WAYNE BARKER, ARTIST’S MONOGRAPH
Published 2000 in association with Chalkham Hill Press Published 2000 in association with Chalkham Hill Press
In his two years at the University of Cape Town's Michaelis Art School, Barker's rough and ready painting instincts made a favourable impression. But he couldn't shake the lingering sense that something was up with the drinking water. As the filmmaker Mira Nair once put it: "Cape Town is not itself. Here even the vegetation is imported." Out of place in the city's small circle of smugness, Barker began to feel that maybe Pretoria wasn't so bad after all, at least it was what it was, however horrible. In Cape Town, P.W. Botha and his ever-encroaching states of emergency seemed to be able to exist in some sort of bubble somewhere above the mountain. Like his cousin Brett Murray and his soon-to- be new friend Barend de Wet, both already fourth- year art stars at the school when he arrived, Barker emerged from his encounters with the more genteel, gin-sipping, faux-bohemian side of life in the former colony thinking hard and muttering aloud. When a respected lecturer, Neville Dubow, asked his students to sculpt extensions of their bodies, Barker decided to make "a colonial thing". "It was a tennis court off my body - and I dressed up as [Dubow] and then got the rest of the students to throw tennis balls at me. Other people were making wings and stuff. And he was furious. He was devastated." 14
Barker's brief outing as a tennis court was just the first of many little cultural interventions and art parodies he would come to perform. The next time he did it, though, he would be Charlie Chaplin and the stakes would be higher. 15
- Page 2: To my wife to be, Claire; my two da
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- Page 7 and 8: part of the making process. One has
- Page 9 and 10: 7 "There's a strong flying story go
- Page 11: In 1963, the year in which Barker w
- Page 20 and 21: When a lecturer at Michaelis told B
- Page 22: Something was up in Johannesburg's
- Page 26 and 27: 24 In 1989, Nelson Mandela was stil
- Page 30: The Johannesburg Art Gallery, a gra
- Page 33: On July 4 1990, five months after h
- Page 43 and 44: as the gem of the Biennale and much
- Page 46: In 1990, at the height of the FIG's
- Page 55: single African country was represen
Barker's brief outing as a tennis court was just the first of many little cultural interventions and art parodies he would<br />
come to perform. The next time he did it, though, he would be Charlie Chaplin and the stakes would be higher.<br />
15
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