Writing Art History Since 2002

First Title

Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who threw himself out of his apartment window, reminds us that we cannot judge a life by how it ends. Similarly, one cannot read a life solely through how it is afflicted.

Portrait of Jan-Henri Booyens. Photographer: David Altman
Portrait of Jan-Henri Booyens. Photographer: David Altman

The case of the artist Jan-Henri Booyens, is fitting in this regard. Deeply concerned by the conflation of his art practice and substance abuse – a journalist described addiction to heroin as an ‘open secret’ – Booyens, as an addict, now stands in place of his art, as a portal through which to enter it. This is a gross misstep taken by those attracted to scandal, who assume that art must reflect a life. An ‘open secret’ is a paradox, and, as such, neither secretive nor open. How, then, does one understand what Booyens paints or does in the act of painting?

On the first of two recent occasions that we met, at the Cape Town Art Residency in Woodstock, he was seated in a blue foam office chair on wheels. He needed a more efficient vehicle. In his hand, he held a paintbrush attached to a stick. I watched him scuttle, crab-like, about his paint-splattered territory, his leg shattered in a motorcycle accident unsupported was woeful, but the painting he was making was not. Can pain truly be translated into art? Is it suffering we truly seek when gazing at Munch’s Scream? Is the howl emanating from the central figure or located in the deafening vibratory din all about? A figure in a landscape, but where is the noise coming from? Everywhere, of course, and in the case of Munch’s painting, perpetually so. My point? That the source of pain is not so easily isolated. And, in the case of Booyens, a young South African artist, that pain – psychic, personal, social, political – is complex, invasive, hydra-headed, impossible to gauge and disentangle.

True, the pain that courses through the artist is singular, but it is never entirely thus.

Oil on unprimed canvas, 170 x 220cm. Photographer: Nicole Clare Frasier. © Jan-Henri Booyens
Oil on unprimed canvas, 170 x 220cm. Photographer: Nicole Clare Fraser. © Jan-Henri Booyens

In an essay to which I’ve returned to more than any other – with addictive regularity, which Samuel Beckett described as a dog chained to its vomit – I find myself, yet again, rereading J.M. Coetzee’s ‘Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech’, in which the banality of evil, like the banality of the pain it furthers, possesses ‘no conscience, no imagination, and probably no dreams’.

The deformed and stunted relations between human beings created under colonialism and exacerbated under… apartheid have their psychic representation in a deformed and stunted inner life. Delivered in 1987, seven years after Booyens’s birth, Coetzee’s thesis, which understands damage as a ‘psychic representation’, best captures suffering in South Africa, then, as now. 

However, Coetzee gets it horribly wrong in the assumption that historical pain is definitional and that it can and must inform creativity. ‘The crudity of life in South Africa, the naked force of its appeal’, physically, morally, ‘make it as irresistible as it is unlovable’. Furthermore, in a country thus afflicted, ‘there is now too much truth for art to hold, there is truth by the bucketful’. Truth overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination. A common mistake made by those who persist in reading South Africa through a pathological index. After all, is this not a typical reading of the so-called ‘Third World’ or the lives of ‘Others’? Of anything, or anyone, who operates beyond the pale, outside one’s known orbit? 

To like or understand or be pleasured by art because it mirrors one’s life is a gross error, as is the fetishistic passion for its difference. Art must intersect a life and yet maintain its indifference. This is why I am concerned by those who objectify others and choose to interpret their creativity in-and-through their suffering, or, in the case of Coetzee, who foregrounds hunger, rage, and brutality at the expense of all inscrutable intimacies and complexities. Suppose there is no tenderness in Coetzee’s vision of South Africa, its people and its artists. In that case, it is because – like the majority – he has chosen to find the country ‘as irresistible as it is unlovable’, a reflex, like an ‘open secret’, which is as compelling as it is deceptively false.

Oil on unprimed canvas, 170 x 220cm. Photographer: Nicole Clare Frasier. © Jan-Henri Booyens
Oil on unprimed canvas, 170 x 220cm. Photographer: Nicole Clare Fraser. © Jan-Henri Booyens

In my assessment of the Cape Town Art Residency, I chose to reflect on Jan-Henri Booyens, one of the first residents who, in my view, painted the ‘wasteland of the mind’. A realm alarmingly devoid of any cognitively graspable structure, and, as such, irreducible to the system. In my view, this remains their greatest strength. Booyens’s vast paintings in oil, acrylic, charcoal, glitter and spray paint are ‘catholic and profligate’, defined by excess. For him, there is ‘no romantic state of exception’. As for the viewer? In choosing to venture therein, he-she-they-it would find themselves ‘snagged in the shattered entrails of a feeling’. This is because the paintings are sensate, a bodily distributed disaggregation of urgencies, drives, and yearnings, affixed incalculably to matter – raw surfaces, paint – and, as such, inescapably somatic. I spoke too of the artist’s pain, its embodiment in art, bonded to a body and a mind ‘destroyed… wasted… ungoverned and ungovernable. I further described this raw interpenetration of mind and body as a striking instance of what Friedrich Nietzsche termed a ‘physiological thought’.

To what extent is this conjunction of body and mind different to Coetzee’s ‘psychic representation’? Isn’t this what Booyens is doing – conjuring snarled inarticulacies? Pain need not be explicable, though dogmatists might disagree. If Booyens presents inchoate psychic topographies, it is not because of damage. The ‘representation in a deformed and stunted inner life’, as Coetzee might say, is because damage is best expressed excessively, rawly, without accountability, in an ever-forming formless void in which there is No Ask and No Answer, in which no reconciliatory spirit abides, where nothing, and no one, is known, understood, or loved, through any reverberating echo. For what I think-feel-believe that Booyens’s paintings gift us is what we perpetually shun – the unstudied eloquence of our desolation.

Oil on unprimed canvas, 170 x 220cm. Photographer: Nicole Clare Frasier. © Jan-Henri Booyens
Oil on unprimed canvas, 170 x 220cm. Photographer: Nicole Clare Fraser. © Jan-Henri Booyens

In our second conversation, on the rooftop of Café Ganesh in Observatory, where Booyens smokes a cigarette and sips black coffee, and I drink whiskey and beer in pairs, we return to painting as unmaking. ‘Everything has its inherent baggage’ is his answer to the question, ‘What do you think you are doing?’ Caught in a slipstream of accreted stuff – physical, psychic – we cannot quite think our way through life. ‘Baggage’ supposes a burden, a wound, but it is also, all importantly, a variant of a landfill, which defines us, which we are. We are all our own Agbogbloshie – a dumpsite for technological waste in Ghana – the more significant sum of detritus, surplus, and excess. To assume that we carry our garbage proportionately, elegantly and eloquently is to succumb to illusion. Booyens’s point is that this is never the case. Our lives are ‘open-ended’ and inconsolable despite all our provisions and arrangements. The point of his paintings – if any art can be said to have a point – is to trigger art’s attention to, yet utter disinvestment in, our suffering. 

Booyens is adamant that it is no longer his once he releases a work from his febrile clutches. Was it ever? Is a painting ever assigned to anyone in particular? That he returns again and again to ‘Glitch Art’ – several writers have been directed thus – suggests that tech plays a vital part in his painting practice. I doubt this to be the case. The digital is a trace, a nostalgic memory of youth, a goad and trigger. The ‘glitch’ is how one ‘gets into the insides of an image’, says Booyens, how one ‘corrupts, adds to, deters information’. But what if everything is intrinsically corruptible? Error-stricken? As Gilles Deleuze reminds us – the system works because it does not work. The glitch is constitutive and endemic. 

In understanding this to be the case, one must consider the nature of Booyens’s corruptive practice – to what end he disrupts ordained patterns and how he de-orchestrates visual movement. That he possesses or enforces no discernible technique is vital. Booyens is utterly disinterested in the investigative drives of others. There is no grail, no deconstructed system, precisely because – unlike Gerhard Richter – he is not invested in paintings as a translation of the pain of history or the banality of the self. For him, emphatically, abstraction is not a trope for some hidden meaning – it is not an ‘open secret’. The layering and erasure of colours and shapes lead to no reveal. At best, Booyens’s paintings are inferential. As to what they might infer? It is never dependent upon the meaning of the artist, his psychology, his struggle, and his history. It is true that Booyens was profoundly disturbed as a child by the lie of Calvinism, the Afrikaner as a ‘chosen people’, the Dutch Reformed Church as a machine for indoctrination and censorship – the Church as Glitch Art. 

Oil on unprimed canvas, 170 x 220cm. Photographer: Nicole Clare Frasier. © Jan-Henri Booyens
Oil on unprimed canvas, 170 x 220cm. Photographer: Nicole Clare Fraser. © Jan-Henri Booyens

His life, as such, is trapped in the burden of white imperial orthodoxy. But to suppose that his art is wholly informed by, or deformed through, oppressive orthodoxies is to miss the point. Coetzee’s mistake is in supposing that an oppressive truth ‘overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination. In Booyens’s case, it is precisely ‘truth’ – as a disguised falsity – which must be rooted out. Deformation stems from purported Truth. Liberation – the freedom from the burden we unavoidably carry – is the means to traduce the spectre of history. In this limited and reactive sense, Booyens’s paintings are traducing in that they refuse the Law of Truth, any juridical or ideological controlling system. No painting form is better suited for comparative freedom than abstraction, though it too is burdened by sanctimony. However, the baggage which abstraction carries is infinitely lesser, say, than portraiture, which for Booyens is horrifically burdened by the noise of patrimony, legacy, selfhood, fatuous identity politics, and some other self-inflicted miserabilism and vanity. 

In abstract painting, the sense one barely makes one’s own, and as such precarious. No consensual opinion can override abstract painting’s intrinsic precarity. Harking back to his childhood, Booyens recalls watching television when the signal was shot, abuzz and aglow with inarticulate and unintelligible scrolled patterns occurring ‘outside open time… when the signal was fucked’. For Booyens, this was ‘the ultimate abstraction’ at the time. But not quite. For what painting would later reveal would prove a fathomless wasteland of irresistible inarticulacies. A time beyond time… untimely… ‘outside open time’… in which no secret possessed an allure, where damage proved permanent, in which a heart could die yet keep on beating, where paint freed from wholly discernible form could linger longer, deeper, further, and do so without the need for story, some clue, or any crooked hook upon which to hang a life.

For more information, please visit the Cape Town Art Residency.

Ashraf Jamal is a Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg. He is the co-author of Art in South Africa: The Future Present and co-editor of Indian Ocean Studies: Social, Cultural, and Political Perspectives. Ashraf Jamal is also the author of Predicaments of culture in South Africa, Love themes for the wilderness, The Shades, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art, and Strange Cargo: Essays on Art.

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