And our fathers that begat us 2000

by Rory Bester

The role of archives in collecting, ordering and preserving historical material, as well as the perspective that each of these three practices brings to the understanding of historical material, is often overlooked in the production and maintenance of narratives about the past. Recently a number of contemporary South African artists have produced works that question the role that archives play in creating particular kinds of historical narratives. As much as archives are about remembering, they are also about forgetting. The material manifestation of one kind of memory is often collected, ordered, and preserved at the expense of another kind of memory. Critically engaging the innocence and sentimentality of archival memory, as well as the absences and silences that exist despite archival memory, has seen artists increasingly use historical photography and film to question the nature of race, gender and sexuality.

Hentie van der Merwe is one such artist whose work has been profoundly influenced by archival practices and, more specifically, the impact that archives have had on the construction of personal and political identity. The sensibility that Van der Merwe brings to archives is driven by the extent to which his identity is not represented in archives. Through the production of installation-based works, Van der Merwe questions and neutralises the authority of the archive by searching for the discrepancies, the omissions that keep the status quo unchallenged. "Exploring archives is uncomfortable but at the same time it can be quite liberating," says Van der Merwe. "It's like scratching around until it bleeds and then having to wait for the wound to heal. It's therapeutic to recontextualise archival material."

Van der Merwe's first major exploration of archival practices was the result of coming across a suitcase of old photographs belonging to Hugh McFarlane, an amateur photographer from Pretoria. When McFarlane died in the early 1980s his photographs were salvaged from the destructive intentions of relatives bent on destroying his collection of gay pornography (along with a series of commissioned anthropometric studies of naked white men recruited for service during World War II). Having been salvaged from this attempt at 'silencing' an archive, McFarlane's photographs trekked South Africa's gay community as a rootless, mobile archive. It was McFarlane's collection of anthropometric photographs, each shot against a grid-like background, that van der Merwe stumbled across and used as the basis for a series of installations at Johannesburg's Generator Art Space in 1997. Van der Mere's installations were a meditation upon the grid as a mechanism that not only maps social spaces and identities, but also controls the parameters of deviancy, normality and supremacy. "A lot of my work is a rebellion against the grid in order to create a space for my own desires and fantasies," he says.

The exhibition at the Generator Art Space included a darkened, diorama-like room, where the walls were wallpapered with Hugh McFarlane's front, back and side views of the naked recruits. A glass screen prevented physical entry into the room, transforming viewing from the possibility of intimate scrutiny to an obligatory, voyeuristic surveillance of the physical shapes of warriors ready for war. This display of McFarlane's photographs challenged the unquestioned place of white male gaze, undressing it in a repetitive display of nakedness. Similarly, a series of blow-ups of the faces of the subjects in McFarlane's photographs were encased behind glass and marked with serial numbers. These body parts, decapitated by cropping, were dislocated in space, differentiated only by morphology and numerical taxonomy. Hard florescent lighting stripped the men of any 'shadow' behind which to hide. This aesthetic of austere, clinica formalism underpinned the 'scientism' of these visual procedures and highlighted the latent violence implicit in these kinds of representation.

Vander Merwe grew up with a history that was driven by masculinity and patriarchy. The archive often authorises particular notions of masculinity and patriarchy and it is this identity politics of the archive that underpins much of van der Merwe's work. "Archives are like father-figures," says van der Merwe,

"in the way that they assume a certain kind of authority." As with the grid-like structures in Hugh McFarlane's photographs that establish a matrix of types of conformity, so too does the archive create expectations about masculinity. In being explorations of social perceptions about masculinity, war and the archive, van der Mere's work often inverts traditional self-other dichotomies and offers important answers to the question of a political art in post-apartheid South Africa.

One of the spaces in which fantasies about masculinity play themselves out is in the landscape. Van der Merwe, being from a land-owning farm family, grew up with a particular prejudice about the land. "Land is so masculine, so butch, so much about the male ego," he says. There is an expectation that he not only look at the landscape in ways that are about ownership and control, but that he also identify with this way of looking at the land. "When my father looked at and photographed the landscape it was a comfortable, secure way of looking," says van der Merwe. "I don't feel that my position in society is secure in the way that my father's was. I look at my father's photographs in a different way. I take his landscapes, put them in the context of other landscapes in order to create a sense of pathos and fragility about the land."

As in his exhibition at the Generator Art Space, Van der Mere's Trappings exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in early early2000 addressed questions of masculinity. memory and war through a poignant deliberation upon the place of the military uniform in the psyche of conflict. But while most of van der Merwe's work has been about looking at photographs in archives, at the ways in which images become detached from their original context and reveal their 'true' intentions, Trappings focuses on archival objects other than photographs. Shot at the South African Military History Museum in Johannesburg, van der Merwe's life-size photographs hone in on some of the military uniforms worn by South African soldiers from the time of the Anglo-Boer South African War to the Angolan War. Using the convention of blurring, van der Merwe's photographs not only disrupt the authority and power of the ritual dress of war, but also bring into question the place of the military uniform as an archive of memory.

In this new body of work, van der Merwe has chosen the military uniform - the dressed body - rather than the naked body to explore questions of masculinity and memory. In the same way that his earlier work foregrounded the vulnerability of the body readying for war, his new photographs rearticulate the military uniform as the cloth that hides similar vulnerabilities. Traditionally, military uniforms are not only the distinctive dress of members of specific regiments or units, but are also decorative forms of hiding. Even as the imposing, costume-like grandeur of nineteenth-century uniforms fell away as the twentieth century advanced towards the ever-increasing demands for functional battle clothing, costume has remained a crucial form of concealment.

Like the archive, the uniform is a construction of memory. And like the archive, the uniform masks certain contradictions. As much as the uniform is a marker of violence, with medals and bars that speak in colourful, lustrous ways of a soldier's service to war, it is also a seamless language that along with various other forms of embroidery and metallic details is silent about the detriments of war. Here the wounded, dead and psychologically scarred, lies hidden behind heroic acts and brave deeds. The uniform is a clinical re-articulation of war, a regimental archive of the cold face of masculinity. The uniform is so much an iconic part of South Africa's over-militarised history. It is the uniforms of this heritage that van der Merwe captures in ways that question the brave face of masculinity, the unsullied innocence of war and the intimate details of memory. The absence of sharp details in the photographs, the display case lighting that van der Merwe re-presents in photographic form and the shifting angles from which he has photographed the mannequins all work together in a series of images that are the antithesis of the vision of military uniforms.

In capturing these uniforms with a blurred vision skewed just enough to lose details but not a sense of immediate recognition, van der Merwe manages to foreground the fragility of their authority. The uniforms become emasculated by the castration of the details of valour. The luscious, rich and extravagant details, each a marker of authority and privilege, fade beyond recognition into the realm of mere decorative patterns. Without instant markers of recognition, the uniforms become something other than themselves - decapitated, skeletal remains of memory. Like costumed mannequins in shop front displays, these uniforms stand in the museum context as markers of a fashion for adornment. The natural lighting of the museum displays housing the uniforms adds a ghostly life to a number of the photographs. The uniforms stand isolated from any real context, decapitated from the waist down. As much as the photographs capture the uniforms of particular individuals they also reflect the absence of the male body. Van der Merwe positions them as amputated mannequins, beheaded by the legacies of histories that prioritised the virtues of the valiant and bravery.

Johannesburg, 2000