OF CONSUMPTION AND CONSEQUENCE

By Hazel Friedman

To understand Robert Slingsby's exhibition 'CC - Unlimited power' one does not have to traverse the desolately beautiful spaces of the Richtersveld in the Northern Cape. But being there certainly illuminates and elucidates the pulling power of the place where the ancient Nama rock engravings or petroglyphs provide an indelible reminder of a once united, spiritually anointed community. Today, throughout the Richtersveld - the polarities of ruin and renewal are present in equal force.

...We are standing among the scorched slopes of  Rooiwal, in the Richtersveld. Where a modest Roman Catholic Church once stood, there remain only its fractured foundations and dung-strewn floor. Marking what its threshold was once, are a rusted padlock and a chain. And behind it, corroding in a sun that stabs with splinter bolts, is an abandoned bus that once ferried expectant mothers to the church for succour, whether spiritual, perinatal - or both.

I have journeyed to this parched earth with Slingsby, on one of his scores of pilgrimages to the jagged lunar-like landscape that lures him like a "rusted blade to magnetite" and which serves as the chief source of his inspiration. The Garies Orange River snaking through the Richtersveld and into the pyramidal mountains of Namibia is Slingsby's River Jordan , his site of baptism and spiritual crossing. It is a space where earth, sky and spirit align. And its kloofs serve as Slingsby’s dictionary, the rocks as his syntax, while the geometric signs and symbols engraved into their skins have become the personal alphabet of his visual dialect.  For over thirty years he has made it his mission to record and transcribe the shamanistic markings of the ancient Nama community who still inhabit this region.

"The Southern African tradition of ancient art-making - whether on cave walls or rocks - has provided us with a legacy that should be cherished," he explains, "a legacy driven as much by an empathy and interaction with the spirit world as with the desire to manifest and make, literally, their mark."

A profound humanism informs Slingsby's work. He remains committed to the welfare of the progeny of the ancient rock engravers who still inhabit the region, most of them in abject poverty. The legacy Slingsby wishes to impart is to preserve and celebrate  an ancient art form in danger of extinction, as well as to assist a community marginalised by the greed of the multinational gem industry and the vagaries of apartheid racial politics - the residue of which remain  in the Richtersveld...

...At its highest point, just outside Springbok and 340 km from Keetmanshoop the landscape suddenly provides 21st century credence to the pre-Columbian belief that the world is indeed flat. But just when you think you are about to topple into the vortex, the rigid outlines of the surrounding landscape morph into an undulating, shifting locus that seem at once prehistoric and post-nuclear -  a jagged megalithic landscape of dolomite, quartz and sandstone, unspeakably desolate and beautiful.

 As we are sucked into the canyon, we leave the last of the grazing, arable land. This rocky terrain is good only for the hardiest of souls, goats and the Kokerboom. The Quiver Tree or Garas' as the Nama call the Kokerboom (which means "to scratch lines") resemble disjointed candelabra and lean at impossibly oblique angles off the rock-face.

It is the surreality of the Richtersveld, its swift bursts of lilac, green and orange pigment  amid jagged monotones amid fields of quartz, its bounty and barrenness - its  ability to morph before our eyes - that inspire epithets usually associate with the effects of a potent hallucinogenic. It is utterly impossible to remain detached from this shamanistic space. Slingsby describes it as an "art gallery curated by the cosmos."

 As a South African artist Slingsby feels an overwhelming responsibility to understand the geography, history and alchemy that informs not only the art of the petroglyphs but all aspects of Nama culture - both material and spiritual. To Slingsby, magic still resides in the misshapen sometimes makeshift relics of this ancient community.

 "I have needed to take these discarded masterpieces, to document them, sleep next to them and revisit their shamanistic sites,” he says.

In the process, Slingsby has acquired an intimate and extensive knowledge of the petroglyphs' geometric markings. Since the 1980s he has obsessively incorporated them into his iconography in an effort to uphold their alchemic properties, pay homage to their makers and advocate for the restoration of these ancestral lands into the hands of the Nama, whose forefathers the Khoisan first inhabited this part of the world.. 

’CC - Unlimited power’ follows this quest. The derivations of the exhibition title are numerous and unavoidably current within the lexicon of a world recession, global warming and the ubiquitous presence of economics-speak: credit crunch, closed corporations, climate change, carbon copy, conspicuous consumption; continuity check, credit card, cubic capacity, critical condition... the list continues.

 And indeed Slingsby's iconography, although rooted in the petroglyphs produced by the ancient Nama, is utterly contemporary in its literal and semiological referencing. ‘CC – Unlimited power’, like its predecessors, evokes the sense both of an archaeological and burial site, where the residue - bones, stones and skeletons - of an ancient community - are constantly being unearthed. Simultaneously it serves as the locus for a convergence between the past present and future. The past is evoked through Slingsby's  arduous documentation of the Richtersveld's neglected history in works such as Blind Rage at Rooiwal; the present through the grandiosity of 2010 soccer stadiums, as evoked through Conspicuous Consumption; and the future through his depiction of carbon footprint-free modes of transport and alternative energy sources in “Give a dog a bone”.

It is a huge show in scale and ambition, rendered in his characteristically psychedelic palette with meticulous detail to minutia. And it speaks as eloquently of a planet irreparably compromised by gluttonous consumption, as it does about an ancient community displaced and dissipated by multinational avarice and political indifference.

“Conspicuous Consumption”, for example, derives its title from the Theory of the Leisure Class, the book written in 1899 by Thorstein Veblen, an American sociologist, in which he developed the term conspicuous consumption. Through the phrase conspicuous consumption Veblen was referring to the nouveau riche, who went out of their way to make large expenditures in order to purchase their way into an elevated social status. Conspicuous consumption by its very nature - overt consumerism and expenditure - is antagonistic to sustainability because it greatly increases resource use and environmental impact.

In Conspicuous Consumption Slingsby has diligently replicated the edifice of the recently constructed Cape Town Soccer Stadium, replete with emerald-green pitch and sweeping silhouette resembling a rose-coloured bowl floating on a base. But under Slingsby's eye, the stadium exudes a laager-like insularity. On closer inspection the grass is comprised of crushed glass, and the pristine flow of the stadium's contours is disrupted by scratches and geometric motifs. These markings denote the visual language of the petroglyphs. Slingsby seems to be suggesting that even the most contemporary of structures should not be erected without acknowledgement of and obeisance to the history and presence of those who inhabited these spaces before. It should not be forgotten, after all, that the first communities known to have lived close to Table Mountain were the nomadic predecessors of the Khoisan. Their presence, as indicated by the remains of their rock art, has been dated back 27 000 years. (3) And along the coastline, evidence of human existence can be traced back 100 000 years. In fact in the 1980s Slingsby himself unearthed an ancient gravesite along Milnerton Beach. Today however, the remains of that burial site - whether a Khoisan cemetery or a colonial execution site - remain submerged under high density housing and tourist developments. This form of consumption is not only conspicuous in its indifference to the historicity of these sites buried and desecrated in obeisance to the gods of progress; it is also invidious in its championing of commercial development  over the heritage of this ancient people.

Conspicuous consumption also issues a contemporary environmental warning that is as prescient as it is current. Instead of floodlights, the stadium is framed by wind turbines. In the wake of global warming, carbon emissions and electricity outages, - not to mention the fact that South Africa emits more carbon dioxide per unit of GDP than any other country in the world - we should be assessing alternative, renewable and sustainable forms of power, he suggests.  With an abundance of wind resources - and coupled with its vast tracks of land and infrastructure - the country in general and the Cape, specifically, has the potential to utilise "intelligent energy" and become a wind "powerhouse".

As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown observed during President Jacob Zuma's recent state visit to the United Kingdom:

"There can be little doubt that the economy of the 21st century will be low carbon... the push towards decarbonisation will be one of the major drivers of global and national economic growth over the next decade. And the economies that embrace the green revolution earliest will reap the greatest economic rewards... Just as the revolution in information and communication technologies provided a major motor of growth over the past 30 years, the transformation to low carbon technologies will do so over the next."

Like most of Slingsby's structures, Conspicuous Consumption is bereft of people - only the tracings thereof. Its surrounding wall assumes the role of a skeletal covering and its cavernous interior transmutes into a burial ground.

Motifs of skeletons and bones recur in his sculpture 'Carbon(e)' which resembles the fossilised remains of a Jurassic beast, and in paintings such as 'Apathy of entitlement' where ghoulish forms, spirals, wheels and mitochondria -like motifs seem to perform a frenzied syncopated dance. In ‘CC - Unlimited power’ Slingsby also utilises the motor car (CC in this context refers to the term describing the volume of a cylinder in a vehicle engine.) But through Slingsby's  characteristic sleight of hand, it becomes a macro-metaphor representing the damage caused by humanity onto this planet, evoked through his depiction of cars being scooped up by the gargantuan claw of a bulldozer, about to be disposed of, or chewed up and spat out. This image evokes a doomsday scenario.  But there also exists an inchoate playfulness in his depiction of motorcars that harks back to much earlier work executed in Holland during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Works such as Pink Cadillac (1980) executed in Slingsby's cartoon palette, depict a perfect replica of the 1959 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible, immortalised by Elvis Presley, who owned one. 

In ‘CC - Unlimited power’ the real, hyper-real and surreal conflate. Such is the case with ‘Blind Rage at Rooiwal’ - the work that best encapsulates Slingsby's ongoing commitment to the Richtersveld. It comprises a flaming red canvas depicting the abovementioned, abandoned Roman Catholic church that once stood at Rooiwal . Built by Catholic missionaries in the 19th century, the church also served as a donkey stable. All that was absent from the apocryphal vignette would have been the manger. What remains is a broken baby doll and the dung-strewn church foundations. Slingsby's painting provides the only visual record of  these misshapen, abandoned shrines to innocence, faith and the erosion of one way of life for another, and yet another.

"Rooiwal represents the end of a 300-year genocide perpetrated against the Nama and their culture," explains Slingsby. "It is both a devastating part of our history and a horrific indictment of exploitation and decimation." He adds: "What was once an integral part of community life, like the church, is now the bounty of scrap-dealer."

He adds: "Like the materials used to build what was once the church, the Nama community constructed their houses from found objects. They were haphazard structures but they provided the community with a sense of individual creativity and stability. When government replaces these homes and puts people in undifferentiated grids of cement blocks, it is appropriating something essential away from the very essence of that which made them believe they had value."

This is the work that also exemplifies Slingsby's ongoing preoccupation with the fields of energy that the now-disappearing traditional Nama structures once exerted. “The Nama traditional dwellings - the matjies skerms - were living, breathing installations, and emblems of self and collective identity," Slingsby recalls. 

Fashioned from reeds their igloo-type form and function were inherently suited to their nomadic existence and the harsh climate. Gradually the matjies skerms were replaced by corrugated iron shacks, constructed in idiosyncratic design. For Slingsby, these architectural shifts did not reflect so much the degradation of living conditions but the community's efforts to reinvent and creatively inhabit the spaces that still exude the remnants of their spiritually-charged history.

Slingsby's most poignant homage to these iron structures and the metaphorical spaces they inhabited can be found in  an earlier exhibition, aptly entitled 'Powerhouse' - his 2005 solo show at the Bell-Roberts Gallery. The show revolved around the inexorable changes occurring in the Richtersveld -a region ostensibly frozen in the ethnocentric imagination. Slingsby’s iconography is the corrugated iron structures\ inhabited by the Nama, which are now being replaced – courtesy of increasing urbanisation and politics – by faceless brick and mortar RDP houses, and promises of running water.

Through installations of found objects - a rusty bed, corroding artifacts like old shoes, tins and battered kettles collected from the region - as well as meticulously cast bronze sculptures and epic monochromatic drawings, Slingsby evoked the residue of a mystically charged landscape in which the human structures once fed off and encapsulated the potency of the petroglyphs.

"Powerhouse was an exhibition that had a completeness to it, as a capsule of how I wanted to contain my vision of what the Richtersveld was before the inexorable changes that beset the area," he explains. "The show was imbued with a sense of ghostliness, of the spirits of the past." 

Depicting textured and embossed surfaces, Slingsby's shack paintings resembled the striations of the petroglyphs themselves. The signature exuberance of his palette uncharacteristically muted, evoking the sense of being stripped. Yet brilliant splashes of colour occasionally emerged in his paintings of the corrugated iron shacks, as though caught in a shaft of sunlight, as in paintings such as 'It won't be much longer'. The shack, itself, serves as more than an illustrative device or literal structure. It is the central metaphor of the show, evoking the nostalgia Slingsby feels for a dissipating way of life and his outrage over the Nama’s neglected history. But more than a passionate protest against the marginalisation of the Nama, as the exhibition title suggests, 'Powerhouse' also signifies a galvanising to empowerment. 

It is as much as witness and humanist that Slingsby produced 'Powerhouse''. Most of the Nama are, literally, grounded in the remotest, most arid parts of the region. While vegetable farms frame the Garies River and Diamond Pyramids flank the horizon, at least a third of the Nama population  lives below the minimum living level, subsisting on under R18 000 a year. Unemployment has increased to around 60% and those who earn an income do so as cheap wage labour for the remaining mines, and surrounding farms.

The fate of the Nama, and the history of cultural dispossession suffered by this ancient community, is of course, inextricably entwined with South Africa's racist colonial history and the exploitation of its gem-rich soil. The Richtersveld Community had exclusively occupied the area prior to its annexation by the British Crown in 1847. Until then the rights to the land (including minerals and precious stones) were akin to those held under common law or customary law ownership. But in the 1920s, when diamonds were discovered in the area, the rights of the Richtersveld Community were usurped by the South African government of the time in favour of Alexkor Mining Company, a wholly state-owned diamond company, on the grounds that any rights that the Richtersveld Community may have had to the land were terminated at the time of British annexation.

The ramifications of the gem frenzy are etched not only in the physical environment but in the collective psyche of its original inhabitants.  The rapacious open-cast mining  has literally chewed up much of the Richtersveld, spitting out the rind, with no attempt to rehabilitate the land In the process, the Nama have been victims of an insidious form of genocide, denied access to arable grazing, sacred sites and to the mineral wealth of their ancestral lands.

The consequences thereof are displayed in CC Unlimited, through works such as Blind Rage in Rooiwal. Unlike the muted hues characterising Powerhouse, the crimson palette of Rooiwal reflects  the searing heat of the rocky desert framing the church foundations and the emotions that the Nama's history of dispossession generates in the artist. But Slingsby has depicted the forsaken scene with an element of intellectual detachment, diligently replicating each detail of the abandoned site.

"This is the scene that greeted me when I went in search of the old church," he recalls, "The tangible evidence of displacement was there, from the abandoned, rusted bus and dung-strewn floor, to the chain, padlock and broken doll. The narrative is therefore as literal as it is symbolic."

He adds: ""The doll, tin cans, the little pieces of stone and bits of metal represent the spirits that don't rest in peace, that continue to exist in states of dis-ease.`'

He navigates me to a sloping rock-face worn down to a smooth, chalk-white. Children would have tobogganed down the slope, he says. At the base, spread across the crusty earth appears to be a field of diamonds and emeralds. But up close they are really beer and brandy bottle shards. Such poignant and paradoxical memento mori are commonplace in the Richtersveld.

...In nearby Kuboes, we approach a white stucco Catholic church erected by the Rhenish missionaries. It still stands intact, its bell-tower casting de Chirico-like shadows on the rocks. The ancient Nama belief systems subscribed both to the natural and the supernatural cycles of life. Their intermediaries were their ancestors and the shamans who, through altered states of consciousness, could step from the material into the spirit world. Yet since the arrival of the Missionaries in the 19th century most of the Nama had been converted either to Catholicism or Calvinism through the Dutch Reformed Church, which now serve as the socio-cultural and theological fulcrums of this marginalised community.

Further into Vioolsdrift another little church has been spruced up. It's emerald green door, immortalised by Slingsby in the 2005 'Power House' show, through paintings such as 'Inheritance from Rome' (2006) has since been painted a stolid brown. Slingsby insists out that the reason the door had been painted such a garish green was because green was the Nama ancestors' favourite colour. It provided an exhilarating contrast to the severe monotones of this inhospitable landscape. Now the threshold, with its brown door is indistinguishable from the bland structures surrounding it.

...Brick and cement ablution blocks with rickety doors squealing in the wind, have become another contemporary feature of the ancient landscape. Grizzled faces smile quizzically as we pass. Some of the men doff their caps. A cluster of elderly Nama women are wearing Victorian bonnets, again courtesy of the Missionaries. Amid the rubble of rusted metal containers strewn among the stones, one can still find a plethora of ancient artifacts. But the space has changed irrevocably. Among the fluted rocks that served for centuries as the canvases for ancient shamanistic engravings are names, dates, swastikas and expletives scrawled as defiantly as tenement graffiti.

Slingsby calls this space an open wound.

“There’s so much defacement of some of the most beautiful petroglyphs in the area," Slingsby ruminates, "A hundred years ago their ancestors would create a spiral or a constellation of motifs. Today they write their names as though trying to still lay claim to the space, as a form of ownership. But even this graffiti needs to be recorded because it is woven into the story of the Nama as told through their petroglyphs, from prehistory, to the early settlers with their ox wagons to the mining houses that have depleted the land. "

Together with the liquor bottle shards, the corroded bedsprings and abandoned shrines, these are the markings and remnants of a dissipated history. As much as the petroglyphs themselves, they continue to inspire Slingsby and augment the monumental contribution this artist has made to the legacy of the ancient Nama. He has done much, much more than diligently catalogue and transmute the debris of their history into the image archives that comprise his oeuvre. From ‘Power House’ to ‘CC - Unlimited power’, from the scraps of their history and material culture he has built an idiosyncratic treasure trove. His imagery offers both a warning of the consequences of rampant consumption and the disposability of value, while providing a vision of restoration, reclamation and the hope of healing.

ROBERT SLINGSBY: EXCESS(IVE) BAGGAGE essay by Hazel Friedman May 2007.

"Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms." - Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

"We should be willing to sacrifice liberty for freedom". These are the words, uttered without a trace of irony, by a young woman interviewed in one of the many documentaries broadcast in the aftermath of 9/11. What the interviewee possibly meant to say was that certain liberties should be sacrificed in the interests of security. While the inadvertent contradictions of her statement are unmemorable in themselves, her words nevertheless encapsulate the mindset that has prevailed in the aftermath of the terror attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001.

Although Robert Slingsby probably hasn't watched the abovementioned documentary during which this ingenuous statement was made, beliefs such as these have formed some of the fodder feeding his current exhibition. In this exhibition, entitled 'Clearing Customs', Slingsby's iconography revolves around the trade-off between security and personal spaces. He has depicted the world as a grotesquely comical x-ray machine, a voyeuristic peep show where self-ownership and privacy have been not merely bartered, but martyred for the "greater good" of global surveillance.

Cataclysmic events and the politics of control are not subjects one would normally associate with Slingsby's iconography. South African artist Neville Dubow elegantly describes him as a new millennial "strandloper" (which translates from Afrikaans into beach-walker) "a free spirit combing the beach, marking and making, transferring meaning from detritus to jewel box. " Although his early work executed during the 1970s and early 1980s fits under the rubric of social critique, one tends to associate Slingsby's subsequent iconology with "other" ancient worlds, particularly those inhabited by the Nama of the Richtersveld in the Northern Cape of South Africa. It is the jagged, desolate lunar-like contours of the Richtersveld that still serve as Slingsby's creative and spiritual loci. Inspired by the San petroglyphs produced thousands of years ago, he has made it his life's mission to record their topographical markings, to study their interconnection with ancient studies and to facilitate greater acknowledgement of their spiritual rites of passage as a means of accessing parallel realities. Part magpie, part archaeologist he has lovingly excavated, restored and transformed the fragmented residue of a neglected history into luminescent artworks spilling over with multilayered motifs, and painted with a psychedelic palette. Like the ancient alchemist Slingsby transforms trash into treasure, imbuing the most mundane bits of flotsam with an iridescent magic. In fact he seems to fit most comfortably in the world of alchemy and archetypes. Occasionally he makes a pit stop or guest appearance in the material world before returning to his inner homeland of shamans, spirits and signs.

There is something innately child-like in the symbols and causes we hold most dear to our hearts. And Slingsby's art is predominantly, pathologically, the product of an acute, almost inchoate, emotional instinct. Yet the sometimes quixotic aspects of his work camouflage a profound cognitive sensibility in which intuition and intellect converge and seamlessly merge. This makes him something of an anachronism in a postmodern world characterised by recycling, not originality; and cynicism, not faith. But he is also a humanist and cultural activist. "It is impossible not to be profoundly affected by the changes in the world since 9/11," he observes. "The way that we perceive everything has shifted dramatically through the restructuring and amalgamation of public and private space. This is most evident in the invasive tentacles of Big Brother creating the false illusion of choice".

Sure enough, nearly six years after the cataclysm, the world post 9/11 is insidiously, inexorably altered. "Everything has changed'' has become the axiomatic mantra among politicians, pundits, prophets, and profiteers. We now live in an age characterized by instant access to, and a surfeit of, information. Yet never before except, perhaps, within the vice of totalitarian societies, has the collective public mind been so malleable to manipulation and control. This is a world in which democratic lands of the free and homes of the brave have become sites of suspicion and surveillance. Ostensibly progressive societies have increasingly become paranoid control states subject to constant monitoring. Surveillance equipment and x-ray machines are now permanent fixtures on transportation systems, video cameras are stationed throughout amusement parks, CCTV systems stand positioned on every street corner and recording devices pick up even the most innocuous conversations in public spaces. This was once the stuff of sci-fi and Big Brother scenarios. Now, it is the norm. The world has become the locus of the watcher and the watched. The enemy is no longer out there, but embedded within. And nowhere is the ubiquity of surveillance more evident than in the ultimate site and metaphor of movement, namely the airport.

"I was at Heathrow, feeling weighed down, fatigued … jet lagged, and it struck me how utterly vulnerable and violated we are under this constant surveillance and how normal it has become to be constantly invaded at these places of flux" recalls Slingsby. "I also had the feeling of excess, of a surfeit of stuff that we carry with us, not only in terms of physical luggage, but of psychological baggage."

Slingsby has produced works that encapsulate this sense of excess in order to "unpack" the layers of "stuff" that seep from public places and corrode private spaces. If there exists a central metaphor for 'Clearing Customs', it is undoubtedly the suitcase. Slingsby has produced paintings and wooden and bronze sculptures depicting the suitcase as more than merely a metaphor of a journey or a mobile container of personal artifacts and fictions. The suitcase serves to contain, preserve and protect from invasion. It is both a metaphor of mobility and ownership. It contains the armoury of the researcher, conceals the arsenal of the criminal and encapsulates the identity, status and aspirations of the traveler. But Slingsby's suitcases are also multisensory skins which, when ruptured under the eye of the x-ray machine, expose the most intimate innards of the self. .

As the title 'Clearing Customs' suggests, the exhibition evokes a site of transit. But simultaneously the double entendre of the word "customs" also suggests an exploration of mores, habits and culture and otherness - a discourse which has obsessively preoccupied Slingsby throughout his oeuvre. Loosely categorized in terms of medium, the works include wooden suitcase sculptures comprising personal artifacts; bronze suitcase sculptures featuring female nudes in provocative poses; acrylic paintings rendered in brash, garish cartoon hues; and as series of portraits resembling painterly mug shots. Themes of excess and exposure serve as recurring refrains, with canvases and sculptures alike seeming almost sag from an excess of clutter that threatens to spill into real space; as well as through the overlapping of motifs and images specifically associated with travel and technology. The wooden suitcase sculptures, for example depict suspicious items exposed by the scanning machine, such as revolvers and daggers, alongside more benign personal artifacts and objects, which recur in the paintings. Similarly the cartoon-like cyborgs interacting with the seductive nudes in bronze suitcases # 2 and 3 reappears in the paintings, in a more stylized format. And each work is depicted in cross-section, dissected like the subject of a scientific experiment, or presented from an aerial perspective, as though seen from an omniscient x-ray eye hovering overhead. This perspective serves to augment the sense of disempowerment pervading Slingsby's body of works. In this show, all is stripped bare, yet the responses provoked by these works are paradoxical, particularly towards works in which Slingsby has incorporated the female nude as subject and object. Unexpectedly, perhaps, Slingsby's inspiration for these contentious forms emanates not from the anthologies of feminist discourse but from a more traditional source; namely, the art of Auguste Rodin. "I happened to visit an exhibition of Rodin's sculptures at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and I was touched by his genius," recalls Slingsby. "Somehow Rodin had networked into the primal core of my emotions. After seeing that exhibition my creative bucket was full."

Although seductively fleshed-out, Slingsby's nudes are depicted with astute irony. They recline or drape themselves over luggage conveyors and under scanners, as though posing with erotic props. They are sexualized genies popping out of suitcases, splaying their genitalia for the concealed cameras as though for a Hustler centerfold or a porn movie. And the ever-attentive security cameras are perfectly positioned to snap away at their private parts and violate their privacy. In these works the naked women becomes complicit with technologies of visualization, reinforcing the deeply predatory nature of a photographic consciousness. Sex, and sexuality, Slingsby confirms, are central actors in the high-tech myths structuring our imaginations. In a world dominated by artificial intelligence, the final frontier for stimulation remains the body. This is pornography's most efficacious weaponry.

Yet Slingsby's nudes evoke an ambivalent response from the viewer, one that is as covetous of their sexual allure as it is condemnatory of their subjugation. Indeed Slingsby has tapped into one of the central contradictions of post modernism: the lubricated, dotted line between pornography and aesthetic irony. Whereas postmodernism ostensibly trades in parody and metaphor, pornography delivers the reality-effect, "bringing the obscene on-scene" with as few ceremonial trappings as possible. But between the two paradigms lies a slippery slope indeed. And in many respects, Slingsby suggests, the camera has replaced the mirror as the ultimate tool (and weapon) of narcissistic self reflectivity. Be they webcams, CCTV systems or other tools and weapons of a digital age we bask in their reflected light, all the while recoiling from their implicitly violent intrusions. "The pleasure principles of the voyeur, to see everything, and the pleasure principle of the exhibitionist, to show all, have shifted from the fates of private drives to social norms," writes cultural theorist Peter Weibel . Simply put, narcissism, or being in love with one's own image means identifying with the mediated image of oneself to the extent of no longer being able to identify oneself apart from it. Men are made to look, while women are made to be looked at, or so the cliché goes. Yet we all possess an appetite for seeing or, as Jacques Lacan put it: 'appétit de l'oeil'. After all, it is through the eyes that we ingest and digest 'the other'. Slingsby articulates this axiom literally, in work #17 by painting eyes that seem to meet the viewer's voyeuristic gaze while simultaneously surveying the antics of a child, depicted in the centre of this painting. The inference is ominous, mitigated only slightly by the brightly patterned motifs decorating the surface of the painting. In the bronze suitcase sculptures spilling their supplicating female nudes, Slingsby evokes an extreme representation of this visual appetite as it unfolds in the representation of the male gaze and the female body. The voyeurism of the former is essentially cannibalistic, while the returned gaze of the latter is one of abjectness and seductive servility. Work # 2, for example, depicts a semi-reclining African nude. Initially she reminds us of those "ethnic" postcards, displaying the assets of nubile, naked tribal women under the guise of "ethnography." But it's not the ethnicity of her features that serves as the dominant focus, but rather her engagement with the cyborg that sits across her lap. On one level this unexpected coupling suggests the fusions of two outsider identities; it also might denotes the convergence of western civilization and its technological tools with traditional African society, predicated on the ideology of "west is best.' Simultaneously it evokes the exploitation of women of colour as the preferred cheap labour force in science-based industries, not to mention the world-wide sexual market.. Slingsby touches on several dualisms that have been persistent in Western traditions, all of which have been systemic to the logic and practice of hegemony and subjugation. Chief among these are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive. But reducing the semantics of his imagery to an illustration of binaries does a disservice to the profundity of Slingsby's vision. Accessing the complex encryption beneath these simplistic polarities entails relocating the epistemology of control within the context of a post 9/11 era. The portal towards a greater understanding may be opened via the image of the cyborg - a hybrid of machine and organism that once belonged uniquely to the world of science fiction. But this is no longer the case. The latest arsenal of the war against terror offers an example of what machines with 'predatory capabilities' might be like. The cyborg has become a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality constitutes our most important political construction. And let's examine our social reality post 9/11: ubiquitous man-less machines that record our prints, control our movement and curtail our autonomy, while governments extol the virtues of this excess of scrutiny in the form of smiley cartoon faces on airport brochures and consumer-friendly advertisements . In work # 3 one of Slingsby's cartoon-like cyborgs seems to have seduced the naked buxom babe into a state of post-coital bliss. The close ties between sexuality and instrumentality, Slingsby seems to suggest, have rendered the body both as a source of private satisfaction- and as a utility-maximizing machine. The cyborg has become our ontology; and biology has been converted to cryptography. Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare apparatuses, satellite systems, medical reconstructions of anatomy, commercial pornography - all of these depend intimately upon electronics. Micro-electronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals. The only means of differentiation is through bar-coding - a unique identification number assigned to each item tracked. In works such as # 22 Slingsby depicts an effete male nude, designer luggage in hand, suspended against a backdrop of bar-codes, while the surveillance cameras discreetly snap away. Slingsby seems to be commenting on the uniform, standardised language wrought through globalization and universal systems of control, in which individual resistance to conformity disappears and heterogeneity can be disassembled, re-assembled, invested and exchanged, like commodities and pork-bell futures. Like the cyborg, the bar-code system has mediated the translation of labour into robotics, sex into genetic engineering and mind into artificial intelligence. The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, material and illusory have never seemed more fragile. These mechanical simulacra imply, as US critical theorist Jo Alyson Parker observes, that we are ourselves programmed products of cultural forces and mere manifestations of the prevalent discourse that inscribes us .

But the nubile slave can assert power over her ostensible master. Although passively sexualized, Slingsby's nudes are not involuntarily submissive. In work # 4, for example he depicts a nude, with stylized mask-like features . Reminiscent of Picasso's seminal painting 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,' she becomes a site for the interrogation of identity versus persona as well as the exploration of self and cultural division, both of which are conditions that reverberate in contemporary psychoanalytic and social theory. Slingsby's evocation of self-division and otherness is effectively suggested through the mask, which evokes a sense of entrapment and dislocation within another's discourse. The mask also serves to foreground sexual desire as a locus of power relations, thereby reinforcing Foucault's claim that "power and desire are joined to one another" . It suggests the programmed nature of gender and sexuality and the social masking that give rise to all forms of conditioning - be they politically, culturally or sexually driven - that divide the authentic self from the multiplicity of cultural representations with which we are subjected from birth . Only by removing the mask and revealing the mechanisms of power do we have any hope of resisting them. But Slingsby's depictions of masks also refers to the shamanistic power that masks provide, which reinforces the continuum between the themes in this exhibition of works and his ongoing belief in the power of ancient societies to enter parallel universes and attain a higher consciousness. Access to these alternate realities is gained through structured rituals that may permit us, if only briefly, to see beyond the limits of our own perception. But Slingsby remains avowedly non-didactic in his articulation and exposition of "other" states. His sense of irony is playful as opposed to prescriptive while his creative nutrients are experiential rather than academic. In work # 5, for example a nude assumes the glamourised pose of a 1950s bathing suit model as she balances atop an open suitcase on a luggage conveyer. Instead of planes buzzing around her head, as in work # 2, Slingsby has depicted robotic dragonflies, whose significance is particularly loaded within the context of military aviation history. It was, after all, the British who developed the Dragonfly HR.Mk1 - the Royal Navy's first helicopter squadron, which was also used for civilian flights and by the air forces of Japan, Iraq and France . The sense of invasion on all fronts and in all forms reinforces the terrifying ubiquity of war in the aftermath of 9/11. The frontlines are located in trenches of amusement parks and city streets, along the borders of transit lounges and in the nooks and crannies of the body. The war has become utterly normalized and we are either oblivious to it, titillated by it or cowed into passive, anaesthetised compliance, like Slingsby's nudes.

Are we programmed performers, dancing to a choreographed beat beyond our control, or have we all become professors of paranoia, dredging up conspiracy theories with an almost fundamentalist fervour? Although Slingsby doesn't ask this question directly, in many of his works the intricate clutter of objects and motifs suggests that our excessive baggage is more of the mind than the material world. This is reinforced, paradoxically by the dragonflies in work #5. Crossing and combining with that of the butterfly , the dragonfly is not merely associated with military choppers but is, in fact, an archetypal symbol of change. It signifies the transcendence of self-created illusions that limit growth. As such, it symbolizes the self-actualisation that accompanies maturity. In a sense, the dragonflies in work # 5 subvert the ominous refrain running through 'Clearing Customs'. Not only do they infer a potential threat, but also the hope of redemption. Like the bunny in work # 17 c, they suggest that a Blakean return to enlightened innocence is not impossible . Slingsby is a master at sleight of hand in his ability to subvert preconceptions and slip between the cracks of conformism. One might read this show as yet another rite of passage in a career characterised by creative initiations and rebirths. From an iconography inspired by ancient codes and engravings Slingsby appears to have shifted to the argot of contemporary encryption. Yet 'Clearing Customs' does not signify a departure from his ongoing concerns, but rather a continuum. As with his earlier output, Slingsby's artworks are the products of a meticulously crafted, obsessively ordered, labour-intensive process. He still protects and displays his precious found objects in box-like installations that sometimes resemble mounted playpens, or miniature pageants. The surfaces of his paintings and sculptures remain richly textured and his characteristically exuberant palette is more spectacular than ever. His series of portraits in this show might be read as a critique of the mugshots snapped by facial recognition systems installed in airports which are capable of culling through millions of records at high speed, in order to identify criminals or terrorists. Yet Slingsby's mugshots are also reminiscent of the portraits he has painted of the Nama in Richtersveld. The signature striations and markings on his works might refer to finger-print devices and scanners. But equally they recall engravings on the Nama petroglyphs, and the spiritual footprints of this ancient society. The spirals and other decorative doodles bursting from the surfaces of his work attest to the continuum of archetypal imagery between past, present and future, and the possibility of attaining an augmented consciousness. His use of speech bubbles in some of the paintings might imbue the paintings with contemporary comic book humour. They also provide commentary on the fact that writing has been crucial to the Western myth of the distinction between oral and written cultures. But the speech bubbles in 'Clearing Customs' are conducting a one-way conversation. They are clearly being seen, but not heard. And while the urgency of his message should not be ignored, Slingsby's humour and playful, brash cartoon strokes serve to soften some of the more sinister edges.

There might well be places where the seemingly omniscient eye of the surveillance camera cannot reach, and spaces that GPS satellite tracking systems cannot monitor. Although the mechanisms of power might appear omnipotent, Slingsby nevertheless offers the possibility for resistance. The baggage has indeed become excessive. But, as he suggests, there are creative, enriching and liberating ways of lightening the load.

Art South Africa - Review by Hazel Friedman for Winter 2006 issue

In his book on Namaqualand, photographer Freeman Patterson describes this contrasting landscape as a “garden of the gods”. It is not the softer side of the Northern Cape that provides the most vivid illustration of its otherworldly properties. It is the desolate, jagged lunar-like contours of the Richtersveldt.

This is Robert Slingsby’s spiritual and creative locus. Inspired by the San petroglyphs and the Nama community inhabiting this rocky hinterland, for over 30 years he has obsessively recorded its topographical markings, their interconnection with ancient societies and their role as a means of entering parallel universes. Access to these alternate realities is gained through rituals that allow us, if only brie fly, to see beyond the limits of our own perceptions.

The most recent pit stop of Slingsby’s ongoing odyssey comprise two related bodies of work. The first was exhibited in the Bahamas and also at the Bell-Roberts. The second, which includes remnants of the first, was recently displayed at London ’s Square One Gallery. In a sense the Bell-Roberts show represents a return from self- exile by a widely acclaimed artist whose work, in the last decade, has fallen out of kilter with more fashionable trends in contemporary art. While many of his post-94 peers have renegotiated the politics of representation through new forms of cultural currency, Slingsby has remained focused, intuitively, on the “shamanistic” aspects of art, a paradigm that might seem anachronistic – quixotic even – to a discourse focused predominantly on deconstructing issues of this world, particularly ethnicity, race and gende r.

Yet he has quietly forged on and his work has been championed overseas, in terms of its ability to transcend the constraints of geography and history. Entitled Power House, his ‘return’ exhibition revolves around the inexorable changes occurring in a landscape seemingly frozen in the romantic, ethnocentric imagination. Slingsby’s iconography is the idiosyncratic dwellings inhabited by the Nama, which are now being replaced – courtesy of increasing urbanisation and political wrangling – by faceless cement houses.

Through bronze sculptures and monochromatic drawings he attempts to evoke the residue of a mystically charged landscape in which the soon-to-be demolished human structures feed off and encapsulate the potency of the environment. But while the sense of oneness is successfully evoked through the exquisitely executed bronzes, the monochromatic drawings resemble fortresses erected in a landscape bereft of people, blocking out, instead of embracing the ancient environment. Inadvertently they become a form of armoury for the artist himself.

But in his Square On e body of works, Slingsby has returned to the exuberant colours anthropomorphic forms and multi-layered motifs of his earlier output. Consisting largely of mixed media panels, including corroded community artifacts and other fragile material traces, they suggest a process of incorporation and integration, rather than simply inscription.

These works evoke an empathy with place that transcends ethnicity and changing techno- economic contexts. As such, they constitute the marking and re -making of individual and collective histories as part of a never- ending quest to locate the outer limits of experience, and to cross them.

Hazel Friedman

Art South Africa Winter 2006  

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