WAYNE BARKER, ARTIST’S MONOGRAPH

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It was early in 1990 that Nelson Mandela was released from jail. He walked from the grounds of Cape Town's Victor Verster Prison into the final hours of a three-year state of emergency and was greeted by ululating masses and a great jostling of international television cameras. A set of that footage would wind its way back to Johannesburg, to the CBS News library in the South African bureau, where it was Barker's job to source and file material for international reports. The pictures that he sorted were harrowing. The country had embarked on a course of volatile multi-party negotiations; the right wing had unleashed a terror campaign, and he would be startled by previously prohibited archive material - of military activity in the townships and decades of police brutality. For Barker, who had never even owned a television set, CBS brought greater insight into the inner workings of mass electronic media and their complicated modes of commercial production. If the pop in his art was presented from a position of compassion, then what he saw emerging on the videotapes was the real thing - hard product. Human suffering and political drama 30 packaged into inserts for adspend on the international market. "For the first time I saw the real power of the media," says Barker, "and it was really quite overwhelming." He decided to hang on to some of the archival footage, certain that he would find a use for it one day.
On July 4 1990, five months after his release, Mandela's call for a Southern African leaders' summit was making headlines. "Mugabe, Chissano and Mandela to Meet" was top of the news in The Star. Just below that, beneath an account of an abortive Zambian coup attempt, was a third story: "Art Entry Rocks Grahamstown Festival". The story was the new South Africa's first contemporary art scandal and its popular introduction to the work of Wayne Barker. Deliberately breaking the rules, Barker entered two works in the prestigious Standard Bank Drawing Competition. One, under his own name, came from the Pierneef series. The other, a crudely charming and overtly political triptych called CV Can't Vote, was entered under the fictional (black) name of Andrew Moletse. Eager to redress decades of neglect, the judges found the Moletse work was just the kind of thing they were looking for. It was accepted for exhibition; the Barker was rejected. "SA art caught with its pants down" was Powell's headline. Barker told journalists that he had created Moletse in order to test some of the problems facing local art - and to expose the "ethnocentric bias" of an art world he regarded as "dominated by patronising white experts." 31 In the slew of press that followed the Moletse scandal Barker would be accused by competition judge Alan Crump of "playing silly games" and of "shameless self-promotion". In truth, Crump could just as well have seen Andrew Moletse to be watering the expansive ground for debate that existed between the old order and the new, between Third World art development and First World art trends and between issues of representation and appropriation. These were to become cultural buzz phrases as the country opened up and cultures began to exchange real ideas. The academic art world was turned on its head, and political and social structures were changing irrevocably. Mandela's release had seen the cultural boycott begin to crumble, and the advent of the first large scale international showings of South African work outside the country. Back home the nascent avant garde was finding its feet: alternative Afrikaners blew up on the music fringe; artist Braam Kruger initiated the Mamba Awards for contemporary art; state sponsored cultural institutions were boycotted by returning exiles. It was only a matter of time before Barker and his contemporaries would cross into the mainstream. By 1992, the Everard Read Contemporary Gallery had opened its upmarket doors, offering them a commercial home. Barker was selected as the début solo artist.
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WAYNE BARKER, ARTIST’S MONOGRAPH

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