SUPER BORING - Wayne Barker

Wayne enthusiastic reprobate friendly persistent good looking happy sad sensitive
rough tough father rich poor good bad drunk sober hard working lazy loving old young fun
sex art politics passionate shoes colourful money powder vomit friend fl amboyant painting
drawing jacket hat computers objects galleries music drink paintings women clean dirty
sleep awake gallerist book.
BAREND DE WET, 2010, CAPE TOWN

WAYNE BARKER

WAYNE BARKER
SUPER BORING

Wayne Barker: Super Boring
Published to coincide with a retrospective exhibition; Wayne Barker: Super Boring
SMAC Art Gallery, Stellenbosch | 20 March 2010 – 23 May 2010
Polokwane Art Museum | 22 September 2010 – 31 October 2010
Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg | 1 February 2011 – 12 March 2011
Exhibition curated by Andrew Lamprecht, SMAC Art Gallery, Wayne Barker
Author: Andrew mprecht La
Editor: Marelize van Zyl
Text: Simon jami N
Carol own Br
Thembinkosi oniwe G
Ashraf mal Ja
Design and Layout: Natascha Mostert
Editorial Assistants: Jean Butler
Kerry delinghuys Re
Nastasha niels Da
Photography: Garyth Bevan
Robert amblin H
Monique aritz M
Artist Assistant: Neil Nieuwoudt
Published by SMAC Art Publishing 2010
De Wet Centre, Church Street, Stellenbosch
Tel: (021) 887 3607
Fax: (021) 887 7624
info@smacgallery.com
www.smacgallery.com
ISBN: 978-0-620-46718-6
© 2010 SMAC Art Gallery (Publishing)
© 2010 Writers (Essays)
© 2010 Artist (Images of artworks)
Fine art printing by Creda Communications (PTY) LTD, Cape Town
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored on or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the above mentioned publisher.

CONTENTS
GALLERY STATEMENT 11
By Baylon Sandri
INTRODUCTION 1 3
Dearth In Venice
By Wayne Barker
FOREWORD 2 1
Wayne Barker: The Artist as Naked Subject
By Simon Njami
MOVING PICTURES 25
By Andrew Lamprecht
WAYNE BARKER: THREADING THROUGH HISTORY 82
By Carol Brown
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT... 87
By Ashraf Jamal
IDEAS AND REFLECTIONS ON “SUPER BORING” 9 3
By Thembinkosi Goniwe
WORKS 1 05
EXHIBITIONS 178
COLLECTIONS 1 80
AUTHORS 1 81

10
WAYNE BARKER
BAUER HOTEL
The concept Super Boring was born during the
vernissage of last year’s Venice Biennale. The 2009
Biennale was characterised by the recognition given to an
older generation of outstanding conceptualists, including
Yoko Ono, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman. A huge
banner on the Grand Canal boldly declared Baldassari’s
words from his 1971 artwork: ‘I WILL NOT MAKE ANY
MORE BORING ART.’
On the night in question, Wayne Barker had met and
befriended the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
and his wife at the Bauer Hotel. This couple had facilitated
Bruce Nauman’s exhibition at United State’s pavilion.
Barker was in a queue for prosecco at the bar, behind
the aforementioned gallery director. A young arrogant,
unknown artist pushed in front of Wayne and the elderly
gentleman. Wayne immediately protested against this
obnoxious behaviour and demanded that the artist get to
the back of the queue. Everyone’s attention was focussed
on the confrontation between the two artists, the tension
was palpable and there was anticipation of a physical
retaliation to Wayne’s insistence. Instead of throwing a
punch, however, the red-faced artist raised his index fi nger,
pointed it at Wayne and in a high-pitched German accent
spoke the words; Super Boring (Supa Boring!). There
was a stunned silence and Wayne looked both amused
and puzzled, he turned to the crowd, raised his fi nger
and repeated; “Supa Boring!” People burst into laughter
and a chain reaction of “Supa Borings” ensued, whilst the
trumped initiator of the whole debacle, sheepishly exited
the scene.
On subsequent refl ection it was a moment of revelation
for Wayne. He rejects the idea of work being inaccessible
or the elitist notion of; art for art’s sake. This is what Wayne
GALLERY STATEMENT
is taking from John Baldassari’s words; namely, the need
for art to be more than just idle navel-gazing but rather
that it needs to engage and arrest and more importantly, it
must come from the heart. Referring to the 90s cult classic,
Wayne’s World: Wayne Barker is Supa Boring… NOT!
Wayne’s infectious personality and larger than life persona
attracts attention and he never fails to entertain. Barker
constantly seems to reinvent himself to remain relevant.
The same applies to his artwork.
As Wayne put it himself, when I commented on his work
being boring – He replied; “yes I know, don’t worry, I always
cheer them up at the end”.
In the current exhibition Wayne has extended this
notion of ‘boring art’ to the enduring reluctance of the
South African art market to venture forth from the safe
haven of Pre-War Modernism and its failure to embrace
contemporary art.
Wayne Barker hails from the late eighties and is
an important fi gure in the Protest Art movement. He is
representative of a generation of young artists who broke
with convention and paved the way for a new contemporary
era in South Africa. From the outset, he was rebellious,
belligerent, agitative and confrontational. He took on the
art establishment, the media and the state in repeated
“interventions” and acts of defi ance which attracted
attention and earned him the notoriety which would
characterize his colourful and unconventional career. As a
multi-media artist, deconstruction and subversion underpin
his unique brand of expressionist, conceptual Afro-Pop.
Despite a seemingly chaotic and self-destructive lifestyle,
Barker’s art remains current, intriguing, challenging and
ultimately; beautiful.
SUPER BORING
By Baylon Sandri
11

12
WAYNE BARKER
Wayne Barker in Venice | 2009
Arriving again in Venice unoffi cially, offi cially invited, I
realised that living in Africa has a certain charm and a sense
of necessity. The night before I left I watched the history of
the Congo which was an insightful piece of info to arrive
in Europe with, at an art show of international acclaim. I
realized how tired most of the international art can be and
how up its own revisionist arsehole it can be.
We started by looking for the space where our exhibition
was housed. This took an entire day but during the day we
saw all the exhibitions being installed and all the artists
could be spotted a mile away, they had been invited by their
country and were feeling on top of the world. I, coming from
the so-called bottom of the world, started feeling more and
more frustrated, as usual we were doing it for ourselves;
carrying boxes of invites and paintings to our venue, while
our ministers were probably sipping champagne in faulty
palaces around the world unaware of the importance of
Arts and Culture in South Africa and the strength thereof,
let alone the fi nancial spin-offs and oblivious to the cultural
importance to represent the diverse visual art works that
are being produced here in SA today.
The stereotypical views about Africa are rife and many
an artist in South Africa is dealing with this ‘poor cousin’
concept, that we are naïve and the art produced here is
less important on a global level. This by the way is bollocks
because the work produced here is challenging for sure
and often deals with relevant issues globally and locally
with a degree of freshness and brutal honesty.
While dealing with my frustrations and the unbelievable
charm of Venice in usual African style, we realised that
since we had travelled half way across the globe we might
as well make the best of the moment. It was now time to
INTRODUCTION
DEARTH IN VENICE By Wayne Barker
clandestinely give the biggest art collectors our invites and
press release. The sky was full of jets and planes, landing
to bring people to this art extravaganza. The who’s who in
the international art fraternity were descending in private
planes and boats like the sardine run in KwaZulu-Natal.
Our fi rst target was a little hidden bar called Harry’s
Bar where the famous Bellini drink was invented. Walking
in sober was maybe a little ambitious, as sitting with his
entourage was the biggest art collector, Henri Pinault. After
downing two Bellini’s, I muscled my way to his table and
introduced myself and invited the table to our exhibition
called ‘Languages of the World’, he almost didn’t know
where SA is, again I felt the frustration of being an artist in
SA. I left the little bar and consoled myself with my cognac
from my faithful hip-fl ask, looking at the grand canal
glowing in the Venetian light, I was so embarrassed that I
felt like jumping in and swimming home and only making
wooden sculptures from now on! Our second target was
the notorious Bauer Hotel where the artists and patrons
hang out and drink champagne, fl aunting their egos and
arrogance; I suppose that comes with the territory? So we
started meeting people and inviting them to our exhibition.
Two out of ten people would give it more than 5 seconds
attention and the others would throw it back in our faces.
This made me consult my hip fl ask with a vengeance and
I thought to myself; who are these people anyway? We all
on this sinking island together exhibiting our work, with this
newfound freedom and realization I was able to meet some
fun people in the greater Art world, What a pretentious lot.
The next morning I woke up in the Bauer Hotel next to a tall
blonde stranger, a curator and a buyer of contemporary art,
on the fl oor were dresses that looked like they had been
fl own in from Pep stores in Africa.
SUPER BORING
13

14
WAYNE BARKER
Erratum | 2009 | digital print on card | 15 x 11 cm
I sheepishly left and looking into the shop windows I
spotted my friends frocks… just one of them would have
paid for the entire SA exhibition (not quite) to be in Venice.
Fuck, the Ministry of Arts and Culture should up their game,
I thought, and sat on a bridge with a post-coital cigarette
and laughed and cried, until the realisation kicked in, to
go to the exhibition space and see if the work was up and
lighting had been sorted out. At our exhibition I found a
grumpy Baylon putting up the works of Kay Hassan. We
worked for two days and were happy with the way our
work was hanging in Venice... with this behind us we could
continue our work to pull guests to our show, of course
Harry’s Bar and the Bauer Hotel became our frequent
haunts. Also we were invited to different countries’ parties,
which were a representation of their food and drink and
wine, fun was had by all. But again sunny South Africa
was not present.
As we settled into the rhythm of the situation we
realised our exhibit was a minute away from Yoko Ono’s
exhibit, this was unexpected and we knew that we were in
a good spot, of course we met her and gave her the press
release. Now that we had worked on the publicity I was
ready to view the artworks from the different countries and
the main show called; Making Worlds.
There was some powerful work from the different
pavilions and some that was very disappointing. On the
other hand, the main show on Making Worlds got me
thinking about what in the world was the curator on about
and why did he not take a trip to sunny South Africa and
do some research. This gave me the idea to exhibit on
his show in the room dealing with the fl uxus movement. I
photographed the labels of the offi cial artists and replicated
the label with my text (see opposite page).
I decided to buy a Prada suit and go to the show
again and place my work in the main exhibit. I was a little
nervous, but needed to make this statement. The work is
still up, so I am starting to feel a bit like a selected artist.
Eventually I had to leave and on my way out of town I
noticed people reading small leafl ets, handed out as they
bought their Vaporetto tickets. I saw them looking at the
illustrations of our South African work and later discovered
that our curator had managed to distribute 500 000 of
these brochures via the public transport network. Mission
accomplished.
I was itching to get back and start producing – whilst
listening to Charles Aznavour crooning about how sad
Venice is….
(This piece, in a slightly different format, was published in S.A. Art Times shortly after
Wayne Barker returned from Venice.)
SUPER BORING
15

16
There’s an anecdote about Wayne Barker as a student responding to an assignment
to sculpt extensions of the body. He dressed up as his lecturer, Neville Dubow, and got
students to throw tennis balls at him. Barker explained that he was ‘making a tennis court
of his body’. Amongst all the myths, true or false, about Barker’s work and life, I think this
one captures something of the place Wayne’s body occupies in his work, or the way his
work is embodied in his life. The rebelliousness to structure and authority in his work is also
played out on his own body. (Dubow was devastated.)
WAYNE BARKER
BETTINA MALCOMESS
Wayne has been recalling how I, as his art history lecturer at Michaelis, once covered
an essay of his with detailed comments in red, with the tetchy remark that ‘this is not a
nursery school’. I recall that essay very clearly; one of hundreds that I marked over some
eight years. Wayne wrote his essay with a very blunt pencil with many crossings-outs on
a single sheet of lined A4 paper that looked as if the cat had slept on it. It was incoherent
and barely legible; enough to make any teacher’s heart sink with despair. ‘Was this an
intended insult to me?’, I thought. I bristled and picked up my red pen and thought, ‘well,
stuff him, if he’s not taking his art history seriously, I will show him that I at least do, and
that I will evaluate and correct every single jot in his effort in
huge detail’.
It took me ages, and I ended up with this now-legendary sea of correction and
commentary in teacher’s red. I suppose that any other half-sane lecturer wouldn’t have
spent half a second on it, but I thought my own mad gesture back at him might make him
think a bit. I thought he didn’t really give a tinker’s curse about art history, but then years
later he started to toy with it in his Pierneef series, with his own quirky and ahistorical
assertion that Pierneef was to him the ‘fi rst Pop artist’.
He left Michaelis, his energy and seeming madness refusing to be guided, channeled,
corrected or shaped by means of formal education. But now I hear of him warmly recalling
this incident, and that I in fact earned a measure of his respect. He failed of course and I
thought that I had also failed him somehow, but there was little I could do to prevent this.
His irrepressible artistic energy fl ourished without the formalities of a Michaelis education
in art. I no longer think that I failed him, or that he in fact ultimately failed. I made an
impression on him, and he continues to make an artistic impression on the world, and
that’s what counts. It’s gratifying to feel that I played a small part in that.
HAYDEN PROUD, 11 MARCH 2010, CAPE TOWN
SUPER BORING
17

18
My work is commenting on society, it is about identity – where do I come from
because I am white? But I am an African. So it deals with universal issues. The inspiration
comes from a country that is very fucked up, because the morality of the country is weird.
So my work deals with that, but I also like to have fun, so some of the work has a
sense of humor sometimes, sometimes not.
WAYNE BARKER
WAYNE BARKER, 2004
Heart of Darkness | 2002 | oil and neon tubing on canvas | 180 x 180 cm
SUPER BORING
19

Performance | 1997
FOREWORD
WAYNE BARKER: THE ARTIST
AS NAKED SUBJECT By Simon Njami
I was wondering about what to write when asked to contribute to this volume. Personally,
I didn’t want to fall into the classical, intellectual analysis of pieces, deconstructing the
why and how of an artistic process. Others, I am sure, will take that to task. After having
given it some thought, I realized that there was only one way for me to fulfil my task:
to focus on Wayne Barker. Twenty-five years of artistic practice is not accidental. A
quarter of a century. It was worth a celebration.
The fi rst time I met Wayne Barker, almost twenty years ago, he was one of the angry kids on the South African art
scene. I was working on an issue of the magazine I was then editing, Revue Noire. Editing that issue dedicated to South
Africa was not an easy task. The 1994 democratic elections had yet to come, and the country was struggling with a
recent history that would take more than a Truth and Reconciliation Act to overcome. It was the fi rst time our editorial
team was forced to pay attention to race – where our freedom was limited by the will to give an equal treatment to each
and everyone. Historically, many white South African artists attended art schools. Some were even able to attend some
schools out of the country. As for black artists, the story was different, and we had to take that into consideration. All of
a sudden, we were confronted with – what W.E.B. DuBois called in the beginning of the 20 th century – the question of
colour. Up until then, nothing was important but the artist’s work. Now everything else became important.
When I heard of an artist who deliberately confronted those boundaries to call their bluff, I could not help but ask who
that person was. In the political correctness of a healing nation, who could dare to address the absolute taboo? It was in
FOREWORD
21

1992. His name was Wayne Barker. He became the black
sheep in the system, because he entered an art contest
as a black artist. Would he have lost; the question would
have been forgotten. But he won. And by his gesture,
he unveiled the unsaid within South African politics. He
revealed the absurdity of a country that would pretend that
its peoples had equal opportunities, and at the same time,
would favour those who suffered from the iniquities of the
apartheid regime. Many of the hatred and the different
refl ections that this act provoked was not based only
on cold blooded reactions, but on the fear that all of a
sudden, all the strategies that were being built were taking
the wrong direction. Wayne Barker became scandalous.
And what I am interested in here is to analyse the very
nature of this status.
Later on in 1997, the exhibition Fin de Siècle took
place in Nantes, France. It was the time when South Africa
was fashionable and when countries that closed their eyes
during the racist era and continued to do business with the
previous political dispensation were seeking redemption.
South Africa was indeed in fashion and Wayne Barker
did it again. Bored by the exoticism and clichés of the
show selected from Africa, he spontaneously took off his
clothes and covered his body with chocolate mousse, he
then went and sat in front of a piano and started playing
one of his own compositions. During the performance,
his French girlfriend licked the mousse from his body.
Wayne was almost expelled from the theatre. He would
later compare and dedicate his chocolate performance
act to John Lee Hooker, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Manzonnie,
Gilbert and George. This list doesn’t need any comment.
Barker referenced his role models very carefully since all
these guys were “scandalous” in their times. Not to pose
their act as an attitude, on the contrary. The simple fact
for them was that to be who they were, was enough to
create that uneasiness around them. They didn’t see their
art as a mere commodity, but as daily engagement. They
were art as well. Were they always right is not here the
problem. The problem is in the way they were regarded by
conservative societies.
22
WAYNE BARKER
This is where the scandal lies. Forged at the heart
of the Judeo-Christian religion, scandal is a chaste and
hypocritical veil which we cast over anything we do
not want to see or hear. Christ himself made no bones
about it, telling his disciples not to fl ee scandal but even
sometimes to seek it out. In those troubled times, the
mere mention of His name incurred the direst penalties.
Assimilating scandal to shamelessness, as bourgeois
society did was another form of avoidance. So Wayne
could have dedicated his ‘chocolate’ performance work to
Jesus too… Those who have chosen the intangible path
of creation could not mirror the society against which they
were forced to rebel.
It takes time to become an artist, to master the skill of
a business where nothing is planned, where success and
fame cannot be predicted. Hence the very question: for
whom are we making art? Wayne Barker is certainly a true
artist, in the classic sense, because he decided to work for
himself, regardless of current tendencies and fashions.
He has chosen to walk naked in the middle of the blind
alleys of art, establishing no barriers between his work and
himself, and therefore, fulfi lling the wish of the French critic
Pierre Restany who, in 1969, was complaining about what
art had become in Europe. I am tempted here to use the
term avant-garde, in the same sense that Restany put it:
“The idea of the work we have assumed, of attaining a
self-defi nition of the avant-garde, implies a basic postulate:
art is solely a phenomenon of language. Language, man’s
expression of thought, is living matter. There are moments
when the oscillatory movement of art becomes blocked.
Art seems to have lost the internal elements of its own
contradiction. It seems to have separated itself from life.”
For better or worse, Wayne Barker has decided never
to surrender to the force of morality, good taste, gentry,
social codes. And that’s what makes him who he his.
War | oil on canvas | 118.5 x 118.5 cm
SUPER BORING
23

24
WAYNE BARKER
MOVING PICTURES By Andrew Lamprecht
Wayne Barker’s life is a conglomeration of stories, events, anecdotes and interventions.
It is also a life of art.
Barker the artist does not stop as he steps away from the easel but rather seeps into the way that he lives his life, as
he approaches his surroundings and interacts with those around him. Echoing the great art patron the Marchesa Casati,
he could declare that his life, like much of his work, is his art.
Even a casual perusal of the published archive of his career spanning almost three decades will show up numerous
inconsistencies, contradictions, chronological impossibilities and other thorns in the lush biography of his life. Barker
himself contributes to this with his own yarns and self-refl ections that are frequently at odds with what others who were
integral in his life at the time recall. This is part of Wayne’s own mythos and is a vital element in his own self-making and
identity as an artist. These layers of fables, half-remembered vignettes and embellished narratives create a canvas as
rich and multi-layered as any of his paintings. He is no liar but rather a consummate fashioner of a truth that is more real
than any dry recitation of ‘facts’ could be. Just as his artworks show a deeper reality through their selective portrayal of
what the artist sees.
Nonetheless there is something profoundly authentic in all that Barker does and I doubt if even his fi ercest critics
could accuse him of being insincere. He has lived (and continues to live) a rich, almost fantastical, life: one that to a large
extent he has created himself, fashioned according to his whims and conscience and one that he is deeply committed
to. He is an artist, and this fact colours all that follows.
SUPER BORING
25

MEMORY / ERASURE
A paper structure is turning as if by its own volition in the centre of a darkened room.
It has been torn and ripped and through the gashes another cube of paper can be
seen, its surface also gashed and pierced. Upon this revolving screen two moving
images are projected, their subject hard to discern due to their projection on a damaged
surface. In the background, Bob Dylan’s song ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ can be
heard, sometimes louder and then sometimes softer than the overlay of other voices,
taken from an archive of historical media recordings. Around this three-dimensional
kaleidoscope is a circular barrier of salt, preventing direct access other than watching
and listening.
Memory / Erasure, produced in collaboration with
Joelle Chesselet, begins with a picture of Wayne as a
young boy, dressed up as a cowboy in his family home
in Valhalla. This soon fades and is replaced by a series of
horrifi c documentary pictures refl ecting the violence and
horror of apartheid’s State of Emergency, especially insofar
as its military aspects went. The other projection opens
with the signboard on Robben Island that ironically faces
Table Mountain (though this is not visible from the angle
Barker chooses). Soon this image is replaced by a video
of the sea, as a ferry approaches – though never reaches
– Robben Island. Robben Island has a special signifi cance
for Barker. His formative years and early adulthood almost
exactly coincide with the period that Nelson Mandela and
26
WAYNE BARKER
other political prisoners spent there. His birth year, 1963,
was also that of the Rivonia trial and one in which Hendrik
Verwoerd was cementing his apartheid policy. 1
Thus we may see this work as being a personal
refl ection on Barker’s early years – and what might have
been had he not been discharged from the army – as much
as a statement on general history itself. Signifi cantly his
original discharge document is surreptitiously included in
the space the installation occupies.
1 Referenced explicitly in Yesterday, Today and
Tomorrow in the ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ series.
Memory / Erasure | 2009 | video installation
SUPER BORING
27

28
WAYNE BARKER
Wayne Cahill Barker was born in 1963 in
Valhalla, south of Pretoria, a suburb populated
by military families and employees
of parastatals. The men in his family had
strong ties to the South African Airforce
and his father only made a sideways step
when he later joined the governmentowned
South African Airways. Barker
grew up in an environment in which the
apartheid Defence Force was admired
and even idolised. As he innocently spent
his formative years there, Valhalla was a
base for military actions against Angola,
Mozambique and its own black population
in the townships. 1
In 1976, when he was in Standard six, Barker was
arrested for buying dagga. That was also the year that
other school children would be arrested – and killed – for
defying apartheid education. Forced to leave his school,
he absconded to Nature’s Valley, in search of freedom,
becoming a woodcarver’s apprentice. Eight months later
he came home to Pretoria and made contact with his
parents once more. 2 Wayne Barker the rebel, the reprobate
and the anti-authoritarian was fully formed and a sense of
alienation (from society and his family) had begun to form
that would infl uence his work forever afterwards.
More than this however was a growing realisation that
things were somehow not right around him. Even before
his teens, he had witnessed brutality and oppression
against those who had a different skin colour to him
and had realised that the fact that white and black were
treated differently and kept apart was not only abnormal:
it was unjust. This, and his articulation of his opinions, far
more than any ‘rebellious’ bad boy misdemeanours would
1 Blignaut, Charl, in Atkinson, Brenda (ed.), Wayne
Barker: Artist’s Monograph. [S.l.]: Chalkham Hill Press &
the French Institute of South Africa, 2000, p. 9.
2 Blignaut, op. cit., p. 13.
gradually cause an insurmountable rift between him and
his father.
After fi nishing his schooling at Capital College he
spent a year at Pretoria Tech as an art student, gulping
up information from art history books as eagerly as he
tooled himself with practical skills. 3 After one year under
the watchful eye of his parents he fl ed to the Michaelis
School of Fine Art at UCT, where his cousin, Brett Murray,
was already enrolled. He spent two tumultuous years there
simultaneously impressing and outraging his lecturers
with his commitment to painting and his ever-growing
resistance to authority. It was to be his diffi culties with
his beloved art history that was to prove his undoing at
that institution. After bad marks in that subject, his father
decided to withdraw him from his studies. It was time to
go to war. He had different ideas, however, and spent
two weeks feigning insanity once called up to do basic
training in the army. Declared mentally unfi t he was soon
discharged from National Service, a relief for Barker but the
fi nal straw as far as his family was concerned. Disgraced
in their eyes and not welcome to stay in their home, he
turned to the big city, leaving for Johannesburg. It was the
birth of Wayne Barker the independent artist.
3 Ibid.
SUPER BORING
29

30
WA W WWAYNE A YN Y E BA BARK BARKER RK RRK RKER K ER
In 1985 I was conscripted to do my National Service – in a way to be initiated as white
male into manhood. But I decided – no way am I going to partake in this rubbish.
I saw the army as a treadmill, and in a way I think it was almost like a shongololo –
this small shongololo with a thousand feet and a thousand boots and I did not want to be
another one of the thousand boots that was going to go into a township and randomly
shoot at victims and shacks.
I convinced this machine that I was a mad individual. So for fourteen days I marched
like Charlie Chaplin. I was the “fokken engelsman”. I was quite diffi cult, but in fact it was
quite hilarious.
I had been given the certifi cate to say that I was mentally and physically unable to
partake in this Military Service.
WAYNE BARKER, 1992
SUPER BORING
31

LEGENDS
The ‘Legends’ series deals with individuals. Personally
signifi cant to the artist, they also resonate in the history of
South Africa. As ‘household names’ they have lost some of
their individuality and have become ciphers for a passage
in South Africa’s story that they infl uenced, precipitated or
described. Nevertheless, behind the familiar face and the
name attached to it lies an individual life, far richer, more
complex and nuanced than the invariable one liner that it
evokes. While Wayne Barker is undoubtedly referencing
their contributions to our history, he also appears
to be demanding that we look beyond their obvious
achievements to the personality that produced them. In
titling this series ‘Legends’ it seems that he is reminding
us that a legend loses its grip on the reality that produced
it by being told too many times and by having too much
erased (or conveniently forgotten) that confl icts with the
‘offi cial’ story being told.
32
WAYNE BARKER
For Barker the reason why they are remembered is the
fact that they challenged the system in one way or another,
This defi ance, be it of the system or of the conditions they
found themselves in, is what draws him to his subjects and
underpinning each painting as a process of research into
their lives. Each work is his personal take on their actions
for change or reform. These are his legends and he has
created a tableau in which their need to act, their refusal
to accept injustice and their desire to better that which
is around them are what engages him. When he speaks
of his ‘legends’ he does so with genuine affection and
admiration. I suspect he sees them as fellow-strugglers
against injustice and this comradery evokes a playful
familiarity which sees C.J. Langenhoven, author of Die
Stem, facing-off against Enoch Sontonga, author of Nkosi
Sikelel i’Africa, in Duel. The punning title has as much to
do with them fi ghting it out, High Noon style, as it does to
their dual role as authors of our current national anthem.
CBS News - 1990: Walter Sisulu | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 138 x 138 cm
SUPER BORING
33

Accompanying each portrait is a small sculpture
(commissioned from friend Richard Chauke and made to
Barker’s design) which dialogues with the legend of the
subject. In some cases this is playful, as when a robin
is placed with Nelson Mandela, a pun on Robben Island
(rather than a literally correct, seal, the Dutch word for
which the island is named) but also, according to Barker
as a way of respectfully humbling Madiba: the bird can
always take fl ight. (The wooden base upon which the bird
sits is in fact the Island). In other cases the sculpture is
dramatic and powerful, such as a burning passbook for
Walter Sisulu. A neon sign burns bright over all, a word
that ties the two together, harmonising the composition
and advertising what they stand for as much as resolving
dualities in their nature.
34
WAYNE BARKER
Much of Barker’s work has dealt, in one way or another,
with the subject of history, especially that of South Africa’s
colonial and apartheid past. In ‘Legends’ this history is
personalised through specifi c individuals who symbolise
and embody something greater than their own role in that
history. They are the accessible and well-known fi gureheads
who represent many others, and the less familiar,
who shared the same struggles, achievements or qualities.
Barker’s legends are legendary for a reason – they
are exceptional – but they also crystallise and concentrate
tendencies latent in everyone and present and activated in
many others. In this sense he democratises history even
as he places one or another individual on a pedestal.
Siel: Nelson Mandela | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 138 x 138 cm
SUPER BORING
35

36
Woman’s Country: J. Hlungwane | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 138 x 138 cm
WAYNE BARKER
High Noon: Enoch and Langenhoven | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 138 x 138 cm
SUPER BORING
37

BIBLIOHOLISM
It is worth noting that there are three sculptures in
the Legends series that refer to books: Walter Sisulu,
Antjie Krog and Sontonga/Langenhoven. In 2002 Barker
exhibited a body of work entitled Erratum which utilised
discarded books covered with white wax stapled to board.
For the artist this wax was symbolic of healing as well
38
WAYNE BARKER
as embalming. On each book little fi gures were placed
which had been sourced from Minitown, an amusement
park for kids that showed the various different cultures in
South Africa. Thus Barker saw his intermingling of groups
separated by apartheid even in the fantasy world of
Minitown as an act of healing and reconciliation.
Poles Apart | 2004 | mixed media on found object | 24 x 36 cm
Book Wax Work | 2002 | mixed media on canvas | 119 x 93.5 cm
SUPER BORING
39

40
I take the books and I take out the knowledge. Covering them in bee’s wax. It is
almost like healing – I am healing this thing in a spiritual way.
There has to be a new knowledge coming. There are just colours, and a little bit of
text, but it doesn’t add a meaning to the work.
The meaning is in fact the recycled books.
WAYNE BARKER
WAYNE BARKER, 2004
@africa.com | 2001 | found object and oil on canvas with recycled books | 200 x 400 cm
World’s Apart | 2004 | mixed media | 27 x 17 cm
Fade to Grey | 2004 | mixed media | 25 x 17 cm
SUPER BORING
41

HEALING
Healing has been a central theme for Barker for
many years. Along with his under-recognised social
responsiveness this can be seen very clearly in The
Bees, the Beekeeper, the Children and the Artist (2007-
2008). Submitted as his work as a fi nalist in the Sasol
Wax Awards (won in that year by Walter Oltman) the fi nal
work presented was underpinned by a complex process
of collaboration and community engagement that would
have ramifi cations lasting long beyond the duration of the
exhibition of the works. Beginning with a workshop with
underprivileged kids that Barker encountered in Troyeville
he had the children trace their hands (and other symbolic
42
WAYNE BARKER
drawings produced) on pieces of paper. These drawings
were then taken into the fi eld with a beekeeper and the
children cut the traced images out of active combs and
then replaced them in the hives. Over the weeks the bees
worked to rebuild the missing areas of their hives but the
scar made by the incision led to the new area formed on
the comb being constructed from wax cells of a different
colour and texture to the original. Clearly referencing the
legacy of damage and the process of healing, the reformed
hives became an integral part of multi-media panels that
Barker created as a series.
Start Dreaming | 2007 | mixed media | diptych | 244 x 245 cm
SUPER BORING
43

44
Heal (Hebrew) | 2007 | beeswax, paraffin wax, oil paint, neon tubing, paper | 140 x 80 cm
WAYNE BARKER
Heal (English) | 2007 | beeswax, paraffin wax, oil paint, neon tubing, paper | 140 x 80 cm
SUPER BORING
45

SUPER BORING
Wayne Barker has always situated himself in an ambivalent position to the established
art world. On one hand the ultimate art insider, knowing ‘everyone who’s anyone’ and
comfortably chatting to the superstars in Harry’s Bar during the vernissage of the Venice
Biennale, on the other frequently resisting gallery representation and quarrelling
with established art institutions.
‘Super Boring’ can be interpreted as a critique on a
South African art culture that sees collector-investors prepared
to spend millions on an Irma Stern or Maggie Laubser
(or even a Tretchikoff) artwork but which shies away
from buying young or even ‘mid-career’ artists’ work at a
fraction of the price. ‘Why the difference?’ he seems to ask,
‘What makes their decades-old work so desirable while
contemporary production is not?’ Could it be in the eye of
the beholder? Or in their wallet and balanced portfolios? If
it’s in the eye then the fact that he has painted upon copies
of the recent auction record breakers, rendered in oils
as they would be seen by someone with colour-blindness
would see them, may give us a clue to his intentions.
46
WAYNE BARKER
Each of these ‘masterpieces’ has been augmented
by his own painterly marks and branded in his signature
neon with the phrase ‘super boring’. Given Barker’s love
for South African art history and his profound respect for
artists of the past 1 it seems unlikely that he is applying this
epithet to the works themselves so much as to the people
and institutions that keep their prices and resultant ‘value’
at so far a remove from what is being produced today.
1 For example he co-curated (with Dr. Fred Scott)
Modern and Contemporary Art: Then Now and Beyond in
2008 at Polokwane Art Museum. The exhibition featured 41
‘old masters’ (including Maggie Laubser and J.H. Pierneef)
alongside 26 contemporary artists.
Colour Country | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 122.5 x 107 cm
SUPER BORING
47

In previous projects one can also detect a criticism of
‘the arts establishment’. For example FIG (Famous International
Gallery), founded by Barker along with Gunther
Herbst and Morris La Mantia in 1989, attempted to challenge
the commercial gallery monopoly by creating a space
which, though decidedly not-for-profi t, allowed artists to
show and sell their works in a ‘neutral’ space outside of
the established gallery system. This endeavour came from
a sense that things were changing more generally in South
48
WAYNE BARKER
Africa, for by the late 1980s it was clear to anyone in South
Africa with eyes in their head that political change was in
the air. The exact form that this change would take, and
when, were however still open questions. Alongside established
artists who chose to show there rather than in a
well-known gallery (for whatever reasons) FIG also showed
artists who could not get a ‘break’ otherwise. Many of the
‘household names’ of contemporary South African art today
exhibited in this groundbreaking space.
Installation View of Laager | 1995
The decision to hold a biennale in Johannesburg in
1995 was, for many, the most exciting thing that had ever
happened in the living memory of fi ne arts in South Africa.
The potential international exposure for local artists, coupled
with the general euphoria of having a major art event
just a year after Democracy, was a heady mix and Barker
stepped up to the plate with a bold and cheeky curatorial
concept. With virtually no budget and lots of favours he
managed to pull off what many considered the coup of
the First Johannesburg Biennale; Laager. Utilizing 14 shipping
containers in a circular structure echoing the laagers
of the Voortrekkers was put in place at the very centre
of Biennale activity. Fourteen artists were each given one
container and the resultant installation was visually and
conceptually challenging. By inviting only white artists to
make up the encampment Barker was echoing the laagers
of the past, and the associated mentality that is inward
looking and defensive. The critics and public alike were
entranced and Laager was invited to Santiago Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chile with the costs paid for by the
United Nations. This was a particularly important invitation
as Barker, amongst many others, had been outspoken in
his criticism of the South African Association of Artists’
support for South African participation in exhibitions in
Pinochet’s Chile.
SUPER BORING
49

50
Wayne Barker’s drive to make an art project happen has never been more evident
than in his curatorial exercise, ‘Laager’. Not invited as a participant onto the 1 st
Johannesburg Biennale in 1995, Barker contrived to place himself and thirteen other
young artists at the dead centre of the offi cial Biennale events, somehow commandeering
fourteen empty shipping containers and having them placed in an embattled circle midway
between the MuseumAfrica and the Electric Workshop. Artists included himself, Brett
Murray, Lisa Brice, Hentie van der Merwe and Kate Gottgens, one to each container.
Acknowledged as a major attraction at the Biennale, ‘Laager’ drew an invitation for all the
artists to exhibit in Chile the following year.
WAYNE BARKER
SUE WILLIAMSON
When I fi rst met Wayne we were on our way to an exhibition and he was telling
someone how he had been struggling all day on a painting which wasn’t working properly.
I felt strangely comforted because I had only been painting for a while, and here was
Wayne who was already famously famous for the FIG Gallery, et al., conferring to doubts
and diffi culties not dissimilar to my own.
After that initial meeting he invited us to one of his legendary dinners in Troyeville
where he had a studio next to Bob’s Infamous Bar. We arrived to a long table laden with
plates of prawns and overfl owing with bottles of wine. Jollility reigned and raucous it was,
and that was the beginning of a long friendship….
And now a decade later, after being so familiar with Wayne’s world, I look at the four
paintings we have of his hanging on our wall at home and realize how amazingly talented
he really is. His deep compassion and concern for humanity, a poetic vulnerability if you
will, underpins I think the underlying quality in all of his work. He’s not afraid to express his
pleasure or his pain, and that takes courage especially in today’s world where art can be
so conceptual and where the idea behind the work has become more important than the
feeling in the work itself.
DIANA HYSLOP
SUPER BORING
51

52
It involved twins, I think, or sisters. It was long ago, 1989, or thereabouts. “That’s the
guy,” someone said, pointing to Wayne in the foyer of the Wits Theatre. He was dating
one of the twins, or sisters, possibly even both. The person narrating this story wasn’t
sure – already then, fact and myth were blurred in the telling of Wayne Barker’s biography. I
looked at Wayne, a rakish fi gure strutting about in loose-fi tting print shirt and fedora, with a
mixture of terror and envy; rumour had it he also stripped naked at exhibitions.
A year or two later, I can’t remember exactly when, I got to see him, Wayne, naked.
It was at the Newlands Forest Reservoir. Hmm, I thought, looking not staring. The tattoo
on his upper arm reminded me of the stock motifs on the walls of Alain’s tattoo shop in
the underground fl ea market off Pretoria Street in Hillbrow – sailor chic, defi nitely pre-rave,
not tribal. Wayne was with Karen then, an actress; he had left the twins. “Hello,” I said to
the naked artist. “Hello,” replied Wayne. That’s all. By this time Wayne was an emerging
somebody, almost a groot meneer, his name about to repurposed from a noun into a verb.
In a dubious article about new South African vernaculars, a 1990s magazine journalist
explained that saying “Let’s do a Wayne Barker tonight” meant something like “Let’s get
roekeloos and fucked-up”. There was a lot of that going on in the 1990s, not all of it
singularly attributable to Wayne.
WAYNE BARKER
It is late night, very late night, quite possibly closer to morning in a Troyeville lounge
decorated with one of Wayne’s neon colour-fi eld paintings. Two grown men, one a doctor,
the other nominally an artist, are arguing in hisses and spits over the affections of the
homeowner, a lawyer, a woman romantically linked to Wayne. Neither she nor Wayne is
present; it is, in other words, a purely philosophical dispute over an absent subject. The
traumatic reds of Wayne’s large-scale painting, erotic but violent, consummately dwarf
the sad and petty argument. A couple months later, now an installation artist, Wayne
cobbled together a show for the FIG 2. One media predominated this work: Wayne’s shoe
collection, which he lined-up in front of a pink elephant borrowed from a booze store on
Commissioner Street. (Yes, it is the same pink elephant that fi red the imagination of Ivan
Vladislavic: “A salesman buggering a pink elephant - excuse my Bulgarian - ,” reads the
opening line of The Restless Supermarket). Thing is, this installation piece, I forgot its
name, was a last-minute thing, dopey and stupid really; it lacked the conceptual clarity and
fi nesse of Wayne’s contribution to the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, that piece he titled
The World is Flat. Working with old army browns, green bottles and neon, Wayne created a
map of Africa. The work effortlessly reconciled the artist’s biography with his birth country’s
history. I suppose this is the germane point in this rambling non sequitur: Wayne’s work,
I’d argue, manifests as a frustrated argument with history and biography; sometimes it
even achieves reconciliation. In this his work evidences a pointed ethical imperative, a fact
routinely overlooked in biographical accounts about his louche morality and ribald habits.
Congratulations, Wayne, on your twenty-fi fth birthday exhibition.
SEAN O’TOOLE, 9 MARCH 2010, CAPE TOWN
The World is Flat | 1995/1997 | army uniforms, beer bottles and neon tube. Exhibition: Scurvy | 1995 | The Castle,
Cape Town. Trade Routes – curated by Okwui Enwezor |1997 | 2 nd Johannesburg Biennale
SUPER BORING
53

ROCK ‘n’ ROLL
After decades of being central to (at least one part of)
Johannesburg’s cultural mix, Barker shocked his friends
(and probably Capetonians who knew him) by relocating
to Cape Town in 2009. From this ‘emigration’ emerged a
new body of work, closely related to what he had been
producing in recent years from his Troyeville studio, but
with a new and different energy and focus. Entitled the
54
WAYNE BARKER
‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ paintings by the artist, they tend to be gestural,
even angry compositions suffused with colour and
visual noise. Like the musical genre that gives them their
name, they are loud and brash and full of complex harmonies.
Their scale is large, often being made up of multiple
panels, but they also have an intimacy and quiet parts, as
if they are a ballad.
Nat en Koud | 2009 | oil and neon tubing on canvas | 200 x 200 cm
SUPER BORING
55

In this series Barker has returned to using text, sometimes
completely or partially erased, and sometimes so
direct it seems to hit the viewer square between the eyes.
Text has been a feature of Barker’s work since his fi rst
solo show ‘Images on Metal’. His words take many forms:
sometimes they are almost illegible scrawls painted directly
on the canvas; sometimes they are stencilled or traced;
at other times they are reproductions in bold typography
culled from newspaper headlines. At their most glaring
they are written in neon and broadcast themselves like a
billboard advertisement. In whatever form they are always
carefully chosen and reward careful study and consideration.
While he frequently utilises puns and double enten-
56
WAYNE BARKER
dres it would be foolhardy to assume that his choice of
words is glib. If there is a joke in the text, it is as likely
as not a double-edged one. In Service Delivery ‘vaak en
moeg’ is not only the Afrikaans for the expression for ‘sick
and tired’ but also conceals a pun which in colloquial Afrikaans
means ‘fucking tired’. While Barker asserts that this
word directly references the physical condition of people
in low-paid service jobs, it may not be stretching things
too far to see something of a refl ection on his own condition
when he arrived in Cape Town. It is as if he is saying
that after his years of prolifi c and unceasing art making he
needs a break but this sentiment is contradicted by the
sheer energy of the painting taken as a whole.
Vaak en Moeg | 2009 | oil and neon tubing on canvas | 200 x 200 cm
SUPER BORING
57

58
WAYNE BARKER
Untitled | 2009 | mixed media on canvas | 216 x 190 cm
Untitled | 2009 | mixed media on canvas | 216 x 190 cm
SUPER BORING
59

POPULATING PIERNEEF
[T]hough they bring in Cubism and Futurism in highly original ways to suggest lines of
force and tension in nature, J. H. Pierneef’s scenes of empty plains, blank mountains,
and towering skies, painted in the 1920s, have had few imitators outside the realm of
Kitsch, probably because of their tendency to heroicile the landscape. J.M. Coetzee 1
J.H. Pierneef’s landscape paintings, especially those
produced for the new Johannesburg Station inaugurated
in 1932 and known as ‘The Station Panels’, have been a
source of abiding interest for Wayne Barker since almost
the beginning of his career. First appearing in the series
‘Breaking Down the Wall’ in 1989 at FIG in Johannesburg
and the Michaelis Gallery in Cape Town, these Pierneef
paintings have recurred as a background that Barker
overlays with new elements whether in paint or with threedimensional
objects. He has bound them in rope, affi xed
found objects to them and reworked them in Photoshop.
This continuing, almost constant, fascination demonstrates
his concern with the South African landscape and perhaps
even more importantly the people who populate it.
The fact that Pierneef usually chose to present his
landscapes as being devoid of evidence of human
habitation (especially of the original Black inhabitants of
the country) has led to considerable criticism from recent
critics. Indeed it would appear that he is presenting a
‘virgin’ landscape, ready for the taking by white settlers.
60
WAYNE BARKER
Pierneef’s landscapes are seen as prone and full of
opportunities and he seems to have cultivated a blindness
to the fact that settlement had taken place long before
whites came on the scene. This has been interpreted as
implicating his works in a white nationalist and colonialist
programme, one made starkly real legislatively in the 1913
Land Act. As N.J. Coetzee puts it: ‘The landscapes are
an invitation, a reassurance and a promise: an invitation
to take ownership because landscape is empty and
therefore does not belong to anyone; reassuring because
its aestheticizing distance means that it is frozen in time –
eternally present as an Utopian ideal; a promise because,
in its unexplored condition, it is the expectation of riches
and potential – the sign of divine election.’ 21
1 White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in
South Africa. Braamfontein: Pentz publishers, 2007,
p. 56. (fi rst published by Yale University Press in 1988).
2 Pierneef, Land and Landscape: The Johannesburg
Station Panels in Context. Fourways: CBM Publishing,
1992, p. 25.
The Epilogue is the Prologue
and the Prologue is the Epilogue
Series | 1992 | mixed media on
canvas | 120 x 70 cm
A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever (Pierneef Series) | 1986 - 2004 |
oil on canvas with gold leaf spades
SUPER BORING
61

Culturally charged objects, ranging from touristy African
masks to artworks by other South African artists, are
carefully arranged on the canvas to make symbolic connections
between the various elements that lie on the surface
of the canvas. This is another Wayne Barker trade-
62
WAYNE BARKER
mark. He has frequently broken the conventions of easel
painting by either placing objects directly on the picture
surface or even having created a small installation around
the painting as in Alter Piece for Hope (1992) which won a
merit prize in that year’s Volkskas l’Atelier Awards.
Alter Piece for Hope | oil, bronze, metal, wood, glass and water | 100 x 200 cm
A Spade is a Spade is a Spade | 1987 | found object and oil on canvas | 180 x 540 cm
A noteworthy example of his technique of inclusion
of objects on the surface of the work can be seen in A
Spade is a Spade is a Spade (1989). Here he has vertically
hung an actual spade (a recurring found object in his work
at this time) in the centre of a reproduction of Pierneef’s
Okahandja, S.W.A., one of two Namibian subjects in the
Station Panels. Given South Africa’s subsequent refusal to
relinquish power over this land this is a particularly charged
Pierneef canvas. The spade seems about to violently gash
into the land and Barker’s inclusion draws attention to a
sexual reading of Pierneef’s original. It is as if the landscape
has become a prone female form, her legs in the air and
apart and the spade about to rape or defl ower her. Nothing
could make the argument that Pierneef was presenting this
landscape as a ‘virginal offering’ to white South Africa any
clearer. But there is another inclusion on the canvas, almost
invisible in reproduction: a bomb canister, camoufl aged
by being painted to match the Pierneef image. Lurking
behind this landscape, seemingly so helpless and prone,
lies something explosive, hidden from ordinary view. It is
worth noting that ‘spade’ is a derogatory word for a black
person that could be heard at the time of the making of
this work. In the three-fold repetition of ‘spade’ one is also
reminded of Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965),
one of the defi nitive works of Conceptualism, and a work
which, like so much of Barker’s oeuvre, asks questions of
semiotic meaning.
SUPER BORING
63

64
WAYNE BARKER
A SPADE IS A SPADE IS A SPADE
Life is too short for regrets, but they are there and some of them will not let go. An
invitation to contribute to this publication brought one such regret
to the surface.
It was early in my tenure as director of the South African National Gallery – some
twenty years ago – that the curators and I visited an exhibition by Wayne Barker at the
Michaelis Gallery. It was my fi rst exposure to a body of his work and I was bowled over,
particularly by A spade is a spade is a spade (see p. 63), a work in which there was so
much about the empty Pierneef landscapes and the labour that still brings riches to some
and deprivation to most in this country.
When acquiring works of art for a national collection one always has in the back
of one’s mind the existing holdings, and there was an Untitled work by Lucas Seage,
ca.1981, also containing a spade as found object. I thought that two would one day fi nd
synergy in an exhibition.
But it was not to be. We worked democratically, which is the only way in which
acquisition for a national art collection should be made, and my colleagues were neither
suitably impressed nor convinced that this was a desirable purchase. And it was not the
only time, so I still have a few acquisition regrets lurking…
MARILYN MARTIN
Black Label | 1995 | found object and oil on canvas | 118 x 104 cm
SUPER BORING
65

There can be no doubt that Pierneef held problematic
and racist views. Despite an earlier sympathy for the value
of Bushman painting, 1 he would write in the late 1930s ‘…
if we had to adopt the idea of E[rich] M[ayer] to develop a
style for Afrikaner art which is based on kaffi r art then we are
lost. This is because kaffi r art must build up its own culture
just as the white races.’ 2 This sentiment demonstrates
that Pierneef held strong apartheid ideas long before their
formal adoption as law under the Nationalist government.
It is this reading of a sinister motive in Pierneef’s
landscapes that Barker is addressing in his appropriation
of that artist’s paintings for his own work. By deliberately
reinserting that which Pierneef excluded and by contextualising
the Station Panels with examples of the product of
1 Coetzee, op. cit., p. 2.
2 From a document quoted and dated by Coetzee,
op. cit., p. 42 (Translation from Afrikaans by the present
writer).
66
WAYNE BARKER
colonial and apartheid attitudes to land he goes beyond
mere critique to an act that attempts to heal that which
has been perpetrated in the past.
Nevertheless there appears to be an affection for
Pierneef that has crept upon Barker in recent years after
decades of appropriation. His ligne clair 3 technique no
doubt played its part in Pierneef’s commission for the
Station Panels and this popular accessibility and his
cartoon-like style echo Barker’s own unstuffy approach
to art. He always took great pleasure in ordinary workers
visiting his studio in Troyeville and fi nding an access point
to his work in the OMO boxes, Boxer snuff tines and other
elements of popular culture that Barker pioneered in South
Africa in the late 1980s. As in his sometimes tempestuous
personal relationships, even with Pierneef it seems that
Barker cannot harbour a grudge for too long.
3 Usually associated with Tintin artist Herge.
The Karoo | 1989 | oil on canvas | 180 x 140 cm
SUPER BORING
67

68
I destroyed Apies River in a performance in a black working-class bar…
WAYNE BARKER
WAYNE BARKER, 2002
In Barker’s “Apies River” the landscape was fi rst roughly smudged out, then various organs and disembodied
heads drawn over its surface. The cartoons look stressed out, they sweat and cry under halos of exclamation
marks. A large saw with two heads sewn together at the mouth threatens the whole scene from above, and
a large diamond pops out of a chute and rises into the middle of the picture. As in Basquiat’s art, these
are very goofy looking images, claims Barker, but they are also quite heavy. They are images of pain and
torture, murder, emasculation and a hard labour that bloodies the hand, pisses red, lobotomizes. In Barker’s
grim view this beautiful South African landscape shits out diamonds and gold, and buries its shattered men
in their place (Peffer 2009: 223-224).
Apies River | 1989 | oil on canvas | 118 x 104 cm
SUPER BORING
69

BEADWORKS
In this series, discussed more fully in Carol Brown’s
essay in this volume, Barker has drawn upon local craft
and materials to invent his own language of critique and
celebration. These new artworks are constructed from
strung glass beadwork (an African technique for presenting
symbolic meaning in visual terms that has been utilized for
centuries) to make a seemingly fl at, painterly plane that
also has a three-dimensionality embedded in it. Within
the history of South African visual art language, networks
of strung beads have been employed for everything from
simple ‘love letters’ presented by a maiden to her beloved
to the adornment of princely palaces and everyday
ceremonial costume. These have usually been ascribed to
‘traditional’ or ‘native’ production.
In the work Barker presents here, this rich tradition has
been appropriated to present a visual plane that viscerally
echoes the very medium of oil paint: the suspension of
solid particles in the carrier of oil or another medium.
While echoing mosaics and other similar art forms, Barker
has reinvigorated painting by addressing one of its own
fundamental desires: the illumination of the fl at surface
not just through strategies of perspective or drawing but
70
WAYNE BARKER
also through the illusion of radiating light by means of
suspended particles of light that refract and project their
own inner power of illumination.
In terms of subject, this series presents the promise
of reconciliation by overlaying images of those who could
be claimed to have been most marginalised by apartheid
and Pierneef’s vision – black women – upon and into his
re-problematised landscapes. This, coupled with a new
interpretation of the free abstract painterly gesture so
typical of Wayne Barker invigorates his latest work as
much as it resolves both the picture plane and the subject
it addresses. In this he has adopted a new language of
tolerance and in this new native tongue demonstrated
the lie of the speech of hate which he has so consistently
raged against.
Barker has always raged, but the product of that rage
is gentleness. Overarching all that he has done is a desire
to see healing take place. He has always been outraged
by injustice but is always prepared to see inherent good
in people.
Church Lady | 2009 | strung glass beads | 170 x 170 cm
SUPER BORING
71

72
WAYNE BARKER
Mining for Gold | 2009 | strung glass beads | 170 x 170 cm Golden Girl | 2009 | strung glass beads | 170 x 170 cm
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73

Barker tells the story of how, when he was just starting
out, he became involved in a community project, helping
with a mural at Moffat’s Mission Station. Caught speeding
on the way there he was bundled into a military vehicle and
driven around, without charge, for the rest of the day. ‘This
was AWB country back then,’ he sardonically notes. What
he saw on that day and what followed would affect him for
the rest of his life. On this forced excursion he witnessed
these police offi cers ruthlessly beating a street child for no
apparent reason. His howls of protest from the back of the
vehicle saw him being taken to a police station where he
was quizzed – bizarrely being played the music of Johnny
Clegg and Paul Simon and asked for his interpretation,
amongst other things – and then thrown into a common cell.
There he met a white man who nonchalantly confessed to
him that he had just killed ‘a Black’. After the horror of the
74
WAYNE BARKER
child’s beating earlier that day, this confession was not the
end to this Kafkaesque experience…. After a few hours
together in the cell a policeman came in and called the
other man out. When he returned he was visibly shaken
and disturbed. He had just been informed that his brother
had died. Barker recounts that for the rest of the night he
comforted this weeping murderer, the memories of death
and violence surrounding him.
This experience led to his very fi rst series ‘Victim’
shown on Images on Metal in 1987. The same image of
the face of that beaten street child which he obsessively
repeated then is the same one that can be seen torn into
the paper turnstile of Memory / Erasure, turning endlessly,
as if by its own force.
Victim | 1987 | mixed media on paper | 75 x 55.5 cm
Victim | 1987 | mixed media
on paper | 71.5 x 58.5 cm
Victim | 1987 | mixed media
on paper | 75 x 55.5 cm
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75

CAPTURING BEAUTY
One of Wayne Barker’s most typical artistic techniques
is to take an existing painting or photograph, to reproduce
it and further manipulate it, be it through paint itself or
digitally and then printed onto canvas. To this a further
layer of manipulation occurs when found or specially
manufactured objects, rich in symbolic value, are placed
upon the canvas. This agglomeration is then worked and
reworked until fi nal compositional resolution has been
achieved and the work bears the unmistakable stamp of
being from his hand. In all this photography plays a vital
role. Barker works chiefl y from photographs, whether
he takes them himself, has them commissioned, utilizes
digital scans or uses found material. However, the idea of
Wayne Barker as being a photographer in the dominant
contemporary milieu would patently seem to not hold,
and yet for Super Boring he has produced a series of
photographic prints, all featuring the female models he
paints.
76
WAYNE BARKER
These do more than just document the source of what,
through his artistic process become the subjects of his
work; rather they are a natural extension of what he does
on canvas. In taking one of his paintings as a backdrop,
creating set-like environment with the physical objects
that he places directly on his canvasses and then, even
applying paint to their bodies, he is replicating in the studio
and in the constraints of a photographic shoot exactly
what he does when he paints.
Central to this is the issue of erotics, and I would argue,
a particular attitude to women and race. The beauty of
his subjects is undeniable but this beauty is drawn out
by Barker in special and sensitive ways. He does not
enslave himself to hackneyed conventions of beauty and
glamour but rather fi nds beauty where he fi rst sees it, in
the lives and personalities of the women himself. Whether
in a high-paced entrepreneurial career, a home-maker or
Title | 2000 | Media | 00 x 00 cm
SUPER BORING
Studio Portrait of Ndumi | 2009
77

a sex worker, each woman is shown nude and free from
the trappings of ‘what she does’ and presented in a new,
highly eroticised, light that conveys something of who she
is.
For all his adult life Barker has lived and worked in highly
cosmopolitan urban areas. The women he encounters in
these locations are the raw subject matter for his images.
It is signifi cant to note that taken as an aggregated whole
they do not show the usual bias toward personal sexual
preference but in many ways encompass the gamut of
women who populate his environment. Highly signifi cantly
they, more or less, statistically represent the racial makeup
of South Africa in true proportion, I do not want to set
up a cold, ethnographical objectifi cation of his models,
with all the problems that that raises, but rather make the
point that Barker fi nds beauty in all his subjects and seems
to be entirely free of the racial and racist conventions that
underpin most South Africans’ ideas of ‘who is hot’.
78
WAYNE BARKER
In photographing Black women as he does he tackles
head on what most white artists (certainly heterosexual
ones) in South Africa and abroad are wary of addressing:
the dignity of Black female sexuality. His female subjects
are undoubtedly sexualised but in sexualising Black women
he treads on dangerous ground: as a white artist he risks
the ‘disapproval’ of white men who have frequently seen
and been conditioned to see black women as ‘dangerous’
and Black men who have frequently been known to
express horror at Barker’s obvious attraction to ‘their’
women. The women in his photographs belong to no one
but themselves and in being themselves, fi ltered through
Barker’s vision and with the accompaniment of his symbolic
and painterly language captured photographically, he has
– astonishingly – proved the lie of racism and sexism and,
on the canvas at least, given them a voice in an arena that
many would argue is structurally and intrinsically designed
to silence them.
SUPER BORING
Studio Portrait of Cheznay | 2009 79
79

80
WAYNE BARKER
WHERE IS IT?
We have spent many hours and days in the company of Wayne. On one such
occasion we saw a class of mentally handicapped children with a quotation on their T-shirt:
where is it? We could not help but notice the comic, tragic element in the quote on the
T-shirts. Where are the children going to fi nd ‘it’ in their lives?
This is one of many fond memories, but I recall it because it is just this element of
tragic comedy that Barker often uses in his work. I am thinking of the cartoon fi gure
picanini freeze in Heart of Darkness. In the latter Wayne portrayed his own loneliness
during a stay in London. To quote Manet: ‘What is pure art according to the modern
ideal? It is to create a suggestive magic, containing at the same time the object and the
subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.’
Visits to his studio in Troyeville and Cape Town are always inspiring. He has perfected
the element of chance in his work just as in life we never know what to expect. He lives his
life with the same energy that he pours into his art: never boring.
What do we cherish the most, his art or the times we spent with him? Memories are of
the past, but ‘where is it?’ implies a search into the future.
We are still trying to defi ne it…
DR JOHAN AND MARIA VAN ROOYEN, POLOKWANE
Since his early days as an artist, ideas and feelings have emanated naturally from
Wayne Barker. There is almost a Hillbrow seediness in the work that is manifested.
Wayne has risen to become a leading avant-garde artist in South Africa today. He has
a magic ability to use oil on canvas with brutal honesty.
His work is reminiscent of both the embattled emotional past and the present in South
Africa. However, his work is never gloomy or negative. His strong emotional lifestyle is
infused on canvas.
He has an uncanny ability to use the paragons and icons of society with a mixture
of respect and contempt. For the collector, he immediately stirs one’s eye and soul to
resound with passion.
He creates powerful, emotional and haunting images, which incur both melancholy
and nostalgia.
His art has an amazing visual and lasting impact.
JOHANN KRITZINGER
27 FEBRUARY 2010, JOHANNESBURG
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81

WAYNE BARKER: THREADING
THROUGH HISTORY
By Carol Brown
Sherlock Holmes, Sigmund Freud, and the Italian art-historian Giovanni Morelli may not
at first appear to have anything in common with each other, let alone with Wayne Barker,
but – as Carlo Ginzburg has argued in an influential essay 1 – these three characters
each embody a version of a particular modern approach both to problem solving and
to the re-creation and discovery of the past. Holmes, Freud and Morelli all find clues
to events in the past – whether crimes, forgotten events, or the identity of an original
artist – in scattered small details: a footprint, an inexplicable dream, or the shape of an
angel’s ear. These apparently trivial details yield rich rewards when closely studied.
Wayne Barker should be associated with this trio and this tradition as, like them, he is part detective, part psychologist
and part art historian. These threads come together successfully and naturally in his latest series of bead “paintings”.
At fi rst glance, the works are glittery, dazzling and seductive but it soon becomes clear that there is a rich vein of social
comment buried beneath the bright surface. If we take Barker’s personal iconology into account we can recognise that
these works represent a natural progression from his earliest work as a rebel bohemian attacking an establishment. His
distinctive and unmistakable stylistic language has remained constant in the decades since his start.
82
WAYNE BARKER
THE PSYCHOLOGIST
South African was in turmoil in the 1980s, when Barker
fi rst emerged as an artist. Barker is of the generation of
young men called up for national conscription to fi ght the
so-called “border wars”. Resisting the regime and the
call-up, he worked to convince army offi cials that he was
mentally unfi t for service. He tells how he marched out
of step in a Charlie Chaplin imitation; answered questions
in ways which he believed would confuse and annoy his
interrogators and fi nally securing his release from the army.
This experience strengthened his resolve to pursue art
and a period of reactionary art works and performances
followed, as he critiqued the South African situation.
Barker’s work has always been more than just about
making tangible art works but rather about living his art
through the embodiment of his ideas especially in his
performance and installation pieces. His experiences as
a practical psychologist – working out how best to evade
offi cial classifi cation and armed service – echo with these
performative aspects of his art making.
THE HISTORIAN
In the late 1980s, the changes that would occur
after 1990 were not foreseeable and – in this period –
many young white South African men left South Africa
for distant shores, retracing the steps of those who
had left European countries to conquer and live in new
territories. Barker remained in South Africa, however, and
was able to embrace the changes brought about by the
political transition. He was one of the fi rst local artists
to be invited to international exhibitions – participation
in which had been precluded in the eighties due to the
Cultural boycott. His involvement with the wider sphere
of art production also led to him opening a gallery space
in central Johannesburg. The gallery was called FIG and
aimed to develop an avant-garde that could respond to
the changing local situation. The spectre of apartheid still
loomed over the country, and its future was uncertain
and unimaginable. The signifi cance of these smaller art
initiatives and galleries in those years is a subject still to
be examined and given its own history.
Barker meanwhile delved into the country’s artistic
heritage. His chosen subject was the painter, Jakob
Hendrik Pierneef. Pierneef had been a favourite of the
segregationist and apartheid era governments and had
been commissioned in 1929 to paint large landscapes
of South Africa for the Johannesburg station. These
landscapes showed a majestic earth innocent of any
traces of human habitation: virgin territory awaiting a
subsequent exploitation. This very masculine view proved
a strong impetus for Barker, leading to an exploration of
gender issues which continues to the current works.
In his work of this period, he scribbles over reproduction
of these cool, ordered landscapes with expressive gestural
marks which contradict the geometric rigidity of Pierneef’s
style. Many of these “scribbles” also relate to signs used
in mapping. He also inserted the images of skulls, blood,
HIV/Aids ribbons, screaming mouths and seductive
women onto these tranquil and decorative landscapes.
Logos from popular commodities such as Coca Cola,
Bakers Biscuits, etc further suggest the abiding historical
effects of commercialisation, ownership and exploitation
of the land.
THE DETECTIVE
While working on his Pierneef series, Barker was
identifying the seemingly transient and trivial objects that –
to him – represented a specifi cally South African mindset.
The result of this was his Zulu Lulu series. This series was
made up of cheeky paintings of a long forgotten fi fties
kitsch objects – which, in its time, had been immensely
popular but which, by the time of Barker’s discovery,
was only to be found lurking in a sex shop. This object,
a bare breasted black woman with exaggerated features,
presented Barker with the clues necessary to uncover a
South African history of a popular-culture commodifi cation
of ideas around race and gender.
Barker’s exploration with objects to discover clues
about people and their history has continued and similarly
found objects have remained central to his work. In
his 1996 installation, The World is Flat, held at Iziko
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83

Museum, The Castle during the Johannesburg Biennale
he assembled 2000 green beer bottles and 3000 SANDF
army uniforms to create a map of Africa. These objects
provided a powerful set of statements about war and the
possession of land: by presenting his audience with these
objects he turns us into detectives of a sort, one is driven
to decode the clues implicit in his work.
BEADS
Having set the parameters for a wide exploration of
the South African psyche Barker has continued working
in his individual language. Most recently he has turned to
beaded paintings.
These are two-dimensional canvasses rendered in
beads. They seduce and dazzle transforming Barker’s
familiar images into a new South African context. Although
I am aware that to impose a linear development on Barker’s
work may sometimes seem somewhat incongruous –
neither his life nor his thinking is linear – but, looking at
these works in the context of his career that progression
is obvious. Nothing is as simple as black-and-white, lines
can be curved and so both progression and digression
can and do exist together in his work. The linearity comes
from having an authentic vision to which he has remained
true in the twenty fi ve years of his art production.
It is necessary to pause and consider the history of
beadmaking in Southern Africa. The region is famous for
this tradition which is millenia old and has adapted to
modern circumstances in a most inventive way. But where
did beads come from and when? Like most things, as we
are recently discovering, they were fi rst made in Africa,
where the production of beads occurred alongside the
discovery of glass, up to 30 centuries ago. Today most
of the beads in South Africa are imported from European
sources, following trade routes from the Czech Republic
and Venice established in the 16 th Century. This rich and
complex history of ancient production, African trade
routes, European infl uences and commerce inform the
way we now interpret beaded works.
84
WAYNE BARKER
Beadmaking was already widely practised at the time
when Pierneef was being heralded as a hero of the South
African art community, but the attitudes and taste of the
time considered the practice no more than an ethnic
curiosity. Patterns of South African art museum and
corporate collecting have been well documented and it is
a fact that it took more than fi fty years post-Pierneef for
these art collections to acknowledge that beaded works
formed part of our artistic lexicon. This was due in part to a
western infl uenced hierarchy of artistic materials but also
to the fact of racial and gender discrimination (as beadwork
was conceived of largely as women’s work) as well as
modernist ideals of what visual art could be. Barker’s
beaded paintings now reclaim and restore this history,
placing the beadwork in the forefront of the painting and
relegating Pierneef’s images to the background.
The process of making Barker’s beaded works is itself
a complex one. Barker begins by photographing female
models in his studio. Recently his models have largely been
women from other African countries, many – if not all – of
whom are refugees from their countries of origin. Barker,
who is the epitome of the “fl aneur” who walks the city
streets, fi nds the bright patterned fabrics of their clothes
(the design of which originated in Holland and German)
inspiring. The tension between their often glamorous selfpresentation
and their strained circumstances – living, as
they are, in a country which often does not recognise them
as citizens or recognise their right to reside on its land
– forms a key part of Barker’s inspiration. The ironies of
their situation in post-apartheid South Africa are not lost
on him.
The second stage of the work involves constructing
a painting from the original photograph; this painting is
then deconstructed using computer generated marks
and images. The mechanical art of taking a photograph is
transformed through the artisanal craft of the painting, and
then again transformed into a machine printed image. This
image becomes the template for the beading.
This template is then taken to the beaders’ studio –
a triple volume building in downtown Cape Town close
to Barker’s studio in Observatory, where there is a hive
of creativity and energy. They painstakingly glue strung
glass beads onto each work taking several months to
fully complete the patterns. This is an undeniably labour
intensive process but one which these women say has
enriched their own creativity. They describe how following
Barker’s lines and working out how to transfer the tones
and textures of the print into bead colours has made them
more enthusiastic about their own creativity and lent them
the inspiration to begin working on their own designs.
They say that previously they made beaded brooches for
sale but felt dissatisfi ed with the repetitive process. They
fi nd their current work more exciting and challenging.
While Barker remains the ultimate author of each piece,
both he and his workshop acknowledge their joint creative
input and their shared pride in the fi nished pieces. This
collaborative process between male and female artists
working in paint, computer technology and beads has the
potential to upset pre-conceived notions of hierarchies
and separateness.
The fi nal works present an image of our country that
is a far cry from the monolithic view of South Africa
envisioned by Pierneef. Barker is suggesting a new vision
– one of collaboration and the use of various technologies,
but where the past is always with us and unable to be
erased for its traces – in trivialities and small details, in
found objects and expropriated traditions – can always be
found.
1 Ginzburg, Carlo. 1989. Clues, Myths and the
Historical Method. John Hopkins University Press.
Baltimore
Artworks produced in collaboration with The Qubeka Bead
Studio. Beaders: Luleka Domba, Neliswa Fkiti, Mandisa
Masina and Nolubabalo Kanku
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85

86
WAYNE BARKER
View of Portraits of Matsobane at Clifton Studio | 2009/10
TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT...
Tolstoy said something to the effect that all families are happy in the same way, but
each is unhappy in its own peculiar way. Hmm…. It’s the festive season and the last
thing I should be thinking about is Anna Karenina or anything depressingly Russian. I
order vodka.
I’m waiting for Wayne at Ganesh, a bar-come-restaurant in Observatory, Cape Town. At the table are my parents and
my daughters; Wayne’s dealing with his family at the same time. I’m fl ying out the next morning and this is the last chance
I’ll get to see him and talk about his work. Right then I’ve no idea that I’ll miss my plane, freak out my daughters and my
parents at the airport, fall crashing to the fl oor because of a hopelessly inexcusable incompetence. After all, it’s the last
night of the worst month of my life; a month of dashed hopes and unrequited love; crazed messages and catatonic limbo.
My parents are sane Swedish types who, thanks to Ingmar Bergman, are also well versed in emotional derangement. But
right then, at Ganesh, I’m keeping a lid on it and playing the sorted family man. Of course it takes a whiff of Wayne and
all that sortedness kind of withers.
SUPER BORING
By Ashraf Jamal
87

No offence; Wayne’s no misanthrope who lures the
hapless to the edge. No, it’s more like we’re in the same
drunken boat. Like Wayne I’m very much the product of
the 80s and 90s, a time as mythic as it was grotesque,
comprising the death throes of an apartheid system, a
system which, while dismantled, nevertheless roams this
country like an airborne plague infecting each and every
bid to transform this nation. Of course I couldn’t see it
at the time. For one, I returned in December ’89 and,
unlike Wayne, had had precious little sense of exactly how
psychically deforming systematic racism could be. Wayne
on the other hand soaked it up, supped from the blood-fi lled
skull of this country, a skull with which we’d later become
all too familiar with through Antjie Krog’s opus before it
wound up in the sanitized clutches of Hollywood.
But right now it’s not the movie that matters but Krog’s
Golgotha, the RSA, and what Wayne’s doing with it –
except I’m still waiting.
The brain shifts and I realize that in the late 80s,
early 90s, other books caught the imaginations of our
generation: There was Koos Prinsloo, there was Rian
Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart. A piece of gonzo journalism
with an annihilating and exhilarating capacity to rout out
a lie, and do so in a manner utterly implicated in that lie,
which captured a radical imagination. Dissolute, addicted,
and utterly conscious of its own intelligence, Malan’s story
mirrored the body politic of an orphaned and psychically
fucked community, one to which Wayne most defi nitely
belonged.
88
***
At a recent Dada Symposium – February 2010 – Andrew
Lamprecht cut his teeth on the Barker myth. Not one to
lionize others, and here I wonder what Andrew thinks about
being dubbed “curator to the stars”, Andrew nevertheless
found himself in the hot seat. Kendell countered with a
swipe at Wayne’s desire to be the fi rst in everything. All
rather boring I thought, or, after the man of the moment
– Super Boring – all the in-fi ghting and back-biting and
WAYNE BARKER
laughable nepotism, because what I think still inspires
Wayne is the artist as outlier rather than out-and-out-liar.
While he loves pastiche – parody is too overly cerebral
or conceptual for Wayne – he has always recognized its
important contribution to rewriting history. Enough has
been said on this: you need only go to the latest Art South
Africa to fi nd Robert Sloon’s highly engaging tit-for-tat
with Wayne.
My point here is simply that what, for me, defi nes Wayne
as an artist is that playful fauvistic pop off-the-cuff quality.
You never get the sense that the artist is: 1/ in love with
himself 2/ convinced he’s on the right track 3/ swanning
about in the emperor’s new clothes – Wayne’s perfectly
prepared to get buck naked 4/ cashing in on consensus
and hype. Sure money’s good, and money for nothing
even more so, which means Wayne’s in the business of
validation, preferably in neon. That he’s got SMAC behind
him is power for the cause, one which Wayne’s pretty much
been fi ghting on his lonesome. What I’m saying here is that
despite the fact that he’s been kind-of canonized, kind-of
feted, there is a defi nite feeling that he – Wayne Barker –
has never quite been absorbed or embraced by the art
illuminati. Perhaps this is because Wayne isn’t a brand;
perhaps because he is not strategically hip; perhaps it’s
just because he feels too much.
Not one to mince words when it comes to drinking
and other recreational activities, the down side is that
people forget to see beyond the recreational activity to the
creation which is always on the horizon and at the core of
the artist’s life. Part pop, part ab-ex, Wayne is the mutant
fallout of the Cold War SA-style – we were also afraid of
the Commies remember.
A kid raised on junk, splattered by colour, fucked over
by race, buggered by militarism, Wayne’s art wasn’t going
to be anything other than messy. Of course it’s the mess I
love, the discordance that’s never ever about being clever,
the glaring colours and the neon and the found stuff all
jammed together in a way that defi es the monochromatic
correctness of SA art. Brash, with that makeshift township
buzz, Wayne’s art is African in a way that Cecil Skotnes can
never be. Fuelled by life rather than abstraction, by a felt
grasp of a vital ordinary world and not the cool abstraction
that would turn Africa’s earth and culture into a thing of the
mind, Wayne shows us just how art feels and looks when
it’s made for other people.
Now this doesn’t mean that Wayne wasn’t-or-isn’t
fi ghting, it’s just that at the heart of his war is pleasure.
Given that South Africans are generally not much fun –
thinking that a dour seriousness or moral high-ground is
the road to Damascus – and, hey, if you look at most South
African art it’s not exactly fun, my point is that Wayne
gives us something to laugh with. And, besides, the man’s
a romantic who believes in the value of hope, that there
is always something to aspire to, always something to
give back, dig out, coax from the entrails of one’s soul.
Of course, like all the great romantics, Wayne’s heart is
also a weeping wound. Which makes his current feel-good
persona all the more heartening if occasionally unnerving.
***
Wayne fi nally arrives at Ganesh in a white fedora and
a salmon pink linen jacket – our man in Panama. I gather
my daughters and we leave for Wayne’s studio, though
for me studio is not quite the word. Sure it’s a bricked loft
with all the appropriate sheer metal, but somehow to me it
feels more like a diner – fast-food for slow minds, art-asprocess
for nighthawks.
I watch as Wayne settles my daughters before the
piano and ink and paper. If you’re a parent you’ll know
that one is always sucked in by the care a relative stranger
devotes to your kids – unless of course the bastard is a
psycho-killer. Wayne of course isn’t; that’s the thing about
him; he’s yummy, just like his salmon-pink jacket. In fact
it amazes me that this particularly defi ning quality has
not been discussed enough, because it is precisely his
humanity – in the Nietzschean sense of human-all-toohuman
without the excessive misery thrown in – which
makes his art what it is.
Nevertheless, a retrospective feels somehow bizarre,
to me at least, because retrospectives are so backward
looking, so, ooh look at me I’ve arrived, and, here, I think
Wayne’s nature confounds such memorializing. A man of
the ceaseless and unending moment, situationist, prankster,
lout, fool, fall-guy, artist of instants, it somehow seems
crazy trying to curate and “make sense” and historicize
that stuff. My hunch, take it or leave it, is that all Wayne’s
been into is the intervention, the intercession. He is Walter
Benjamin’s actor who enters in passing. Not one to linger,
obsess, when Wayne spoofs or quotes someone else it’s
never with that lumpen heaviness of high seriousness. And
it is precisely this special quality – the quality of laughter,
the deep distrust of irony – which sets Wayne apart. It is
his very uncoolness, his heat that matters. I love him…
maybe you do too…
SUPER BORING
89

90
Albany | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 200 x 200 cm
WAYNE BARKER
Mumbo Jumbo | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 200 x 200 cm
SUPER BORING
91

92
Cuntree | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 122.5 x 107 cm
WAYNE BARKER
IDEAS AND REFLECTIONS ON
“SUPER BORING”
I
After spending productive time erecting his artistic
career in Johannesburg and having travelled in art centers
like Paris, New York and London, Wayne Barker is currently
living and working in Cape Town. Be this move temporary
or permanent is yet to be seen taking into account that
Barker is a mover, shifter and shaker. Something not to
wonder about is that Barker is content with his move to
Cape Town, a place where he has been able, of course
under mixed feelings, to produce a new body of artworks
titled; Super Boring. Another factor not to wonder about
is the curious observation that Barker is part of a coterie
of white artists and scholars who are recently migrating
from culturally dynamic and racially diverse Johannesburg
to racially apathetic and culturally dormant Cape Town,
including Stellenbosch – let us refer to this region as the
Cape!
There is no doubt about the fact that the Cape region is
very disappointing as a socio-cultural center, specifi cally
with respect to democratic transformation and cultural
By Thembinkosi Goniwe
diversity in the present South Africa. Yet Cape Town has this
irreconcilable duality. On the one hand, it is a very beautiful
place, adorned by spectacular mountains, the meeting
point of Atlantic and Indian Oceans, lavish wine farms and
so on. No wonder Cape Town is a popular destination for
tourists, a place for leisure. On the other hand, there is the
graphic segregation between black and white people, of
course with Coloureds and Indians occupying the bufferzones
between black and white races. This consequence
of colonial-apartheid is more appalling when considering
the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Black people including Coloureds are the worst affected
as they endure the downside of life and livelihood: poverty,
unemployment, unpleasant housing, ill-education and
improper health facilities, all attesting to the plight of black
people as the wretched of the Cape.
It takes a short car-drive from white suburbs to black
townships to witness how despicable structural racism
remains a haunting institution in the Cape. The recent
incident of toilets constructed without walls for township
SUPER BORING
93

dwellers, emphasises the continuing inhumane treatment of
black people in the Cape. Mind you, these very township
dwellings are also part of the tourist package. So disturbing
is the post-apartheid capitalism that it is reprocessing and
repackaging black experiences as commodities for tourist
consumption. Such black experiences are the result of racist
regimes that colonized, exploited and dehumanized Africans
whilst producing the beautiful commodity Cape Town has
become. Yet, perpetrators and benefi ciaries of such racist
regimes continue to enjoy the highest standard of living in
comparison to the black majority in South Africa.
It is a fact that Cape Town remains a white-dominated
region, not to mention its visual arts circuit, completely
remote from anything characterized as a cultural melting
pot. To defi ne such place as post-colonial or democratic
remains challenging if not impossible given the institutionally
entrenched and unrelenting whiteness thereof. With the
foregoing, it is very curious that Barker has relocated to
Cape Town, especially recalling some of the reasons why
he left his hometown Pretoria for Johannesburg, many
years ago. Pretoria’s racial segregation and Afrikaner
conservatism were too unbearable for a young Afrikaner
person who wanted nothing to do with apartheid. Such a
stance must have been diffi cult given that Barker comes
from a military family and his father was a pilot and a
loyalist to the Nationalist government. Rebelling against
conscription or compulsory service in the apartheid military
force, Barker had to fl ee Pretoria to explore his possible
freedom in the crazy-chaotic inner city of Johannesburg.
In Johannesburg, Barker managed to negotiate his way
in and out of multiracial groups of people and art circles. It
was in this sounding context that Barker began his biting
critique of Jacob Hendrik Pierneef’s classical paintings;
a critique that somewhat underscores his recent project
Super Boring.
II
Super Boring is Wayne Barker’s new body of artworks.
It draws on and brings together some of the themes and
creative strategies Barker has been examining since
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appearing on the South African art scene in the late
1980s. Its underlining premise extends Barker’s critique of
classical modernist art, authority and authoritarian systems.
Barker expands this critique to include dimensions of
appreciation and gratitude and instead of merely lashing
out and antagonistically assaulting Pierneef’s classical
paintings; Barker extends his critique to other South
African “Modernists”. His quest is complicated by then
paying tribute to eminent South African individuals or
“Legends” as he calls them, against the backdrop of his
now notorious digitally manipulated Pierneefs.
Notable in the series; The Legends, tributes are
dedicated to musicians Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba
and Lucky Dube, the novelist JM Coetzee, political
leaders Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, to name
a few. These individuals have questioned and challenged
oppressive regimes. Barker holds them dearly important
as he visually inscribes them in his paintings.
He does so by superimposing them onto Pierneef’s
landscape paintings. These portraits are positioned in
small, round encased shapes that distinguish them from
the rest of the wider painted surface. Pierneef’s paintings
serve as backdrop to these portraits which stand out
individually, assuming a distinctive presence that speaks
to their signifi cant contribution to the history of the South
African body politic. It is no exaggeration to construe
that, in different ways, these individuals are humanitarians
whose ideals and work bear testimony to the democratic
society South Africa is becoming. They are historical icons
that deserve praise and recognition. This is the reason
why Barker embraces and celebrates them, especially for
the gift they have offered him, South Africa and the world
at large. Barker makes it his responsibility to inscribe them
into the powerful domain of historical writing: the visual art
history or the (re)writing of South Africa’s cultural history.
In an interesting manner, Barker situates these
prominent fi gures in a South African historical context
haunted by unsettling social and economic concerns.
Thus his use of Pierneef’s landscape paintings as surfaces
become representative of the land itself, land; that was
robbed from Africans by whites, land; that continues to
be exploited for the enrichment and privilege of whites.
Such a reading of African-exploitation is made possible
by Barker’s insertion of a steam-train crossing Pierneef’s
landscape in the Hugh Masekela work. It is worth recalling
that in his classical song Stimela, Masekela refl ects on the
paining experience of this train that used to carry African
mine-workers from rural South Africa and neighbouring
countries such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe, to
Johannesburg and Kimberly, to work in the darkest-deepbelly
of earth from where their return to the surface of the
land was never guaranteed.
Even though Barker’s The Legends pay homage to
important individuals, he remains critical of the history
that has shaped the democratic South Africa. In fact, he
continuously wrestles with the socio-economic problems
rooted in colonial-apartheid. It is for these reasons that
Pierneef’s landscape paintings remain primary targets
as they exemplify symbols which buttressed colonialapartheid,
particularly in the domain of visual arts. These
works become an indictment of Pierneef’s classical
landscapes; not at the aesthetic level, but rather at the way
in which they advance complacency, despite their symbolic
complicity in the exploitation of land and human labour.
The Legend series speaks to the bias in representation of
the land in South African modernist art.
It is important to recall that the target of Barker’s initial
critique was the political power and cultural imperialism
inherent in and espoused by Pierneef’s paintings, the
indirect support of the colonial mission and processes
which affected not only Africans but also whites, in
particular the youth, such as Barker who grew up in the
heart of Afrikaner Pretoria, in a military family. It has been
tough-going for Barker whose father and brother were
both pilots and loyal Afrikaner Nationalists. These works
therefore also become personal as the psychological
and emotional implications of his upbringing are evident
in the aggressive manner by which Barker has attacked
Pierneef’s paintings.
Pierneef’s contribution to realizing the apartheid mission
cannot be minimized, particularly when examined in light
of the Afrikaner Broederbond as a cultural movement that
was instrumental in promoting apartheid policies and
brutally violating human lives. Pierneef’s monumental
paintings played a role in constructing South Africa
as a sanitized land, without people, without problems,
without confl ict. In fact, Pierneef’s sanitizing aesthetic
representation of South Africa evacuated Africans from the
land and in so doing rendered the landscape empty and
accessible for colonial settlement. Pierneef’s works gloss
over the brutal violence applied mainly to Africans and
somewhat to rebellious whites in building a white country
ruled by Afrikaners. Pierneef’s landscape paintings were
not simply espousing a utopian fantasy or purist ideology;
they were in fact instrumental in erasing fraught histories
and concealing bloody murderous deeds inherent in the
construction of a white South African history.
Barker’s mission was therefore apt, to deconstruct
such apartheid mythology, in particular questioning and
challenging its visual representation in historical paintings
such as those commissioned by the colonial-apartheid
state. Thus, Barker considered it necessary to perform
such deconstructive mission, at the time when the
Afrikaner novelist and essayist JM Coetzee published his
important non-fi ction work; White Writing, a text discussing
the ideology expressed in Afrikaner nationalism writing,
attempting to justify colonialization.
Another important point to mention is that, Barker
undertook his mission just at the moment when the world
was about to witness the political transition of South
Africa from apartheid to democracy. Barker’s artistic
intervention was just before the release of Nelson Mandela
and other political prisoners and the unbanning of political
organizations such as African National Congress and the
Pan African Congress. How apt and timely was Barker’s
critical project historically and in the light of his recent
critique of other South African modernists in his Super
Boring series?
SUPER BORING
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Kind: Ingrid Jonker | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing | 138 x 138 cm
WAYNE BARKER
Click Click: Miriam Makeba | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing | 138 x 138 cm
SUPER BORING
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Super Boring attests to Barker’s unrelenting quest or
extended critique of Pierneef’s landscape painting, but
this time including other South African modernists such as
Hugo Naudé, Irma Stern, Maggie Laubser, Frans Oerder
and Wolf Kibel. These premier modernists have made a
signifi cant impact on South African art. They are in fact,
along with the likes of John Mohl, Ernest Mancoba, Gerald
Sekoto, Albert Adams, Gerard Bhengu and George Pemba,
pioneers of South African art. This inclusive history,
however, still waits to be written in a way that represents
and refl ects the complexities and contradictions of a
country that continues to wrestle with its becoming.
These artists are part of the privileged few who have
been written into the partial South African art history and
have been adopted by the secondary market and the
art-buying public. These white modernist painters have
fetched the highest prices from both local and international
collectors. Some of the speculative reasons have to do with
stereotypical representations of South African landscape
as well as natives. Such representations of primitive,
primordial images of the land and native in the paintings
of Naudé, Stern and Laubser continue to attract the most
interest amongst contemporary South Africa.
III
More than investing in the critique of subject matter or
contents, Barker has also been incessant in exploring a
visual language that is provocative and subversive, at time
polemic and disturbing in its strategies of appropriation,
quotation and assemblage. While using painting as a
basis, his visual language involves the use of existing but
distinct images, aesthetics and objects. Such is Barker’s
creative strategy, one that is a conscious experimentation
with multi- or mixed-media, combining conventional
and non-conventional artistic techniques and materials.
It is a mixture of different but related phenomena and
procedures, which speaks to malleable notions of
readymade and postmodernism. In this mixture, historical
and contemporary subjects and forms are reconfi gured in
processes intended to produce something dissimilar to
the canon in art practice and discourse. Barker’s use of
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WAYNE BARKER
the readymade and postmodernism involves mediums of
drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, digital media,
performance, installation and curation.
Copies of modernist painters, portraits of idols and
photography of women either scanned or uploaded onto
the computer form part of this process. They are then
digitally manipulated and reconfi gured into photo-montagelike
painterly images. Thereafter they are printed onto
canvases that when stretched-over rectangular wooden
frames assume the status of conventional paintings.
These printed-on-canvas-paintings become beautiful, in
fact precious, objects but Barker does not settle for this
easy accessibility, he wants more. He wants to experiment
further and to discover an effective visual language to
communicate his ideas. Even the so-called cutting edge
digital medium is apparently inadequate; Barker takes it to
be just another tool, a different kind of paintbrush. In his
artistic quest, Barker seems pressed to produce works of
art that are challenging, refl ective and engaging.
He stretches his experimentation further by, for example,
adding props such as miniature -wooden-sculptures,
beads and neon lights onto the paintings. Still Barker
is not satisfi ed until he physically paints directly on the
precious artwork. His personal touch matters as a gesture,
central to his interventionist persona, a desperate painter
whose mission is to attack authority. Of course, Barker’s
interventionism is a symbolic gesture, nevertheless potent
within the domain of visual art practice, to assaulting
images, signs, symbols and icons of those in power.
IV
To extend his artistic critical quest, Barker also made
use of his persona which has tended to cross between the
realm of art and life. In fact, Barker has cultured himself into
a persona that traverses across boundaries of disciplined
and undisciplined human behaviour. Apparently, his
persona comes across as that of an autonomous individual
who challenges institutionalized convention or systems
not only within the demarcated, albeit limited, realm of
artistic medium but also in real life, in the actual social
realm wherein people interact physically, psychologically
and emotionally. Very few artists have performed such
controversial, subversive and troubling acts symbolic of a
highly complex ego, which is an indispensable component
in the art-making process to challenge and shift people’s
perceptions.
It is however unfortunate that Barker’s performed ego,
to some extent, has tended to work against him, to do a
disservice to his instructive works of art. Critics and artlovers
have tended to focus on Barker’s self-manufacturedego
at the expense of paying attention to his inviting
artworks. This writer is also painstakingly labourious in his
effort to avoid falling into that blind spot of not looking at
or properly considering Barker’s works of art outside of his
personality. Barker is also responsible for such misfortune,
that is, to seductively lure people to paying attention to
his personality at the expense of his art. Besides, Barker
is very aware of his ego and how to solicit attention in
the culture game. Thus, arty people, specifi cally art critics,
should also share the responsibility for being misdirected
from the artwork, if we take into account the inherent
pretentious liberalism and couched complacency within
the white-dominated art circuit.
It is important to acknowledge that Barker’s persona
is neither unique nor outside the context of art history.
Just recall artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Robert
Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol and their interventionist
avant-garde approach intertwined with their larger
than life personas. As a formally trained, academically
qualifi ed and internationally travelled artist, Barker might
have encountered these artists and learned from their
creative strategies and politics. Therefore, it should not
be surprising to discover that Barker in many ways is
comparable to them in so far as his attitude is premised
on or derived from avant-garde principles and aspirations:
to make- shift, shake-up, disturb and disorientate comfort
zones and safe havens in the art world.
Disturbing forms of intervention have characterized
Barker’s driving mission since the late 1980s, preoccupying
himself with the politics of the artistic medium and
aesthetic forms notable within dated-local-modernism
and the political contents and social conditions, selectively
addressed, within the changing South African landscape.
Barker has always purchased from the discourse
of controversy and subversion, hence his creative
interventions have never been without a contradictory
sense of provocation, playfulness and entertainment. Yet
so crucial to this sense of Postmodern humour and irony,
is a seriously disturbing critique of and refl ection on things
problematic in the art world and society at large.
V
Barker has done this by modeling his creative strategy,
for example, in the Duchampian sense of readymade,
but an expanded kind of readymade, no longer limited to
Duchamp’s original and primary purpose. Such a version
includes numerous if not unlimited contemporary artistic
strategies some of which involve postmodern tendencies
of multiplicity of media, quotation, mechanisms of
reproduction and transformation already existing images,
aesthetics and materials into new/other meanings/
signifi cations.
Such strategies have been useful for Barker, in
particular his tendency to shuffl e through earlier artistic
developments in art history. Barker has assigned to
himself license for ironic quotation, mockery and criticism
of South African premier modernist paintings as well as of
photographic images of women he has photographed in
his studio.
The procedure by which he has approached Super
Boring, for example, is a tendency traceable to Duchamp’s
makeover of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa into L.H.O.O.Q.,
a vile visual pun that disturbed the divinity of the Western
art canon. After Duchamp, the artist Asger Jorn, founder of
the COBRA and member of the Situationist International,
also undertook a similar exercise when he painted over
a portrait of a bourgeois woman, adding a moustache
and inscribing this provocative slogan: “The avant-garde
doesn’t give up”. Such innovations have been signifi cant
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in the continuous quest of the avant-garde to not only
rupture and subvert stable and oppressive regimes but
also champion new avenues. A number of artists desperate
to advance cutting edge critiques not only against art itself
but also against circumscribing socio-political conditions
in society have benefi ted from such avant-gardism.
Barker is one of the many benefi ciaries who, in his
home context, have somehow pursued Jorn’s call that the
avant-garde doesn’t give up. Employing the avant-garde
spirit of readymade, Barker not only appropriates paintings
of South African modernists and images from various
publications, he also appropriates images of women’s
bodies that he has photographed in his studio. This is an
interesting body of work, which at one level presents itself
as a critical engagement with prostitution. Barker invites
women into his studio, where he arranges them as sitters
surrounded by theatrical props which include his own
painting, displayed fl owers, and all sorts of objects. In their
curious aesthetic qualities and insinuations, these props
function as decorative visual forms that amplify the visual
atmosphere in which the women are photographically
rendered whilst distract any total attention to these
women, whose visual representations cannot escape
objectifi cation. Whatever critical engagement they might
posess, it is notwithstanding their questionable rendition:
they seem to feed into that dramatic representation of
women’s bodies that either confronts or buttresses power
relationships between men and women. In a sense, they fall
in to that trap of a patriarchal tendency to render women’s
bodies as exotic fascination and consumable properties of
men’s taste. It is such an appropriation and representation
of women’s bodies as readily available subjects or objects,
even more disturbing as readymade that makes Barker’s
project fall short as a critique.
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WAYNE BARKER
Barker undertakes another curious appropriation in
producing his artworks, one that involves the commissioning
and contracting of other artists and assistants. In this way,
Barker also brings his own innovation to the avant-garde
project, nevertheless a curious innovation that deserves
comment even if briefl y.
Questions of exploitation seem inherent in Barker’s
discourse of readymade, specifi cally his appropriation
which mines other persons’ creativity, craft and labour.
Whatever gain, positive or negative, Super Boring
accumulates, only Barker the artist will have to enjoy or
endure. Barker’s name will be inscribed in publications
that promote and preserve the authority of Super Boring.
Not the names of his invisible collaborators who will not
enjoy the privilege value of publicity and circulation in the
art world and society, today and tomorrow.
The foregoing is just a brief critical reading, of course a
partial one, of Barker’s usage of readymade in producing
Super Boring. There are other readings, I am sure, but they
are for another occasion. What needs mentioning herein
though is that a substantiated criticism will have to engage
with Barker’s artistic quest in the same vein that his
artworks critique authority and its exploitative and abusive
apparatus. Such a criticism surely should be fair and
balanced, certainly conducted in ways that unmask and
illuminate even the most seductive and dodgy artworks
and artistic strategies that may lure the critic’s reason to
sleep.
Hell on Earth | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 122.5 x 107 cm
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102
Wayne lived and worked in Troyeville, Johannesburg where he perfected his unique
painting style and neon fi ttings to express his feelings, opinions and beliefs regarding
prominent personality and social issues in a direct and honest way. More recently from his
studio in Observatory in Cape Town his multilayered images and markings on canvasses
are further being amplifi ed with skillfully crafted sculptures which he conceptualized
and commissioned from Richard Chauke for individual large canvasses. His conceptual
expressionism brings life to objects and shows the link between these objet d’art and
our existence. His masterly touch, a combination of realistic detail and abstract painting,
projects his confi dence as an artist. Wayne’s art, for me, matches the work of the greatest
artists of our time.
WAYNE BARKER
FRED SCOTT
Wayne Barker is defi nitely not super boring and rock and roll is defi nitely not dead.
This I know now, consequently after spending many hours assisting in the months leading
up to the Super Boring exhibition.
Chaotic and frantic are words that I would use to express the mood building up to
the exhibition. Meetings on the run and running to get to meetings and running away from
meetings. Dodging bullets and late night working sessions that would last until sunrise. Not
stopping and not giving way. Countless stories and tales – Wayne’s reputation preceding
him by far and an aura of unexpected randomness surrounding that which he does. But as
I have found – very little is not carefully thought through and deliberately enacted. Very few
random and chaotic acts as it may appear. And not just in Wayne’s art but the way that he
lives and interacts with society. He deals with both in the same manner – life and art – and
that is what sets him apart from the rest in contemporary South African art and everyday
life. In a way I think his own personal struggle is about correcting injustices both personal
and political and maybe sometimes even both.
There is a certain quality of being that attracts characters to him from all walks of
life. Not everybody always shares his idealistic viewpoints about life or are open-minded
enough to consider the notion, which would be the real advent to change. This is, I guess
what all artists strive for, essentially.
NEIL NIEUWOUDT, SUPER BORING ASSISTANT, 18 FEBRUARY 2010, CAPE TOWN
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What time is it? In Wayne’s world, from Beryl Court to Biarritz, it is always 1920.
Sometimes I feel that Wayne’s works are illuminated by this funny relationship to time,
places and History. Wayne does not teach history, although through his works, he
assembles paint, beads, sweat, soul, conscience, what-what all together and he tells
stories. Stories that, put all together,
could be part of History.
WAYNE BARKER
THOMAS RODRIGUES, 22 FEBRUARY 2010, PARIS
WORKS
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WAYNE BARKER
Untitled | 1987 | mixed media on metal | 115.5 x 87 cm
Velvet Underground | 1987 | mixed media on metal | 70 x 140 cm
Lamb to Slaughter | 1987 | mixed media on metal | 53 x 100 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
Our Home is on the Range | 1990 | oil on canvas | 139 x 126 cm
Transit Culture | 1990 | oil and found object on canvas | 118 x 127 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
SUPER BORING
And Life Goes On | 1992 | oil on canvas | diptych | 120 x 197 cm
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She was the fi rst black girl to go to a white school but on the arm of a child.
WAYNE BARKER
WAYNE BARKER, 2004
Winky Doll | 1992 | media and bronze | 25 x 27 cm
ZULU-LULU – The new swizzle stick sensation
Slave Painting – Slave Doll | 1992 | oil and masonite on canvas | 111 x 140 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
Castle | 1996 | mixed media on canvas | 169 x 160 cm
Blue Colonies | 1995 | mixed media on canvas | 169 x 160 cm
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I went to Mozambique and walking around Mozambique and going around hospitals
and seeing no doctors and seeing Coke machines in this war-torn country was for me like
a massive installation of apartheid. So, the fi rst installation I made was called “Coke Adds
Life”. If you can get a Coke machine in a hospital, can’t you get a doctor?
WAYNE BARKER
WAYNE BARKER, 2002
His and Her Mozambique | 1995 | mixed media and neon tubing on metal | 200 x 246 cm
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Blood | 1995 | mixed media and neon tubing on wood | 200 x 123 cm
WAYNE BARKER
Hope | 1995 | mixed media and neon tubing on wood | 200 x 123 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
The Rest is History | 2008 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | diptych | 200 x 400 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
No.1 | 1996 | mixed media on paper | 150 x 120 cm No.5 | 1996 | mixed media on paper | 150 x 120 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
Notice | 1996 | mixed media on paper | 160 x 150 cm Nothing Gets Lost in the Universe | 1996 | mixed media installation
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WAYNE BARKER
WAYNIE, LONDON AND SOME OTHER ANECDOTES
Wayne’s enthusiasm for ‘anything art’ brought us together in 2001 and very shortly afterwards
we found ourselves with a small project space in Underwood Street near the famous Hoxton Square,
and the new White Cube gallery in London. This was a prime time for the YBAs and Hoxton Square
was home and a home away from home for many of the leading YBAs at the time. Amongst those
with studios there were Gary Hume, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas.
Wayne and his current girlfriend at the time, Claire, were participating in a new (and the fi rst if
not mistaken) reality TV programme, Sweethearts, on Channel 4, about her divorce/separation and
their new relationship. A presentation at the LUX theatre, also on Hoxton Square, got very heated
between a small ‘South African contingent’ and Claire’s ex on the opposite side of the theatre.
Things were later amicably smoothed out at happy hour by the ever-charming Mr Barker, at one
of the numerous pubs in the area. There were many brushes with the YBAs and art personalities
that included beers with Tim Noble and Sue Webster, chatting with a spellbound Jay Jopling about
Wayne’s new monograph, meeting Gary Hume, chatting with the friendly Jake and Dinos Chapman
brothers, Tracey Emin slapping Wayne at an exhibition at the White Cube, popping a monograph
under the door of Gilbert and George’s home, drinking way too much bubbly at the Gagosian when
Wayne personally gave Charles Saatchi another monograph and told him he expected a call the next
day, being chased out of the Green Room after Wayne experienced a foam explosion, being dissed
by Sarah Lucas, being dissed by Damien Hirst, great dinners with Lisa Brice, seeing great exhibitions
and having Wayne as a personal art guide in London.
A short while after we got back to Cape Town we met with Charles Saatchi’s ex wife, Kim
‘Saatchi’ Hartenstein who gleefully recounted how while moving into a new apartment with new
partner Nigella Lawson, the voluptuous television food personality, how the refrigerator for the Marc
Quinn work, Self, a portrait of himself made from 5 pints of his own blood and worth approximately
GBP 300 000, was switched off by contractors and the work had half melted.
Charles should have called Wayne the next day.
SUZETTE AND BRENDON BELL-ROBERTS
1 MARCH 2010, CAPE TOWN
Fille 1 | 2002 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 172.5 x 172.5 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
Lucky Star | 2003 | mixed media
Black Label – Sunlight | 2003 | mixed media
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WAYNE BARKER
Radio City | 2003 | oil on canvas | 95 x 95 cm The Rapist | 2003 | oil on canvas | 95 x 95 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
Jozi Nudes in Studio, Troyeville | 2003
In the plethora of artists active at the moment, many are fashionable, but hardly a
handful are serious. By serious we mean artists whose importance will become more
obvious in the decades to come. In this context, it was not a surprise to see Wayne
Barker’s work included in the thought-provoking Dada South exhibition at the National
Gallery this year. This was confi rmation that Wayne is amongst that very small group of
artists, the relevance of whose work will endure.
To us, the integrity of the artist is a prerequisite for the artist to be taken seriously.
In Wayne’s world every human being, irrespective of their station, is very and
equally important. Wayne really cares and this shines through in his work. In this sense,
Wayne’s art is in the tradition of Vermeer in that both of them display huge empathy with
their subject matter. The timing for a retrospective exhibition of Wayne’s work could not
be more apt, because this will give us the opportunity of better understanding the intense
social history of the country’s last couple of decades.
JEANETTA BLIGNAUT AND DICK ENTHOVEN
SPIER COLLECTION, STELLENBOSCH, 10 MARCH 2010
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WAYNE BARKER
Faith | 2003 | mixed media and neon tube on wood | 126 x 99 cm
Hope | 2003 | mixed media and neon tube on wood | 126 x 99 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
SUPER BORING
His and Hers | 2003 | mixed media on board | diptych | 125 x 197 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
Trust the Native | 2006 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 200 x 400 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
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Man and Woman in Delft Landscape | 2004 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | diptych | 170 x 340 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
Boy 2 | 2004 | oil and neon tubing on canvas | 171.5 x 171.5 cm
Ubuntu | 2004 | oil and neon tubing on canvas | 171.5 x 171.5 cm
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WAYNE BA BBARKER RKER
SUPER BBORING
Land Desire | 2006 | Mixed media and neon tube on canvas | 320 x 180 cm
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WAYNE BARKER
LAND AND DESIRE
South African history cannot be separated from these two words because ultimately
it is about the desire for land. Histories are always layered and underpin present realities –
Barker has expressed this by drawing the viewer into a darker level of the canvasses.
CAROL BROWN, 2006
Land and Desire | 2005 | laser print and enamel on canvas | 100 x 100 cm
Land Desire | 2006 | mixed media on canvas | 91 x 91 cm
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Untitled (Land and Desire series) | 2004 | monoprint and enamel on canvas | 19 x 17 cm Untitled (Land and Desire series) | 2004 |
Untitled (Land and Desire series) | 2004 |
monoprint and enamel on canvas | 19 x 17 cm
monoprint and enamel on canvas | 19 x 17 cm
WAYNE BARKER
Untitled (Land and Desire series) | 2004 |
monoprint and enamel on canvas | 19 x 17 cm
Untitled (Land and Desire series) | 2004 |
monoprint and enamel on canvas | 19 x 17 cm
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Untitled | 2008 | mixed media on canvas | 25 x 20 cm
150
WAYNE BARKER
Untitled | 2008 | mixed media on canvas | 25 x 20 cm
Untitled | 2008 | mixed media on canvas | 25 x 20 cm
Untitled | 2008 | mixed media on canvas | 25 x 20 cm
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152
WAYNE BARKER
Hell Shell | 2003 | glass beads on resin | 8 x 11 x 8 cm
Global / Desire | watercolour on paper | 76.5 x 56.5 cm
SUPER BORING
153

154
Hope | 2006 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 180 x 180 cm
WAYNE BARKER
Sorrow | 2006 | mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 180 x 180 cm
SUPER BORING
155

156
WAYNE BARKER
SUPER BORING
World’s Apart | 2006 | mixed media and neon on canvas | 150 x 300 cm
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158
Clandestin | 2008 | mixed media and neon tubing on board | 181 x 243 cm
WAYNE BARKER
clandestin
[French] klan-des-tən also - tīn or - tēn or klan-dəs- / clan·des·tine adj.
Middle French clandestin, from Latin clandestinus akin to Latin celare - to
hide
: marked by, held in, or conducted with secrecy : surreptitious, concealed
[opérations] clandestine
[réunion, rendezvous] secret
[traffi c, marché] illegal, (POLITIQUE) underground, undercover
passager clandestin: stowaway
travaileur clandestin: illegal worker
SUPER BORING
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160
In the wake of the recent Picasso exhibition, the French Institute commissioned him to
do a work inspired by it, so he went back, past Cubism, way yonder to the African mask
that put modern art on the map, or was it vice versa? Touched by the plight of Africans
all over the world, Barker took the anonymous curio masks and gave them identities, and
jobs – like the president. The work is plastered with words like “immigrant”, “exile” and
“homeless”, and it becomes much more than a collage of masks and newspaper cuttings,
and more than a political statement. It makes your skin crawl with compassion,
its poignancy without sentimentality.
WAYNE BARKER
BRAAM KRUGER, 2006
SUPER BORING
Clandestin Series | mixed media on board | 181 x 79 cm
161

162
WAYNE BARKER
SUPER BORING
Clandestin 1 | 2009 | mixed media on canvas | 150 x 300 cm
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164
WAYNE BARKER
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow | 2009 | oil, mixed media and neon tubing on board | 120 x 360 cm
SUPER BORING
165

166
Hope | 2009 | oil, mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 78 x 81 cm Flight | 2009 | oil, mixed media and neon tubing on canvas | 180 x 180 cm
WAYNE BARKER
SUPER BORING
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168
WAYNE BARKER
Gold Fish | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing | 122.5 x 107 cm
Cinema: Gerard Sekoto | mixed media and neon tubing | 122 x 98 cm
SUPER BORING
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170
Sex in the City | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing | 130 x 150.5 cm
WAYNE BARKER
Baselitz | 2010 | mixed media and neon tubing | 124 x 110 cm
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172
Invitation to ‘Great African Nudes’ Exhibition by Karl Gietl and Wayne Barker | 2003
WAYNE BARKER
DOUBLE TAKE
I met Wayne Barker for the fi rst time in jubilant 1994. In roaring Rockey Street,
Johannesburg... Staggering backwards and falling over a café table
and somehow still managing not to spill his drink!
This Wayne Barker and his art, has always remained one and the same for me,
despite the changes his work and the country (South Africa) have gone through since
then. Although our work could not be more different in style and content, it was his energy
and ability to be effortlessly just one step ahead of his contemporaries that infl uenced and
inspired me in many ways, notwithstanding the fact that we are best of friends and shared
the same hedonistic appetite for life and for a number of years the same
houses and studios.
For me Wayne’s work was always a fresh take on his already existing ideas, which
he would rework and reformulate continually; and as with all works which are loaded with
historical content, the more one readdresses issues of the past in a contemporary context,
the more one becomes aware that history is a repetition of itself, in one form or another.
His work, whether it be delicate glowing neon mounted onto a canvas exploding with
colour, a book on plants coated in wax, a glass box full of live bees, or him covered in
chocolate mousse playing the piano naked and being licked clean by some French girl in
Nantes... whatever Wayne Barker makes, can only be made by Wayne Barker and his art
is a product of his lifestyle and how the world has affected him.
Whether you like it or not, understand him or cannot, Wayne Barker’s work, life and
infl uence, has taken on mythical proportions in his own lifetime.
There are millions of so called artists in this world, but there can be
only one Wayne Barker.
KARL GIETL, 2010
SUPER BORING
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174
WAYNE BARKER
SUPER BORING
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176
WAYNE BARKER
WAYNE BARKER’S INVASION OF SPACE
The past is history, the future a mystery, the moment a present – Wayne Barker is
both, a gift and intensely present, wrapping up the past into future memories condensing it
all to one powerful moment that again lasts for ever,
as Nothing Gets Lost in the Universe.
Wayne is the fi rst to greet me when I enter my studio here in Vienna, Austria, as he
looks at me from a giant poster fi xed on the wall right at the entrance, a poster from the
exhibition‚ Gurus & Lovers in France together with Samson Mnisi, where we all met, having
the time of our life. My space, which is a public art space too, is invaded by remnants and
tokens of Wayne, of our many meetings in different countries, of his visits to Vienna.
His Madonna on wax displayed in the glass cabinet, a postcard from the South coast
of Natal mounted with a bright yellow plastic shovel on the wall, framed artworks of his
serial Landscapes of Desire, his portrait on the Sasol Wax Art Award catalogue, just to
name a few, form a sort of permanent installation here which is symptomatic of his way of
enriching environments, reshaping and reformulating them with his presence. People here
remember him, they keep asking after him, many of whom he inspired in his workshops of
our Art Symposia in Hungary, Slovakia and Poland.
Wayne Barker certainly didn’t Jump into the World to be ignored… Assimilating
contradictions, reading behind the scenes, disagreeing, reversing irritation into messages
of hope, faith and healing, he puts works in our faces, allowing people into his work, his life
and emotions. Referring to the current term of‚ walking exhibition as used by the German
media artist Rusmann, Wayne can be seen as “walking art”, himself being part of the fabric
of his country, interwoven with the fabric of the world, exploring similarities and differences
and depicting a new cultural diversity. We can meet in these worlds, we can reconstruct
the present and reinvent the future. There is nothing too utopian in the merging of art and
life. Coming Out of Darkness, covering Lands of Love the works of Wayne Barker have
reached a complex, beautiful maturity, dismantling stereotypes, unveiling the hidden and
immersing the viewer in the whole range of human emotions from anger, fear, sorrow,
horror to desire, love, respect, tolerance, hope, forgiveness, always returning to healing.
The themes are deeply universal and at the same time subjected to cultural connotations
in their expression. In the refl ection of this concept of universality and singularity I have
allowed myself, as an observer from Europe, and as a stylistic device in this text, to employ
many of Wayne’s own words and titles of his works, reassembling them in a sense of
sharing and trust. Accordingly ending with another quote: “People get alive, lets distribute
work and knowledge”.
CAROLINE FEKETE-KAISER
KULTURAXE VIENNA, AUSTRIA, MARCH 2010
SUPER BORING
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178
WAYNE BARKER
EXHIBITIONS
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2010 Super Boring [solo exhibition and retrospective],
SMAC Art Gallery, Stellenbosch;
Standard Bank Polokwane and Standard Bank Gallery,
Johannesburg, South Africa
2009 I Linguaggi del Mondo: Languages of the World,
collateral exhibition to the Venice Biennale, Pallazzo
Querini Art House, Venice, Italy
History n , [group exhibition], UCA Gallery, Cape Town,
South Africa
2008 Heal, [solo exhibition], Polokwane Art Museum,
Polokwane, South Africa
Collection 10, [group exhibition] SMAC Art Gallery,
Stellenbosch, South Africa
2007 007, [group exhibition], Polokwane Art Museum
Sasol Wax Art Award Exhibition, Johannesburg Art
Gallery, Johannesburg
2006 Urban Jungle, [two man show] , Afronova,
Johannesburg, South Africa
2005 Land and Desire, [solo exhibition], AF Gerard Sekoto
Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
The ID of South African Artists, [group exhibition],
Fortis Circus Theatre, Scheveningen, Holland
2004 10 Years of Democracy [group exhibition],
Gallery Frank Hanel, Frankfurt, Germany
Evidence [group exhibition], Artspace, Johannesburg,
South Africa
2003 Black and White, [solo exhibition], Art on Paper,
Johannesburg, South Africa
Great African Nudes, [two man show], Everard Read,
Johannesburg, South Africa
2002 It’s All Good, [two-man show], CPC, New York, USA
Erratum [solo exhibition] Alliance Francaise,
Johannesburg, South Africa
Gurus and Lovers [two-man show] CACBN, Basse
Normandie, France
Lost and Found, [solo exhibition], NSA Gallery, Durban
KultureAxe: International Summer Academy and
Symposium, Kleine Plastische Triennale, Stuttgart,
Germany
2001 No Logo, [group show], Prince Albert Museum,
London, United Kingdom
1998 Memorias Intimas Marcas, [group show], The Electric
Workshop, Johannesburg, South Africa
Kunst is Kinderspielen, Kunsthalle, Krems, Austria
Beauty in Politics, [solo exhibition], Millennium Gallery,
Pretoria, South Africa
1997 All Washed up in Pretoria, [solo exhibition], Millennium
Gallery, Pretoria, South Africa
All Washed Up in Africa, [solo exhibition], Gallery
Franck Hanel, Frankfurt, Germany and Cape Town,
South Africa
All Washed Up in Africa, [performance with Ian
Waldeck], Venice Biennale, Italy
Dirty Laundry, Festival End of the Century, Nantes,
France
Trade Routes: History and Geography, [group
exhibition], 2 nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa
1996 Nothing Gets Lost in the Universe, [solo exhibition],
FIG, Johannesburg, South Africa and Gallery Franck
Hanel, Frankfurt, Germany
Colours, [group show], Haus der Kulturen der Welt,
Berlin, Germany
SUPER BORING
179

COLLECTIONS
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
180
WAYNE BARKER
1995 Laager, [group exhibition], 1 st Johannesburg Biennale,
South Africa
Spring Time in Chile, [group exhibition], Museum of
Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile
1993 Coke Adds Life, [solo exhibition], Everard Read
Contemporary Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
1992 Bodies of Love, [solo exhibition], Everard Read
Contemporary Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
1987 Images on Metal, [solo exhibition], Market Theatre
Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
CURATORIAL PROJECTS
2008 Modern and Contemporary Art: Then Now and Beyond,
Polokwane Art Museum, Polokwane, South Africa
Co-curated with Dr. Fred Scott
1996 The Young and Restless: Not Allowed, Sandton Civic
Gallery, South Africa. Co-curated with Kendell Geers
1995 Spring Time in Chile, Museum of Contemporary Art,
Santiago Chile
Scurvy, Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town,
South Africa. Co-curated with Brett Murray
Brown and Green, Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria,
South Africa
Can Art Exist Alone? Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria,
South Africa
1989 Klapperkop, South African Association of the Arts,
Pretoria, South Africa
Anglo American Collection, Durban Art Gallery, Gencor Collection, Gertrude Posel
Gallery - University of Witwatersrand, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg
Art Gallery, MTN Collection, Polokwane Art Museum, Pretoria Art Museum, Rand
Merchant Bank, SABC Collection, Sanlam Collection, Sandton Civic Gallery
AUTHORS
Andrew Lamprecht lectures in Theory and Discourse of Art at the Michaelis School of FineArt,
University of Cape Town. He has a multi-faceted academic profi le and respected as a lecturer and
researcher. Andrew Lamprecht has an active interest in contemporary South African Art, as a writer,
curator and occasionally as a practitioner.
Simon Njami is an independent lecturer and art critic, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Revue
Noire. He is also a consultant in visual arts for the Association Française d’Action Artistique. His
extensive publications include essays in the catalogue for the Sydney Biennale and contributions
to a wide range of other exhibition catalogues. Njami has been the artistic director of the Bamako
photography biennale since 2001, and was the curator of the fi rst African pavilion at the 52nd
Venice Biennale in 2007. He has curated numerous exhibitions of African art and photography,
including Africa Remix, which is touring the world and Johannesburg Biennale.
Ashraf Jamal teaches Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University. He is a recognized
playwright, novelist and cultural analyst. Jamal has been involved in numerous seminal publications
as co-author of Art South Africa: The Future Present; the co-editor of Indian Ocean Studies: Social,
Cultural and Political Perspectives and the author of Predicaments of Culture in South Africa.
Carol Brown is freelance writer and curator and art consultant. Currently the curator of the Moses
Mabhida Stadium collection, Brown is former director of the Durban Art Gallery with exhibitions
which include Positive 2007, Not Alone 2009 and Past/Present 2009 to her credit.
Thembinkosi Goniwe is an art lecturer at the Art Department of Wits University. He received an
MA(FA) from the university of Cape Town in 1999, where he also served as an assistant lecturer
of drawing and printmaking. He is currently completing his doctoral studies in History of Art at
Cornell University, New York. He has been included in, and has curated numerous national and
international exhibitions.
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“ONTSNAP UIT JOU WIT KOKON IN ‘N HELDER VAN KLEURE!”
When I asked Wayne how he came to be an artist he recounted early years growing
up in Pretoria, observing proteas in a state of wonder as to how nature could produce
such a curious creature of beauty and started to experiment with the possibility of
reinterpreting that beauty with paint. On any ordinary day he can be stunned and delighted
by the way sunlight tenderly caresses the leaves of a tree and penetrates through its
branches, illuminating all its colors. Only a soul of exquisite sensitivity can incarnate such
an artistic gaze, but sensitivity alone is not enough to make one an artist, one has to be
fearless and passionate in the face of the tremendous mysteries of life.
Wayne embodies everything that historically and mythologically has come to represent
an artist. He who lives on the frontiers, intrepidly confronts the shadows while embarking
on the light, with the innocence of a child and the intensity of a lover. He reinterprets
nature’s beauty, life’s mysteries, society’s tragedies and comedies for us to eat with our
eyes, feel with our viscerals and simultaneously satisfy our aesthetic desires. He drinks
from the glass of the bourgeois and eats from the hands of the people; champagne topped
with a quart from the closest shebeen. Today, the artist wears Prada while still reveling
in the decadent pleasures of wine, women and song. It is of course also the role of the
artist, in this case Barker, who is meant to on occasion enrage the authorities and provoke
the uptight galleries through his personal antics, yelling to the masses “Ontsnap uit jou
wit kokon in ‘n helder van kleure!” But beyond the decadent and fl amboyant disguise is a
generously creative being. Generous color, generous depth,
generous beauty, generous love.
WAYNE BARKER
JADE WEPENER
It began there,
at a precise moment in Time,
our vacant night fi lling suddenly
with the dash of an idiot.
It is not anymore an intention,
or pure potential,
that hint of Fate has moved a dormant idea
concrete in the world.
Bauer!
The bar was hectic and stuffed,
Veronica in her Marni chicly outside;
its my turn!
the pedant young man shouted
at the stunned, old gent;
thus Baylon and Wayne in Venice,
by their kindred spirits in Venice,
their antics hang the rogue to silence,
but where on planet will they now take him?
A clash not a murmur,
with a thousand clangs not with a sigh,
Wayne from nothing built
the unsung ultracity of
Super Boring.
FC & EP
Francesco Capodiferro (Poet) and Wayne Barker
in Venice | 2009

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Special thanks to Mr Francois Nel, Mr Emiliano Sandri
and the Van Rooyen Family for their role in the realisation
of this project.