Interview with Christo Doherty
by Michael Smith
Christo Doherty's new show, seen first at the Wits Substation Gallery and then during March at Resolution Gallery, is entitled 'Small Worlds'. Through a series of photographic prints, Doherty explores the phenomenon of railway modelers in South Africa, as precursors to digital or computer-age 'imagined worlds'.
I spoke to Doherty about the body of work, and about refuge in imagined environments.
Michael Smith: Given your association with all things technological (Doherty is Professor and Head of Digital Arts at the Wits School of Arts), railway modeling seems like an unexpected means with which to explore imagined worlds.
Christo Doherty: Yes, it is a rather oblique angle! But I see the analogue worlds created by these modelers as precursors to the virtual worlds that have proliferated on the World Wide Web. In a strange way they share recognizable elements of the same psycho-geography.
MS: Were you conscious of avoiding the almost default fascination with cutting-edge technology that often accompanies work in this area of thought? Railway modeling is decidedly lo-fi in technology. Furthermore, your images are technologically simple, un-manipulated still photographs.
CD: By approaching the topic from this angle I could avoid those concerns with innovative technology and concentrate on the imaginative aspects of the constructed worlds. For this reason, as well, my photographs are intended to capture the modelers' views of their created worlds. I was fascinated by how the modelers imaginatively inhabit their created spaces, and I sought to reveal this in the photographic images.
MS: Your catalog essay, 'Rail technology, nostalgia and South African landscape' makes the point that many of the landscapes created by railway modelers operate from an impulse of nostalgia. This seems strongly at odds with the impulse towards creating futuristic, often forbidding landscapes in the digital texts you mention in your essay, like video games in particular.
CD: Yes, railway modelers are necessarily driven by a nostalgic impulse; but this is common to many digital environments as well. Hugely popular game worlds such as Warcraft, or the many World War 2 games also trade on nostalgia for an imagined past. Even the futuristic worlds are tinged with a nostalgia ñ a 'nostalgia for the future'.
MS: Yet, the common thread is the creation of worlds to take refuge in.
CD: Yes, this is definitely the common thread which, when unraveled, leads from the analogue worlds of the railway modeler to the most futuristic imaginings of the virtual netizens. Yes, of course, in the South African context, the impulse to take refuge from the changing world has a strongly political implication.
MS: The image Township squatter camp and railway lines reveals a certain aggression towards anomalous elements within nostalgic landscapes: the informal settlement beside the railway tracks is noteworthy because it features a group of Black residents 'necklacing' a victim. This is one of very few representations of Blackness within a set of mostly idealized landscapes, as if the only way Otherness could be included was under the premise of a reductive racism and White moralizing. Would this be fair to say?
CD: Yes, this is a valid observation and certainly one supported by my visual research into these landscapes. The worlds of these railway modelers are often a refuge from the political dilemmas of transformation in South Africa. The modelers are overwhelmingly white males who find respite from the anxieties of the new South Africa in their imagined environments.
One modeler, when I confronted him about the lack of Black people in his landscapes (which were otherwise painstakingly realistic in every detail) snapped at me: 'This is my South Africa, and I don't have to have Black people in my South Africa if I don't want them!'
MS: Many of the installations feature painted elements behind the models. Class GMAM Garratt and passenger coach, and Karoo and Class 5E Electric Locomotive in particular have painted mountains that recall JH Pierneef's works. In fact, the entire project of the railway modelers seems like an extension of Pierneef's idylls. Were you aware of your works, in turn, setting up dialogues with key Pierneef paintings?
CD: A very interesting observation! I can't say that I found any kind of conscious dialogue between the modelers and key Pierneef paintings; but the resemblances, I think, arise from the fact that Pierneef's imagery has been absorbed at an unconscious level into naÔve South African landscape art.
Interestingly, the background paintings are often the work of the wives or females relatives of the modelers. The male modelers concentrate on the foreground details and the rolling stock while the female input is on the backgrounds.
MS: The work Suburban train coaches with graffiti seems to be the sole example in this project of railway modeling as direct reportage, representing the experience most people have of contemporary rail travel. Was the modeler, Pramod Makan, aware of his installation in this manner?
CD: Yes, Pramod Makan has a rather different orientation towards his installation. He was particularly proud of the graffiti work on his carriages. On the evening that he finished these carriages he told me that he was so excited that he ran the train around his layout until dawn the next day. Perhaps his orientation is different because he is the only 'non-white' railway modeler that I have encountered in South Africa.
MS: In a broader sense, I am interested in imagined worlds as they intersect with or, in many cases, intrude upon the sovereignty of the 'real world'. I recently read about the phenomenon of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPPG's) like World of Warcraft (WoW) collecting obsessive devotees at every turn: kids failing their varsity courses because they spend all their time playing WoW, relationships breaking up due to gaming addiction, scholars not turning up for school because they're too exhausted from 14-hour stretches of gaming, etc. One friend told me a story of medical sundries companies reporting sales spikes in catheters since the launch of WoW, and the accompanying speculation that these are being used by gamers to self-catheterize to prevent time being lost to urination. Would it be true to say that an interest in this level of obsession seems to inform your project?
CD: Absolutely! I think these railway modelers share something of the gamer's obsessive need for imaginative involvement in their worlds; yet they are also 'outsider artists' who create because it fills a psychic longing and have to externalize their imaginings in a physical object.
MS: You state in your essay that 'industrial landscapes have been under-represented in South African landscape art'. Some of your images like Class 34 Diesel units and petrol tankers, and Crane above turntable certainly do trade the picturesque vista for gritty realism. Furthermore, your pictorial decisions, i.e. zooming in so that the machinery occupies the entire pictorial space, deny the neutralizing effects of miniaturization. Were these intended as comments on the tendency of miniaturized landscapes to neutralize harsh realities?
CD: I wasn't aware of that in my compositions. Most of my framing decisions were intended to support the intended realism of the model builders. I feel this goal was achieved when visitors to the exhibition experienced an uncertainty as to whether they were looking at images of real or miniature worlds.
