 So thank you everybody for joining us this evening. Welcome to session four of the Black, British Artist and Political Activism Public Lecture course. My name is Lizzie Robles and I'm a lecturer in contemporary art at the University of Bristol. And together with the wonderful team at the Paul Mellon Center, I've had the pleasure of convening this course. So in our previous sessions, we've opened up some of the issues and tensions that arise at the perforated boundaries between art and political activism. First, in a session that took up as an example, a key work by Rashid Arin. In our second session, we heard from artist, archivist and researcher, Agostowinski, who shared her research on the work, networks and archives of the early 20th century sculptor, Ronald Moody. And last week, we were joined by Adele Patrick from Glasgow Women's Library and the artist Ingrid Pollard, who led us in a discussion of no coverup. Pollard's recent project in and with the GWL's lesbian art archive, that opened up to still very much in process circuits and cycles across and between interconnecting activism. Tonight, though, it's my very great pleasure to sort of push our series on and introduce you to our speakers for this evening. Before I do that, I just wanted to, yeah, thank you, handle some housekeeping. So as you can see here on the screen, the lecture will be followed by an opportunity to ask questions. So on your screen at the bottom there, there should be a Q&A function. And we ask that you type all of your questions into that function. And that sort of makes it easier so that when we're answering them, they're all sort of in the same place. Just so you know the session is being recorded and will be made available at a later date. And in case it's something that you require or would like to have, there is a live closed captioning, which is available if you click the CC button on your screen. And it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. So as I said tonight, it's my very great pleasure to introduce you to our speakers, the artist Gavin Jetties and the art historian Allison Kay Young. Dr. Allison Young is assistant professor of art history at Louisiana State University. She received her PhD in art history at New York's Institute of Fine Arts in 2017 and specializes in post-colonial and contemporary art of the African diaspora and Global South, centering issues surrounding migration, transnationalism and social justice. Young has published scholarship and criticism in art journal, the International Review of African American Art, art forum, Apollo International, the photo works annual and other platforms. She has contributed to several exhibition catalogs, including the measurement of presence, the Dutch Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, Out of Easy Reach 2018, All the World's Futures, the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and the forthcoming prospect five yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021. Before joining LSU, Young was Andrew W. Mellon, Foundation Fellow for Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where she curated and published an exhibition catalog for Lina Eris Victor Haven, a hell, a dream deferred in 2018. German Gentjes is a painter, curator, writer and lecturer. He studied at the Makayla School of Fine Art and the University of Cape Town before moving to Hamburg, where he completed an MA in 1972. He remained in, sorry, my computer's decided that it wants to do things now, where he remained until the early 80s when he moved to the UK. During his time in Hamburg, he was a founding member of the German anti-apartheid movement, and he served as consultant for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In the UK, he took up a post as Senior Election and Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, served on the Council, the Arts Council, and was a consultant for the creation of the International Institute for Visual Art, better known as INEVA. It is with INEVA and Tate that he coordinated the Seminole New Internationalism Symposium in 1994. He has served on the advisory board of Tate Liverpool, who was a trustee of the Serpentine Gallery from 1995 to 98 before moving to Oslo, where he took up the artistic directorship of the Heine Onstad Kunst Center and later became Senior Consultant for International Contemporary Exhibitions at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design there. Recently, his work has been exhibited at the Dachar Biennale in Dekar in Oslo in 2017, the British Museum in 2016, the Center for Photography in New York in 2013, the White Chapel Gallery between 2004 and five, and he was recently included in the group exhibition, The Places Here in 2017. His lectures and essays have been published widely in many international publications and art journals. So it's over to you, Gavin and Alison. Thank you again so much for joining us. Thank you for that long introduction. It's a great pleasure to be invited to participate in your series and I'd like to thank Alison for being willing to share this with me and just to say to the Mellon, congratulations on doing something significant. But I have to share my screen with you so I can start. I'm going to read a short paper which I hope will not take too long, about 10 or 20 minutes, I think. But I want to start my I want to start my little talk with this image. And this may be a strange place to start, but as a preamble to this talk, I want to go back to 1974 and a performance work by my professor, the late Joseph Boyce titled I Like America and America Likes Me, which was presented at the Renier Block Gallery in New York. Boyce was, as we all know, not loved in the American arts scene then, long before the presentation of this work. The central comments about the artist was his role as a luffa for piloting the Second World War, where he had bombed factories in Poland and was shot down in the Ukraine. In 1974, not much was said about the complexities, no implications of this three day long performance with a wild coyote in the capital of America's post-modern culture. The gatekeepers of that culture, the historians, the critics, the curators, the keepers of collections had their definition of it. The preconception determined to a large degree the reception of this work. Boyce's creative response to this animosity was to make a work that illuminated the things he loved about North America and particularly the USA. Today, this work is a sign or a signpost for how expectation and assumption about an artist was overturned. And this revision happened once people began to engage with the work itself. The voice of the artist then became central to its reading. The cultural and political subtleties of it began to stand over and above the personal history of the artist. I'm a painter and a printmaker, and my talk will focus on these lonely forms of cultural activity. There's a lot I can say about the categories British black artists. And I put that in inverted commas and activism. And most of what I can say falls between the elevated plinths on which these categories have come to rest lately. Firstly, I am not British. I have lived a part of my life here, but much of my life has been spent in other countries in Europe and in Africa. I am ambivalent about the term black artist and I regard activism as an array of activities that includes the intellectual juggling. One calls philosophy. And throughout the 70s and the 80s, the content of my work touched upon issues of history, culture and identity. Central to it was South Africa's apartheid regime, European cultural myopia and the urgent need to recode a segregated Western European art history. All of these issues fell within the scope. Of the terms of terms such as black and political activism. They were nonetheless the source materials for my prints. And for my paintings. Troubling for me then as it is still today was the neglect of the art that carried these issues into arts public readers. Most times, art was overlooked completely. The first reading of a work placed in the category black was about where the artist was from. The second reading was the political affiliations and the message of the work. The third reading was about the artist's identity, his cultural or sexual identity or even his religious identity. The achievement of the work itself, its aesthetics and its visual qualities really made the fourth reading. Mostly this review was ignored. It was I ever not ignored in the reviews of artworks in the so-called mainstream. In that realm, the review was inverted. Simply the other way around. Aesthetics and vision came first followed by content. The identity of the artist was completely ignored. When the millennium closed, I decided to move on. I closed my studio and I moved away from the UK. I'd already begun to write and to lecture and to publish. And the move from studio to lecture hall and curation of other artists' work changed my outlook on the production and the reception of art. Ten years into the new millennium, post-modernism and post-conceptualism had transformed art galleries into libraries. Performance spaces, research centers, et cetera. The literal had rapidly overshadowed the visual. Preoccupied with content and happy to be entertained by arts events, many neglected the primary reason for a gallery visit, namely to look, to contemplate and to reimagine. There are not many objects in the world. That evade literary description. And when we cannot name something, we are confused. When we cannot find words to categorize something because it slips and slides across memory, we are shocked. And when there is no recognition, no recollection to help one align such objects to previous experiences, we are baffled. These unnamed objects remain as curiosities, mysteries or strange phenomena until we can name them. And naming gives us a sense of control over them. Now, non-figurative painting is such an elusive object. Its imagery falls outside of known categories. It resists the rational and avoids given vocabularies. When rational minds fail to immediately bring an object under control, the tension develops between logic and intuition. In short, the desire to be in control of what one sees begins to pull against the opposing emotional desire to trust one's intuitive and instinctive interpretation of visual experience. The contest of rational logic versus the fruitful incoherence of new experiences is writ large in every first encounter with a non-figurative work. But this is nothing new because one finds the same conundrum of oppositional tension in academia, in economics, in education, in language, etc. These are systems we have designed to eradicate incoherence and to replace it with rational logic. They allow us to name, to organize, to control, or place constraints on human behavior. But art has a habit of inverting the rational by asking the very simple questions, why and what if. These questions drive artistic imagination and they sit at the center of any artist's studio practice. They shake up and unravel rational certainty. When art answers to them with known certainties, with the traditional or the accepted view, it does not broaden the vocabulary or challenge the creative mind. And therefore, artists seek to answer them in imaginative and different ways. Why does the painting have to narrate and proclaim, I ask myself, why describe in form or record what if one approached painting differently in an open-ended emotional assessment of one's interpretation? What else can painting do? Could it provide a more fruitful and sustainable answer to the what if and the why questions that surround race, gender, and artistic purpose? This is an alternative I am researching in the studio. And the goal of this non-figurative research is to make a painted image that is an invitation to others, to other viewers, to partake in what I am doing. That doesn't mean physically to move paint around on a surface, but to move ideas around, to imagine rather than conclude, to practice the liberty of setting aside preconception and make curiosity a principle in painting's reception. What if art was not just a way of painting, of picturing nature? Could a painting be something other than a stand-in or a representation of something in the real world, something academia, economics, education, or language have not already named and classified? How does one begin to evaluate painting's contribution to cultural discourse? Does painting's aesthetic qualities introduce something we are not talking about? Something as obscure and as curious as beauty, perhaps? And I make no claim that my response to this what if question will produce works of art more relevant than other painterly practices in Africa, Europe, or elsewhere. My non-figurative, non-narrative enterprise aims to engage states of feeling. I want to alter how one sees and how this new insight takes thoughts beyond the rational comfort zones of literal depiction. Retelling the public murder of George Floyd and a literal image will never be as successful as the Internet version. Painting has to be a reduction of what I already know about painting and real life. I practice this reduction to arrive at something essential, an emotion that uplifts and spotlights the humanity of all oppressed people. And now it's good to have something when you're doing research, to have something to compare your research outcomes to. Equivalencies of non-figurative painting to jazz, painting to jazz, have revealed that both are novel reorganizations of how we listen and or see. Our auditory and visual experience coalesce feelings, evoke moods and heighten our sense of place. A free jazz composition has more in common with non-figurative painting than the poetic words of a folk song or the rhyme of rap. The stream of consciousness, one associated with free jazz music, is no different to the flow of marks and forms across the canvas. A lot of it is unrehearsed, spontaneous. It is invention arising from acquired knowledge and driven by the audacity to let things flow. When talking about this album in the democracy suite, the composer, band leader and trumpeter, Winton Masalis, mentions how the fundamentals that underline jazz align to notions of democracy. He lists improvisation, swing and the blues. Elements of jazz music that, respectively, embody one, the freedom to innovate, two, that it underlines the agency of individual responsibility within a community, and three, that it demonstrates an attitude of persistent optimism in the face of adversity. Thinking about this, I realize that this is a modern jazz take on the revolutionally triplet, liberté, égalité, fraternité, that drove the French to revolt. Most noticeably, and this is the most important part, there is no mention of representation, description, nor documentation in this philosophical concept. Most painters work from a wellspring of tradition to both music and painting. And we watch them dip into this very often. When tradition is shaken up and reorganized, something different emerges. When there is a cross-pollination of cultural knowledge, something new appears. Most painters continue still to use a narrative subject. To entice viewers to their worldview. And some will at times even add text to particularize, even instruct viewers to the desired meaning of the works. These methods have undoubtedly produced good art. My early paintings and prints made full use of this very strategy. I have no objection to figurative narrative forms of painting whatsoever, other than the limitations they impose on the viewer's imagination. And when I say viewers here, I include those gatekeepers of the museums, the curatorial practices or programs, those writers and art historians, and those who help to build collections of art. If questioning paintings, narratives, or figurative convention does open the human gaze to an alternative, this new insight is not an absolute. If abstraction and nonfiguration of the 1950s New York school reveals anything, it was that no form of art production should believe itself to be the be-all and end-all of art. Nonfigurative painting is a part of art that needs to be considered seriously and not marginalize as pictures of nothing, a term postmodernism often used to describe it. To build a world view from the realm of the emotion is just a different way of thinking, a different activism. I want this form of painting to free up imagination and undo the restrictions placed upon art's purpose. I know that this is an invitation to look again, and this time to look with greater visual sensitivity and personal freedom. I want to broaden the emotional range beyond anger, frustration, and sadness. My research is a form of intellectual activism in the realm of culture through which I regain the idea of individualism. It is a provocative way of making choices and arriving at conclusions that broaden my concept of humanity. This is a form of activism that fills me with hope and enjoyment. And so to conclude, I want to return very briefly to Joseph Boyce and the manner he invited his critics to make that imaginative leap with him. He taught me that it's not what anyone thinks of me and what I possibly stand for. It's about how art changes expectation, how it overturns the visual, the viewer's assumption. It is comfortable today for the gatekeepers to talk about an artist's production in context of gender, skin color, race, identity, cultural history at art. These are no longer the curiosities, the mysterious strange phenomena they were just 30 years ago. There are today archives, there is ongoing historical publications, ongoing research that allow one to look back as never before on the history's plural of art. They reveal how badly the gatekeepers of the past were at their jobs. What should not happen today is that the discourse remains in the past in order to suit the next generation of gatekeepers. That the names of the words, categories, etc. from the past that entered into Western European art vocabulary way back then is being used today as a matrix for dealing with new art productions. If you are trying to control and name what does not fit your expectation with language and definitions of yesterday. You are once again marginalizing the art of the present to the periphery of those many art histories. That's what I have to say, and let's talk about some of those issues. Shall I share my screen or do you want to keep some images? Why don't we keep this image up for a little while and we can always flip back if we feel so inspired. Thank you and as I'm starting to respond, I also just want to take a moment to thank Lizzie and Palma and center and Gavin for inviting me to be part of this conversation. There's obviously a lot to pack in what you've just spoken about and also in the various images and bodies of work that we've been seeing on the screen. I thought, before I kind of begin, I might just draw out a few of the themes or topics that I'm hearing, perhaps mostly to make a mental note for myself and also perhaps for the audience and maybe we can get to some of not all of these throughout our conversation. So on one hand is your approach to this distinction of art and political activism, which I think is a complex one on one hand wanting to separate these activities but also seeing the act of the artist as an act of activism depending on the context. There's also a sense of ambivalence that you carry about frameworks that focus on cultural, racial, other forms of identity, especially when imposed by art history, art institutions as a predominant framework. I'm also interested, and you've touched on this a little bit as well on your roles, not just as an artist, but also as an art worker as a writer and administrator curator, and how each of these different roles has offered you an opportunity to navigate these questions from a different angle. And of course, especially looking at this image, you know you're currently now turning to non figurative painting so we should absolutely make sure to touch upon that practice and what it's not to you how you're approaching it. That's where the work is going. I might start by failing to resist a bit of the temptation to do art historians to and a little bit to brush intention with some of what you were just describing in terms of seeing a framework or seeing a cultural background or history as a point of origin but I'm doing so in part because I think from what I'm hearing this will allow us to add nuance to some of your ideas, you've continued to use these phrases and repetition throughout your talk that remind me to return to South Africa as a point of origin and part of that is this very antithetical relationship to naming organizing categorizing during the talk you says you say naming gives a sense of control this is something we probably should resist more to name to organize to be able are all these ways that that art history art institutions can impose restraint on artists or on our own, I guess, abilities to interpret in an open or associative way to me it seems inscapable that there's a little bit of a passage of the fact that you obviously were brought up in a place in which naming categorizing controlling and organizing were part of a predominant pernicious and violent social system. I might invite you to take that point of entry however you wish whether it's to maybe speak a little bit about the perhaps formative nature of having grown up in apartheid or perhaps to think about different ways that you've navigated art institutions in South Africa but also and how each of these experiences has added some nuance to the formulation of your thoughts as you've expressed them here. I'll start us to take that take that question right on and and and tell a story about. Many years ago I was doing an exhibition I forget where it was, and there was an artist talk and I gave an artist talk and in the audience was a young, young boy, he must have been about 1213 and he asked me this very naive question. What decide what made you decide to be an artist. And, you know, you kind of think of this is a typical question that a kid would ask and how do you deal with it and I don't want to just fob him off and give him some, some ridiculous, some ridiculous answer but it also made me think for the first time about, why had I really become an artist why why was this the case. I went to an art school from literally from the age of three my kindergarten took me to the children's art center in Cape Town, which was at that time the only black art center in the country. It was also the very best art center in the country we discovered some years later. But I went there with great enthusiasm it was a moment in my day when my, my, my kindergarten marks me the two blocks around the corner to the center that I was, I was filled with expectation. And I enjoyed going there, I went back there, almost every week, and right up until I entered university I in fact I began to teach there when when I was at university. One thing that struck me about it was the reason I went there, it was the one place where nobody told me what to do, where to go where to sit, which color to use which paintbrush to use which sheet of paper, what pair of scissors it was just a moment of freedom for a very young child who didn't understand that freedom but just enjoyed it. And I think this phenomenon of being in a society where I stepped outside of that room onto the street. There could be a policeman who told me I could not walk there I could not go there. I could go only home. I could not associate with X I could not. There were all these limitations on my humanity. The art world had none of those. You know, if I, if I was in that art center and I spilled over a bucket of water. Nobody freaked out. It was just to get them up will mop it up it's like easy. Nobody freaked out if I spilt a bucket of paint in the art world onto a canvas people would say what the fuck are you doing. This is this is the reality. So that that connection between the imposition on your humanity the imposition on your liberties was one of the things I registered I registered very easily subconsciously. And that's what made me enjoy being in the artistic space because in that space. There were these limitations not there. I only recorded these limitations again, when I came outside of the country thinking now this limitation I'm free. I'm outside of South Africa. It'll be, it'll be a lot easier than realize no no limitations are still there they just have other forms. In academia in history, in, in how you read things in how you perceive other people, all of these, and how they perceive your personal history, all of these mutations started coming back. And I worked with them in the best way I could. And I was enormously to heighten this idea of humanity of freedom of liberty. That was against the system of government, a legal governmental system that actually denied, not only me but millions of my fellow countrymen, their full humanity. And I, I fought against that. And I recognized how those limitations also were being imposed in other areas of life in Europe when I was a student and then started my first studio. So I don't know if that answers your question right there. Yes, I think. And as you're talking about your studio in Europe, and all of these themes about wanting to kind of transcend the restrictiveness of life in South Africa, in addition to other limitations. It's making me want to just stop, perhaps on the South African coloring book for a moment because I think this body of work. It's really to look at as an art historian as the work that is the most, and I'll put in quotes with a capital P political, but at the same time when we actually like read into this work much more closely what you're doing is kind of trying to draw our attention to the absurdity of this legalized system of segregation that South Africa had created for itself. This is in at least two of these images, the very detailed definitions of racial categories such as white that had to be outlined in relation to every possible form of heritage that somebody might represent and how to create such strict definitions of self and it just becomes bureaucratically almost unmanageable. At the same time as deeply violent, you know, and so it's a work that is engaged with politics at the forefront in a way that I think you've moved away from towards a more kind of poetic or abstract practice even before the present moment. This work is really trying to compel the viewer to like unpack our ideas of assumptions that we bring to bear. When we encounter images as well as people I mean would, would you say this is somewhat accurate or could you talk a bit about maybe how this work, you know relates to this way that you were thinking at that age especially coming to when I decided to make this work it was I've told the story many times it was because my fellow students at the Hochschule in Hamburg literally didn't understand about they didn't know really what it was about and they had no true sense of how it affected the individual. They had a broad sense of this was wrong, but they had no real sense of exactly how it worked, what the mechanisms were, etc, etc. So this work which which we describe as one of the first artistic archives this is an archival work basically. It, it gave my fellow students an opportunity to just take some very simple bits of information. You can divide all those 11 screen and they all deal with a single issue related to South Africa, each each sheet is a kind of a very short summary of what the reality was. And I wanted to at this stage do what my my my one of my lecturers are an artist friend, it's become a friend Joe Tilson said to me, if you're going to make a print, you're going to ask questions about printmaking. You know, remove or challenge all the assumptions of printmaking. So for example, just the formal challenge and you made a print and you, if you made an etching you made etching in an edition it was signed, it was signed in a very particular way with numbers etc. The signature went on a certain place so we put the signature anywhere in the print so if you look through these series, you will find the signature sometimes in the top corner sometimes in the middle of the middle of the of the page somewhere, etc, etc. You can speak to the limitations of an edition, etc, etc. Those things I kept, but I really wanted to challenge. If you made a print, a print that to be a single sheet of paper. Most of these things have colleges on them they think stuck on them with glue. They have things attached to them with pins. They have handwritten things which I repeated with the same handwriting again and again over the whole edition. So there's lots of things which were breaking rules of printmaking. And about that aesthetic break that I was looking for in printmaking was something art critics never ever dealt with. They ever never ever dealt with the quality of printmaking of the art aspect of this work they will just focus on the content of the word and that began to frustrate me. I'll give you I'll give you another example. This image. And they say, yeah, it's great. It's quite a big painting. It's a meter 50 square one and a half meter square. But actually I started this, this picture as a result of reading through how cubism and and pointillism had affected European art history. If you look at this picture the construct of this picture it is a square inside the square there is a cone inside that code there is a spherical shape which is the spotlight on the ground. The colors in this work are the three primary colors, red, yellow and blue. I'm working with very, very basic elements in this picture up to today. No one has ever spoken about this work in those terms. No one is recognized this. No one even asked me why this is structured the way it is. This is what I'm talking about, about when you're trying to do something. The narrative here became the subject matter, because that was the easiest way to relate to the work. If I look at what I'm doing. If I look at something. If I look at something like this. That's a different such as cup of tea. You now have to deal with what is in front of you. There ain't no, there's nothing here there's, there's just a large rectangular surface covered in marks that you can stand in front of and it does something to you. Your brain tells your feet, stop here and look, or your brain tells you, move on, go somewhere else you don't want to deal with this. You've got those two options. That's the liberty aspect of it. That you are determining what is happening to you in the gallery in the visual experience in the gallery. I'm not instructing you, I'm not telling you anything you make up your mind that little action is a restatement of your humanity. That little action is saying, nobody is restricting me, nobody's pushing me down, putting me into a box. I'm just dealing with this. This is what I want to deal with. Let me deal with it. I first experienced the very first time I saw a Helen Frank Antala painting and a Matisse painting. I stood there and I was aghast. I could not believe how beautiful these things were. I still today look for those experience. It happens to me, but very, very seldom. And it tends to happen with me now with earlier work and I'm looking very much for newer work work of right now that is doing the same thing. And there are many artists who are trying to do this and I think I'm so glad that painting has returned as a medium in contemporary art discourse that people are again looking at paintings and talking about. But I think we have to look at it with a different set of eyes. We cannot look at non figurative painting with the ideas of Clement Greenberg just doesn't hold. It's no longer relevant. We dealt with the postmodernism as dealt with that. I mean there's two different sides of what you're talking about. One of which is the artists and the choices that they make in their work, you know, to make something that has familiar representational aspects versus to make something that is non figurative or abstract, and then the other side of it is what the art or the viewer or the curator or the writer brings to it and the frameworks that were prepared to invoke or to discard as we engage with artists work. And your words are reminding me of something I think I encountered this sentiment quite often, especially in several writers work, but especially not Jean Fisher in the 1990s, throughout many essays of hers. In the essay she wrote for the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997 she begins by saying, I should like to make a plea for visual art everywhere, more specifically to ask that we rethink the way by which we frame art in order to return to it what is proper to art. And she goes on to talk about this double bind, you know at this moment of art being absorbed into discussions about cultural context as a sub almost as if it's a subcategory of anthropology. And I think, you know, one of the issues at least the one that folks like me can control is, you know, whether I'm faced with work that's abstract or figurative, or that has a political meaning or that doesn't. You know what is my like, first or second or third response what am I willing to kind of push through or see or see past in order to engage with it as an art object and not as anything else. I think Jean was absolutely absolutely right I think there's the issue of the ethnographic reading of other people's work ethnography is part of social sciences, but it's it's the people who invented ethnography, never applied it to themselves. The ethnography was always applied to someone else out there, those those guys someone else over there it's not me. They analyzed a culture ethnographically, and therefore the production of artwork from that culture in that same in that same vein, but you never did that to yourself. And that was what was what I think was wrong with the ethnographic, you know definitions. And what I'm what I'm sensing right now is since black lives matter as force has forced institutions in the cultural sphere. To look at themselves again and say, what are you doing what have you done in the same way that we were asking these questions in the 70s. There is a response today which certainly makes me fearful that we are using categories. Again, to engage to begin to engage with what is being produced in this contemporary time. To start off by looking at just what is there in front of you. And this is perhaps one of the reasons why I went into nonfiguration, because nonfiguration prevents you from talking about a given subject, you have to talk about this is a painting. This is one layer of paint placed on top of another on a surface, making an image and that image elicits and response of you either walk away from it because you don't like it, or you'll find something intriguing about that fixes you standing in front of it, engaging with these two things, which is the very foundations of the visual experience. Yeah, it reminds me of concepts that emerge out of African diaspora discourse but nonetheless are in line with what you're talking about such as gliscence opacity, you know with the right not necessarily to reveal once full self, you know, this idea that you have the right to kind of see hyper visibility invisibility or visibility on your terms. And one thing, you know, when I started to see this abstract work of yours for the first time you sent me some images perhaps digitally in the last few years and it took me by surprise knowing your practice so well, and took me a moment to sort of reconcile with it. And I think for me the, the recognition of what it is that you're doing has kind of come out of getting to see the work in person and to spend some time in the studio to actually see that it's not. I would venture you can tell me if I'm wrong. I would venture this is in part about the images that you're producing and what you want them to say but in part and maybe perhaps importantly at least from my end it's about the practice of making about the return to the studio about the freedom that you find there, especially because it is prolific there's so much work at every scale on paper and in paintings. I have to sort of credit another artist Phoebe Boswell for making me aware of this particular reference but when I think about this work. I am kind of starting to understand it in the lens of the writer Kuguru Macharia who poses this question. How will you practice freedom today. And you speak about freedom in this work freedom. Perhaps this is the American and we speaking it's a, it's a charged word and it can be it is a, you know, people use the word freedom. And, nonetheless, to justify, you know, like oppressive forces. That's not what we're talking about in art history we see the word freedom or at least the concept of freedom as it bears on American democracy free market capitalism, whereby Greenberg and the American government kind of use American abstract capitalism to like promote their ideals this is not necessarily the freedom I'm talking about but rather, you know in a liberation context or in a freedom that comes out of, out of struggle from oppression of freedom that comes out of anti apartheid anti colonial rights and that freedom to, to practice as you wish. And then of course to, yeah to make images that don't bind you to a particular narrative is this freedom from what Copenhagen research referred to as the burden of representation. So there's so many different angles, like in which these seem to be about liberation in a way that your practice always has been but in a very surprising format that your practice hasn't taken until recently. So that's why I, I, I repeated that that story of this young boy who asked me, why did you become an artist and I think that joy and freedom that I had experienced as a young five year old is what I'm going through now. And depending to the studio five years ago, I have had a ball. It's been wonderful, because there's nothing I was just thrown off everything that appeared to me as some form of limitation that some form of in intervention to say no no no don't go there stop, don't do this, you know, scale is no no problem. How many, how many times I over paint something is no problem. You know some of these these paintings that I did for the exogenic series have been worked on for two years, one canvas, not every day of the week but you know returning to it again and again and saying no this doesn't work. I think I can, I can change it and make it better or just destroy it and start again, and just over paint it and I have no hesitation to do that I have no hesitation to paint over a work that I have exhibited, it's not sold but it's returned to the studio I just, if I don't like it anymore I paid over that no hesitation about that, because it's fun. I have, you know, there's no reason for me to say, there's no desperation I have to do this it's like just, no, I don't have to do it I can, I have that liberty, and that liberty is such a pleasure because it makes me understand my humanity, and the issue that activism is always about seems to be about making us aware of our humanity and the humanity of others. That's what we do. I don't know if we want to open this to something or do you still have more questions. Many more, but yeah many more. Okay. We probably. Let's see, maybe, maybe I'll raise one more, one more point and then. I can't see I can't see the questions because I'll be able to look at the green. Yeah. Maybe just one other thing I wanted to make sure to ask and of course if people have questions about this we can expand on it too but I think. And at the way that your practice has developed, you know, we're making this 70s, 80s, early 90s and then you sort of move to other roles where as you're participating in shaping the nature, especially in Britain, you know, speaking, you know, from the perspective of the present talk, you know how you've engaged with the British art world has been not just as an artist in that art world but also as somebody who's been involved with arts and administration policy with writing conference organization curating. And I think part of this was motivated by a desire to kind of allow that freedom to other artists and to try to resist some of the problems that you saw in the way that your work was framed and that the work of those artists to you know and respect was framed. I don't know if you want to speak a bit about maybe whether I guess how you how you came into doing work on the other side of this, we've spoken about gatekeepers a little bit so on the other side of the gate. Exactly. Let's just talk about that very briefly. I mean, I was, I was confused that after presenting realistic concrete alternatives to where art had been in the 50s and 60s. You know, they were, this is not myself is the Rashid Paul Gilroy. So, my Raj, you know, a whole group of people, particularly in the UK, who were presenting an alternative way to deal with this issue and address it in a manner that we are just beginning to do today, I think. And, and I, I just thought I'm somebody who likes to put my money where my mouth is I thought there must be, there must even be a commercial aspect to this if you want to if you want to do it properly. So when I was offered the opportunity to run an institution. That's exactly what I did. I actually created a program for Henion Center that was was actually bringing the art world of today into Norwegian visual culture and preparing them for what you're seeing today is going to be the art history of tomorrow. And because that is absolutely the case, you know, my my track record in that institution shows that everybody I showed in the six years I worked there went on to become a major major artist if they weren't that already by the time by just that and Scandinavians had very little contact with us with this world of art. So that was an opportunity to say here it is this shows you how you can do it. You can do it that it's commercially successful. These are exhibitions that people want to see, you know, my visitor numbers in my museum was sometimes the highest in the country for for most of the five years six years as I ran Henion stuff. And it was expensive to get into my museum because it was a private semi private museum. So it wasn't like a state control thing where the budgets were, I worked with zero budget. I literally started with nothing and just made an exhibition and earn the money for the to make the exhibition from the intake at the door. That's basically how I ran an institution for six years without much, much institutional or governmental help. And it was just to prove that this was possible. And I think today people realize yes it is possible. You know, you can today, you know, get major artists of color into the so called mainstream of the art world selling worked at the same prices as everyone else in that in that art world contributing ideas to the development of artistry and the making of art that is absolutely significant. And I think this is just something that that's that's for me the platform where we have to be today. And that is the position we start from. I having dealt with this issue of identity, etc. and activism, all my life. I just feel, no, there's a there's a whole new plateau on which I can work from and launch my my work into an autistic arena wherever that may be. The only thing that has happened is that, whereas before everybody wanted to show just in London and New York today that's not the case. You can show anywhere you can show in. You can show in Australia in New Zealand you can show it here in the strangest of places I'm preparing an exhibition for Sharjah, the middle of the UAE. And I think this ago, nobody thought what you want to do an art show in a shower what the hell's going on there. It's significant what they're doing in charge of it's absolutely significant. But because we've been blind to it because of the way we've we've looked at that we haven't fully realized just what they are doing then I think people have begun to recognize hey, the art world is shifted and therefore the art that's going into that art world has we should begin to find new ways of dealing with this, a new language, a new attitude. That doesn't mean we just throw everything of the past over our shoulder and forget it. That's important history, but we asked with, we have reached another plateau, and we should go from there. So I don't see any questions in the Q&A but I invite everyone who is here to type in some questions there. Actually we do see one now so maybe perhaps we'll, we'll take that and if anyone else wants to go ahead they can so Gavin I can read this out, if you like. And it relates to some of your work in conversation with other South African artists. So this is a greeting from Cape Town from Woodstock by Ben Verges who thanks you for your presentation and asks would you please comment on your collaboration and visual questions with George Hallett, such as Freedom Hunters, as well as the 1977 Swapwell calendar. Also it was a collaboration with George Hallett and I understand those are not the only two. Yes, I'm trying to find. Yeah, there it is. Actually, there's much more than George Hallett in there there's Ilver McKay who wrote this poem I used at one point illegally and I still apologize to her today for for doing that because I found that poem in a book by my friend James Matthews a writer and publisher. There was at the at the moment of the uprising in Soweto and there was this explosion of energy that came out of the youth of South Africa. And I use the photographs of George Hallett and of Peter Maccabone. This is from Ernest Cole, which people don't recognize this from Ernest Cole but it is. So it's, it's a completely kind of amalgam of South African photographic and documentary photographic culture into into a print that literally has a sense of the anger that was in the air at the time of the Soweto uprising, and George was my one of my oldest friend he passed just recently. A few years ago, who was self taught photographer with a great sense of humanity, and a great sense of purpose and what he's doing his portraiture, his photographic portraits are exceptional. And that legacy of that he's left behind needs to be needs to be evaluated if anybody is looking to work with an archive of great emotional sensitivity. So when you look at George Hallett's portraits and they're not just portraits from South Africa or Africa, but they are portraits from all over the world, because he traveled around the world, but he was my friend and we shared a house together at one point. We, we wanted to move to live in France together, and that fell through at the end of the day. And we were an inspiration we I inspired him and he inspired me there was a kind of a fruitful interaction between the vision he had as a photographer and the things he would say about photographs of the things that I was doing in print. And we kept contact until literally the last moment of his life. And I'll give credit in case people are interested in learning more about his work. I've, I think some of the most interesting scholarship I've come across on George Hallett's work has been through Christine. She's also published on that subject, I think, as part of your South African visual history series. So, yeah, there's the history book. And this it's interesting that the question coming from with stock is also maybe in particular and I'm thinking about all of these different figures who are kind of commingling on the surface of the print and it's reminding me of something else which is, you know, on one hand as we were discussing earlier you grew up in South Africa was just, you know, during apartheid. The predominant system of legalized segregation but of course he also grew up in district six, which is a part of Cape Town where there was intermixing and where there was interaction among communities that are different from one another and the image has formed an exile of course from people who are also finding their way into different communities and commingling and firing one another so I think that, you know, finding a way to like break through these boundaries has always been something that it's tangible in your work. There is a just to stay with George how that's just to mention this, there is a photograph of George is called under the Oaks, I think it's called it's just a group of people sitting in the shade of a huge ancient oak tree playing dominoes. And I ask anybody who sees that picture to look at the faces of the people, and you'll see the entire world in there because the actual cross cultural mixing and identities in that there's one chap in there with a hat on who is actually Italian. I think the woman in the picture is part Spanish. The one other guy is African. It is a complete conglomerate of what was happening in Cape in the culture of the Cape, because of it being a port city. The world came there and the world left from there. And so my childhood experience was that growing up in district six. You would walk down and you'd hear, you know, somebody speaking Malay. Somebody speaking Arabic, somebody, you know, there will be a Jewish aspect. District six was first and foremost a Jewish community before it became a black community. So there was still remnants of Jewish shopkeepers, etc. We spoke a dish. So you, you could move through that culture and you would hear all of you'd hear African speaking cause I would hear, you know, it was a it was a phenomenal mixing. And I realized at that point that people could live together. We can get along with each other. There's no problem. There isn't the problem. We all realized that the one thing that drove us mad was the stupid idiot government that wanted to segregate everything that was the best of our ability. And that was what we resisted to the best of our ability. But the jazz scene, for example, in Cape Town was completely mixed. It was totally mixed. And that's why I love him. That's why I love jazz so much because it allowed me as one of the other areas where I where I could listen to, you know, an American jazz pianist playing with the British saxophonist with Italian guitar player. So for me, the world being this integrated with was always natural. What was unnatural was trying to segregate it out and pull it apart and separate that was unnatural. And you bring up jazz in relation to your work and they make sense, of course, being a style of music that comes out of many overlapped history. Absolutely. A unique invention, but made out of, you know, cross mixing and taking traditions and nuances and, you know, like I say, artists, the artists who respond with tradition, don't do it anyway, the artists who take those traditions and toss them up and turn them inside out and come up. They come up with something new and different. And that's their contribution to humanity. And this happens all over the planet. It is not something that just happened in Paris, or in Barcelona, or in New York, or in London. So what I'm speaking from today was called in the Choctaw language, the Bulbancha. Absolutely. Many times. Absolutely. We know it today is New Orleans, but even predating its colonial history has a similar history of being home mingling and contact and encounter. So this is something there are so many parts of the world I think that, and of course I appreciate your reference earlier to Martin Marsalis and New Orleans jazz musician. When his life is exemplary, I mean, example of just how things, how you resist, how to be active, how to be a creative activist with just the tools that he had, which was his trumpet and his ideas about what makes great music. And it's not just limited to New Orleans jazz. Wynton has played Mozart, for God's sake. He's that typical wonderful experimenter, that scientist, that researcher that I expect all artists to be, because like I say, at the very core of every artist studio is this idea to reimagine. I'll invite anybody who's tuning in if people want to ask questions. Sorry, can I just chime in? Sorry, my video's not. Thank you so much, Kevin, that was so interesting. I was just wondering, this is not going to be very eloquent, I'm afraid, because I feel like I'm still so sort of enriched and sort of mulling through things, but thinking about what you've just been saying around jazz and this idea of mingling and this, you know, where voices come to the fore and fade into the background and join together. It made me think about the overlapping and the visuality and questions of visibility in your most recent works. And I sort of non-figurative works where there seem to be, and again I realize I'm only seeing it on a small screen and I really look forward to seeing this in person. But I was wondering if you could, you know, sort of talk about that, because that seems to be a sort of something that comes out of your practice a lot, the city of layering and sort of washes of color over each other, if that makes. In part, I don't know if I'm going to answer this correctly, but I'm trying to just look through the slides and just let's take an image like that. I started with a blank canvas. Every work is just, I fix up a size and I make two or three, I mean, I think in this set there's four paintings of the same size, I brought them all together, primed them, got them ready. And then I just began to make a mark on them and started from there. I've never made sketches, so to speak, of my work, even in my early days, the early paintings that I have, I never ever made sketches, I just had an idea and then I built an idea and developed the idea on the canvas, so to speak. This is exactly the same. You know, the only thing that I gave myself with this, with this particular canvas and its partner canvases was, I wanted the color to be warm and hopeful and welcoming, because I was enjoying myself at the time. And I wanted to put this feeling into the canvas. Also, this feeling of something fading, receding, and certain things coming forward and certain things coming back, just like a summer's day. If you sit on your balcony or the watch, look out through your window, watching the sky change from dawn to dusk, watching clouds go past, watching birds or whatever fly in the space. All of these things coalesce in the feeling of making this work. And one of the things that happened later in the process was, I felt that I wanted to have a sense of a kind of a stepping stone of having a series of, how can I call them, framed positions. So all these canvases have a blue, sort of, what I don't know what to call them, a plinth, like structure on top and bottom, because the painting is never worked on just in one direction. Sometimes this is the way up. Sometimes it's flipped around. Sometimes it's standing on its head. I continuously work completely in the round and get a feel for it as I go along. And color is a very, very important part I've discovered of painting. It is the emotional anchor to the painting. All the paintings that I have are, they tend to be very light. I've made a few dark pieces, particularly small ones, but they tend to be like a breath of air. Because what I don't like about so-called early non-figure to work, particularly the New York school, is this crazy desire to put paint on, like, use a trial to put paint on the canvas. In other words, this heavy impasto surface, and to rely on the viscosity, this dense, you know, malleable viscosity of the paint to create an emotional feel. I want the emotional feel to be purely visual. The paint I use is very, very thin. It's like milk. It's like washes, very thin layers of washes. And like I say, painting is this act of putting one layer on top of the next and seeing what happens. Putting a layer down, stepping back, going back to the surface, to the canvas again. Putting down another layer, different color, whatever it is, another layer thinner, a heavier wash, a heavier mix of paint, a different kind of mark and stepping back. And the picture builds itself. I don't tell the picture how I want it to be. The picture tells me, no, no, you should be doing this. You shouldn't be doing that. Cancel that out, do this other thing. And this is what happens in the studio. And this is the joy that I love because I can go into the studio and feel utterly optimistic one moment and then utterly depressed and then come back and work with it again. And then maybe by the end of the day, I feel, wow, actually, actually, I've had a great day in the studio. I've really enjoyed myself. I feel uplifted. I go into the kitchen. I make myself a cup of coffee, put my feet up and watch a football game. That's basically how it goes. And I struggled with it. It's not that it happens like overnight. I describe it as if this is like one take. This happens, this picture in particular I think has been worked on for maybe a year. Can I ask about the, again, I recognize I'm only seeing this on a screen and so, yeah, so you might just go, you're speaking nonsense, but it does look to be, there's sort of a square there. And so it seems like part of it, it's all sort of quite, as you say, sort of loose and lovely and inviting and sort of effervescent. And then it does seem like there's some sort of, yeah, a sort of geometry, a sense of organization and that square, I realize I'm pointing it on my screen. I know, but yes, there is a rectangle in the rectangle. And I think, as I said, I want to create these steps, like a series of steps or doorways you can pass through. But they are not, they are not clearly defined. The more you look at the picture the more you get drawn into it. What I haven't done with any of these and what I should have done I just realized is, I should have put in some close ups because in some of those tonalities that look like flat color. There isn't ever any flat color. There is no flat color in nature, really. What I would say is, even if you paint a flat color, the minute you expose it to light, the light is always fading from one end to the other, because of the way the sun moves across the sky. So in nature, there is no flat colors. So this, this is what gives a sense of depth. This is what gives creates a kind of visual space. And I play with that visual space. And sometimes to heighten that visual space I will put in something quite rigid, just to show you, there's one thing. That's behind that. This one's coming forward. But they, they, they, somewhere along the line, they, they kind of talk to each other. They, they mix and they melt and they, there's nothing that's absolute. The only thing that's absolute there are those two blue stripes, and that reoccurs throughout the pictures and show you who is the next one. Is that the next one? Yeah, there's the next one. There's the same thing again. And there's four in that. There's four paintings in that series. And I've been working on them for about a year. But, you know, there's a lot of detail, there's a lot of detail in the, in the bottom half of that picture that actually you perhaps can't see on your tiny little screen. No, but this, I mean, it does sort of, I think Alison, I really, when you, when you mentioned Jean Fisher, I was just going, yes, absolutely. You know, to myself in the room, because I'm, yeah, I think there's something so rich here about, as you say, the sort of the work between us, you know, that's the name of the thing, isn't it? And this idea that, and what I really am so sort of inspired by at the minute is this idea that by engaging the possibility that this work between us isn't just, I think this tends to be sort of a, maybe a misreading of Fisher, right? That this idea is some sort of return to form or return to formalism that sort of defends politics. Do you know what I mean? And yeah, and again, I think this reading and I wouldn't ascribe that to her at all. But what I think is so fascinating about this is this idea that the work between us, and by turning to it that by opening up this space that is about liberation and freedom and humanity in the broadest sense, that's really radical, isn't it? Elizabeth, there is this one thing that I began to notice when I started to look at painting very seriously while being a curator. I suddenly realized that if postmodern philosophers had a target that they attacked in the visual art, it was painting. Painting became this kind of no, no, you don't go there. It got so bad that when I started teaching again in Norway and went into the art academies, and I would ask students, what do you do? I would say, I'm an artist. And I say, what do you mean by that? Are you, what do you, what do you make? And they would almost be afraid to say, I make paintings. I say, are you, therefore, are you a painter? And they would say, well, no, no, I also make photography. I also make videos and say, okay, but when you paint, while you're painter, and I think that fear that was in, that was installed everywhere, don't go anywhere near this stuff, because this high modernism literally made the reception of art such an elitist horrible practice that you just steer clear of it, you know, somewhere else, something that will bust that up. This actually, if you think about it, this criticism level that painting has never been leveled at drawing. It's never been leveled to any degree, any similar degree towards sculpture. It was just because painting was the dominant thing in all through the 40s and 50s. It was just painting. So you had to take painting down and painting would take taken down so far that we literally almost forgot about it. So the statistics once in the Whitney Biennale of like, I think it was the Whitney Biennale of 2014 or 12, whatever, because I gave a lecture at the time, and I made an assessment, there was like 128 works of art in the Whitney Biennale and three were paintings, three. And I thought, what, what's up with this stuff, why, why, and yet when I worked in the museum, and we made an analysis and asked the visitors, what would you like to see in the gallery. 89% of our visitors wanted to see paintings. What was shocking. Yeah, that was absolutely shocking to me. So there was a question, why have we gone away from and that's what really sparked my interest again and so I thought, maybe I should go back to this and look at this in a new way and this is what I did I stopped curating went back into the studio and started making this stuff, this stuff, you know, I think I mean part of Fisher's critique and I think yours as well is in part the tendency in postmodernism to bring like us, you know, social political deconstructive approach to absolutely every art encounter and the productive side of that wave of criticism and of course is its intervention in the universe, virtualizing aspects of modernism that of course we can now look back on and say that there's a lot of hero centrism in there. This is not a discourse that was made available to everyone there are, you know, lots of different dynamics and hierarchies that needed to be vanished perhaps by way of that like postmodern unpacking and deconstructing but then in the course of that we move away perhaps from a visual out of a fear of it and I'm hoping now, you know we have some distance even from that moment so perhaps in the, in the name of some sort of balance or like a fruitful progression from each of these phases, there is the possibility to reemerge not as something burdened by its weight within art historical canon in the West, and also not as something to be feared by postmodernism as say whatever the critique. And to use it as a place to explore subjectivity presence of these different aspects that you're bringing. As I said, I've nothing against people who have pain figuratively or paint in abstract modes, it's simply about. As long as those modes make you go into a gallery and reimagined the world by looking at stuff and looking at them from every possible angle from the subjectivities, as well as from their creative potentials and what they offer you apart from something to talk about. And subjectivities give you something to talk about David Hockney once said I make I make figurative paintings because it allows the art critics to have something to talk about. That is why I don't make abstract paintings. And it's very true. It's very, very true. That was the realities already in the sixties when he said that. This this dynamic that we have to look at this in a completely new way and stay. There are things happening in this field that have a value have a certain validity. And one of those validity is to make you realize or reimagine your humanity to say I'm an individual with with great senses of feeling that I am. I'm not having these feelings looking at other things I know I don't get it from watching a performance or I don't get it from watching a. Some some kind of interactive sculpture or whatever the case maybe, but I get it from from this particular, you know, I love I love performance work I go and see it I love, I love all forms of art. I make that difference of trying to look for where is the art in this work. Where is this where is this. This visual thing that that is the basis of why we call it art, it is a visual thing. Why is art the chosen medium for this particular statement and not, you know, writing or spoken delivery. I always return to you and I try to compile my students to especially because I do tend to gravitate towards socially engaged political issue driven art and of course I think there is always has to be the question of like, I think you put it well but I want to make something to do with like the wise art the vehicle through which the statement comes to be. Why is it kind of carried to us in an artistic form and what can we learn through seeing it as such. And you've, I'm looking at the time so I might, I might just slowly walk this into a transitional conclusion. Plenty to think about on that note and some interesting provocations that I hope will stay with everyone who has joined us for some time. Thank you so much for your generosity. No, it's been it's been it's been great it's been a huge opportunity to to a good opportunity to air some of this because I run this through my head all the time when I when I'm thinking about my own work or when I go to exhibitions. I'm constantly confronted by things that I say well, I really truly enjoy this like I say those are those rare experience such as seeing seeing my first Matisse because people don't realize when I was training in South Africa. There wasn't a Matisse to look at there wasn't a Matisse in the country. So that when I came out of the country the first time I got opportunity to see a real Matisse. I was I wasn't even a painting it was a paper cut out. And it absolutely stunned me it absolutely stopped me in my tracks, because I suddenly realized there was a potential within this work, which I was not following. I had followed it when I was a child but I had no. I kind of wiped the slate in that in that area and I think I want to unwipe that I want to go back and just look at that again and I think it's a kind of a going this this going back and looking at the past is perhaps one way to find out where we need to go in the future because I think those past offers give us messages about the sense of direction we should take. Thank you for that note. Thank you so much Kevin I feel like I have some pleasure quietly and now and just digest everything. Thank you so much to both of you that was just fantastic and thank you to everybody who joined us this evening. I don't know if I just wanted to remind you that will be back at the same time, same virtual place. Next week where I'll be in discussion with the artist Keith Piper around the idea of black art in his early practice and the role of black nationalism, again in his formation of thinking in the, especially in the early 80s. So again thank you so much. And I wish everybody and lovely evening.