2006 ‘Skip I am Far Above You’
‘Skip I am far above you’ (dedicated to the Pataphysical Society, London)
Introduction
‘For several years from 2006, choosing to have no filter on my computer to exclude spam, I would trawl through emails, curious at the randomly generated paragraphs that formed the body of the message. Most were incomprehensible but for a certain period there was a slew of cogent (if not entirely sensible) short paragraphs. From who? To whom? Messages created by a computer in order to gain access to my computer, a Trojan horse, the meaning unimportant, the approximate syntax just a means to penetrate my firewall…’
2003 ‘Take a Piece of Africa Home with You’
FIFTY-FIVE DAYS IN JOHANNESBURG
or
‘TAKE A PIECE OF AFRICA HOME WITH YOU’
‘walking across the Nelson Mandela bridge (which on some maps exists only as a dotted future project awaiting completion) the city divides before you, hundreds of goods trains or stationary and empty passenger trains in a stagnant river between the two heights of Braamfontein and the CBD. Each one is crowned with skyscrapers, rust and mirrored glass, buildings imitating quartz, basaltic outcrops either side of a fault that shouldn’t (geo)logically have produced these forms, if the mineral in question hadn’t been gold…’
I have spent most of my artistic life struggling to erase any trace of allegory in my work, (chasing the elusive rainbow of unmediated reality).
But how is it to be avoided in country where the Struggle is famously Life itself?