Text
Money Loves Money
Historically weaving paved the way for the first automated loom by JM Jacquard, and this in turn led Charles Babbage to create the basis for the modern computer. This play between analogue and digital is the technical backbone of a lot of my weaving work. Text, textile and texture are integral components. Language, history and patterns inform my artistic practice, especially those relating to southern Africa. This includes cultural phenomena such as racism, migration and the lingering aftermath of colonialism. I work with skilled African crafts-people to realize labour-intensive concepts.
Since my first exhibition, I have been dealing with texts that resonate for me. Classic books such as Animal Farm by George Orwell and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad inspire me. Ideological texts such as The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau also interest me. The idea versus the translation that inevitably occurs when it is put into practice fascinates me.
‘The original is unfaithful to the translation’ – Jorge Luis Borges.
And money, I love money. Money loves money. I have seen money corrupt and I have seen money become completely worthless in my home country of Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean dollar was the name of 4 official currencies in Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2009. In 2009 after hyper-inflation hit Z$300 trillion to US$1 on the blackmarket, it was abandoned in favour of the US dollar. In 2014, the Zimbabwe central bank announced that the US dollar, South African rand, Botswana pula, pound sterling, Euro, Australian dollar, Chinese yuan (renminbi), Indian rupee, and Japanese yen would all be accepted as legal currency within the country.
The US dollar was by far the favourite until it began to run out. In 2016 Zimbabwe began to offer bond notes as a form of legal tender pegged to the US dollar. Despite the notes being notionally pegged to the US dollar, their value, like the former Zimbabwean dollar, is collapsing, with everyday transactions using a rate of $3 bond notes to 1 US dollar in January 2019 and over $90 bond notes to 1 US dollar as of November 2020.
In February 2019, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe Governor announced that the bond notes would be part of the “values” that make up the new currency to be added into the Zimbabwean market, the RTGS dollar along with the bond coins and electronic balances. The Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) dollar or RTG (Zimdollar or zollar, now abbreviated as ZWL or ZWL$) was the only official currency in Zimbabwe from June 2019 to March 2020, after which foreign currency was allowed again. (Wikipedia)
This exhibition looks at past and present realities in southern Africa. It is an area that has been and continues to be exploited both by foreign powers and also those in control of government. We cannot seem to shake off the past, perhaps because it has never been properly addressed and dealt with accordingly. The legacy of colonialism and lack of appropriate reparations has left a deeply divided and highly unequal society. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority and poverty is widespread. Land stolen during the years of colonial conquest is to a large extent still being inherited by the privileged descendants of those colonial masters.
‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ – William Faulkner
This monopoly on wealth is also reflected in the controversial South African phrase ‘White Monopoly Capital’ used to describe the continued economic dominance of Whites in post-Apartheid South Africa.
The origin of the term, the exact meaning of the term, and even the existence of what the term is thought to mean is disputed. The term is thought to mean everything from an oligopoly owned by a super wealthy white elite that dominates large sectors of the economy consisting of colluding monopolies to business groups that are critical of corruption and alleged state capture within the administration of former South African president Jacob Zuma.
The phrase gained contemporary notoriety when it gained widespread use in 2016. Former president Jacob Zuma used the term to reject calls for him to step down as president amidst corruption allegations against him involving his relationship with the controversial Gupta family.
The British public relations agency Bell Pottinger used the term to describe opposition to the Zuptas (Zuma and the Guptas) and sow racial division in South Africa. The aim of the campaign was to portray the Zuptas as victims of a conspiracy involving ‘white monopoly capital’ to deflect accusations and evidence of their client’s involvement in corruption and state capture, and to suggest that ‘white monopoly capital’ is actively blocking transformation in South Africa. In 2017 Bell Pottinger went bankrupt as a result of this scandal in South Africa. (Wikipedia)
Lately we have been seeing the expansion of Chinese interests in Africa and there are some fears that this might constitute a form of neo-colonialism. Only time will tell. As George Orwell stated in his book 1984:
‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Coronavirus MT324062 2020
Coronavirus MT324062 2020 Hand-woven archival ink-jet prints 64 x 90 cm
Coronavirus MT324062 detail
detail
The Lake magazine #27 150619 Words: Rick de la Ray Photography: Oliver Kruger
p16-21 July 2019
Skaraborgs Allehanda 13 December 2017 Roland Svensson
https://sla.se/skovde/2017/12/12/konstnar-visar-zimbabwes-historia
Mail & Guardian Sept18-13 2009 pg8
Dan Halter’s works: images, maps and transactions
Francesco Tedeschi 2008
(translated from Italian)
The geographical and cultural location Dan Halter lives in is both peculiar and specific, with a direct influence on the spirit of his work. Even in a world where everything appears to be connected economically and culturally, no one can fully understand the art of Dan Halter (30 years old, born in Harare, Zimbabwe and working in Cape Town, South Africa for the last couple of years) without linking it to characteristics of the places in which he has lived. This can be seen in the works recently showcased at the Joao Ferreira Gallery in Cape Town – where he had his first solo exhibition in 2006 – now shown in part in Milan.
The profile of the artist becomes clear through works that display, as often today, a wide range of techniques, materials and themes. His work shows the ability to interpret some of the social and economic problems of his native country, without treating them too didactically.
It is the starting point of elaborations showing a symbolic and reflexive approach to the world we live in. It aims to activate the possible cathartic function of the art object, moving from the descriptive to the representative. Among the subjects of his work, particular attention is devoted to some aspects of a “local” reality, which properly reflect matters of a “global” nature. The reorder of the national organization through the measure and reinterpretation of land assignment, the surrender to an unbearable inflation, and the continuous presence of the HIV virus: problems that determine the lives of both individuals and the community of the country. This is combined with the aftermath of a difficult post-colonial period.
Such subjects would be enough to induce judgement on the degree of influence the “political” sphere may have on the works which, in this way, meet a sensibility typical of the most recent art¹. Considering Halter’s work as a product of today’s aesthetic models, and being able to foresee that it may soon draw interest on an international basis, one still needs to take account of its level of originality. Important in his corpus are maps of Zimbabwe that are made by weaving together shredded documents such as the country’s banknotes, telephone directories and books chosen for their content. The theme of geographical maps, among the most intriguing in the artist’s work are based on linguistic and rhetorical, as well as formal meanings of possible representations. This often blends with an implicitly critical judgement on the way the interpretation of the territory is linked to strategic and political agendas, in a set of rules that readily displays the effect of power.
As shown in the studies of a French geographer who devoted himself to studying the meaning of the demarcation of borders, Claude Raffestin, every form of border or territorial subdivision is more or less directly connected to a form of control or possession, and as the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar underlined in one of his works of 1989, which compared images to the life conditions of the inhabitants of a village in Nigeria with the world routes of oil, in an immediate comparison between “Us” and “Them”, speaking about geography is the same, in some sense, as speaking about war. (“Geography = War” was the title of that work, presented at the “Centre Pompidou” in Paris in the famous exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre”).
Even Dan Halter’s maps, with their textual indications, show forms of subordination to an order imposed from on high, but also suggest different possible meanings linked to the phrases embroidered on them, quotations from popular culture and local proverbs. The internal boundaries, marked by the colours of the different areas delineate different farming regions. Every form of description contains a comment or a judgement and there is no neutral denotation, particularly in geography. Whether or not he posed such questions based on theoretical reflections about the geographic discipline, Dan Halter still gives a version that joins the exterior and visible element with an internal discourse, explicitly given by the fragmentation and combination of lines and letters that form the fabric of the map. Observing them directly, in fact, these maps show a refined skill in the process of weaving, that combines linear, vertical, and horizontal arrangements, according to the virtual structuring that is superimposed on each geographical representation to determine a form of orientation, in a unique and fragile tapestry of magical consistency that is reminiscent of Alighiero Boetti’s maps. This technical aspect is differently and personally resolved by Halter.
Along with the maps, and confirming a passage through practices that in the artistic field recall conceptual typologies, we then have the print and video elaborations that show without comment the names of the farms that underwent government siezure, a sort of horizontal map, produced by the nominal information, that will become temporal sequence and writing seemingly with no target, monotonous and occlusive. This form of description is also part of a “geographical” attitude that moves towards a proposition, at the image level, of motifs that illustrate the characteristics of a place. Among these there is the use of currencies of a certain kind, and money which forms the fabric of some of his maps, and also provides the theme for further works by the artist, beginning with the two supermarket till receipts. These are from purchasing monochromatic objects, only black or white, interpreting the transaction in a symbolic way, that naturally brings us back to the problem of coexistence of populations with different skin colours, after centuries of colonialism in that part of the African Continent. Putting money at the centre of the aesthetic operation is, in a way, like a form of manifestation or confirmation of an relational aesthetic taken back to its most immediate level, as if through objects, things that are bought or sold, are traces of lost gestures, that are visually recorded, like mental images. One could confer to the artistic object a scope that goes beyond its immediate impact, to inscribe it in a metaphoric dimension, raised above the banality in which the use confines the object. The little stylized statue in fibreglass, that shows an embrace between a black maternal figure and a smaller white child, represents the union and coexistence of different ethnic roots, but its repetition raises it from a banal object of example or decoration to a different connotation, where it is considered as an instrument of communication, more for its function than its meaning.
At this level, the modus of interacting with things and images is based on the observation of the conditions of daily life perceived by the inhabitants of a region of the world that the artist interprets, joining the inevitable sense of empathy with what happens in other parts of the world, within a geography of communication efficiently represented by his plastic mesh bags, which are the object in which his writing through a process of sewing is not far from the one of another African artist, Ghada Amer. For the Egyptian artist the procedure of sewing and using it to produce messages regarding the feminine identity is an essential way of working. Halter uses this modus operandi in a way peculiar to some of his works, following a dual approach: technical in the manual aspect that distinguishes a part of his production, and conceptual, using it along with other ways of image communication. Words become images, for example, in a neon sign, like the word “pefection” instead of “perfection” is enscribed out of a cursive- type script in Black Light, or in the matches and matchboxes forming his original typeface “Font for a Revolution/Zimbabwe”. Often an African proverb is used as a sign of communication based on correspondence between images and words.
Halter uses different techniques and forms of elaboration, often poetic, that focus on certain themes derived from reality to convey a sense of precariousness and at the same time vitality in every image that becomes representative of a collective experience perceived and recorded through extremely personal eyes.
¹Dan Halter said in a statement that he is not interested in expressing a specific “moral judgment” in his work, even though he’s deeply interested in representing the conditions of life he observes around him. It’s obvious that a strictly “political” interpretation of his works would easily limit its comprehension to the most immediate denotative level, ignoring the all important formal and symbolic aspects.
Know Thy Enemy, Know Thy Self
Khwezi Gule 2006
I don’t like Dan’s art. In fact there is a lot of art I don’t like. But that is not to say it is bad (aesthetically), misguided or insincere.
Fortunately my profession demands that I must engage with art that is not necessarily to my taste and art that promotes ideologies that aren’t consistent with my own and to understand its origins, the contexts in which it is produced. I am also required to take into account the technical and visual acumen that informs its production.
Unfortunately, all this does not make me like the work. So what is it that I don’t like about Dan’s work? In the first place it is too nice. I have used the word nice for all the innocuous connotations that come with it. I find it as innocuous as some of the terminology that is used these days to describe murder of civilians such as “collateral damage” and “extraordinary rendition” to gloss over kidnapping.
A while ago I received an email from a friend with a link called Fallujah Pictures. What I subsequently saw was the kind of thing that messes up your day and makes you lose your appetite but at the same time there was a sense that at least this kind of information was getting out there so it was good because these are the kinds of things that the embedded media finds too inflammatory to screen. Having said that however I had to wonder what I expected to see when I clicked on that link. It is not that I thought that the siege on Fallujah was without casualty or that it would not be bloody. So what is it that made it remote until I saw those pictures?
The point about this story is that there are many things in the community of nations that are vile. What do these images of other people and their suffering really tell us about who they are and the places they live? How do you make sense of the conflicting reports that come from those places beyond merely identifying those who look like us and sound like us? What has been interesting in the many discussions that have happened since 9/11 is in trying to define who and what the enemy is. How far in the hierarchy of the world’s victims do white Zimbabweans fit in and how far in the hierarchy of perpetrators do they fit in? What about South Africans and all those nations who think they are oh so good?
So when Dan asked me to write for the catalogue it was important for me to understand his work and where it was coming from. Because, in my thinking at least, I have abandoned the desire to write about art in such as way that my text is an elaboration of the artist’s statement. This piece of writing is less about Dan and his art than what I bring with me to the conversation. Not that I have been completely insensitive to what Dan is trying to say but that my engagement is as loaded as the work themselves nor do I expect his work to answer any of these questions. But I do expect him to ask himself and those who are close to him some hard questions and maybe that is precisely what he is trying to do.
You see, in light of the very complicated “challenges” of coming to terms with sheer scale of human tragedy that is unfolding around us there was no way that I could write about Dan’s work without bringing all of that luggage with me to the writing process. It is precisely because his work delves into these unsavoury territories of fear, paranoia, race, power, farm attacks both those perpetrated by employees on farmers and by farmers on employees that I have to go beneath the surface of his work. It is like when my friend Joe says there is contempt in the eyes of black people even as they bow and smile and rub their hands. It is that same look of contempt that I see in the eyes of white blue and white-collar workers even while they are calling me “Sir”.
But it is necessary for people to take the sting out of what they are experiencing or to lessen the pain of their memories. Dan’s life is replete with the contradictions of being a white person in the world today and if you look closely, behind the lines so does his art. You see from where I stand it is easy to dismiss Dan’s work as the anxieties of a white Zimbabwean bemoaning his paradise lost and to reduce his experiences here in South Africa as a spoilt rich boy who does art to titillate himself and his Michaelis-trained friends. And so I dislike the fact that his art is cool.
It is also the thing I detest I a lot of South African art. How can you aestheticise horror? Perhaps to do so is the only way to deal with it without letting it consume you. To stare at it obliquely lest you be blinded by the sight, to understand it, to come to terms with it. Maybe not to make peace with it but at least to come to terms with it and ultimately to confront it. So maybe I have spoken too soon.
There are of course many other things that are implicated in the subject-matter that the artist is delving into: the machinations of the liberal press, the viciousness of the attacks, arbitrary state power, the besieged settler mentality and its gun culture that is so aptly described in Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and one that afflicts many a community including many white South Africans, large sections of the Israeli population. There is also embedded in discourses about Zimbabwe many of the same assumptions that frame the way people talk about African societies which is to look at contemporary African society solely in terms of what has been lost instead of what has been gained as well as the possibility of what can be achieved.
In all fairness though there are no spaces in the chaotic world that we live in that do not in some way compromise us in some way even less when you are trying to earn money from the art industry, so I can’t judge. But I do judge. Because what is art other than something to be sold. An artist once said that his paintings are like his children. Well you don’t go selling your children, I thought. But then again we do and a whole set of other gruesome things as well.
These are all the kinds of things that happen in which we are implicated in one way or the other. And for those of us who chose to do or say something about them have to take some responsibility for what we say. Our motto should be: let me judge so that I too may be judged.
So what is to be done? The one thing that can be done is that we can take responsibility for the person that we are or have become. For instance Dan is white and that’s not his fault but he still has to take responsibility for it. The same applies for the fact that he holds a Swiss passport, that he is an ex-Zimbabwean living in South Africa and a man that lives in a Capitalist society that demands he sell his produce. It is a terrible feature of contemporary society that you have to be accountable to a society that you had no hand in creating.
But he is also as artist and on that score he has tremendous power to determine what he produces. I don’t know what his art would look like if it was to bring all of these issues to the fore. I certainly do not want to see blood-splatters and severed limbs. That is something for Dan to solve as his career develops and as he delves ever deeper into these murky waters. A conciliatory note to Dan is that he could do no better if he was a flower painter. No one could. It is unfair to expect another Guernica but the video of toyi-toyi/rave video starts coming close to exposing that raw nerve but it still panders to being cool.
In the end to know your enemy you have to also know yourself and one of the ways you get to know the enemy is by looking at his art. If Dan’s work is able to make South Africans and Zimbabweans look at themselves with the disgust they deserve, maybe then I might like it a bit more.
Good luck Dan. You have your work cut out for you.
See the exhibition mentioned in this article.
