Victoria Yards
08.06 - 08.06.2024
On a perfect winter’s day in Johannesburg, the sun a glittering ice cube, I entered Daniel Stompie Selibe’s studio in Victoria Yards, an inner-city Eden housing art and design studios, a marketplace and a vegetable garden. While too many artist’s residencies are plagued by dereliction, and an accompanying and impactful despair, Vic Yards stands apart, a squat post-industrial brick marvel, its rooftop quaintly lined with squat fire engine red chimneys with conical hats. Here, ‘creative hub’ is a fitting descriptor. Here, we are very far away indeed from annihilation or pathos, or any other gathering dark cloud that afflicts Johannesburg’s inner-city art scene.
I was called in to speak on behalf of Selibe’s art, an invitation of especial significance, given that he is one of the very few South African artists who has brilliantly ventured into a realm, after Heraclitus, that remains largely ‘trackless and unexplored’ – namely, abstraction. His ‘take’ is neither acquisitive nor presumptive, his is not a strategic claim upon a new-fangled fad. For it cannot be denied that abstraction is now a global phenomenon. As for the why and wherefore of its resurgence? It is certainly a symptom of resistance to an absolutist righteous hysteria, typically pegged as ‘cancel culture’, and, as such, the morbid quintessence of denialism which masquerades as the voice of the so-called ‘concerned citizen’. Judgmental, exclusionary, vitriolic, faithless, it is a culture that lacks compassion, voids understanding, denies reason, embraces dogma. Declamatory, urgent, maniacal, it is the precise inverse of abstraction, a realm of art-making that refutes any certainty.
Daniel Stompie Selibe, Why we hide our thoughts, 2024
In his ‘Abstract Manifesto, in Twenty Parts’, Jerry Saltz provides some pithy conclusions – that ‘abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented … to imagine, decipher, and depict the world’. Its implosive emergence at various stages in the nineteenth and early twentieth century – in Turner’s dysmorphic land and seascapes, Manet’s saturated anti-portraits, Picasso’s Afro-centric hallucination, radically expressed in the defining painting of the early twentieth century, Les demoiselles d’Avignon – track the seismic negation of neo-classical art, realism, societal and consensual normativity, and, as a great consequence, the radical transformation of the meaning and affect of art. It is within this counter-intuitive tradition that we must position Selibe, who, after Saltz, ‘circumvents language, and sidesteps naming or mere description’. However, Selibe’s paintings are never abstract in their entirety, collaged sheets of musical notation appear, as do cut-out images of African masks and a host of other cryptic signage that judder and swerve the focus between abstraction and the figurative and nominal. This spastic dance – a fitting descriptor for an artist impelled by movement, music, human physicality – allows for a Dionysian affect, an animistic surge, a wild pulsation, that reminds us of the root ‘primitivism’ that informs the art.
Franz Boas, in Primitive Art – still a landmark study a century later – countered the ongoing prejudice against primitivism, and reminded us that ‘Anyone who has lived with primitive tribes, who has shared their joys and sorrows, their privations and their luxuries, who sees in them not solely subjects of study to be examined like a cell under the microscope, but feeling and thinking human beings, will agree there is no such thing as a “primitive mind”, a “magical” or “prelogical” way of thinking’. Rather, Boas examines the particular and universal, and confounds the pervasive prejudicial presumption that African art, say, lies beyond the pale. Or, in the case of ‘Negritude’, that there is some a priori realm, unstained, that precedes the damage wreaked by colonialism. On the contrary, form-meaning-affect cross time, are potently distilled and enduringly expressive. It is this primal currency that courses through Selibe’s paintings. Again, after Saltz, he ‘disenchants, re-enchants, detoxifies, destabilises, resists closure, slows perception, and increases our grasp of the world’. In effect, Selibe reconfigures how we see the world, and why. Unmoved by literalism, his, rather, is a psychic apprehension.
Daniel Stompie Selibe, Confusion brings positive thoughts, 2024
As such, Selibe’s paintings are far removed from abstract art as ‘zombie formalism’ or ‘visual muzak’. His is not a decorative display or some effetely elegant expression of supposedly irrefutable power. It is certainly not a kindred spirit to Mark Rothko’s Buddhist TV screens, as one wry critic remarked. Rather, Selibe’s paintings flood the cortex, thrum through a bloodline, heave, judder, rubbish conviction, and propel us onward and inward. After Frantz Fanon, in his masterpiece Wretched of the Earth, Selibe’s paintings occupy a ‘zone of occult instability’. For Fanon, this enigmatic zone was the motherboard of radical change. If Selibe conveys this revivifying transformation, it is because his paintings are anticipatory – they yearn for human betterment while snagging us in the throes of struggle. In Selibe’s case, however, that struggle is never pathological. For him, in the midst of gravity, history does not hurt. This disposition is especially remarkable. If Selibe refuses the blithe placidity of ‘zombie formalism’, he also refuses the conception and production of art as a trigger for the further aggravation of suffering.
‘One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star’. Nietzsche’s formulation is a precise mirror for Selibe’s art. For him, chaos is nurturing, the unknown a great font, possibility adjectival, the sparkling dance the great outcome. The titles of Selibe’s works – Why we hide our thoughts, Space for emotion, Confusion brings positive thoughts, Broken chords – alert us to a core dissonance, some snag, that suspends coherence. If thoughts are hidden, it is because their self-presence is not consolatory. The mind – Reason – comes in the way of what Nietzsche describes as a physiological thought – one that threads the body. If confusion is generative, it is because it allows for the accidental, for rupture, some new and surprising alignment. If emotion is key to the making of a painting, it is because it is therapeutic. As for music – those broken chords? – for Selibe it is a medium, a means, a way-finder. Music is at the core of his understanding of painting – his aboriginal songline.
Daniel Stompie Selibe, Space for emotion, 2024
If Daniel Stompie Selibe is one of the more thrilling abstract painters today it is because he has never lost sight of its primary and primal goal, which is to restore the sensate to an insensate world. If we need abstract art today, if it is now resuming its urgency, it is because of the dulling and oppressive weight of moral piety and justice. Ours is an Age of Anger, outrage, defiance and despair, in which we are forced to take sides and subtract human complexity. Against the simplifications which abound today, Selibe gifts us an animistic realm in which all things are alive, in which hierarchies collapse, and wonder and dread are joined in a life-affirming dance. Then again, Jack Kerouac hits the nail, “Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings’.
