WAYNE BARKER, ARTIST’S MONOGRAPH

In 1986 Barker had made his commercial art debut
on the experimental wall at The Market Galleries (a new
artist who painted on glass made a small notice in
Johannesburg's daily newspaper The Star). Showing in
the main space were friends up from Cape Town - including
Barend de Wet and Kevin Brand. With Fig these artists and
their Johannesburg contemporaries had a free space in
which to test new work on their peers and on the arts
press, often seen at openings looking somewhat
beleaguered by having had to drive into the downtown
badlands on a Sunday night. But no matter how vinegary
the boxed wine, nor how sour the press, Fig would come
to be regarded as a vital stop-over on the way to the
mainstream success achieved by many who exhibited
there. William Kentridge, Robert Hodgins, Joachim
Schönfeldt, Neil Goedhals, Kate Gottgens, Lisa Brice, Kendell
Geers, Steven Cohen et al all stopped over at Fig on their
diverse paths to local and international recognition.
A black South African art scene never happened at
Fig - not for lack of trying, but because it would take some
years for a mainstream system for black artists to emerge
from a painfully segregated society. When it did it would
settle at the Market
precinct and then
at the revamped
Goodman.
Barker still recalls every blurry detail of the opening
show at Fig: "The Cape Town crowd came up and we did
our first show, Urban Melodrama. We called
22
ourselves The Famous Five. We covered each painting in
newspaper and we got the Prince of Swaziland to open
the show. He used to walk around town in heels with a
cigar mic shouting into a megaphone - wearing an afro
and a kilt... "
It was scenes like this, coupled with the arrival of a
new breed of art intellectual from the more liberal
universities, that would, by the early 90s, prompt much
press speculation about the emergence of "an authentic
Johannesburg avant-garde". For most, though, the label
would seem frivolous in the face of an unprecedented
national State of Emergency facing the country.