This artwork was loaned to the exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance curated by Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk, Iziko South Africa National Gallery, December 12, 2009–February 28, 2010. It is indexed here as part of Smith and Van Wyk’s revisiting of the Dada South? Archive of materials at A4 Arts Foundation.

In 2010, Roger van Wyk asked me to speak at a conference as part of Dada South?, the exhibition that he had curated with Kathryn Smith at Iziko. The subject was to be Possession Arts, a short-lived but extensive collective that I had been a member of in 1983/84.

The conference was more or less academic. I am self-un-educated. I can privately extemporise on many subjects, but this does not qualify me to engage in public discourse. I offered instead to create a performance on the subject. I lived for years with ‘the pain’ – let’s just call it this – of the failure of Possession to achieve its aims, and any attempt to speak publically about any aspect of the project felt like having swallowed a brick which churned around somewhere between larynx and solar plexus. It was possible to speak into a tape recorder. But this neat narrative immediately demanded to be countered by another, and so on, and I decided to build a multitracked cacophony of contradictory impressions, histories, facts, reports, memories, fantasies, etc.

The physical aspects of the performance were a few quotations from Possession work (Aletta ripping, while sewing, cloth and singing a lullaby; Andre in the Postbox Captain; an attempt by myself to walk back and forth in lead soled boots carrying a springloaded crate on my back) plus a few traces of a dimly perceived future work, Shakespeare’s Chair (Chas as a Chameleon Man hauling the recording tape across the stage; pages of the fragmentary text, on office spikes, fluttering in the breeze of a desktop fan; the steel desk; a Meccano maquette of the chair; and the presence of several readings from the embryonic text woven into the layers of the taped soundtrack).

I had not stood up to perform in front of an audience of artists, critics, historians, theorists, and other art attendees, for twenty-five years. It was fortuitous that I had chosen to begin with the pacing, the struggle against the weight of the lead-soled boots, their pounding on the wooden floor of the Iziko Annex, focusing and releasing the waves of fear.

Almost immediately the demon of live performance struck: no sound. The ancient reel-to-reel was not working. We sorted something out, it kind of worked, but at low volume and with intermittent drop out. Ivor Powell – who wasn’t there, I cannot remember the reason but he had taken an elder statesman position against the notion of dada as a curatorial grab bag – would have loved the intrusion of chance and accident.

I thought at the time that it was possible to build some kind of bridge between who I had been (had proposed to be) and what I had seen in the 1980s and what I hoped to do at ZINK, which was about to open.

I wonder now if I ever properly thanked Kathryn and Roger. Opportunities are oxygen. If one suffocates without, does too much lead to burn out…

– John Nankin, quoted from Facebook, March 8, 2024