Saturday, June 27, 2009

Naoya Hatakeyama: Journey through the residual world

Naoya Hatakeyama 畠山 直哉, from the Blast series, 1995

I arrive early for my interview with Naoya Hatakeyama. Punctuality is one thing in Japan, but arriving early, similar to being late, is an imposition; so I opt to simply linger along the concrete promenade adjoining the Shinkawa River. I sit on a bench. It is mid summer, my shirt clings to my back. Cicadas sing. Joyous. This bounded profusion. Having grown up and lived much of my adult life in South Africa, the ordered symmetry of the Japanese landscape has always impressed me greatly, particularly the greying tones in which the country has so willingly cloaked itself. Order and abundance, wildness and constraint.

It was while living in the rural backwater of Tokushima that I first encountered Mr. Hatakeyama’s photographs, images that quietly confront viewers with the complex beauty and unavoidable character of our modern existence, images that make strange the mundane: mountains excavated for their lime deposits, rivers notable only for their perfect symmetry and sameness, blast sites, machinery, the intractable mystery of the underworld. More than simply make strange the mundane edifices of Japan’s consumptive progress, Mr. Hatakeyama’s photographs impressed upon me a different way of looking at how progress is measured in a photograph.

Having palpably been influenced by Mr. Hatakeyama’s worldview, it is not surprising then that I wanted to meet him. On my four-year journey to achieve this simple ambition I was afforded much time, to sweeten my appreciation, which is how I came across Edward Burtynsky. Like Mr. Hatakeyama, this Canadian landscape photographer also photographs from a viewpoint that is “anthropological rather than critical”, to quote John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the father of cultural landscape studies.

And like Mr. Hatakeyama, Mr. Burtynsky is articulate in describing his interest in the theme of ruined modern landscapes. “I remember the first time I came to Toronto alone,” Mr. Burtynsky once tellingly digressed during an interview. “I found myself looking up at skyscrapers sixty and seventy stories high. I was bowled over by the scale at which we operate, the kinds of things we can create.” Looking at these edifices Mr. Burtynsky realized that for things to be on this scale, “there has to be something equally monumental in the landscape where we have taken all this material from. I felt that Newtonian law implied a reciprocal action in nature – a hole in the ground that meets the scale of the rising of the skyscraper – and my task was to go in search of the evidence of that reciprocal action, to see what the residual world looked like.”

Mr. Hatakeyama’s photographs are very much concerned with this residual world; a world sometimes obvious in its photographic exegesis yet implacably sly in delivering neatly encapsulated meanings. His photographs are not simply images of Japan’s ruined splendor, or mere activist refrains. I realize this when I finally meet with the photographer, who arrives at the gallery on a battered off-road motorcycle. More so than his habit of vigorously scratching the underside of his chin when I propose a difficult question, I am most charmed by Mr. Hatakeyama’s redoubtable grin. He is not a somber man. Indeed, as Mr. Hatakeyama guides me through his photographic landscapes, I am struck by his remarkable thoughtfulness and levity. His elegant pathos.

The following interview was conducted on July 21, 2004 at the Taka Ishii Gallery.

Youth and Early Influences

Born in provincial town of Rikuzentakata, in Iwate Prefecture, Mr. Hatakeyama recalls the “vast empty space in front of our house”, which overlooked the Kesenagawa River. “I was always looking at the emptiness,” he says. “My favorite place, though, was near the a train tunnel. It had this huge cutting that was covered in concrete. I was about five when I discovered it.” Fourteen years later, in 1977, he entered Tsukuba University’s School of Art and Design.

How did your interest in photography begin?

I met Kiyoji Otsuji, a professor of photography, at Tsukuba University in 1978. Before that I had no interest in photography. Meeting him was really inspiring, particularly hearing what he had to say about the art of photography. It is quite difficult to express how great he was. [Pauses] Do you know much about the circumstance and atmosphere of Japanese art schools at the time?

No.

In 1977 Japanese art schools offered many courses, including painting and sculpture. Many of the teachers were very conservative and advocated the salon style of teaching art. I found it very boring. Mr. Otsuji, however, was fantastic. He knew a lot about avant-garde art in the twentieth century. He was a member of Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), an art movement founded by a number of artists after the war, which included the sculptor and video artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and composer Toru Takemitsu. The group’s theoretical axis was Shuzo Takiguchi, a very famous poet who died in 1979. Mr. Takiguchi was personally very close to the French Surrealists and Dadaists, men such as Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Everyone in the Jikken Kobo coalesced around Takiguchi. He had a great influence on many people, including Mr. Otsuji. It was very exciting to listen to him speak. Mr. Otsuji would often talk about photographers such as Eugene Atget, the great documenter of Paris life.

How would you say Mr. Otsuji’s teachings influenced your first body of work, Contour Lines?

Do you know the work of Takuma Nakahira? Along with the philosopher and critic Koji Taki, he co-founded the photography quarterly Provoke, in 1968. During the 1970s Mr. Nakahira wrote many important essays, which I thought were good. He had a fantastic sense for words and writing. I particularly liked his collection of essays, titled Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? (1973). In it, Mr. Nakahira renounced all his previous lyrical works, and declared his aim to create materialist photographs in the form of an album or pictorial compendium. He even burned all of his negatives. His position was in many senses typical of 1970s thought, which doubted the subject. You can create something, but is it true. Mr. Nakahira’s essays were very important in relation to this.

To answer your question, though, Contour Lines represented an attempt to avoid any explanatory elements in my photographs. Very often when we take pictures, we do it to express something to someone, to tell them something, as in press, advertising and family photographs. We are all used to seeing these kinds of images. Following on Mr. Otsuji’s advice, I removed all explanatory elements from my images. Admittedly, this style of looking that has become very popular in photography nowadays.

In 1984 you moved to Tokyo. I read that you were overwhelmed by the city? Has this sense changed?

I’m still overwhelmed by this place. [Laughs] I hate this city. After completing my postgraduate studies at Tsukuba University in 1984, I worked for the Seibu Group. I had a part-time job with them for one year. I was a salaryman. But, during this time, I also directed a video documentary on the German artist Joseph Beuys, who was visiting Japan. About a year later, I started photographing Japan’s limestone quarries.

Lime Works

Limestone is one of the few natural resources in which Japan is totally self-sufficient. A sedimentary rock comprised mainly of calcium carbonate, limestone is an essential ingredient in the production of cement. It is also used as an aggregate for asphalt, iron, and glass, even medicine. Every year over 200 million tons of limestone is extracted from various sites across the country. Photographed over eight years, between 1986 and 1994, at 30 sites from Hokkaido to Okinawa, Lime Works (1996) presents an instructive document of Japan’s limestone industry. With scientific detachment, Mr. Hatakeyama pictures everything from the ducts and conveyor belts of huge lime processing factories, to vast, opencast quarries and concentrically mined hills. Amidst the splendor of these industrial landscapes, none of which are named or captioned, Mr. Hatakeyama sneaks in a picture of a bird’s nest. It contains two, chocolate brown speckled eggs.

Where did your interest in photographing these lime quarries derive from?

I suppose in high school, in 1975, when I painted the local lime works. I also took my first photograph in Iwate, in my hometown. I simply went to the nearby quarry and rattled the gate. The people who worked there were very kind and welcoming. They allowed me to photograph as I pleased. Although I didn’t talk much with the men who worked there, I did, however, find out that there was an office in Tokyo that possessed a lot of information on limestone quarries. After visiting this office I made a pilgrimage to as many of the quarries as possible.

Did you ever doubt your commitment to the project?

[Laughs] It took me eight years to complete this project, which should answer your question.

The images in the book strike me as remarkably declaratory, or explanatory, to borrow a word you mentioned earlier. Were they meant to be explanatory given what you had been taught?

You’re right; they are explanatory. When I started this work, many friends were dismayed and stopped speaking to me. They felt that this way of imaging was too literal. They loved Contour Lines but thought this was just so different. But it was this project that made me realize the city I was living in was not separated from the countryside. As I wrote in the introduction to the book, we live in cities that have tossed away the sea, the mountains, the rivers, yet receive their fruits for our consumption through a vast distribution system. Nature is already so distant from us that you might say it has become a fantasy.

Your comment cues with a question I want to ask about the political subtext of your work. In a recent interview, the photographer Michael Light stated: “In my opinion, serious contemporary artistic production dealing with landscape must deal with politics and violence in some way, whether explicit or implied. Otherwise its just fluff, decoration for those wanting false comfort and a delusionary ahistorical and apolitical world” Would you say that, in the context of contemporary Japan, that your is political?

No, no, no. But, landscape images can be political when people demand only beauty. That is when landscape becomes political. Generally speaking, traditional landscape photography has a tendency to make people stop thinking about political issues. I don’t personally think the events shown in these images, the destruction of beautiful mountain landscapes, is bad. I don’t think that specific action is bad.

Those people who protest or feel outraged by these works, people who want to preserve beautiful landscapes, are victims of aestheticism. They are living in the tradition of the romantic landscape. In my introduction, I speak of this as the desire, quite unrelated to our lives in the city, for a healthy ecological system. It is a desire that is gradually developing into an obsession, while its object recedes even farther into the distance.

This seems like quite a provocative statement, can you elaborate a bit more on what you mean?

I can understand that this is a big issue. Let me explain it this way. When I go to Europe, for instance, I see many beautiful fields. They look like soft pieces of cloth. But you have to remember that those fields have been cultivated over centuries, by humans. Before the fields there was a large forest. Yet when we look at images depicting those fields we see nature, not a cultured nature. I think the romantic, or aesthetic way of viewing what is nature constitutes a different thing entirely from what it means to conserve or preserve nature. However, many people confuse these two issues.

I am interested in understanding your intention in this work. The Hungarian-born photographer Brassai (born Gyula Halasz) openly argued that the camera is a crudely fashioned sociological tool. “It is not sociologists who provide insights,” Brassai remarked, “but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very centre of their time.” Would you agree?

I don’t think many photographers look at themselves as sociologists, although I suppose they can do sociological work with their cameras. It is probably better to say that sociologists find things that interest them in photographs. But, I must add that if more photographers possessed the consciousness of sociologists, the world of photography would be much better.

Nocturnes

The book Underground (2000) is a collection of photographs of Tokyo’s underground culverts, and takes as its subject the abstracted beauty of an atrophied urban environment. The character of the work, while highly original, has precedents in the work of Shomei Tomatsu, specifically his images Aftermath of a Typhoon, Nagoya (1959) and Asphalt, Tokyo (1961), from his book Nippon (1967). Underground won the photographer the 16th Annual Higashikawa Prize for Domestic Photography, in 2000, as well as the 42nd Mainichi Award for Art, in 2001.

I know your decision to explore the underground recesses of Shibuya was prompted by a particular image in your River Series, from 1993-4, which showed a large, gaping blackness. How did it feel heading into that nothingness?

Creepy. [Laughs] I entered all by myself. But I must correct you somewhat. Have you ever visited the catacombs in Paris? It is located at the edge of an underground quarry. Basically Paris was built from stone quarried beneath the surface of the city. This fascinated me when I first found out, as it seemed to mirror my idea that quarries and cities are like negative and positive images of a single photograph.

The Paris catacombs, however, exhausted me, the large number of tourists and human bones. [Laughs] While I was experiencing this in Paris, it struck me that Tokyo had similar underground spaces, which I recalled from the photograph you mention. Two days after returning from Paris I visited Shibuya’s underground culverts.

Can you speak a bit about the process?

I worked for almost a year of this series. The photos of the illuminated tunnels were taken last, right at the end of the project. For the first ten months of the project I took detailed images of the surfaces of the water underground, as well as the animals that inhabit it. While I was doing this, I suddenly realized that, despite the incredible colors and form of the images, there was no explanation as to where I was. It was then that I thought to photograph the interior spaces as a whole.

Shibuya is such a notoriously busy place. Did you ever meet anybody underground?

Never. You must remember that these are natural riverbeds that have been covered over. It is not habitable like the railway tunnels in New York. About 50 years ago there was open sky above these rivers. If you look carefully at image of one particular tunnel, you can see the remains of an old bridge. The city needed more land, so they covered over the river.

You said friends stopped speaking to you after Lime Works. Did they at least start speaking to you again after Underground?

No, but after this series I made many new friends. [Laughs] I’m okay.

Venice

In the summer of 2001, Mr. Hatakeyama was invited to represent Japan in its pavilion at the 49th Venice biennale. He showed an unusual pair of images, aerial views of an Osaka baseball stadium. In the one image it has been retrofitted with domestic housing elements and a parking space, on what would have been the pitch. In the latter, it is being demolished in its entirety. The work claims a lineage with an earlier series of Tokyo aerial views, started in 1989.

What was it like exhibiting in Venice?

A wonderful thing happened to me at the opening of my exhibition. Just before the opening, at the press reception, the curator asked how she should introduce me. As an artist, or a photographer? I told her to simply introduce me as a photographer. She duly did. ‘This is Mr. Hatakeyama, a photographer,’ she said. Afterwards, the journalists asked, ‘Where is the artist?’ It seems that most people consider photographers to be photojournalist – with the Nikon slung around their neck.

The debate does tend to get heated over whether photography is art. What are your thoughts?

I think it is an interesting debate. Over the past twenty years art has changed. It was once almost impossible to think of Henri Cartier-Bresson as a great artist. Twenty years ago, a good photographer was simply a good photographer, not an artist. But then, twenty years ago, sociological research wasn’t art, which it can now sometimes be.

Slow Glass

In 2001, Mr. Hatakeyama was a resident artist, on the Light Xchange, in Milton Keynes, England. Aside from photographing his host nation’s distinctive suburban landscape, he also produced a new body of work, titled Slow Glass, images of half-discernable landscapes photographed from behind rain-soaked glass. The abstract pattern of these images, as well as their interest in repetition hint at an earlier project, titled Maquettes/ Light, from 1995-8, which pictured the geometric order of Tokyo’s high-rise apartment blocks, their night-time corridors lit in precise rows.

What attracted you to do a suburban study?

Milton Keynes is such a funny place. In Tokyo suburbia, there is still quite a lot of diversity. There are at least shops – and pachinko parlors. In Milton Keynes, however, there are only houses. Everything looks completely the same but always slightly different. It’s crazy. People want to live their lives in certain specific contexts but they don’t want to be the same as other people. They want to be different, but only slightly. This intrigued me.

Contemporaries and Future Work

Few of your works show people. Do you find it difficult to photograph human subjects?

Well, sometimes photographs of people, portraits, make me very sad, very tired, exhausted. I hate that feeling, so I don’t want to repeat it. I appreciate that some people have no interest in architectural and landscape photography, and prefer portraits. Personally, though, portraits make me sad because people in photographs look dead.
But bear in mind that I work in very isolated places with few people. [Chuckling, he picks up a copy of Lime Works and points out a miniscule figure in one of his images.]

As a matter of interest, do you own photographs by any other photographers?

Yes, I have one print by the American photographer Gary Winogrand, his famous image of the elephant nose. Recently, I also bought an image by the Los Angeles-based photographic artist James Welling.

Speaking of architectural photography, what about Lewis Balz?

Lewis Balz is cool. He was always cool, always apocalyptic, always conceptually interesting and extreme, which is why he is still alive.

What about Japanese photographers?

I love Toshio Shibata’s work. Remember that place by the train tunnel I was telling you about, when I first saw Mr. Shibata’s photographs, I said ‘Aaah! That is my place.’ I also admire Hiroshi Sugimoto, the expatriate Japanese artist and photographer based in New York. Sugimoto is a very special artist. I have never known an artist before who is also an architect. He built a shrine on an island two years ago. His photography extends beyond photography.

Last question, what new projects are you working on?

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in Montreal, has commissioned me to make black and white photographs on the subject of architectural photography. This is not about photographing architecture, but rather photographs about architectural photographs. The CCA has an extensive collection of architectural photographs, around 20 thousand items dating from the 1800s. They asked me to revive their collection; I have to create new works inspired by the old works in their collection. I am also working on a project in the Swiss Alps, and also completing a series of photographs of a museum on Naoshima Island, designed by the architect Tadao Ando. Lime Works took me eight years, but this year alone I have plans to release three books.

Thank you to Tomoko Fujibayashi of the Taka Ishii Gallery for her invaluable assistance.

(This article originally appeared in a 2005 edition of the Kyoto Journal, one of my favourite magazines. It introduced me to Donald Richie and Pico Iyer. Thank you John and Ken.)

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Anyway: Santu Mofokeng's laughter

Santu Mofokeng, Buddhist Retreat near Pietermaritzburg, ­ Kwa-Zulu Natal, 2003


If the SPCA ever needed a photographer I would recommend Santu Mofokeng. Then again, I’m not sure the SPCA would want him. Not that the Johannesburg-born photographer is cruel to animals or anything, it’s just that the chickens and goats in his austere black and white photographs don’t posses what you might call sentimentality, that essential mushiness needed for selling the SPCA to the general public.

Mofokeng is not one for soppy pictures. His photographs are calculated and precise, even if they’re about things that are not that easy to photograph. Things like history, memory, magic and spirituality.

Take, for example, his photo of a horse foraging in a wood. Taken in 2003 at a Buddhist retreat he visited near Pietermaritzburg, I found the photo tucked away in a corner of Johannesburg’s Standard Bank Gallery, where the photographer recently showed (July 31 – September 1, 2007).

The work is spellbinding, never mind Happy from Hillbrow’s observation in the visitor’s book that Mofokeng’s work is “depressing and dull”. The picture is also strangely macabre. Photographed in semi-shade, the contrasting light tricks one into believing the horse is without a head.

The photographer is leading a walkabout of his Johannesburg show, and is surrounded by a group of young hipsters who nervously titter when the photographer cracks a joke, which is often. Mofokeng tells us that what we are seeing is “magic”. Standing just askance his earliest body of work, a series on religious worshippers catching the Soweto train in the late 1980s, he directs us to look at a large picture of two goats. On the flat picture plane the one goat appears to be standing on the other.

“It is an optical illusion,” he says, his slender frame fitted into a pair of jeans, the chest pocket of his button shirt showing the contours of a box of smokes. He suddenly swivels around and points to the horse, the first in a trilogy of oversized magic pictures.

“Have you ever seen a horse with three legs and no head?”

Before anyone can answer, he turns again, this time to face a giant-sized portrait of a middle-aged man. It is not just any man: he is a holy man, a sangoma, Ishmael Mofokeng, the photographer’s brother. He died of Aids-related complications in 2004.

“I don’t know if his eyes are open and shut,” he says, pointing to pair of ghostly eyes that seem to be both open and shut at the same time. Magic.

The picture becomes the source of a story. In matter of fact language Mofokeng tells how, on his brother’s insistence, he drove him to Salpeterkraans, a sandstone overhang near Fouriesburg in the hills of the southeastern Free State. The area is a place of ancestral worship. Mofokeng explains how his brother, severely disabled by his sickness, had to be pushed in a wheelbarrow to the cave.

“They gave him water and holy ash. He felt better and said thank you.” It was during this moment of respite that Mofokeng took his picture. Afterwards, they both walked back to the car. “It didn’t take him long and he was dead.” He pauses. “Anyway.”

Mofokeng turns and walks off in the direction of an unrelated series of photographs, landscape photographs of unholy places like Birkenau, Krakow and Aushwitz. Trailing behind him, I chew on that final word of his. Anyway.

If there is any truth to be got from a journalistic profile, and many would dispute that there is, I think it is to be found in the fragment, a moment sectioned off from the whole and spotlighted, a moment exaggerated. In Mofokeng’s case, that moment arrives when he blithely says, “anyway”.

Two years ago, when I met him at his Bez Valley home to talk about his portrait of Ishmael, I found the photographer slumped in his driveway. He looked forlorn, lost – not at all dissimilar the picture of his deceased brother.

“I think about my family,” he mumbled. “I think about my kids. I think about what I try to do. I get pissed off. It is really hard. I live in a time when relationships are defined by who has and who doesn’t have money. I don’t like that. I feel very depressed. I hate the time in which I live. It is depressing. I am divorced, and have kids who do not live with me. I was crying just before you came. I was asking myself, Who am I? What am I doing? Why do I do what I do? It hurts. I was crying all day. I am not in good shape.”

Two years later and this raconteur photographer who began his professional career in a newspaper darkroom is in much better shape. “Anyway,” he says.

Of course this is how he is: charismatic and contradictory, comical and sometimes just plain callous. A few years ago I travelled to Tokyo with a bunch of South African photographers, Mofokeng included. One evening, the bunch of us squeezed into an impossibly small booth at a Shinjuku restaurant, he drunkenly told Zwelethu Mthethwa that Chris Ledochowski took better pictures of townships than he did. Mthethwa choked, Mofokeng laughed. He often laughs.

A few months prior to our Tokyo trip, at a public talk in Rosebank, I was also at the receiving end of his scorn. Midway through some or other point I was trying to make a voice started mumbling in the crowd. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was Mofokeng, a man whose soft-spoken telephone voice is quieter than that of Guy Tillim, which is quite something.

He is not immune his biting criticism. In his 2001 monograph, perhaps the best book in David Krut’s ongoing TAXI Art Books series, Mofokeng concludes a fragmentary essay, equal parts autobiography and artist statement, by recalling a moment from his divorce.

“I listen to the proceedings, quietly, waiting for my turn at the stand. An unflattering portrait of me is being painted in words. I am hoping for a kind word, a refrain, or a ‘but’, even. The picture of me that emerges is that of a drunk and violent man.” The divorce is granted. “I walk her to her place of work. I don’t know what I am feeling at the time. I go home and make a few calls to friends and relatives. They tell me how to feel.”

Anyway. Well no, not anyway. When Mofokeng says anyway, when he walks away from Ishmael to the haunted landscapes of modern history, it is hard to believe that it is without a sense of deep-seated emotion buried somewhere in his chest. But then again this is just an exhibition, right? And anyway, we’re done with animals and stuff.

A young Soweto hipster asks the impish figure leading the session what Vlakplaas is. Mofokeng laughs. He often laughs.

(This article appeared in a September 2007 edition of Sunday Time's Lifestyle supplement. The photographer called me afterwards to thank me for the "nice obituary".)

Fiction: Strange weather

From Olafur Eliasson's exhibition 'A laboratory of mediating space'
held at Aedes am Pfefferberg, Berlin, June 2006. Photo: Sean O'Toole



It was only the wind that seemed to be in any hurry. It ripped and tore and gusted; it perplexed. Sprawled across his sofa, Ivan P. languidly fingered his blond curls as he waited for the kettle to come to a boil. The wind had been blowing near constantly for three days. Particularly at night, it gusted with such fury that the electrical cables across the road from his house would occasionally touch, fabulous green explosions illuminating the night. But it was not yet that time of day. In the windowsill, a frozen chicken – deboned and filleted – lay sweating in the afternoon sun. Ivan P., immobile and morose, listened to the wind.

It had been a week, perhaps more, since his suspension from the newspaper where, 15 years earlier, he had kick-started his career in journalism as an art critic. He had eventually admitted to fabricating some contextual detail in a prominent news article alleging graft in the public works ministry. Adamant that his “purplish prose,” as he described it, didn’t alter the veracity of his allegations, his paper nevertheless decided to retract the story. There was even talk of a reconciliatory luncheon with the enraged Minister, whom Ivan P. had described, in a draft version of the article, as “a fragile and pompous child-man, uncannily similar De Heem’s portrait of William III of Orange, a man obsessed with the empty symbolism of power and statehood”. (A sub-editor had struck the statement, leaving only the description “fragile and pompous” to describe the Minister.)

Despite the routine excision of these allusions from his articles, Ivan P. would still try scuttle them in. He once almost got away with describing a prominent banker as looking like “George Dyer after Francis Bacon and Mike Tyson had each had a turn correcting the other’s niceties”. Although retired from criticism proper – he hadn’t written a formal review in over a decade – Ivan P. still dabbled in a bit of “lyrical hysteria”, which was how he once described the well-paying catalogue essays he infrequently wrote, this in a conversation with Dave.

“So how would you define yourself then?” Dave, a news journalist friend, had drunkenly asked. “As a lapsed– or a retired critic?”

“Neither,” Ivan P. had responded, stealing a line from an architect he interviewed once: “Dave, my man, I’m what you might call a reluctant critic.”

“A reluctant critic? What sort of bull is that?” laughed Dave.

“Let me put it this way. I no longer have to play the part of the idiot savant.”

“You mean like Mr. Bean?”

“Yes, something like that although I was thinking more along the lines of Basil Fawlty, or maybe Buster Keaton.”

“I doubt any of them cared much for art. Anyway, I don’t really get what you’re saying.”

“Nothing, Dave, I’m saying nothing, just that I’m not up for that old game anymore.”

“What game?”

“Suspending disbelief.”

“You once told me doubt is the critics most powerful weapon. That hardly seems like a position that would allow for suspended disbelief.”

“Dave, like I said, I’m not an art critic anymore… What I said then doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Right, you’re just a reluctant investigative journalist now, I take it. So does the fact that you no longer write art criticism mean that people don’t call you Snowy anymore?”

“Fuck you Dave.”

Snowy. The nickname had come early in his career as a critic. It followed on a series of sharp reviews, one based singularly around a visiting Nigerian curator’s shoe collection, another an investigative piece of sorts involving interviews with the impoverished, often anonymous subjects appearing in the work of two South African photographers exhibiting in New York at the time. Not quite hack jobs, but enough to cause one alert wit to liken his curly hair to that of a Wirehaired Fox Terrier, the same breed as Tintin’s trusty companion. For years afterwards Ivan P. had kept his hair closely cropped, only allowing it to grow out again as time and distance grew between him and the art world. These curls were now speckled with traces of grey.

The kettle, which seemed as lethargic as Ivan P., was lazily coming to life. It made him think about the wind. To be exact, a kettle steamed, but saying this in no way really accounted for the aural sensation of hearing it do this. There were no words that could faithfully substitute for sounds like boiling water, or the wind. Words here were really just surrogates, conveniences that substituted for experience. Ivan P. had encountered the same frustration writing about art. The closer he looked, the more he realised art criticism as a dubious process of reducing visible forms into words of comparative value. Something always got lost, the act of writing mired by its own idiosyncrasies, by the small negotiations and compromises that a writer must often make. Inevitably, the thing being described became secondary, got lost. Of course, art criticism had a whole history, which at least allowed for the standardisation of this impoverishment.

Ivan P. rounded his lips and exhaled:

Whoooossssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

He laughed at the noise that came out. Wind, it all of a sudden made sense to him, was little more than a collection of exaggerated consonants and stretched vowels. Hardly “a literary specialty” as Mark Twain had once described it. The wind slacked off, quietened down. It now sounded like a warbling drunk with lockjaw:

Ssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

But the more he listened, the more this thing he was trying to imitate proved itself as unknowable, elusive, a trickster; it was capable of changing speed, direction, intonation and purpose seemingly at random, without logic.

Wwwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The wind outside now lacked any vowels, but then suddenly flared up again, gaining a familiar tempo.

Whoooossssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The kettle pulled Ivan P. out of his daydream. It signalled its climax with an abrupt mechanical click. Ivan P. sat up.

Tea steaming, he sat down at his work desk. He looked at the laptop, closed but still blinking. For two days now he had thought about venturing online, reconnecting with the world, however tentatively. The deluge of questions awaiting him was, of course, obvious, the inevitable recriminations too. It was why he had switched off his phone, tossing it in a drawer. But his laptop, with its voyeuristic remove, it was different. He didn’t have to reconnect, not fully. He would ignore his emails.

Opening his browser, Ivan P. stared blankly at the empty subject line in Google. At length, he typed in the word “wind”. It seemed obvious, also the perfect diversion from everything that awaited him. The first entry to appear beneath the list of news results was a Wikipedia entry.

“Wind is the flow of air or other gases that compose an atmosphere (including, but not limited to, the Earth’s). In abbreviated terms, wind is air molecules in motion.”

He scrolled down through the various entries listed below this definition, stopping at a one-line paragraph titled “Named winds”. The link took him to a page displaying, in alphabetical order, the names of various winds across the globe. Abroholos was the first entry and referred to a wind that occurs from May through August on the coast of Brazil. Next, Alize, which described a northeasterly wind across central Africa, and so on. He considered reading more about the Harmattan, a famed, dry northerly wind that blew across central Africa but hesitated. Would it lead him to Sembene Ousmane? Likely not. Ivan P. clicked on a news website listed in his bookmark folder, scrolled through the muddle of headlines. He clicked on a headline, recognised the photograph accompanying it immediately.

Acclaimed photographer dies in freak accident
By David Motsamayi

Well-known South African photographer Thomas Wall was fatally injured yesterday in a bizarre accident at a historic Tshwane cemetery.

It was just like any other morning for Tshwane bus driver Gwen Mabitsi when she started the engine of her Marcopolo bus at 6am. After allowing the bus to idle for five minutes, as regulations require, Mabitsi, a mother of two, engaged first gear and headed for the exit.

“I am still suffering from what happened next,” explained Mabitsi, who is being treated for mild concussion and shock at Steve Biko Academic Hospital. According to Mabitsi, who has been driving busses since 2003, she lost control of the empty passenger transport as she exited the depot.

“Turning right into Church Street, the recently procured bus experienced brake failure,” explained Tshwane Metro spokesperson Mike Kekana in a press statement.

The out-of-control bus skidded across the road, ploughing through the cast iron fence surrounding Church Street Cemetery, which lies opposite the depot. Although no longer in use, this heritage site contains the graves of many prominent Afrikaners, including poet Eugene Marais and statesmen Paul Kruger and Hendrik Verwoerd. Prince Christian, a grandson of British monarch Queen Victoria, is also buried here.

The bus, which destroyed a number of headstones of early Pretoria residents, collided with Wall, who according to eyewitnesses was facing the opposite direction, a dark hood over his head. Paramedics rushed to the scene but were unable to revive the photographer, who had been dragged some distance by the bus.

In what a bizarre turn of events, the bus came to a standstill a short distance from the grave of renowned landscape painter JH Pierneef. Wall, who came to public prominence in the early 1990s for his unconventional large-format landscape photographs of violent aftermath in Angola and Rwanda, had been working on a series of photographs recording current-day realities at the various sites depicted in Pierneef’s original railway panel paintings.

Commissioned by Spoornet’s predecessor and originally installed in the old Johannesburg train station in 1929, Wall’s interpretations of Pierneef’s paintings were due to be displayed as posters at various railway stations, including the Gautrain, during the country’s 2010 festivities.

It is uncertain how many of Pierneef’s bucolic scenes Wall had successfully photographed before he was struck down, allegedly facing east towards Meintjes Kop, as Pierneef would have done when he painted his Apies River panel.

Wall, who was born Thabazimbi north of Gauteng, attended Pretoria Boys High School and completed his photographic studies in Durban. The 41-year-old photographer, who received numerous awards during his career, was unmarried.


Ivan P. read the article again, taking in each sentence slowly, precisely. He hastily made another cup of tea, spilling the milk as he shakily decanted it into his cup. He sat down and read the article a third time.

He had always doubted Pierneef. As a painter he exhibited a fundamental flaw: his work lacked narrative. Nothing seemingly happened in his paintings, not even that most primary variable, weather. Ivan P. had once seen a relatively late career painting by the artist, Naderende Storm in the Die Veld, painted in 1956, a year before his death. The billowing clouds and swathes of indigo blue filling this canvas failed to describe the elemental beauty of a Highveld storm, the voice-drowning assertiveness of its thunder, the strange half-light that often accompanied it. Weather, it seemed, undid Pierneef. In his station panels, it was used as mere effect. In his two industrial scenes showing Premier Mine and Rand Gold Mine, the wind blows from left to right, causing his smoke to drift horizontally. It looks cheap and shows up Pierneef’s deficiencies. How much more engaging would his panels have been had he, like Hokusai for instance, shown peeling papers fluttering in a wind, men clutching at their hats, a tree twisted in deference to a strange, invisible force.

“Dave, howzit. It’s Ivan.”

“Ivan! Man, whatsup? I’ve been trying to get hold of you for over a week now. What happened? Everyone’s talking about your suspension.”

“Long story.”

“Hey, isn’t it always.”

“What’s this shit you wrote about Tom?”

“Jeez dude, can you believe it.”

“No, David, I can’t.”

“Did you read my story?”

“I told you I did, that’s why I’m phoning. It reads like a bad Edgar Allen Poe melodrama. It’s an imaginative, Dave, I’ll give you that. It really worked. So, here I am, the joke’s over. You got me.”
Dave was silent. Outside, an agitated gust of wind ripped through the afternoon street, whipping up stray community newspapers, pizza menus and glossy leaflets listing unsellable properties. One of these bits of printed junk flipped and flapped over Ivan P.’s yard, eventually settling on the spikes crowning his perimeter wall.

“No dude, this isn’t about you,” whispered Dave. “He’s really dead.”

(This short story was originally read at the Iziko Summer School symposium held at the South African Museum's TH Barry Lecture Theatre, Cape Town, February 21, 2009.)

Clive Chipkin: Lover of the unloved

The N1 motorway at New Canada, southwest of Johannesburg, May 2009


“Joseph Conrad once said that it’s necessary to immerse yourself in the most destructive elements of the times, and then attempt to swim . . .” JG Ballard, from a 1976 interview


The quest: to find a language to fit the mood, shape and intractable silence of an uncommonly ordinary thing, although saying that, I wonder if it – this thing – can ever be described in the singular. Is it not really a collection of things? Gauteng’s heart attack highways. Appropriately, or is it stupidly, I attach myself to a language not my own for comfort, solace, or is it simply help. Somehow Afrikaans, this home-grown bastard, so blunt yet lyrical at the same time, is far more evocative when it comes to describing Johannesburg’s fatal inner-city landscapes, in particular the tangle of roads, flyovers, veld and human aftermath on its southern periphery.

To call the landscape surrounding the Heidelberg interchange rude is simply polite. It is far truer of things to say that the scene at the corner of End Street and Heidelburg Road, in the unlovely and in-between neighbourhood of City and Suburban, is onbeskof. It is an affront, although even this loose translation bleaches all colour from the word. So onbeskof it is, a contrived mess, one that I invited Clive Chipkin, a self-described “reluctant architect” and Johannesburg city historian, to explain.

Car parked up against the pavement, the two of us head for an open patch of veld. Our intention: to look at a bridge, actually the bridge – “Bridge 6”. For as long as I’ve known this anonymous piece of civil engineering floating over the Heidelberg interchange, I’ve associated it with traffic fines, the 80km/h speed limit here plainly onbeskof. In Chipkin’s eyes, however, this “steel viaduct,” as he describes it, is far more than just a useful place to install a traffic camera. It is, as he told me last year when we first met, “one of the greatest pieces of sculptural achievement”.

Approaching it is quite a trick. Which is how we ended up parked outside a grey building marked No. 1 End Street. Across the road, we find a footpath. It ducks beneath a blackened underpass. Not to sound all fancy, but the scene here recalls something painter Francis Bacon said of one of his paintings: “It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another.” Bacon could just as easily have been describing the fetid little patch of land near the Heidelberg interchange. Here a burnt out fire, there a suitcase mysteriously wedged into a cement crevice. Splayed across the footpath, a fleshing little something, food perhaps. If Johannesburg’s outdoors are a free art gallery, as Chipkin (and many others) would suggest, it bears mentioning that its treasures are brutal and unromantic.

“It is terribly elegant,” counters Chipkin as Bridge 6 comes into full view. “It curves, rises, does a hundred pieces of geometrical movement, all very, very …” He gets sidetracked by a detail in the construction. “It is not concrete, it is box-framed plate,” he says of the metal bridge. The riveting, perhaps equally benign in the eyes of many, is also lovingly singled out. Still, it’s only a bridge and there is only so much you can say about it, rainy Wednesday morning or not, which prompts our next decision.

“You see how it drives,” enthuses Chipkin as the car follows the bridge’s south-westerly curve. “It is beautifully cambered, and it is rising to get the right levels, and it’s turning, and it’s steel, and it’s on loose ground, so it has to be mobile.” Mobility, it turns out, is key to understanding Bridge 6’s eccentric design. In his forthcoming book, Johannesburg Transition (2009), a dispassionate account of Johannesburg’s “promiscuous nature and the endless parodies of other cities”, Chipkin dedicates a brief few lines to this bridge. Straddling unstable mining ground, the bridge, he explains, was designed by German consulting engineers Baubro Grassl. It was completed in 1972.

“And that’s it,” he concludes as we clear the bridge and connect with traffic on the M2. The experience of crossing it lasts less than half a minute, if that. “It’s as short and small as that but it’s one of those pieces of engineering that successfully linked up things.”

Linking things up. Connecting the dots. Making sense of Gauteng’s highways. Now there’s a plan.

Fifty years ago traffic volumes between Johannesburg and Pretoria averaged about 4,800 vehicles per day; nowadays the three-lane highway between these two landlocked cities conveys more than 180,000 vehicles daily – that’s 60,000 more than the total number of cars licensed in Johannesburg in 1957. Recognising that something needs to be done about the mad crush, cabinet recently approved plans to pump R20 billion into alleviating Gauteng’s congestion problems. But that’s the future. It is the crowded now that holds us, often very literally.

Two unrelated events led me to Chipkin, in my search for something beyond the usual commentary on Gauteng’s roads. Usual commentary? Aside from the familiar themes – functionality (frustrating), size (gargantuan) and safety (perilous) – the province’s heart attack highways remain a mystery. Very little is written in the popular press about their rich history. It took a middle finger to stumblingly lead me to this realisation.

The middle finger belonged to the driver – black if you must ask – of an old Merc. This jennelman, to borrow from ee cummings, was adamant about getting to Pretoria a few seconds ahead of everyone else. Weaving through traffic, he saw a gap in the fast lane: me. Without fuss, he as nudged into the emergency lane on my motorcycle. I hooted. His response: up yours. Eish. Then, a couple more experiences with wayward drivers later, a Sunday Times profile on Rob Byrne, a traffic announcer, in the Insight & Opinion pages no less. My interest was sparked. I started keeping notes on this thing, this highway so much a part of negotiating Johannesburg.

The earliest note, dated June 5, 2006, reads: “Two pieces of pine planking, tapered, like large splinters; bits of plastic bumper; cigarette butts; a crumpled piece of paper; more cigarette butts; glass from a shattered window; other things less easily described, all fleetingly observed from the car at stationary intervals. You look at them; their placement and location is random, determined by accident – an unfortunate word in some cases. They say nothing about the congested frustration, the waiting.”

My favourite ‘observation’ is dated October 4, 2006: “A fat woman in a red shirt, next to her a skinny man, both seated in fold-up chairs at the Buccleuch interchange. Are they studying the traffic? What do their clipboards prompt them to look out for? Nearby, the new electronic sign reads “NO INCIDENTS AHEAD”. Less than a 100 metres on, in the fast lane, a pulverised Honda is parked near a dump truck angled into the concrete barrier. “FUCK DA POLICE” reads graffiti on the rear of the truck. An orange Metro Police car, a Mercedes, pulls up to the scene.”

It was however the Zimbabweans, a people so easily ring fenced by a nationalist pejorative, a people endlessly seen washing up and down the highway, who delivered the most telling insight. Telling because the scene encompassed so much – without yielding anything.

December 9, 2007: “The busses ferrying Zimbabweans from Braamfontein to the north are oil-perfumed wrecks. Two of them have broken down today: one at Buccleuch, the other beneath the bridge where Brett Kebble was shot, the spot marked by a pot plant and kink in the protective railing.” It was a Sunday when I made this note. The latter of the two breakdowns remains particularly memorable. A few feet below where Brett Kebble died, a young man lay on a pink leather sofa. Retrieved from the roof of the broken bus, he had parked it in the emergency lane.

It was with this jumble of experiences, observations and half-arsed insights that I knocked on Chipkin’s office door, situated in the bucolic suburb of Parkview. He proved remarkably courteous. “You’re exploring a situation which is only latent,” he said of my whimsical interest in highways and their connectedness to Johannesburg. “You might find an architect who is terribly articulate but I, as quite a middle-ground architect, haven’t got all your answers. But it is terrific to explore such an unnoticed thing. It is also very important.”

The conversation could have ended there. It didn’t. In part, I suspect, it is because the elevated highways piercing through central Johannesburg cue an important theme in Chipkin’s own writings: Johannesburg’s perplexing identity as a city.

A Wits graduate, Chipkin first started writing about architecture in the late 1950s, after returning to Johannesburg from England – via India – in 1957. His first article, published in the South African Architectural Record, was on Indian architecture. A fitting subject: Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens, two signal figures in Johannesburg’s early architectural history and indeed Chipkin’s writings generally, left South Africa to work in India, the crown jewel of the imperial project.

Although prolific, co-authoring along the way a book on Parktown, it was only in 1993 that Chipkin announced himself as something more than an itinerant voice. His book Johannesburg Style is a classic, offering an incisive history of this city’s uneven and often garish built environment. Of the writing itself, it is interested, witty, empirical, and very often concerned with detail, but not bogged down by it. Ivan Vladislavic, an admirer of Chipkin’s knowledge of Johannesburg, says he predates theory, as in his writing shuns trendy –isms and –ologies. In this he recalls Hemingway, if not stylistically then at least philosophically. Wrote the boozy old newsman: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over…”

Of his interest in writing, Chipkin is modest: “I always felt a need to find what I am thinking; I don’t know what I’m thinking until I have expressed it somehow.”

Unlike some architectural writers, he allows his thinking to be influenced my more than just an appreciative eye. Chipkin is also a good listener.

“A well-heeled conversationalist on the upper deck of the Parktown North bus once-declared with a flourish, ‘Johannesburg has no style’,” Chipkin records in the preface to Johannesburg Style (1993). “On another occasion I overheard a snippet of street conversation: ‘Johannesburg is net deurmekaar’.” He wanted to title his first book as much. Stern advisors warned him off it. People would get mixed-up.

To an extent, the M1, which follows a north-south axis, and the M2, an east-west axis, represented an attempted to untangle the mess Chipkin’s forsaken title alludes to. Conceived in 1955-56 by urban planner Maurice Rotival – in conjunction with American consultants – and completed in phases, starting in 1966, the highways acted as a much-needed gateway to the city. Their impact was enormous.

“The new peripheral elevated road system took an amorphous spreadeagled city on the plains, tied it together in an urban package and provided a sense of recognition for visitors and locals alike,” writes Chipkin in Johannesburg Transition.

Driving along the M2, to see these words made manifest, Chipkin neatly paraphrased his own writing. “Johannesburg was a very vague city. You weren’t quite sure what it was. You had to travel all over it to know it. But this [the highway] gave it comprehension, I think.”

Of course, comprehension wasn’t the only intended outcome.

“But, as always, with Johannesburg’s modernisation we must pause to observe deep-seated anxieties,” writes Chipkin in his new book. “All the advantages and betterment of the huge capital expenditure accrued to the white areas. The motorways, conspicuously, did not connect into the vast Black ghetto locations. In part, they acted as a visual and movement barrier to reinforce segregation.”

Driving back from our brief urban expedition, I ask Chipkin about the contradictions so much a part of twentieth century architecture, contradictions that extend to the seemingly dull practice of urban planning. In particular, I mean the idealism and the hubris that defines modern architecture. The widening gulf between the promise and the outcome.

“I am not sure whether my generation’s work was liked,” concedes Chipkin, whose ideological progenitor is the French modernist architect Le Corbusier. “I think a lot of it was disliked. I would be sufficiently objective to say that mine might have been a bad generation for architecture.”

“Isn’t that partly to do with the utopian impulses?” I propose.

“Yes, although I don’t know how you see it but I interpret utopianism as something very positive.”

Which takes us back to Bacon and that thing of piling one continuous accident on top of another. It is a trait common to all cities, something that is both necessary and inevitable. Although in Joburg, at the moment, it just seems a little more pronounced, the city’s highways simply a part – rather than apart – from the compounded mess. But this is just a thought, not a definitive proposition. If the process by which a city grows is evolutionary, gradual, so too must all thought be on it.

The evolutionary metaphor here is intentional. While driving to see Bridge 6, we encountered another piece of sculptural art. Situated on the corner of Eloff and Stott, next to the Faraday Market, at an onramp onto the M2, this grubby little office building, now a low-income residence, teasingly popped into view every so often. Its defining feature: the plant life cling to, and sometimes growing out of the brickwork.

“Gee, that building was quite a landmark,” remarks Chipkin the first time we pass it. “I wonder why it went like that. I suppose the owners abandoned it.”

The second time: “Look at that building! Phew. Look at the moss. There can’t be too many cities outside Africa that allow that.”

“You know, that is becoming one of the greatest buildings in Johannesburg,” he says on our final encounter, as we join the highway and speed off west. “It’s utterly amazing, how the decay and the shutters have fallen in the most wonderful sort of vague pattern. Ah, you have got to come back with me here.”

(This article appeared in Empire, July 2008, Vol 1.6)

Peter Saville: Life after the flicker of greatness


Skateboard designs inspired by Peter Saville's sleeve design for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures (1979)
and New Order's Blue Monday (1983). All boards by
Supreme, New York


Peter Saville. The name says it all. In an interview with Sleazenation, New Order’s Peter Hook offered this on the Manchester-born graphic designer turned record label entrepreneur turned art director turned artist turned, well, whatever: “[He’s] an artist and a piss artist who never turns up on time and makes you months late… we’d have the record ready to go and it would be delayed cos of the sleeve. And where was he? He was fuckin’ walking around Paris with some model looking at perfume bottle shapes, the twat.”

There are many versions of this story: Peter Saville the elegant wastrel, the penniless Lord, the directionless savant who scuppered a sure thing with Pentagram
, Peter Saville the twat. Which one is true?

There is a wonderful moment in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002), a film that incidentally features a bit part dedicated to Saville. Tony Wilson, played with aplomb by Steve Coogan, is in the toilet of the Russel Club, the legendary nightclub that launched some of Factory Record’s earliest acts. In this moment of apocryphal storytelling, Wilson pipes-in as a voice over: if it comes to choosing between truth and myth, he says, he would always choose the myth.

Which, for way too many years, is how I regarded Saville, as something rare and mythical, an exotic insect pinned under glass, stuck. The truth about this boho icon is a lot more commonplace, and twice as compelling for it.

In 2004 I was asked by Design Indaba magazine to interview Saville, due to speak at their annual conference. Being a no-budget publication, I had to phone him in London on my own account, which at the time involved top-up cards bought at the corner café. Thinking he’d be a surly bastard, I bought two R50 cards, the second just in case. After all, mythical men don’t say much, at least this is what I reckoned. How wrong I was.

Peter Saville is simply a businessman, at least this is how he put it to me. More pointedly, he is an interpreter, someone with the capability to distil contemporary culture into a meaningful visual format. Rather than revisit the overly familiar narrative of his years with Factory Records, where his sleeve design for New Order’s Blue Monday 12-inch single, lost the company somewhere between 10p and 50p on every single sold, I engaged Saville on life after the first flicker of greatness.

As an interview subject Saville proved surprisingly loquacious, pausing every so often to thoughtfully mull over his choice of words. Of course there was also something of a well-practiced narrative to the conversation, a falling back on habit and convention. But then my R50 credit ran out, cutting him short, and we had to pick things up afresh again. (I blamed the unreliability of our line on South Africa’s telephone infrastructure.) When the credit ran out on my second voucher, it was all over. Well, sort of. I took a long shot and called again the next day. Saville, unperturbed or inconvenienced, simply glided back into the narrative, picking up where we had left off…


You’ve just completed work on the new book, Designed by Peter Saville (by Rick Poynor, Frieze, 2003), as well as been involved in putting together a retrospective exhibition that features much of your design work to date. This must have occasioned its own fair share of contemplation, right?

From a work point of view I’ve been in a very contemplative frame of mind for the last few years. I gave myself the 1990s to find the conclusive part of my career. I did something in the 1980s that took me somewhere, created a profile for me, created a body of work that I was pleased with. At the end of the 1980s my first incarnation as a studio, Peter Saville Associates, was insolvent. My method of working was anything but guided by profitably, which I managed to get away from for a while but as I employed more people and the recession kicked in, I couldn’t get away with it any longer. Peter Saville Associated came to a conclusion in late 1990, when I joined Pentagram. I was happy with what we had done, proud in fact.

What was it like joining Pentagram?

Pentagram was an introduction to the grown up world of having a design studio. It was company with an integrity, but it was also a different generation to me, philosophically a different generation. Colin Forbes had imbued Pentagram with a very disciplined operational structure. Pentagram had a spirit of designers cooperative, but it was run in a very disciplined way. By the time I joined in 1990, 18 years after the founding of Pentagram, the senior partners, I think, were more engaged in the business of being Pentagram than with innovation.

There is an innovation sensibility to graphics which is quite hobbyist actually, and you tend to grow out of it. Many senior designers evolve into business people, be it running their own businesses, or in their interaction with business and clients. That’s where you end up. And that was the culture of the Pentagram I joined in 1990, with the one exception being Alan Fletcher. Alan was still more interested in getting his brushes out than he was in courting the Financial Times. It was a fantastic experience, almost like a post-graduate course for me.

Would you say your career has been one of resisting growing up and maturing into the roles you outlined?

No, not wilfully. A quick look at my history can suggest that, and I get that from a lot of journalists who do a quick look in, as if I am just some 15-year-old teenager who doesn’t want to listen. It’s little bit more complex than that. I was very happy for a year or so at Pentagram, to simply learn. When I started out I set up on my own; I had never worked for anybody. I’d had to gather the wisdom of experience myself. I hadn’t leant it from anybody.

At Pentagram I found myself in the midst of a diverse and cumulative knowledge base. I had seven successful design partners, some of them working in the latter stages of their careers, and another ten partners at various places around the world. I appreciated it, and I have continued to appreciate it. I must say that all through the 1990s, when I found myself on my own again, almost in every working situation that came up, something that I learnt at Pentagram was there as a resource to call upon. It was fantastic.

What went wrong then?

The problem at Pentagram was that they didn’t actually understand me. I particularly had a problem at Pentagram with the older generation. The younger partners were simply filled with petty envy, which I didn’t care for. I experienced the same problem after leaving Pentagram, for the next ten years in fact, certain clients and marketing directors of corporations not understanding me. They don’t understand anything about me, and they don’t attempt to learn. I appreciate that in them not understanding me I have to take some responsibility to find the language to make myself understood. But I’ll only take half the responsibility. The other half of the responsibility lies with the partner or client to try to understand the person they are working with.

In the years after Pentagram I got particularly frustrated with myself, by my inability to find the language to bridge my instinctive sense of vision about things with business. That frustrated me. In recent years I have come to appreciate advertising agencies. They have managed to find the language, to translate what you see and feel, to translate that into terms that somebody else can appreciate and understand.

But the senior partners at Pentagram didn’t understand where I was coming from. They didn’t like the work I was doing. They told me it wasn’t design. They didn’t see the point in it, nor could they see any value in me nurturing fashion clients or luxury brands. Even Alan Fletcher told me while I was at Pentagram that the design for New Order’s Republic (1992) album was not graphic design. The problem was compounded, at the time, by the fact that I didn’t find a way to help them to get it. I didn’t do myself any favours either going in late, and not wanting to be a part of the team and so forth.

And it seems Pentagram now values the work I did there, which in retrospect I find upsetting and ironic. David Hillman, in particular, takes a distinctly hypocritical position towards me. I was put forward to be a Royal Designer for Industry this year, and David had it stopped. He lodged a personal objection, which didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was when I then heard that Pentagram now includes my work in presentations. The value of those fashion projects with Nick Knight for Jil Sander and Yoji Yamamoto, and Nick’s own book were questioned when I was there. The work was resented because it wasn’t profitable. They doubted the value of it then, but it would seem they don’t now.

I suppose some of this is reflected in the fact that you are variously credited as being a designer, art director and creative director. Which title, if any, are you most comfortable with?

If you want to get a bit of insight into what I do, there is one piece of press worth reading. Andrew O’Hagan wrote a piece for the London Review of Books. I have never met him, nor spoken to him, yet after reading his piece I was astonished. As I read it, I thought, finally someone actually fucking gets it. He quotes me on my influences, on
“film noir meets yellow Daytona. O’Hagan actually understands what I do. The guys at Pentagram didn’t get it, only latterly, resentfully. Most of the companies I worked for, that I failed to strike a successful relationship with, were the same. For the most part all of them have subsequently gone the way I had suggested. When I advised them they weren’t ready to hear it and for the most part they only found out later.

Following you departure from Pentagram you went to Los Angeles. What was that like?

While I was at Pentagram in 1991 I went to Los Angeles for a six-week period, to work on an identity for a television station. I have to say it was the most forceful impact on my visual sensibility in some years. Being there for six weeks, driving along Sunset, taking a call next to the pool on a cordless phone whilst having breakfast, it is a very different experience to Northern Europe. It is very different to being in London. It had quite an effect, the fabulousness of it, and also the truly awfulness of it. There is something I find fascinating about it, and that I quite like.

After I was asked to leave Pentagram, I went to Los Angeles. After six months I knew in my heart that I couldn’t project a future in that place. I remember distinctly driving one Saturday afternoon, through Beverly Hills to Rodeo Drive, to go shopping – again. I remember thinking, I really don’t care. I was driving past these big houses asking myself, ‘is that what you want one day?’ I said no. Once I knew there was nothing there that I wanted, I knew I have to get back – very quickly.

Did your time in Los Angeles help you find the language to bridge the translation barrier, or did it remain a problem into the latter half of the 1990s?

For the most part I learnt the hard way, moving from one nearly successful corporate liaison to another. For example, I fell out with the president of Mandarina Duck, the Italian luggage company, by insisting that the communications programme for the company would have to penetrate the fashion media. I redid the identity in a way that would be acceptable to him, and suggested myself as a positioning consultant for the company. But the president of the company and I just agreed to disagree.

In 1996, he absolutely swore to me that it would be over his dead body that the company be positioned in the fashion media. We had these ongoing debates for a month or so. It was really an Italian generational thing. Fashion to him was la moda, and that if he associated his product with la moda, then it would be out of fashion the next month and that would be the end of Mandarina Duck. I tried to get him to understand that wasn’t the case, that the fashion media is the canvass of lifestyle, that that was where the product had defined itself, within the context of lifestyle. It wasn’t really about fashion but a way of life, which is completely what Mandarina Duck are about.

The sensible, suit version of myself would have just gritted their teeth and persevered. Okay, we can’t quite get what we want but we’ll compromise. We’ll hold on to the client because it’s foolish and rash to say bye-bye, we’ll compromise and do what the client wants and maybe they’ll get it eventually. That’s where I disagree. From a business point of view I am my own worst enemy, because I am not motivated by holding onto somebody’s bank account. I am motivated by doing something good, part and parcel of which is doing the right thing. I’ll be honest and say that there is a high degree of ego in there.

You mean in satisfying yourself?

Yeah. I am motivated by pride. I want to do the right thing, I want to do something great and I want to be associated with doing something great. For me doing something great it doing the right thing – in all ways of understanding the right thing. Timely right, prestigiously right, conceptually right, intellectually right and culturally right. More often than not I can see the right thing. These days, at 48 years of age, if an 18-year-old band are brought tome by some record company, I do not know what the right thing is. I have no idea.

I recently had to do an interview with a magazine the other day about my show opening in Manchester. They asked what my favourite album covers were. I don’t have any favourite album covers. Sure, I have some from when I was a teenager but I am not interested in album covers at the age of 48. I am not interested in them at all. And I don’t know whether the album cover for The Darkness is right, or if The Darkness is any good or not – I don’t really care.

When it comes to questions about what to do with Jaguar, what to do with Fortnum & Mason, what to do with Mandarina Duck or the Aramis division of Este Lauder, I have a pretty good idea what a company should be doing. Very rarely, however, do I meet anybody in the corporate world who senses that I might know, that I might be able to help them. And I don’t court it. I don’t go through the act of nurturing that kind of business.

In London in particular, it is a very high energy, high profile competitive market place for design, brand positioning and marketing. There are a bunch of guys out there with agency backgrounds who really do that stuff, the Power Point presentations and all that. It is kind of grubby and it doesn’t interest me. It doesn’t motivate me. I am motivated by the situation when someone sits down and discusses it with me. I don’t need to go off and research for six weeks.

As I have got the hang of things over the last ten years, and also got to the right age to be able to do it, because that’s crucial, being of equal age or older than the CEOs, the balance is right. I remember John McConnell saying to me at Pentagram, ‘Peter, one of the problems is that you don’t have any grey hair.’

This intuitive sense you speak of, this ability to instinctively know the positioning of a fashion brand or luxury goods item, where does that knowledge derive from?

If you read the press, you always read about what time I get up and so on. In the O’Hagan article, he turns it on its head. He asks if I ever go to sleep. If we call what I do work, if we can call it that, I work very hard. That is all I do. I don’t go on holidays, I don’t go to parties, I go out at night, but to eat, that’s it. My entire life is orientated around a sense of what I am in the midst of.

Do you mean that culturally speaking?

Yes, I am in the midst of my times, and not strictly culturally now. It was cultural when I was young, but now it is more social and political. I am far more political now than ever before. And, for me, it is how these factors influence popular culture. This last year or so, to my feeling, something awful has happened to design, it has got what it wanted. During the 1980s I was part of the last wave of designers who had to coerce industry. Since the last recession, since the mid 1990s, the situation has been entirely different.

The new generation of business doesn’t need any help wanting design. They want it big time. I know that my own work in the 1980s played a part in bringing this about, actually quite an interesting part because I got to them young, with something they loved. The New Order covers achieved something that Knoll and IBM never did, they insinuated themselves into the sensibility of young people.

It is very interesting how it happened, it is something I worked out in this reflective period of the book and exhibition. Traditionally design had one or two big clients and museums as patrons. In general, design didn’t really affect the mainstream. It was pleasing the converted. By injecting a sense of design into teen pop culture, myself and one or two other people set some benchmarks for a generation or two that they were able to take into their adult lives.

This is unusual for pop culture because, normally, when you return from university at age 22, the Grateful Dead posters and Guns ‘n Roses T-shirts had to go. Until the 1980s, you had to shed the ephemera of teen culture like a skin for your adult life, but not if you had a cupboard full of Factory Records. In fact, you wanted your business card to look like that New Order cover, and you wanted your first business to have an identity and a look of a logo.

Are you not somewhat cynical about your achievements then?

Factory endorsed and supported me doing it because we wanted to do something well. We didn’t see the people who bought the records as punters or victims, we saw them as an audience, as collectors. I didn’t see why pop culture had to be so banal and immature, so tawdry. I thought, why can’t this music, which is basically a soundtrack to life, why couldn’t it look good. Why cant it look as good as a BMW looks? Why can’t it have a cultural content that is comparable to what we have in a gallery or museum. Why not?

It is quite questionable how I went about doing it, but the principle was meant well. It was not done to seduce people into buying the product; that was not the intent. It was more one of respect. We said, we can do this badly or we can do this well. We choose to do it well. But business doesn’t operate like that, business is mercenary and ruthless. Business is motivated by profitability. It is not driven by good intent. So, design has become the servant of profitability. And designers are now corporate Casanovas. That’s their job, to seduce and coerce the consumer.

You make Factory Records sounds as if it was founded on some very utopian, idealistic principles.

I spoke to someone recently who is preparing a book on Factory, and I said I couldn’t think of one decision that was ever taken on the basis of profitability, in 14 years. Nobody ever made a decision at Factory based on profitability, that’s why it’s a legend. That’s why it’s a brand. This is what frustrates me the most about many of these brands being rolled out now. At some point in the past all these brands were founded on a belief, on somebody actually doing something they believed in, and in doing it well. That is what is at the heart of BMW or Porsche, somebody wanting to make a good car. Those brands are being shagged to death at the moment. If it was just about survival it wouldn’t be a bad thing, but for the most part it’s to hang on to an unrealistic 20% growth target. I see a big problem in this, and I don’t believe in it. It’s kind of like melting down the family silver each season to make it go a little bit further.


(This interview originally appeared in a 2004 issue of Design Indaba magazine. Only the introduction has been edited.)

Monday, June 22, 2009

Roger Ballen: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness

Roger Ballen's photo of Selma Blair in a Givency Haute Couture hand-felted-wool jacket
with Vulture feathers and trapped-feather-embroidered Georgette dress.

There is something of The Addams Family about Roger Ballen’s photographs, a grotesquery that is also darkly funny. The comparison doesn’t end there. The Addams Family is only a family by default. Before Hollywood, which press-fitted Gomez, Morticia and the rest of the freakish family into a suburban straightjacket, they were simply anonymous cartoon characters.

Dreamt into life by Charles Addams, they first appeared in The New Yorker, in 1938 Over the 50 years that Addams drew for the magazine he continually returned to his impromptu family to articulate his macabre vision. Which is not dissimilar to how Roger Ballen does things.

Over the past decade this geologist cum photographer has often worked with the same people, a cast of downtrodden figures from South Africa’s colourless underclass. Many of them live in Pretoria, others in his native Johannesburg. Collectively they have offered the socially awkward photographer the necessary intimacy to make his unsettling pictures.

Remarking on his process to the Village Voice, Ballen likened his method to that of a well-known Swedish filmmaker: “I consider myself like Ingmar Bergman in some ways, working with the same crew and the same actors year after year.”

His cinematic metaphor was given an uncanny literalness recently when The New York Times asked him to do a Ballen fashion shoot for their T Magazine supplement. The offer, which required Ballen to substitute his usual photographic habitats for a New York location, came with an inducement: the actress Selma Blair would model for him.

“Trish, what movies did that woman I photographed appear in?” the photographer shouts to his secretary.

Ballen is in his Parktown office, which he uses to both run his geology company and warehouse the black and white photographs he makes.

“Legally Blonde and The Fog,” his secretary shouts back. I can tell from his expression that he has seen neither.

After replying in the affirmative to the newspaper’s request, Ballen was emailed a selection of pictures – potential locations for the fashion shoot.

“I really wasn’t that excited by any of them,” he says; this segues into an explanation of how he eventually found the right location.

“My cousin, who lives in upstate New York, told me about this place, an abandoned insane asylum, that might contain the type of spirits I would be interested in.”

On a visit to New York in July 2004, Ballen accompanied his cousin to the asylum, located near the city of Poughkeepsie. The place was locked up. A couple of phone calls later and he made contact with its caretaker.

Ballen explained his request, the derelict precinct’s minder finally agreeing to show the photographer through the 80 or so abandoned buildings the following day. The visit yielded an outcome, Ballen finding a space containing the appropriate mix of psychic malevolence, deteriorated texture and available light.

Location sorted, he then rushed back to New York – the photographer needed props to give his shoot that essential Ballen feel, being bits of wire, charcoal (to draw on the wall with), masks, children’s toys and a cast of cute and not-so-cute animals. Just how he was going to use the rat, lizard and hairless Sphynx cat remained a mystery, even to Ballen.

“I never really have a total preconception of what I am going to do. I have to rely on my own sense of imagination to feel out things and decide what I am going to do next.”

The shoot lasted three days. On the first, he took still photographs. These included a picture of a $60-thousand diamond necklace placed alongside a dead goldfish.

The Hollywood model proved much livelier by comparison. Ballen describes Blair as “very professional” and eager to engage with his prompts.

“She had the right kind of personality, wasn’t scared of putting a rat in her mouth or picking up a snake. She felt the nature of the place.”

Not so the entourage of fashion stylists and photographic assistants.

“Most of the people I worked with on the shoot had headaches, and were feeling sick from the place. It was claustrophobic and had a lot of dust. I always said I was quite immune to the place because I normally work in crowded, very difficult conditions.” The explanation is delivered with Ballen’s typically droll New York twang.

Looking back on the experience, his first ever fashion editorial, Ballen is ponderous.

“I had never done a fashion shoot in my life. I never even considered it, to be honest. My photographs are so far from being romantic and sentimental that I think most people would probably run away from me.” He titters at the admission.

A glance through any fashion glossy will bear out his statement. For the most part, fashion photography is about the seduction of the unattainable, thin bodies, abstract hairdos, maximum bling. Ballen’s photographs, however, plunge one into a world of Gucci gone horribly wrong.

Turns out though that T Magazine was “absolutely delighted” with the gothic horror of his shoot. Less so a reader who complained about the photographs and their relationship to prison abuse in Iraq. Ballen bemusedly shakes his head.

“There is humour in them, like all my pictures. And then there is something disturbing and dark in the pictures.”

I forsake the Addams family analogy and ask him to explain the humour element, in his own words. After all, these are not pictures that scream out obvious funny.

“If I had to say what these pictures are about I would call them tragic comedy or dark humour. I would say they are half disturbing and half funny. It is an interesting tension.”

He mentions Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophical musings included the assertion, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

Ballen’s choice of quote is equally loaded: “When you laugh, you cry.” When I check to verify the quote afterwards, I find that the quote is repeatedly credited to the actor Roberto Benigni.

To be fair, the quote’s attribution is really unimportant. What Ballen is trying to explain is his existential worldview. Also how this impacts on his photography, which in equal measures evoke a world of laughter and sorrow, horror and delight.

The playwright Samuel Beckett neatly summarised this contradiction when he said, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

Ghoulish laughter aside, where do these pictures fit into Ballen’s overall catalogue? Are they just a cute indulgence or do they dialogue with his local photographs?

“It is really hard for me to get to the bottom of these pictures,” he responds. The admission is prefaced by a lengthy attempt to speak in words what he prefers to say in pictures. His explanation is, by turns, obscure and definitive.

“It is conglomeration of 55 years of travelling through time, developing a way of being and seeing through photography that incorporates all sorts of aspects of my life.”

Interview concluded we chitchat for a while. I mention an abandoned leprosy mission on the outskirts of Pretoria. I add that it is very close to where some of the people he regularly photographs stay. His eyes light up.

“How do I get there,” he asks excitedly.

(This piece ran pretty much as you read it in the Lifestyle supplement of the Sunday Times, sometime early in 2006, I think.)

A Japanese weekend


Architect Tadao Ando, photographed at Punta della Dogana,
the Venetian customs house he retrofitted for collector
Francois Pinault, June 2009. Photo: Sean O'Toole



The bus station outside is a purposeful swirl of activity, despite the early morning hour. The man next to me yawns and rubs his sleepy eyes. He works in a bank. He told me this the night before, as the bus from Tokyo to Tokushima City crawled west through Japan’s muggy summer dark. He is visiting his wife. She is a teacher, bureaucratically assigned to Tokushima, a non-descript provincial town on Japan’s western island of Shikoku. She is pregnant; he is visiting for the long weekend. So am I.

Exiting the bus I spot Misako. She waves. Deep-set dimples hint at the intensity of her smile. A former work colleague, I notice that her neat, shoulder-length crop of hair has hints of grey. We shake hands, awkwardly embrace. Bag in hand I follow Misako to her car. It has been four years since I last visited this vaguely melancholic landscape. I am eager to explore it again.

Oddly enough, it is a South African writer who has most helped me make sense of Japan, my experience on that lonely archipelago at the rising of the morning sun. He is William Plomer. In October 1926, Plomer accompanied his friend Laurens van der Post aboard the steamer Canada Maru for a fortnight tour of Japan. The tour was a thank you of sorts, sponsored by an Osaka-based shipping company, allegedly in gratitude for assistance Van der Post had given two Japanese journalists subjected to racist insults in Pretoria.

When the Canada Maru eventually returned for Durban, 25-year-old Plomer was not aboard. In his autobiography, Yet Being Someone Other (1982), Van der Post would later recall that Plomer, standing forlornly on the Kobe quayside, looked “disturbingly” like a “Dickensian… orphan seeking food and asylum in the slums of a great city”. Plomer went on to find sustenance in Japan: by the time he left the country, in March 1929, Plomer had completed his first collection of short stories, Paper Houses (1929), and his second novel, Sado (1931), both set in Japan.

I first read Plomer’s writings on Japan while on a bus journey to Tokushima, many years before the current one. I was returning from a weekend in Osaka, Japan’s ribald capital of comedy, to Tokushima, where I had been assigned to teach English. Tokushima is a small port town on the east of Shikoku, an island renowned for little more than its astringent limes, strenuous thousand-year-old Buddhist pilgrimage, and odd collection of famous writers, Kenzaburo Oe included. Mostly, though, Shikoku is known for its crumbling rusticity, Japanese-style.

Once you exit the freeway, the main road into Tokushima City, Route 55, is lined with used car dealerships, beauty salons, bookstores, even the odd MacDonalds. Journeying through this landscape again, first on the bus, then again in the Misako’s car headed for her home, I was again compelled by how strikingly prosaic it all is. Ordinary.

Occidentals, South Africans included, have long been participants in the construction of a fantastical Japan that has little bearing on reality. Plomer’s collection, Paper Houses, runs counter this narrative, offering a “rather ramshackle collection of Japanese stories and impressions,” to quote one reviewer. Such honesty, though, is not always appreciated.

“[Plomer] makes the mistake of not writing as a Westerner interpreting the East”, remarked the Saturday Review of Literature (November 9, 1929), adding that he “resolutely excludes not only all glamour, but all sense of exoticism and novelty as well.” In other words, to denude Japan of its apparent exoticism is to expose the west’s craving for the fictional succor of an east that barely exists.

One small part of this lingering fiction defines the Japanese as inveterate Spartans and innately aesthetic. Misako’s pre-fabricated modern home defies all sense of this. Like the irregular urban planning and messy clutter of overhead electrical wiring that outwardly characterises domestic Japan, Misako’s stock-standard house is a chaotic mix of imported styles and old world inheritances.

A large western-style leather sofa sits inelegantly on the tatami, tightly bound rectangular reed mats that over time have become units of measure in house building. In modern Japan, however, tradition is no longer inviolate. Misako’s tokonoma, that small, symbolically significant alcove built into the living room of most Japanese homes, and typically used for ornate flower displays and traditional calligraphy, is decorated with an jumble of telephone directories and school sweaters.

Misako is married. Similar to the man who sat next to me on the bus, Misako understands the word family to mean love in a dispersed form. Two years ago her husband, Hiroshi, a policeman, was transferred into the mountains that rise steeply from the outskirts of Tokushima City. Traditionally, Misako and her youngest, school-going daughter would have accompanied him. The old ways are, however, no longer inviolate. Misako still lives in town, alone.

Driving into the mountains to visit Hiroshi, Misako tells me how the education ministry has incrementally scaled-down what used to be a luxurious twice-yearly bonus. Fifteen years of persistent recession is affecting all aspects of daily life in Japan, she sighs. In Tokyo, this has manifested itself in the increasing number of homeless, their cardboard and blue tarpaulin homes colonising quiet backstreets and inner city parks. On Shikoku, along the winding mountain road that leads to Hiroshi’s village, Japan’s economic malaise is defined slightly differently.

Alongside absorbing rustic charms – bamboo groves, rice terraces and single-lane tracks – Shikoku also offers the visitor views of concrete rivers, each patterned in a manner resembling Zen gardens, and mountains made static with strikingly visual symmetrical retainer walls. “The Utopia Song,” penned for the Ministry of Construction’s Road Bureau, sums up the character of this visual assault: “asphalt blanketing the mountains and the valleys… a splendid utopia”.

Remarking on this rather troubling aspect of modern-day Japan, journalist Patrick Smith, in his informative history, Japan: A Reinterpretation (1998), observes: “Throughout Japan today there are countless highways to nowhere special, useless bridges, unneeded sea breaks, ruthless land reclamation projects, half-built resort schemes, and deserted ‘technopolis’ centres intended to make rustics familiar with high technology devices.”

Adds Smith writes: “These projects have done little for the decentralization of Japan but everything for Japanese contractors – the frenzy for building has had little to do with the Japanese need to improve their lives, or how they want to live. The building has continued, needed or not, to keep the postwar machine in motion.” Their is a shorthand for all this: pork barrel politics. It has been a defining feature of Japan’s post-boom economy.

A simple tabulation of facts bears this out. Japan’s total production of cement in 1970, in what is generally considered a boom period, was 57,190,000 metric tons. Production in 1994, early into during the ruinous “lost decade,” reached 91,620,000 tons, far exceeding total US production in the same year (77,900,000 tons). In 1996, 311,210 public construction projects used a total of 94,490,000 tons of cement.

All of this has helped create a bizarre dependency among inefficient corporations and moribund economic sectors, much of it centred on construction. “Japan never built up a huge public welfare system, but it has instituted safety nets and subsidies to create a welfare state for companies and towns and declining industries,” summarised Nicholas Kristof in a 1999 New York Times article. While pervasive, this sort of “welfare dependency” has its opponents. In 1999, Tokushima Prefecture’s conservative residents controversially upset the status quo when they vetoed the proposed construction of an unnecessary flood control dam. Their vote made national news.

Arriving in Wajiki, where Hiroshi is second in command, Japan’s troubled economic system is notionally a distant thing. The rural farming hamlet is, at face value, still attuned to the rhythm of an older Japan. Hiroshi suggests we visit a bathhouse, that genial place of repose and amiable chatter.

In the afternoon, we visit nearby Kakurinji, the Crane Forest Temple; it is hidden high on a mountaintop, and accessible only by foot or cable car. The temple forms part of Shikoku’s famous 88-temple pilgrimage route. Established in 807 by Kukai (774-835), a student of Esoteric Buddhism in ninth century China, the route links remote mountain and seaside temples across Shikoku. Originally monks faithful to Kukai (also known as Kobo Daishi) followed the route; commoners only embarked on the 1500-kilometre journey during the late Edo period (1603-1867). It is now equally popular with pensioners and students looking for an alternative summer break.

I completed the pilgrimage for teh first time in 2000, again in 2006, this time by bicycle. It is somewhat unusual activity in that the pilgrimage has no definitive destination, nor does it have any real goal. Unlike the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, for example, or the Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Shikoku pilgrimage posits no holy endpoint; the circular passage of the route is its essence, the circle assuming both a literal and figurative importance – no beginning, no end.

The sober grandeur and religiosity of Wajiki’s temple, with its 800-year-old cedars, proves to be a stark counterpoint to the bawdy fun of the fireworks festival held later in the valley bellow. Old men get drunk. Teenage girls dressed in summer kimonos coquettishly engage with flirtatious boys wearing oversized hip hop clothing. A man wearing a white helmet, blue overall and red flashing stick guides the traffic.

Fireworks done with, their fragrant aftermath long blown down the valley, we retire to Hiroshi’s dilapidated two-bedroom apartment, an outwardly grubby structure that is the complete antithesis to the venue of our next day’s travels, architect Tadao Ando’s sublime Hompukuji, otherwise known as the Lotus Temple.

Located on Awaji Island, between Shikoku and neighbouring Honshu, this temple utterly unlike any other of Japan’s numerous religious buildings. Situated in a typical fishing village, on an elevated position overlooking Osaka Bay, one enters the temple through a freestanding concrete wall with a doorway cut through it. (Non-loadbearing walls are a common feature in Ando's repertoire.) The Lotus Temple’s chief feature, however, is a staircase that pierces through a lotus pond, the ash-grey concrete stairs leading to a hall of worship beneath.

Commissioned on the strength of a powerful congregation member who championed Ando’s austere work, the smoothly textured finish and sleek concrete grain are, ironically perhaps, a testament to Japan’s masterly tradition of wood carpentry. The wooden forms into which Ando’s concrete is poured are reputed to be less prone to leaking, the watertight shuttering producing perfectly formed concrete structures.

Commenting on the temple, architectural critic Cheryl Kent writes: “Few of Ando’s projects better represent the challenges and comforts this architect offers to Japanese culture than [the Lotus Temple]… Less a building than a series of shaped sensual experiences, the Lotus Temple is a radical challenge to centuries-old conventions governing temple design in Japan”.

There is no refuting this insight, although Ando’s structure also stands as the apotheosis of a culture that now worships concrete, not wood, the material over the insubstantial. More prosaically, its show-off quality is also a tad dangerous.

Bored and in need of smoke, Hiroshi tramples across the temple’s pebbled landscape to a small verge. The white stones introduced to the site to compliment its aesthetics give way under the gauche policeman’s feet – he slips and lies spreadeagled on his back. Laughing, Misako and I run up to him. Hiroshi grumbles disconsolately as he stands up, then nonchalantly pats his polyester pants and back.

Later, in a ramshackle little restaurant near the Lotus Temple, while brooding over a beer and snacking on a starter of takoyaki, a fried octopus dish particular to the Kansai region, Hiroshi indulges in the Japanese cultural inclination to speak epigrammatically. During this clipped exchange Misako reminds him of the time, five years before, when he sulkily sat in the car, refusing to visit Kyoto’s famed Ginkakuji, or Silver Pavilion. Hiroshi frowns, becomes even more sullen.

“These buildings don’t mean anything to me,” I distinctly remember him saying back then.

Was he just being morose? I couldn’t quite figure him out at the time, still can’t as he sits quietly opposite me munching on his okonomiyaka, pausing only to take a sip of beer. Most likely yes, but I also like to think that in his sullen defiance Hiroshi was staking a claim to a Japan that has little to do with exotic buildings and far-flung places. Objects and habitats that evoke a Japan ever out of reach.

(This article originally appeared in the Mail & Guardian's monthly Leisure supplement, sometime late in 2004.)