SUPER BORING - Wayne Barker

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WAYNE BARKER
Wayne Cahill Barker was born in 1963 in
Valhalla, south of Pretoria, a suburb populated
by military families and employees
of parastatals. The men in his family had
strong ties to the South African Airforce
and his father only made a sideways step
when he later joined the governmentowned
South African Airways. Barker
grew up in an environment in which the
apartheid Defence Force was admired
and even idolised. As he innocently spent
his formative years there, Valhalla was a
base for military actions against Angola,
Mozambique and its own black population
in the townships. 1
In 1976, when he was in Standard six, Barker was
arrested for buying dagga. That was also the year that
other school children would be arrested – and killed – for
defying apartheid education. Forced to leave his school,
he absconded to Nature’s Valley, in search of freedom,
becoming a woodcarver’s apprentice. Eight months later
he came home to Pretoria and made contact with his
parents once more. 2 Wayne Barker the rebel, the reprobate
and the anti-authoritarian was fully formed and a sense of
alienation (from society and his family) had begun to form
that would infl uence his work forever afterwards.
More than this however was a growing realisation that
things were somehow not right around him. Even before
his teens, he had witnessed brutality and oppression
against those who had a different skin colour to him
and had realised that the fact that white and black were
treated differently and kept apart was not only abnormal:
it was unjust. This, and his articulation of his opinions, far
more than any ‘rebellious’ bad boy misdemeanours would
1 Blignaut, Charl, in Atkinson, Brenda (ed.), Wayne
Barker: Artist’s Monograph. [S.l.]: Chalkham Hill Press &
the French Institute of South Africa, 2000, p. 9.
2 Blignaut, op. cit., p. 13.
gradually cause an insurmountable rift between him and
his father.
After fi nishing his schooling at Capital College he
spent a year at Pretoria Tech as an art student, gulping
up information from art history books as eagerly as he
tooled himself with practical skills. 3 After one year under
the watchful eye of his parents he fl ed to the Michaelis
School of Fine Art at UCT, where his cousin, Brett Murray,
was already enrolled. He spent two tumultuous years there
simultaneously impressing and outraging his lecturers
with his commitment to painting and his ever-growing
resistance to authority. It was to be his diffi culties with
his beloved art history that was to prove his undoing at
that institution. After bad marks in that subject, his father
decided to withdraw him from his studies. It was time to
go to war. He had different ideas, however, and spent
two weeks feigning insanity once called up to do basic
training in the army. Declared mentally unfi t he was soon
discharged from National Service, a relief for Barker but the
fi nal straw as far as his family was concerned. Disgraced
in their eyes and not welcome to stay in their home, he
turned to the big city, leaving for Johannesburg. It was the
birth of Wayne Barker the independent artist.
3 Ibid.
SUPER BORING
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