'Can I Live with myself? Yes': Roger Ballen, controversy, and Die Antwoord
“Can I live with myself?” Roger Ballen asks a writer for The Guardian when questioned about his alleged exploitation of poor and mentally unwell South Africans in the production of his work.
“I can,” he responds, answering his own question. Where the writer once travelled to small towns in South Africa, shooting poor people in cramped spaces, he began to create elaborate staged sets in derelict housing structures and boarding houses occupied by those society frequently chooses to forget. He uses like them props, posing them with animals like birds, snake and mice, putting chalk in their hands, instructing them to draw on their walls, on their floors.
Hans Prinzhorn was a German psychiatrist and art historian who studied art history and philosophy at the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1908. In 1919, he became the assistant of Karl Wilmanns at the University of Heidelberg, and was tasked expanding a collection of art created by people who struggled with their mental health. The collection comprised sculpture, drawings, poetry and literature, and birthed a movement called “Art Brute”, also known as “Outsider Art”. Between 1919 and 1921 Prinzhorn traveled to several psychiatric institutions across Germany to collect approximately 5,000 artworks made by patients. By 1930 the collection had grown to include some 6,000 works.
According to Artnet News, “The collection was popularized by the Austrian writer and illustrator Alfred Kubin, after professor Wilmanns had invited him to view the collection. Deeply impressed by the “secret laws” of the works, Kubin wrote about the “wonders of the artist’s minds, whose creativity dawned from beyond the depths our understanding” in his 1922 essay, The Art of the Insane.”
“Artists at the time were fascinated by the originality and immediacy of the collection’s expressions. Paul Klee saw an “intermediary realm” in the works beyond “normal” perception. Max Ernst, who attended lectures on mental illness as a student and explored the limits of madness in his art, used the drawings as inspiration. Klee and Ernst extensively studied the illustrations of Kubin’s writing, as did the surrealists in Paris.
Very few critiques of The Prinzhorn Collection have been willing to question the ethics of it. Possibly because those who struggle with their mental health are generally deemed to be useless in society. When they die, people think of it as “better off”, lacing their deaths with somewhat insensitive statements alluding to the end of their suffering. But it’s likely more selfish relief than compassion. When the infirm are not there for us to look at, we can pretend they don’t exist. ‘Art Brute’ presents a way for people living with disability to useful to society. Their art, their lives, their suffering become fungible goods. Belying these ideas, is the notion that these lives have no inherent value outside of what can be commodified.
“There is no one other than myself who has a clear and objective understanding of my relationship to the people I have photographed,” says Ballen in Huck Magazine in 2015. “Ultimately I have to live with myself with the decisions I make while photographing. Over the years I have gotten to know the endless people who live in the place that I refer to as the Outland. Many of my closest friends live here and I have kept regular contact with many of the people from this locale for over twenty years.”
“In nature there’s no black and white.” The photographer says this to me many times, both over Zoom, but also in person, at a new exhibition space he’s built in Forest Town, Johannesburg. It is a beautiful concrete and glass structure just a stone’s throw from Zoo Lake. And all over its hard, cold flooring are taxidermied creatures: hyenas chasing human figures up a wall. An Iguana gripping what appears to be a human head. A lion here. A cheetah there. A brown baboon escaping from a wooden crate.
“There’s no good or bad. I don’t have this issue of light and dark. Life is life to me.” And maybe this is the place from which Roger the Rat is born, a place that can look into the face of human suffering and still decide that there no such this as good or bad. Produced in Johannesburg between 2015 and 2020, Ballen creates and documents a part-human, part-rat creature who lives an isolated life outside of mainstream society.
“So I found this mask about five or six years ago,” says Roger the human of Roger the Rat. “I really liked this mask because it seemed to be laughing or grinning. And so when I put Roger the Rat on somebody’s head I thought it would be an ideal character… to create an absurd character who does absurd things that nobody else can do. He’s a politically incorrect character because he’s doing things that nobody else would dare to do but would think about doing. He’s the human bits of conscience. He’s the repressed parts of the human subconscious. He’s doing things that you and I wouldn’t do. He accepts the absurdity of life.”
Revealed, 2020. (Photo: Roger Ballen/ Supplied)
More and more of late, there’s a been a trend of privileged people using their access, power and platforms to push back against what is now known as cancel culture, referred to previously, and quite accurately, as just consequences and accountability. When privileged people rebel against political correctness, it is because they have benefitted from incorrectness. They have invested too deeply in the future value of their incorrectness to course correct, to cease from causing harm.
Anton Kannemeyer, he of golliwog and minstrel art, claims he’s being censored.
Bret Murray, speaking to Arts24 about his work seems to think that while freedom of speech should protect his right to make work that perpetuates anti-black violence, it does not extend or apply to his detractors. “The current Facebook Fascists and Twitter Nostras are acting as self-appointed cultural arbiters and McCarthy-lite determiners of what can and can’t be said, made, filmed and joked about and are attempting to further silence and censor. The past is being “cleansed”, Gone With The Wind is no longer being streamed because it apparently “celebrates slavery”. Faulty Towers, Monty Python and Little Britain...the genre shifting comedy programmes are being censored and cut. Sombreros are only allowed to be worn by Mexicans. Eating sushi is perpetrating racism and cultural imperialism, one mouthful at a time. White people wearing cornbraids is now deeply offensive, a position I reject intellectually. But in my heart of hearts I know it is wrong on so many levels. But each to his, her or their own I say. Musical explorations and hybrid collaborations fly in the face of these trumpeted postulations of the evils of cultural appropriations. For me these attempts to sanitise and separate culture smacks of a balkanised view of the world,” he rants to Zaza Hlalethwa.
Guilty, 2015 (Photo: Roger Ballen/ Supplied)
While defending his right to eat sushi (no-one has ever called this cultural appropriation except for him and those of his ilk), eight people were murdered by a white man in America in the most recent incident of violence during a spate of post-Trump Anti-Asian attacks in America. The police said that the suspect, Robert Aaron Long, was having a bad day.
Poet and scholar Claudia Rankine says it best when she writes:
“because white men can't police their imagination, black men are dying”
Ballen is too intelligent to be caught up in this measuring and quantifying of imagined freedoms and myths of meritocracy. He is also perhaps, too attuned to being seen as “wrong” to attempt be “right”. He’s intrigued by the world mostly because he is bored by it. He cares, deeply, but maybe wishes that he didn’t. Which makes his deliberate dalliances with “controversy”, curious.
All these years, several rape allegations and a number of homophobic attacks later, Ballen still praises Die Antwoord and the Fink U Freaky moment. Paging through Ballenesque, a comprehensive retrospective published by Thomas and Hudson, he stops at images of Yolandi and Waddy. One can tell that there is affection here. But Ballen, for all his attempts at hiding it, is a kind man. He glows when he speaks of his wife, his twin children. He’s at his most tender when one mentions his mother. While his mouth doesn’t smile often, his eyes twinkle when he speaks of the Inside-Out Foundation. When he gifts me a signed copy of his book. That there is love here should not be surprising. Die Antwoord introduced Ballan to younger audience that is too exposed to absurdity to find any value in shock. In film, horror has became a refuge for conversations about black suffering. Because you can not surprise us with what we already know.
I tell him that I don’t find Die Antwoord interesting. That their interpretation of his work is an unfortunate flattening that will always colour it badly. In the Analysis piece “Marred by controversy and soaked in scandal: Is Die Antwoord’s House of Zef collapsing?”, writer and editor Chris Roper makes great work of unpacking the homophobic and racial violence that propelled Die Antwoord’s success, spilling over from performance into real life. They move to America to escape accusations of cultural appropriation and exploitation in South Africa, reinventing themselves as the real thing, far away from tongues of anyone who may have knowledge of Waddy’s privileged, upper middle class upbringing.
In Australia, Watkin Tudor Jones is accused of sexual and indecent assault by musician Zheani Sparkes. Another singer, Jade Carroll accuses Jones of indecent assault at a concert in Italy.
The Sydney Herald reports: “Among Die Antwoord's millions of fans was Sparkes who, in June 2013, received an Instagram message from her favourite Die Antwoord member, Visser.“
"i saw ur tumbla! V cool. . How cn i get in touch wif u? " the comment from Visser read.
“Hours later, Visser introduced herself to Sparkes via email, attached a photo of herself and asked to meet Sparkes should they tour Australia. She also told Sparkes that Jones, who goes by the stage name "ninja", also wanted to connect with her.
“The email from Visser was sent on June 22, 2013, and read: "yo yo yo skull of foxes! ! ! Wats pumpin ur style is on point! Ninja showd me ur tumble blog… i like i like! ! He also gun say hi 2 u! Will be cool 2 hang & get hi as f--- wen i cum 2 aus nxt tym! Stay bad! Xxx. "
“The attention left Sparkes feeling "absolutely overwhelmed and shocked". Before she could reply, she received a message from Jones. Then another. Within 24 hours, she had half a dozen from the then 38-year-old rapper while communication with Visser ground to a halt.
“On a night when Sparkes had her drink spiked while having a post-work drink with her then boss and housemate, Jones began to change plans while Sparkes was feeling the effects of being drugged.
"He was calling it a 'spell' to heal me, [speaking in] psycho-babble, unhinged messages referring to the spiking as a 'quickening'. He never called it spiking, I was poisoned and this 'sped things up'," she said. Sparkes says she woke up to messages from Jones claiming to have spoken privately with her boss to arrange for her to travel to South Africa instead.
“Jones took her on a trip to the Wilderness near the town of Knysna and allegedly picked up tattoo needles and magic mushrooms to take with Sparkes.
"I didn't want to do it with him is because I had seen weird little cracks in his personality starting to peak through in the four days before that," Sparkes said.
“She eventually succumbed to his pressure on their last day in the Wilderness, taking the drugs with Jones which she claims heightened his already erratic behaviour.
"He was talking about Jesus and then relating Jesus back to him," she said. "Then he switched really quickly and started to talk about his brother committing suicide. [He said,] 'Last time I saw my brother it was right here and we were on shrooms.' I was like 'What?'
"I remember tripping and being, 'Crazy celebrity man brought me to the location where he last saw his dead baby brother before he killed himself and they did shrooms together.' Sparkes says she was feeling uncomfortable and asked to return to their accommodation before it began raining. As soon as they went back, she says Jones began to aggressively have sex with her against her will, choking her while behaving violently. She says he looked to have passed out immediately after the ordeal, then woke up 30 seconds later and claimed to have no recollection of anything that happened. She refused to discuss the incident with him despite repeated attempts.
"I was just in shock. I wouldn't discuss it," she said. "I might be young, naive, dumb, but I knew what had just happened but I didn't know how to address it and I didn't feel safe to address it."
“Sparkes felt "unsafe in his company" after her alleged ordeal.
"I was alone, I didn't know anyone in Africa. I just wanted to get back home to Australia in one piece. There was a lot all at once to come to terms with," she said. She recalls crying on the flight home and falling into a bout of depression upon her return home, drinking regularly.
“But the emails and messages from Jones didn't stop. He frequently asked Sparkes to talk about what happened in South Africa and, in one exchange, referred to her trip as a "ritual".“
In October 2014, an email appeared from Jones asking to meet Sparkes on the group's 2015 Australia tour then another in February 2015, encouraging her to join them as an assistant. Sparkes says she hoped to gain closure on the events in South Africa and joined them but left in tears before she was due to finish, claiming to have been treated like a stranger.
Guilty, 2015 (Photo: Roger Ballen/ Supplied)
A 2012 video shows Jones attacking a gay musician, Andy Butler. In the video, Yolandi is heard in the background hyping the aggression. “Run, fa***t, run,” she screams. Towards the end of the video, she laughs hysterically while Jones hits Butler.
Die Antwoord used their 2012 video for “Fok Julle Naaiers” to attack Chris Roper. “The menacing footage features the group members threatening to ‘”fok” a “punk ass white boy in the ass” and performing in front of a wall which has the number of the feared 28s gang scrawled on it, a caricature of a figure with an unnaturally prominent penis, the words “Viva ANC moffie”, and the invitation ‘4 Hot Bum Sex Call” with my mobile number,” writes Roper for Channel24.
“Well, in 2005 Yolandi contacted me. She sent me a message and she said that when they saw my book,” says Ballen of the relationship, “they were impressed by my aesthetic. They asked me if I would work with them on a video. We kept in contact and it’s funny, I took the first picture of Die Antwoord in my office. It’s one of my favorite ones actually. Then they released their first album that contained a lot of my drawings and my aesthetic. So they linked their music with my drawings.”
“And it was crazy because let me just tell you, in 2009 I hadn’t even looked at this group, I didn’t even know what it was. I remember listening to the music... I didn’t know. It was just crazy. They had 8 million hits in a week on YouTube and they just went viral all over the world. They were able to find something in my aesthetic. They were able to extend it in performance and music.”
The Twins. (Photo: Roger Ballen/ Supplied)
“I’m 70 years old now. I’m not 20 years and so I’m not a young people music specialist but that had a big effect on my career in the sense that the videos that I worked on with them with my aesthetic got into millions and millions people’s heads. Their music videos must have 60 millions hits by now. And so you know what an enormous influence they had on people all over the world. They got into people’s minds and my aesthetics spread as a result of them. When I look back on my relationship with Die Antwoord and there were two things that came out of that. One of them was my aesthetic became more available to a lot of people, especially young people. And secondly, I started making video projects. I had made some films before that in fact my first film was in 1972.”
And so the violence of Die Antwoord, the real harm they have caused, propelled the Ballenesque aesthetic to new heights, new audiences. And for that, he is unwaveringly grateful. But that Die Antwoord were ever exciting, or radical, is an indictment on us as a people. When it comes to the methods of Die Antwoord, publicly threatening people with sexual violence for example, it is only as controversial as the country from which they come.
There is nothing new, or even unSouth African about this. South Africa already believes that some rapes are ok.
"She was asking for it."
"Look at what she was wearing."
"If he wants to be a girl, I'll treat him like one."
"She just needs to know how a real man feels."
Corrective rape, also curative rape, is a hate crime in which one or more people are sexually violated because of their perceived sexual orientation and gender identity. In Hate Crimes: The rise of corrective rape in South Africa, produced by ActionAid in 2017, a 23-year-old Zakhe is quoted saying: "They tell me that they will kill me. They will rape me and after raping me, I will become a girl. I will become a straight girl."
In 2001, her friends, Sizakele and Salome, also lesbian women, were raped and murdered. Society already believes rape to be reasonable, and this is partly what fueled the now dimmed successes of Yolandi and Ninja.
Twirling Wires. (Photo: Roger Ballen/ Supplied)
When I ask about the critiques of Ballen’s work with poor and mentally ill people, he glosses over the question, answering only what he cares to let me know. And while he may pretend to be impervious to external voices, he responds in his work. When he was criticized for how he shot disenfranchised black people, he told critics he didn’t care, but they stopped appearing in his work. When he drew ire of the public with the boarding houses series, he defended his relationships with his subjects, but they too stopped appearing in work. Gradually, he moved from documentary, to portraiture until eventually, today, almost no human beings exist in his work at all. Just mannequins and stuffed, taxidermied creatures. Models with masks over their heads. And dead things can’t really hurt people. Until they do.
The work takes on a different gravity when you look at it that way. The darkness held in his frames becomes more texturized when you realise that Ballen is a man who studied primordial rocks, the topography of the earth, in order to discover what lies beneath. And that maybe, just maybe, when he went underground into the mines, he never really came up.
“So you know, geology for me was a great career. I loved it. I loved being around the earth. I loved looking at rocks. I loved going underground. I love the concept of looking at things that have a primordial being. A rock is a primordial being. It’s much more primordial than any artwork.”
Earlier we’d stood on the edge of a man made pond filled with water plants and fish while Ballen drank from a can of ginger beer. The traffic on Jan Smuts threatened to drown out his voice as pointed north of us, to the Linksfield Ridge. He was telling me how those rocks were probably some of the oldest things on the planet. Certainly older than him. Than me. Than the precise moment, the buzz of cars. The babble of the water.
“That is what people don’t understand. Art is a human activity, but nature is the greatest creator. Just looking at a common rock. Looking at the side of a hill with rocks can be a very deep experience in so many ways.”
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“Geology is nature. It’s an ongoing nature. A stream is geology. A volcano is geology. Geology is an ongoing process. It’s a very slow process. It’s a profound process. I guess the two most important metaphors that I use when I try to compare it to my work are the sedimentary aspects of geology. Which is layer by layer by layer. So if you look at my career, its been layer by layer by layer. And also the meaning of the work is full of layers. You can see my work isn’t about one particular thing or the other. Well, I hope it isn’t. My work should be different to different people. There should be different ways of viewing it. If you look at a lot of my works, they can have opposite meanings. If something has opposite meanings, what is its true meaning? So that’s one way of looking at it.”
“The other is that of a fault. So sometimes, everything is very calm, and then all of a sudden, the earth shifts. And then you’re on some other plane. So things can happen layer by layer very slowly, but then like with the colour photographs I showed you earlier, that was like fault.”
After being gifted a camera by Leica, Ballen first the first time in over 30 decades began to shoot in colour. The results pleasantly surprised him. “It was like like a fault. I was only a black and white photographer. It was on my website. I’m part of the last generations of photographers to do only black and white. And then the next day I’m taking colour. All of a sudden something happened, but I got there.”
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“With a lot of the geological, you walk along the land.” He’s as excited as he can become. His hands punctuate every word by the syllable. "But what you’re looking for is underneath the surface. So you’re trying to probe below. And sometimes its quite mysterious. You don’t know what’s there. So it’s always this process of looking down and not being sure what’s there. You might find something completely unexpected. You could go from the surface to something two billion years ago. So it’s the same way that you probe the mind. So it’s the same kind of process. You’re going from now to the primordial. And that was always my goal, to get beneath things. To find those hidden places that existed long before I existed.”
But as the words of the opening paragraph of a CHP article on the Ballenesque retrospective go: "We’re under no obligation to believe what an artist says about her or his work. Out of courtesy or curiosity, we might want to listen or read. But the work is the work, regardless of the yarn spun around it by its maker. At the same time, an artist is under no obligation to make the work we, the audience, want. Out of courtesy or curiosity, s/he might want to listen or read. But her or his impulse must remain that, the impulse, and the work has to arise from there, regardless of whether we (or the artist actually) want that or not."