Tour 2006 :

Pretoria : 30 June - 14 July
Port-Elizabeth : 21 July - 4 August
Cape Town : 10 August - 25 August
Durban : 6 October - 27 October
Mbabane : 3 November - 24 November

Our home on the range
Oil on canvas, 1.7 m x 1.2 m, 1987

Wayne Barker is a latter day Guy Debord, an artist who would have fitted in perfectly with Debord’s coterie of Situationist International artists. These artists are ’psychogeographers’, exploring the specific effects the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, have on individuals.

Their chief means of investigation are the strategies of dérive and détournement, the former being defined as drifting and deliberately trying to lose oneself in the city, a feat early and admirably achieved in Barker’s 1980s Pretoria map works, and also, in ’losing’ himself in his South African National Defense Force stint.

Détournement is defined as the transformation of everyday ephemera, such as advertising slogans and comic strips, and significant cultural products, such as old master painters. Barker is a psychogeographer of the South African landscape, deconstructing typical Pierneef landscapes and using them as ’wallpaper’ for his own exploration of place.

Facing landscape 2
Laser print and enamel on canvas, 25 cm x 25 cm, 2006

"Everybody wants to find their place in the world," according to Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar. But how does one recognize place as important and not merely empty space ? In a world where people continuously fight over land, place can cause conflict or bind people together. In Barker’s art he is quite explicit : the words ’worlds apart’ echo through many of his landscapes. Territorial divisions demarcating one place from another, often with terrible consequences, are the chosen subject of many artists ; others prefer to focus on non-places that lack any real identity of their own.

Barker stakes his claim in this landscape of landscapes unequivocally : "I am interested in how the media, through popular images, inform, confuse and rape the African continent. For the past two decades I have also been dealing with land, which is quite trendy now. My approach has been to deconstruct the icons of South African painting, particularly works by Pierneef."

Barker’s art is as much about the deconstruction of obsolete cultural icons as it is about the reconstruction of the landscape. He has, however, been overlooked for many prestigious exhibitions dealing with issues of land and place, notably Panoramas of passage : changing landscapes of South Africa that toured the US in 1995.

Facing landscape 3
Laser print and enamel on canvas, 25 cm x 25 cm , 2006

But Barker is not a marginalized artist : he has made his mark, quite literally, on Pierneef prints, and on the South African and international art circuit.

Barker is not only a (re)distributor of culture, but also a painterly cultural theorist, analogous to the literary cultural theorist JM Coetzee. It is no coincidence that when Coetzee wrote White Writing : On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988), critiquing the picturesque and the sublime in the South African landscape in the travel writing of the 19th century colonialists William Burchell and Thomas Pringle, Barker was critiquing the picturesque in contemporary South African art. Wayne Barker has always reflected the complexities of the South African cultural mix in his work. Cultures in his work, however, are never ’worlds apart’. Rather, they are hybrids of each other : mutually affecting and reflecting change among one another and finding mutual co-habitation in this place we call South Africa.

Wilhelm van Rensburg

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