Moshekwa Langa
Langa’s text-based works (many of them composed of shorthand notes the artist had taken in Amsterdam and Brussels when first adrift from his birth country) came to be called Word Towers, each work, Untitled, followed by a Roman numeral. This work was among that number, officially known as Untitled XV (Word Tower) in correspondence with the artist’s gallery at that time. In preparation for the exhibition You to Me, Me to You at A4, Langa took the opportunity to bestow upon this work its rightful name – Index Drawing (you give me the creeps).
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Excerpt from a conversation with Moshekwa Langa (M.L.), Josh Ginsburg (J.G.), Sara de Beer (S.d.B.), and Francisco Berzunza (F.B.) held online in preparation for You to Me, Me to You, 24 July 2023:
M.L. In Amsterdam, at the Rijks Academy, I met people doing lots of things that didn’t mean telling a concrete story. I was asking myself, what am I supposed to do here – in this arts school, a place of higher learning? I didn’t know how to start to address the things that were fascinating to me. Everything became fair game – how I constructed myself as a youth, a man, a foreigner. Shorthand became the material for me to make sense of my world. I really began to articulate my excitement, frustrations, and angers, and made a series of works using texts. Later, these became what were called the ‘word towers’.
One of the first ones I have is ‘creepy’, painted with nail polish. I was recording everything interesting to me, in shorthand, “This, I must not forget. This, I must not forget.” The things I mustn’t forget became motivations. It grew very organically.
There were too many stimuli at once and everything was slippery. I needed something to ground myself. I supposed I realised I was forgetting a lot of people’s names. My memory was all that I had.
A new place was very exciting, but offered less of a feeling of belonging. I was discovering myself. What made me the person that I am, the one sitting right here? I had the sense of everything slipping away from me. I was a young man at the beginning of my adulthood. And as I was getting more and more into Dutch (I was becoming myself in a foreign place, clearly where I did not belong, but where else did I belong? Finding myself right here, now, in these moments, I was separating from my school years – from boarding school, from farm life, from Yeoville, but I was not yet grounded in the Netherlands. That feeling of slipperiness was pronounced even then. It became louder with each setting sun, with each rising moon.) I was also finding my way among these versions of English I was encountering: from London, from Istanbul, from the Netherlands. To add to this, I found I could understand people in the Netherlands because of my time spent within a majorly Afrikaans setting in Mooiplaats, in Donkerhoek, near Cullinan, near Pretoria, on the way to Witbank, with mountains, and what I suppose were farmlands, with the smell of pig farming, with the smell of sulphur periodically drifting through, things that I had not been used to before… I thought of the languages in which I was proficient, of Northern Sotho Sepedi, in which I had to gain the singular and the plural. And I thought, I can use the same way of learning to gain a new footing in this place.
MO-MO
LE-SE
N
BO-GO
BA-ME
MA-DI
DI-MA
GO
(the mnemonic for singular and plurals in Sepedi)
(‘n’ remains the same in both forms)
(‘go’ remains the same in both forms)
I was to later make a series of works inspired by the recognition that in German in particular there is a masculine and feminine form in formal language use, to that end. I made a work titled schauspielerin, which was a text and a form of abstract drips made with nail polish and, probably, Tippex. So content and musings were very important to me, so too was visualisation, and the work was made up of a mashup of thought brought into a visual sphere. What endures, in this case, is a striated form of a long-winded process. Maybe I was struggling with being coherent and disintegrating. What are you doing, how can this be understood? What is it? Why make it? Is it important? If it can be explained, then why make it? These were the things that needled me at that time, and still do at this time. So, the debris on the floodplains.
Writing everyone’s names down in the works was calming. I could know how I could relate to everyone, whether negative or positive, when I wrote their names down. I wrote extensive notes and could not make a singular sense of them chronologically. They were all important to me, all of them, how to make sense of this litany of information. Do I start from the beginning, but what is the beginning? Is it when my parents met, or when I was born, or when I have clear recollections?
The most practical way to think about how I came to this jumble, was through reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. If this was an acceptable art form, I thought, this is the art form I would like to involve myself with.
Is it better to be named or not named? I grew up in a place where the streets have no names. I lived in a place that was without names but in which it was easy to find one’s way around. I knew how to navigate by knowing the place, knowing who lived where and what went where. The town I was born in, Bakenberg, wasn’t named on any maps. It was probably a dark spot in the history of demarcations in one of the previous South Africas, before I was aware. I did not suffer from not having street names, how I and everyone navigated the terrain was sufficient. It was a big place, but also a small place.
But you could ask anyone where things were, and find your way. Then, when I came to the Netherlands, this required never asking anyone for anything because everything was already written down. This was challenging, it caused distress, two incompatible systems operating on the same hard drive. They melded eventually.
The more I started to write I realised that to every name, I had a strong attachment (but then I always did because I retained those particular names, fight, fondness, peculiar, strange and unusual, or just ordinary, positively or negatively) – and that these names exposed other people. A normal inventory was actually an extremely revealing form of self-portraiture. This gave me something to struggle with in my waking hours, this meant I had declared all people who might not necessarily want to be known, to know me. I was implicated and implicating others in dark shadows, in happiness and in sadness, in joy and in dark thoughts and all else that might fall between.
b.1975, Bakenberg
Ask Moshekwa Langa to speak to an artwork, and he returns a series of detailed anecdotes across time, place, and scale. “I am an episodic river,” he offers –
There is so much urgency around making… I’m always doing things, working out things that are disturbing, difficult, impossible, latent through my hands. When I pause, I have to stop and name everything. The objects are extracted from the river, the outpouring… Everything is shorthand – notes upon notes, confluences and influences. Where am I in that?
Reading Moshekwa’s artworks recalls the stream-of-consciousness style of James Joyce. He recounts his experience of coming upon the latter’s Ulysses (1918–1920), fresh out of high school, as significant. "Later, when I was becoming an artist with a career, I would arrive at places and I would not have had a formal education in art, which was difficult for people who studied for their degrees over four years to accept. But I had read things, and made, and learned. I had poured over Ulysses at least twice, cover-to-cover, developing my vocabulary because there were many things I did not understand, and at the same time I was mesmerised."
The text compelled, beguiled and frustrated the young artist. One can sense, in Moshekwa’s materially limber records of becoming and displacement, traces of the observations – in colour and manner – of Joyce's alter-ego and protagonist in the first chapters of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus. (Dedalus appears in this novel, aged 22, grappling with early adulthood after his bildungsroman in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916.) In Ulysses, Dedalus recalls a dream of his mother’s death, a materially rich encounter with wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. What is a home without mother? (2008) mourns one of Moshekwa’s paintings, in which red washes faintly browned resemble the colour of dried blood. Or in Moshekwa’s paint, crayon and watercolour landscapes, one might find Dedalus’ snotgreen sea. The scrotum tightening sea. So too, can one hear Moshekwa in Buck Mulligan's camp inflections (Dedalus' social parrying partner and foil), particularly through the artist’s wry explanations. What? Where? I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations, says Mulligan. And Moshekwa – “I have no memory, at least not in the conventional sense,” before listing, with encyclopaedic accuracy, the time, place, and people who were present in the very moment he made a work, irrespective of whether one or thirty years have since passed.
The artwork that first brought him renown in 1995, made from repurposed cement bags, set the tone for Langa’s unfolding practice, marked by a distinct material confidence and economy of means. Untitled, assembled at his mother's home in KwaMhlanga and informally referred to by curators and critics at the time as ‘Skins’, was exhibited at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery in Johannesburg and later acquired by the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. This precipitous success was shortly proceeded by the artist’s two-year residency at Rijksakademie, during which time he participated in biennales including Johannesburg, Istanbul, and Havana (all 1997), a list to which he added in the following decade to include both São Paulo and Venice twice over (1998/2010 and 2003/2009 respectively), Lyon in 201. Berlin and Dakar followed in 2018. Reading his works as indexes of memory, one can experience crossing over that suspension bridge between the “small communities” of youth into the world overseas. By his own measure, he was at the time “formed but unformed, uninformed,” finding meteoric fame in the post-apartheid optimism of the late 1990s. The experience – of being South African, black, always feeling other, living in a foreign country under the glare of artworld limelight – was a mixed blessing. Much like the title of an early photograph from 1998, he felt Far Away From Any Scenery He Knew or Understood. Having stepped into this astounding number of international biennales so quickly, the funding opportunities one might suppose follow an art career of significant international renown had not yet caught up. By European and American standards, he was 'skint', "arriving with my small bag of tricks and making it all happen,” a singular practitioner, inexperienced to the ways of big cities, of art world opulence, yet gathering and making use of the substances and mediums in his vicinity, whether plastic or cement bags, nail polish, candle wax and crayon, ink, watercolour, pencil, or dust.
This immediacy of working with materials arising from the location in which the artist finds himself invariably becomes its own kind of social record – a gesture towards time-keeping and a subjective mapping of place. Langa’s work is perhaps fugitive, an adjective he has offered up to describe his practice, in that the artist’s subject is more often transitory, of a moment soon passed, a self-portrait of the self in all its flux and complexity.
