An uncomfortable ’90s flashback
An auction of photographer Greg Marinovich’s pictures showing violence and death at the front lines of South Africa’s transition to democracy provides a touchstone for where we are now as a nation – with some disturbing echoes, writes
AMAN’S body is suspended mid-air as a bullet hits him. A soccer team in their club’s regalia encircle a fresh grave. A man runs through the street with a gun in his hand. Tyres burn on a street.
Modest domestic settings became the backdrop for a brutal war that played out in the country’s townships – Thokoza, Duduza, Bekkersdal and others – in the early 1990s in the run-up to the 1994 elections.
The photo journalist, Greg Marinovich, referred to them as the “dead zones”, the eponymous title of a photographic essay that presents a country teetering on the edge of its destruction.
A portfolio of 41 images from this series will go under the hammer at Monday’s Strauss & Co auction in Johannesburg alongside a number of artworks from that era, causing an uncomfortable flashback.
Some of Marinovich’s images are difficult to look at again.
Fortunately, some of the worst he took during that time, such as one where a man is burnt alive, are not part of it, although it is images such as this that made him world famous.
Dealing with death at the front lines is one of the conflicting issues he addresses in the book he co-authored with Joao da Silva, The Bang Bang Club: Snapshots From a Hidden War.
It was turned into a film with American actor Ryan Phillippe playing Marinovich.
The film wasn’t that well received – it sidelined black and female photographers and, to some degree, it glorified the actions of those who were informally known as members of the Bang Bang Club.
With no supporting Hollywood gloss, the portfolio of images of this era brings home the raw everyday matter of death, the devaluing of life that defined that violent era.
You can detect it in images where a body lies uncovered. Subjects are depicted sitting besides or walking past the dead as if their passing is insignificant.
How could it have come to this and would our nation, our national psyche, emerge unscathed from this horror?
These are some of the questions that Marinovich’s essay provokes, particularly in conversation with artworks produced in the 1990s by William Kentridge, Norman Catherine and Anton Kannemeyer, which will all be on public view at the Wanderers Club ahead of Strauss & Co’s auction at this Johannesburg venue.
The 1990s are not only back with a bang at this auction house but in popular culture, too, what with high-waisted ripped jeans, peroxide-blonde pixie haircuts and velvet tracksuit bottoms all back in fashion, evoking a peculiar sense of deja-vu.
For South Africans, this sensation marks our socio-political outlook, too, as our streets perpetually fill with protest marches, police brutality continues, shacks are bull- dozed and built, an endless stream of media reports on the state’s corruption and the brutalisation of women and children.
Racism, too, looms as this festering disease that has resisted a cure. This has caused us to question how far we have come as a nation, but also underpins our current sense of disillusionment.
Marinovich’s images not only show violence and destruction, but unity and triumph. Images of Nelson Mandela raising his fist, for example. In reflecting on the portfolio, Marinovich surprisingly recalls the “great spirit of those times. We thought that anything is possible if we could just fight through this white supremacy”, he says.
Nevertheless, he suggests that the outbreak of violence in the “dead zones” in the early 1990s, which was often fuelled by the apartheid state, appeared to suggest that “we had reached the nadir”.
They were difficult times to process and make sense of, said John Leyden, one of the members of 1990s pop group, Mango Groove, that featured Claire Johnston as the lead singer. Leyden felt compelled to write the hit song Another Country as a means of coming to grips with the Boipatong massacre, which took place in the Sebokeng Township in 1992.
Forty-one people, including children, were murdered during a vicious, politically motivated attack. The band approached Kentridge to create the music video. He had yet to become world-famous, but he was known locally for his stop-frame animation films tracing violence and corruption.
Two of the charcoal drawings he made for the animated parts of the music video, which will also go under the hammer on Monday, don’t reflect the massacre. They present an empty billboard (or cinema screen) and a megaphone. These two typical motifs of his art function more like vessels to carry a message rather than to transmit one.
As such, you are left with a sense that he was preoccupied with the tools of influence rather than the content or substance of it.
These charcoal drawings embody his characteristic aesthetic and owing to their use for a Mango Groove video and rarity, they are valued at between R1.8 million and R2.5 million.
For Leyden and those familiar with the song and video, they are historical records of a dark time in the country’s transition.
“There was such a visceral horror about it (the Boipatong massacre). Death by pangas. In the second part of song, we try to make sense of it,” remembered Leyden, during a panel discussion about the 1990s at the Strauss & Co headquarters.
The song was recorded in 1992 and 1993 at Bop studios, where Leyden recalls getting the news about Chris Hani’s assassination.
“It felt like we are on the brink of something horrific, something we couldn’t come back from.”
The role that pervasive police brutality played in the cycle of violence defines Norman Catherine’s Predator, a very bold painting he created in 1993.
It will join this pseudo 1990s retrospective at the Strauss & Co Auction. A blood-red background frames a vicious-looking policeman with sharp teeth that are echoed in the spikes on his cap and uniform. He has a tongue like that of a snake. Treacherous cactus plants sur round a Zulu hut, which offers an escape if you can get past the cop.
The 1990s weren’t all about treachery and violence. Because of it or in spite of it, the years that follow the 1994 elections present an aboutturn and are defined by a sense of euphoria and “rainbow nation-ism”. This aspect might have been harder to depict by artists. Aside from Marinovich’s smiling Mandela pictures, there aren’t any in this auction that bring this quality and spirit to mind.
Or perhaps it has become unfashionable to look back at this optimistic era?
Marinovich, who spoke via a video link at the Strauss & Co event, certainly was nostalgic about this phase of the 1990s, and suggested we shouldn’t so easily dismiss the euphoria that followed the violence and loss.
“We must not forget what ordinary people did for us to achieve this moment of transition,” he said.
1994 became this dividing line, between the past and the present, the apartheid era and post-apartheid era.
Coincidentally, artists such as Kentridge denied this sharp division in his animation, although it relied on erasing lines and replacing them with new ones. He used colour, red lines, encircling spots on the landscape to draw attention to “mistakes”, errors in human judgement, which led to trauma.
The born-frees have adopted 1990s fashion; the ripped jeans and grunge-checked shirts. Even the Afrocentric “euphoria” fashion – the Shwe-shwe print and Steve Biko T-shirts, are making a comeback.
As is protest, they are closely scrutinising the terms that defined the era of their birth, which is probably what has brought us back to this retrospective moment.
Or maybe our nation will forever look back at this defining era, though always from different positions.
Strauss & Co’s auction takes place at the Wanderers Club Johannesburg. The public are invited to view the lots.
Visit www.straussart.co.za
Anything is possible if we could just fight The 1990s wasn’t all about treachery
Corrigall is an art consultant www.corrigall.org