WAYNE BARKER, ARTIST’S MONOGRAPH

After the considerable amount of unpublished
material I have read about Wayne Barker's work, I find it
somewhat strange that the artist should ask me to
contribute to this publication. After all, it was I who accused
him during the last Standard Bank national drawing
competition, over a decade ago, of "playing silly games"
and of "shameless self- promotion." The outcome of this
exchange was, for some, and undoubtedly Barker, that a
reversal had taken place. I had become the mouthpiece
representing an authority "dominated by patronising white
experts." Long before the change to a democratic
government a new cultural political correctness had arrived.
The days of judging art, especially judging art for no
remuneration, were nearing the end. The question of
who was capable of judging whom, who represented
who, and who was acceptable to all parties made the
task unenviable and became a political minefield. Wayne
Barker has always had problems with authority both at
the level of the individual and that of a system. In fact any
young artist who does not possess a healthy degree of
irreverence against previous art systems has some cause
for concern. Brancusi believed this of Rodin at the
beginning of the
twentieth
century,
and contemporary
British
sculptors still
insist that every
generation
should commit
patricide of their previous masters. After Henry Moore,
their sentiments are comprehensible.
In South Africa, the tradition of artists waiting
interminably for the nod from a commercial gallery or
museum curator to exhibit their work is still in existence.
But an alternative group of artists began to question the
traditions of this system more than ten years ago. Wayne
Barker was certainly one of them. Audacious, truculent,
witty, highly critical and iconoclastic, the works he produced
and the alternative venues that he found and encouraged
artists to use, posed a genuine alternative to the existing
system. Most artists felt more comfortable in the somewhat
confined area of only making art works. The possibility of
an artist challenging the domain of museum curator and
orchestrating contentious exhibitions with work from
different and sometimes jumbled perspectives was initiated
and encouraged by Barker. Though much of the work was
not purchased that was by no means an indication of the
quality of the shows. The South African art public had
generally been used to logical and sequential exhibitions
which dealt with single themes and comprehensible
parameters. For artists to curate cutting-edge exhibitions
without the experience and qualifications of seasoned
museologists was both foreign and risqué. This was one
important contribution that should not be underestimated
when summing up this artist's creative output. It requires
as much ingenuity as the making of an artwork itself.
Superficially, Barker's work often possesses a cavalier
quality and his personality appears to be that of a cultural
cowboy reminiscent of the young Robert Rauschenburg
of the mid 1950s in North America. The cultivating of a
persona also seems for some artists to be an inextricable
4