the publication of texts such as Reframing the black subject: ideology and fantasy in contemporary South African representation by Okwui Enwezor (1997), and the various responses thereto, for example Grey areas: representation, identity and politics in contemporary South African art edited by Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz (1999), may be cited as examples of other ‘moments’ in recent South African art history that were of specific interest to me. However, the list of South African people and context specific ideas that have all shaped my approach to art making is almost endless. Furthermore, i am not exactly sure where i fit into this picture. If anything, i would prefer not to fit into this or any other picture at all.