WAYNE BARKER, ARTIST’S MONOGRAPH

When he talks about growing up in the dire political and cultural conservatism
of late-70s Pretoria, it's clear that flight then was much more about fleeing than
flying. As a teenager, he would run away from home to become a wood carver
at the coast. And as a conscript in the South African Defence Force, he lost no
time in fleeing the institution that had been a second home to three generations
of Barker men.
Coupled with the contradictions of a country where freedom was a highly
relative term, his family's nationalist politics and patriarchal values created a
schism that Barker would compulsively concentrate on straddling in his artistic
work. Writing about the paintings on Images on Metal, Barker's debut solo
show in 1989, Weekly Mail critic Ivor Powell put it this way: "It's as though [in
Barker's work] meaning is the point where the lies of one's childhood meet the
realities of the present, not a fixed point but an intersection." Shaped by those
schisms, Barker would later emerge in the national press as a prankster and
cultural agitator, in one instance assuming a black identity for the purposes of
entering a national drawing competition. Still later, he would devise a performance
piece that had him covered in brown chocolate and playing the piano naked:
a bitter-
sweet brown-white man with something to say about the stages of personal
initiation, the commerce of cultures, and the agony of political entropy.
"In a way it's a bit like having two identities," he says today. "But one was an
identity I had to reject, which was based on my entire education as a white South
African male."