Young liars
Wood, wax, ivory, glass
Dimensions variable
2008
La Tenda Rossa
Inkjet print on cotton paper
1255 x 830 mm
2004
Edition of 5
When enough people start saying the same thing.
Solo exhibition
16 August – 18 September 2008
Art Extra, Johannesburg
The title of the exhibition – When enough people start saying the same thing. – functions as a binary definition of the tipping point in power dynamics as a means to effect broad-based political will in both democratic societies and fascists regimes.
MacGarry’s working methodology in the past was dominated by a conceptually-based dogma that excluded the material manufacture, exhibition or manifestation of any artworks or art objects. Using this aspect - titled All Theory. No Practice. – MacGarry wrote about ideas, concepts, artworks, themes, film treatments, etc but never produced them, exhibited them as material objects or made them. Over time this dogma presented serious challenges to the artist’s ability to function as an artist, and ultimately to produce anything at all (ideas included). In 2008, MacGarry moved away from this methodology, instead producing props, ephemera and stand alone sculptures from these fictional films. He also produced large-scale photographs that in a sense act as stills from these unrealised films. It is these films, existing only as treatments and ideas and scripts, that generated a majority of MacGarry’s tangible output for several years, until 2012. So the shift from not producing material works at all, to producing props from these fictional films means that the artist was able to produce, make and market art objects for the first time.
In drawing on the role of linear filmic narrative, the process of conceptualising a film and the strange dual function of the props and objects themselves, MacGarry as retro-fit his conceptual framing as defined by All Theory. No Practice. into a new means of working.
The Father
Inkjet on paper
1200 x 900 mm
2008
Edition 10
Thabo M. Mbeki
Wood, wax, steel
730 x 220 x 240 mm
2008
Private collection
H.F. Verwoerd
Bronze
650 x 270 x 270 mm
2008
Edition 3
An interview with Michael MacGarry by David Brodie
July 2008
Q.
I would like to start our conversation with a discussion around some of your earlier work, produced under the banner of All Theory. No Practice. The first time I encountered your work was some years back - Modern Amusement was a self-published, limited edition book that focused on an extensive body of work you had 'produced' - that is, a body of work that was meticulously explained and documented, both through text and image - but never actually made, or manifested as physical objects - instead, the object was the publication itself. This mode of engagement (as your working name All Theory. No Practice. suggests) was something of an antagonistic challenge to the object-centric understanding of the art object - and I understood it at the time as an immediate revolt against the fetishisation, or the supreme status of the art object. Could you discuss this strategic mode of 'non-object' that you deployed in early works such as Modern Amusement and Or until the world improves.
A.
My artist statement at that time read as follows: My work investigates the ongoing ramifications of Western imperialism within the African continent. Of particular concern are the mechanics of control and vested interest that inform the journey of culturally symbolic languages and products from the so-called centre to the periphery (and vice-versa) via established global trade routes that define and manipulate the peripheral context through an insidious process of inclusion and exclusion.
As a broad thematic qualification of my working practice the above statement was useful in its vagueness - it alluded to sustained postcolonial deconstruction of neo-colonial and imperial products and practices whilst hinting at investigations into the associated discourses on globalisation. In terms of the demonstration of subject, I was largely preoccupied with seemingly failed utopias and obsolete technologies. My concern was neither to redeem nor vilify specific past events but to alter them for review through fictional narratives and temporal comparisons. This mode or aspect continues today, but the focus is more on contemporary political conditions, and somewhat less on the historical precedent. This concern, predominantly with products and legacy issues around Modernism, was to question why utopian moments did not implement themselves and what dominant interests and forces maintained regional moments as secondary ones. In so doing, to suppose and manufacture what was airbrushed from these histories - what might be useful there, what might be reused today? For when they become superseded, forms of communication develop into catalogues of access to begin answering these questions. But saying that doesn’t communicate any implicit understanding or ownership of specific historical narratives – my reflections on Modernist and colonial practices were not nostalgic but rather manifested a desire to reclaim and subvert such assumptions about specific histories and their closely associated presents. Temporal compression and historical manipulation created hybrid events and products that refigured specific pasts and specific presents as direct products and continuations of each other.
But, as a defining statement the above also constituted a form of discursive captivity - a series of categorisations that were not wholly representative of concerns necessarily manifest in completed works. Yet, central to my working practice then was a conceptually motivated exclusion of materially manifest artworks. Production was instead focused on publishing: ideas, concepts and projects that were described as if they were ‘finished’ and materially manifest but in fact, they all existed only in the form of a series of descriptions in differing modes of publishing. There was no art product in a market-orientated sense - there was nothing hanging on any walls – there was nothing to buy or sell. The king had no clothes. Perhaps. But, ideas – principally mine, as well as those of others - were the currency, were the modus operandi - were the means. And in so working like this, the aim was to achieve the ‘perfect crime’ of combining formal seduction (design), conceptual resolve (thought) and readability (entertainment) in one downloadable or printable consumable. Functioning along similar lines to an album produced by a recording artist - a singular, packaged resource and entertainment product for personal consumption. An act which was based, in part, on the precedent set by the Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) film-makers, who in France in the 1950s wrote extensively before they were able to make any films - stating that such writing was a form of film-making. This mode was also useful to realise (at a conceptual level) various projects that at the time, and still today, are not possible to materially realise. The mode of publishing allowed these concepts a role independent of a material completeness. From the peripheral position the experience of global contemporary art is always a mediated one, either through publications: monographs, catalogues, art magazines or via online resources. A similar precedent was emerging at the time, and to some extents still is, in South Africa in the relationship between the Diasporic requirements of successful once-local artists and their increasing presence in contemporary art publications –both foreign and domestic. Such magazines are to a large extent singular means to access these artist’s work and projects. Inconsequentially, the production of my own publications mimicked this mediation (both geographic and institutional) to the level of absurdity, in the abstract hope that “the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience.” (1)
The Master
Inkjet on cotton paper
1500 x 1200 mm
2008
Edition 10
Q.
As a direct follow-on to the previous question, I am curious as to how this seeming wariness around the object has slowly given way to the production of actual objects. Your objects are, as a rule, always - bluntly - exactly what they seem; while simultaneously being tongue-in-cheek, acidly ironic comments on the status of the art object. This game of surface and/or meaning is further complicated by the fact that your objects are, without exception, meticulously produced. I think here of works such as One Man Struggles, While Another Relaxes - a miniature-size cargo ship carved from elephant ivory, and also of works such as Heart of Darkness, your re-working of Nicholas Roeg's 1993 film version of Joseph Conrad's 1913 novel. Could you discuss the shifts that you believe occur when works such as these - existing first as theoretical objects (in publication form) - are translated into actual objects in the world.
A.
At the time I was focused primarily on writing treatments, concepts and whole scripts for filmic artworks, and while the rigid dogma of All Theory. No Practice. was initially very liberating, in so much as I was freed from several fundamental and logical constraints – gravity, financial backing, scale and time all ceased to have any relevance to my practice. I could think about the narrative, concept and visual character of a film independent of anything else. A number of these filmic projects remain today as simply ideas because the realities of practice return instantly as soon I want to really make them – they are too expensive, complicated and time-consuming to materially produce. So the intent of All Theory. No Practice., initially had nothing to do with a weariness about the art object as I wasn’t concerned with objects at all, I used it as a means to publish work and ideas at a time when I couldn’t physically manifest these ideas. For my university undergraduate degree I majored in sculpture and still see myself principally as a sculptor. The restrictive dogma of All Theory. No Practice. was no longer viable once I returned to making sculptural props and objects to be included in my fictional, hypothetical films. Once I started to materially manifest the props from these elaborate unrealised films, I could no longer deny the materiality of my practice, and I saw no value in sticking to a dogma that actively prevented me from functioning as an artist. That said, most of my ideas for work at present are still generated through filmic narratives, treatments and scripts before they become material objects, sculptures, photographs or installations. The common germination point of all the ideas is still the same as during the period of All Theory. No Practice., the difference now is that I am able to produce the accompanying, support material from these films – the props. While the photographic works act, in a sense, like stills from the film. And by extension, works like Heart of Darkness are not props or objects relating to other filmic projects, it is a film in and of itself, and this is the product of my decision to begin to make art objects, because ultimately my intention is to function as a visual artist, and as such people need to physically interact with my work, and not simply read about it.
Thabo M. Mbeki
Wood, wax, steel
730 x 220 x 240 mm
2008
Private collection
H.F. Verwoerd
Bronze
650 x 270 x 270 mm
2008
Edition 3
Q.
Could you discuss your Heart of Darkness work, shedding some more light on your decision to use this iconic narrative, and also explain how you approached your 're-narration' of the film from a technical point of view.
A.
This project features Nicolas Roeg’s 1993 film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness filmed through a kaleidoscope with the original audio left intact. Heart of Darkness was first published in 1902, while Nicolas Roeg’s film adaptation was released in 1993. Conrad’s novel enjoys considerable academic and popular interest in the West and has been credited by leading literary scholars to be “among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language”. (1) But outside this framework the appeal is considerably less: “I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question." (2)
By retaining the film’s original audio, the narrative of Conrad’s story (from which the screenplay was created) is kept intact. The kaleidoscope lens however reduces Roeg’s visuals to an ever evolving and shifting colourful pattern, reminiscent of the vague, generic ‘ethnic’ fabric prints popular in tourist markets. The vital visual component of the film has been interrupted for the purpose of questioning Roeg’s decision to shoot a film about colonial Africa on location in Belize in South America. What were the motives behind choosing to make a film in 1993 based on Heart of Darkness and to then decide to film it on the wrong continent?
Fetish
Inkjet print on cotton paper
900 x 700 mm
2008
Edition 10
The Instrument
Deactivated 30-06 Mauser KAR 98k (c. 1942), Oregon pine, ivory, epoxy, enamel
1300 x 360 x 200 mm
2007
Private collection
Q.
I have always been interested in the way your work seems to problematise notions of the 'performative'. Earlier publications of yours 'perform' the (fictitious) existence of objects, and simultaneously you appear as a central character in several of these works (either as present and embodied, in works such as The Twenty Second Johannesburg Biennale and Spiderman; or alternatively, operating as disembodied/absent author - in scripts such as LHR-JHB). In a sense you assert your presence as artist and author, but disavow the manifestation of such authorship. In your recent Archetypes photographic series, we also see another version of performance emerging - these images are, at first glance, firmly within the realm of pure docu-theater: characters appear in an image, deadpan; yet here again, as with previous work, you immediately remove this comfortable (and wholly fictive) sense of cohesive narrative, by declaring the specific conditions of the image's construction. The Master is a case in point: the image is of a masked figure posing in a jungle of colonial-fantastic lushness and steaminess. The figure wears a camouflage suit, posing with a golf club and an AK-47 in his hands. Accompanying the image is the following text:
This photograph features three works I made this year — the wooden mask of Hu Jintao (President of China); the Ghillie suit and the AK-47 assault rifle. The Hu Jintao mask was carved from an existing Okuyi mask I bought at a market in Johannesburg for R 400.00. The Ghillie suit I bought online from a U.S. military supplier in Utah for R 780.00 — this is a standard issue tactical marksman suit issued to all infantry snipers and spotters within the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps. The AK-47 was made from a plastic toy I bought for R 75.00 — which I then aged with sandpaper and carved the wooden elements from pine timber, gluing them to the plastic gun with epoxy. The person in the photograph is my girlfriend s parent s gardener. His name is Main Road Ncube and I paid him R 100.00 for a three-hour shoot.
So there are several levels of performance activated here: the performance of character itself, the 'rhetorical performance' implied in the use of various elements of an autonomous sculptural work of yours (Hu Jintao and The Scramble for Africa), and the performance of an image that masquerades as documentary photography, but is revealed as anything but. There is a disjunct between what we think we're looking at, and what you tell us we're looking at. Could you discuss your understanding of performative aspects of your work with reference to the works cited above, and others.
A.
The work titled The Master, is borne out of another as yet unrealised filmic work titled Hu Jintao and the Scramble for Africa. As I mentioned earlier, the photographic work, The Master functions much like a film still of this unrealised work – whilst the props used in this photograph, namely the suit and mask also exist as a separate sculptural work. My reason for unpacking the mechanics of The Master’s visual and symbolic construction in the text that accompanies the work is principally two-fold. Firstly, because I am not particularly interested in the viewer scrutinising, or unpacking the photographs themselves when the ‘real’ meaning or intent of the piece exists in a film that has not yet been made. Secondly, I take serious issue with the normative paradigms associated with representations of people on the African continent, and the perpetual othering of normative practices here. The role of the primary African person is tied into a Promethean spiral of manifesting or performing ‘weird’ practices, clothing, decoration, beliefs and physical characteristics for the gaze of a principally Western audience. By describing in detail the mechanics of the image’s construction and being totally candid about the processes (financial, power dynamics and contextual) involved in producing the images, my intent is to simultaneously critique photographic epistemology; the power dynamics attendant on paid-for, posed portraits; paradigms of how the African continent and it’s people are represented for strategic means as well as allowing the conceptual, contextual and semiotic ‘frame’ around the images to expand and leak, allowing a multitude of meanings and references in.
(1) Huysmans, J.-K.; A Rebours; 1884
(2) Gerard, J.; Introduction to Heart of Darkness; New American Library; New York; 1950; p.9
(3) Achebe, C.; An Image of Africa: Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness; in Moore-Gilbert, B.; Stanton, G. and Maley, W. (Editors); Postcolonial Criticism; Longman; New York; 1997; p. 121
Teeth Fetish
H&K G3, timber, animal teeth
1050 x 205 x 85 mm
2008
Private collection
Interview, August 2008
Mary Corrigal –
Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki [the second democratically elected President of South Africa] is part of your Champagne Socialist series and was recently exhibited adjacent to the bronze sculpture H.F. Verwoerd [the ‘father’ of Apartheid] from your Tipp-Ex Politics series. As such, does this pairing imply that Mbeki’s brand of leadership is as corrupt as the Nationalist leaders that preceded him? Would this be a correct assessment?
Michael MacGarry –
The Champagne Socialists and the Tipp-Ex Politics series of sculptural works are two distinct projects with autonomous means and intents, but with a binary logic premised on articulating both the legacy of corruption under the Apartheid era coupled with the contemporary failures of the ANC leadership. The pairing of these two works is not a comparative exercise but rather a dual statement on the mechanics of leadership and it’s impact on the everyday lives of South Africans, especially those on the margins of society – economically, socially and politically, and who were thoroughly repressed under Apartheid and are today a large proportion of the ANC’s power base. The basic point of this pairing is to state simply, that the power dynamics on which the lives of these people are most patently contingent, have changed little.
Mary Corrigal –
Corruption is a recurring motif in your work; do you see it as being an automatic manifestation of political power?
Michael MacGarry – Without question – power, and the attendant quest for its currency is tantamount to the struggle for life – in an individual capacity, as a political organ and as a manifestation of nationalism.
Mary Corrigal –
Your observations about South African politics is embedded in a broader discourse centred on your apparent disenchantment with Pan-African politics, do you see the Mbeki’s failure as a leader to be part of a trend that afflicts the continent?
Michael MacGarry –
Implicitly – poor governance is a problem of pandemic proportions in nearly all African nation states post-independence and is responsible for vastly more destruction, death, social breakdown and infrastructural degradation than any other source. It is the recurring patterns of poor leadership, the mechanics of power dynamics and the common motives that drive these systems, on which I base my focus.
Mary Corrigal –
If so, does this reality make Mbeki’s failings that much more unpalatable? (That the continent’s future is as predictable as its western critics propose).
Michael MacGarry –
No, the process South Africa is engaged in post-1994 is one initiated by most other African states 40 years ago – in terms of post-colonial nation statehood, we are in an emergent phase, barely out of the womb. The failings and processes of Mbeki’s leadership do mimic patterns of corruption and political power dynamics evident in the leadership of a number of other African states, but they also mimic those of head of states in Europe, South America and North America – power corrupts. Period. But I don’t live in Europe or North America so my focus is on patterns and repercussions that affect my context. Western critics be damned, it is the advanced economic machines they represent that subject vast areas of the African continent to unfavourable trade barriers and loan systems – whilst actively supporting corrupt institutions for their own political and economic ends – generally premised on a wholesale removal of raw materials, with little or any benefit to the citizen populations of the countries they trade with.
Mary Corrigal –
Is your art driven by anger, disillusionment, or is it the manifestation of detached observation?
Michael MacGarry –
My work is based on several key components – namely an idiosyncratic philosophy premised on questioning the very process and manifestation of material art objects versus a conceptual, lens-based approach to production; a critical, but largely abstract investigation into the mechanics of life on the African continent with a particular focus on the legacy of a colonial past coupled with emergent neo-imperialist practices and lastly, with a purely mechanical and/or formalist focus on the physical production of art objects. With regards your question, my focus on the mechanics of political and economic processes on the African continent are largely abstract, and philosophical, based in part because I grew up in this context, continue to live here and like any artist, have a vested interest in attempting to articulate the time I live in.
Mary Corrigal –
We come from a history of art being used as a socio-political tool, but do you think that art with political content can shift the status quo?
Michael MacGarry –
No. I don’t think art can shift anything, except itself, both in financial terms and in terms of advancing a niche knowledge base. Within the design fraternity this is a current issue globally, but in contemporary visual art it is considerably less so. Design as a route to shifting the advanced capitalist socio-economic paradigm is seen as a viable tool in the movement for global change – post the 1970s, an increasingly globalised visual art world, however, has seemingly further established itself in a ghetto of commerce and self-interest. I think locally, that the legacy of the so-called ‘Resistance Art’ in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s was largely a manifestation of white guilt, and little else.