ROBERT  SLINGSBY    HOME / PAINTING / SCULPTURE / INSTALLATIONS / Works on Paper / EDITORIAL / BIOGRAPHY

'CC - Unlimited power' 2010 UCT Irma Stern Museum South African Art Times July 2010 Lloyd Pollak

For the past thirty years, a specific location, a specific people, and a specific culture have been the wellspring of Robert Slingsby's art. The place is Richtersveld in the Northern Cape. The people are the Nama, the descendants of the nigh extinct San, and the culture is the animism to which their ancestors gave concrete expression by whittling their cosmogony into stone millennia ago.

Holistic ideals of balance and harmony were the foundation of Khoisan spirituality in which man and nature form a continuum. The petroglyphs served ritualistic goals as keyholes into the beyond, and their flinty magic unleashed itself during ritual trance dances when they mediated congress between the shaman and the ancestral spirits, divinities and cosmic forces who spoke through him to the tribe.

The hundreds of thousands of inscribed rocks scattered throughout the Richtersveld present a hallowed world in which the earth, the firmament, the rain, rivers, crops, flora and fauna are all seen as living forces in constant communication with mankind. Slingsby's intimate contact with these shingly masterpieces gave him keen appreciation of the Sans spiritual wisdom and reverence for nature, and his paintings form a tribute to this defunct tradition.

The artists intaglio technique of incising motifs into smooth surfaced acrylic canvases mirrors the San art of inscribing motifs into rock. Prolonged communing with the petroglyphs has trained his eye to diagrammaticise the visual universe, and his mark making invokes the San lexicon of mystic signs and symbols. A runic script of miniaturised crosses, crescents, arrows, triangles, circles, concentric rings, starts pentagrams, stripes, zigzags, ovals, spirals and dots fill the field, and provide a philosophical yardstick whereby we can evaluate the ethical implications of the large scale, figurative motifs.

'Mechanical factor' voices the artists fear that rampant consumerism and global warming - phenomena inconceivable within the context of traditional Khoisan culture - jeopardise the survival of earth and mankind. The car dominates his iconography, and although it spells freedom and the open road, it also implies acquisitive profligacy, the carbon fuelled economy and mans violation of nature. Abandoned jalopys spill over the canvas, surrounding its central feature, the hugely magnified bucket of the excavator that will serve as a dump for the phalanx of aggressive vehicles relegated to the scarp heap by the strategy of planned obsolescence. man is absent, and the convertibles and limousines with their long phallic bonnets become a stand-in for humanity and its lust for self-aggrandizement, wealth and power.

The gigantic scale and heavily accented three dimensionality of the monstrous bucket imbue it with greater reality than anything else in the painting. the voracious toothed jaw of this behemoth gives it a threatening presence as it impatiently waits to be filled with the junk that will soon engulf the planet. Horror vacui composition, teeming pullulations of wriggly, hyperactive lines, and their bleep and flash of vividly contrasting high-key hues, convey the souped-up pace of this urban jungle, and the San emblemata function as atropopaic amulets and talismans warding off imminent catastrophe.

Slingsby views Green Point stadium as an architectural fanfaronade of fascist tendency, and in 'Conspicuous consumption', this enormity is planted amidst a devastated landscape strewn with San hierograms. Centuries before the Dutch arrived, this site was the stomping ground of the San, yet the stadium, modeled on a Xhosa headdress, fails to acknowledge their presence and contribution. Helicopters patrol the sky and act as instruments of surveillance and control, and the clash of fiery reds and burnt-earth blacks expresses the artists rage and indignation.

The 'progress' and 'development' wrought by globalization are seen as morally regressive, and the stadium - the hubristic outcome of megalomaniac town planning - becomes an embodiment of the historic forces that visited genocide upon the San.

'Blind rage at Rooiwal' is a literal, rather than an imaginative, response to the utter destitution in which the Nama now live. Photographs reveal that Slingsby simply reproduces this ethnic scrap heap, and the verbatim approach proves both compositionally and stylistically unsatisfactory. The bulk of the painting is a yawning void; the demolished churches visually unexciting' and the linear stylization of the clouds and kopjes jar with the naturalistic idiom applied to the boy and horse.

The artists approach veers from the representational to de-centred, all-over, semi-abstract, compositions like 'Moment of flight' and 'In ten minutes'. In the latter, swinging arcs and swirling lines spin over the canvas, weaving a jiggling linear web of colour zones and overlapping syncopated lines. Scale is uniform, and the highly energised surfaces appear completely unified. However such aesthetic harmony comes at a price, for the insistent patterning and boogie-woogie rhythms distract us from whatever message the artist seeks to convey.

One questions whether the jitter, agitato and zoom of Slingsby's kinetically over-charged style can adequately covey the gravity of his subject matter. All too often the simplified imagery suggests comic book & toy box sources rather than the art of the San. In tandem with keyed-up candy floss pinks and pillar box reds, it creates a blend far too frolicsome and exuberant to convincingly enact the artists prophecies of doom.

Slingsby's most memorable and emotive paintings are his smoldering red apocalypse like 'Apathy of entitlement'. A skeletal colossus, akin to the therianthropes of traditional San art, looms over the poisoned landscape strewn with emblems of oppression - ancestral bones, graveyard crosses, manacles, union jacks, ox wagons and bayonets. This emaciated personification of the Nama people fixes the viewer with a baleful accusatory stare that incriminates us in his degradation. His grey flesh, starved body, skull-like head and supplicating pose pronounce him in extremis. Although death appears imminent, wings sprout from his back as he enters a trance traveling beyond space and time in search of supernatural strength.

Another product of the catastrophic imagination is seen in the tortured San titan frozen in a crucificatory pose amidst a holocaustal landscape in 'Pushing the limit'. Can the San possibly survive, these paintings ask. It is our obligation to provide a positive answer.

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