It would be somewhat reductive to describe the reception of Roger Ballen’s work in love-him-or-hate-him terms; nevertheless, it is fair to say that he provokes strong responses.
American-born Ballen has lived in SA for about four decades since he hitchhiked from Cairo to Cape Town in 1974. The deep (and dark) psychoanalytic approach that drives his oeuvre is undoubtedly inflected by the country’s sociopolitical morass, though this is not a strong feature of his reputation internationally.
Ballen may be perceived as something of an anomaly on the local arts scene, but he is committed to supporting his fellow artists — a commitment that led, in 2007, to the establishment of a foundation in his name “dedicated to the advancement and appreciation of photography in SA”. Earlier this year Ballen opened the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Forest Town, Johannesburg, where he will host exhibitions related to “issues relevant to the African continent”.
The centre is a welcome addition to the Johannesburg arts scene, and will no doubt attract a range of artists even as it remains heavily Ballenesque. There is a sense in which it is created in Ballen’s image. Inside Out signifies art that “takes the viewer on a journey into the deeper, elusive recesses of the psyche”, which Ballen calls “both the aesthetic and aim” of his own work. The building that houses the centre is part exhibition space, part house of horrors and part Bond villain’s lair.
To launch the centre, Ballen called on long-time collaborator Marguerite Rossouw as co-curator of a disturbing, immersive experience: End of the Game. The punning title comes from Peter Beard’s book of photographs, published in 1965, which detailed the ecological damage done across the African continent by the “enterprisers, explorers and big-game hunters” of the West. The texts accompanying the exhibition, along with excellent catalogue essays by Ballen’s daughter, Amanda, encourage us to dwell in the ambiguity with which the artist treats the human-animal relationship.
On the one hand, Ballen undertakes a sustained critique of the bloodbaths euphemistically described as hunting safaris: those fundamentally colonial endeavours that attempted to demonstrate machismo through wholesale slaughter. (The most egregious of many examples is Theodore Roosevelt, who took great pride in killing over 11,000 animals in a two-year period.)
Despite many conservation efforts that have attempted to remediate the impact of “great white hunters” on African wildlife ecosystems, Ballen affirms: “The relationship between animals and humans is essentially adversarial and exploitative. Most societies try to deny this fact, but it is clear to me that the destruction of the natural world continues unabated.”
On the other hand, this assertion is subverted by Ballen’s attempt to “locate the animal in the human being and the human being in the animal”. The human-animal hybrids that emerge in his surreal, dreamlike photographs and sculptural installations can be comical and innocuous. Often, however, they are rather ghoulish creatures — the “animalistic” here is arguably designed to spur a response of fear and antagonism, which becomes the basis of a “human” desire to dominate and control the natural world.
The human figures may be grotesque to varying degrees but in many cases, as with the stuffed animals that are caged or chained, their suffering also invokes our pity. Such a response, it could be argued, is part of what makes humans distinct from animals. Reciprocally, one might ask: if we are not fundamentally different to animals, should we be held accountable for our violent and brutal behaviour? Should it be weighed in moral scales?
End of the Game is invested in ethical questions, even if it does not provide any clear answers. In one of her essays, Amanda Ballen focuses on a mannequin-type figure we encounter early in the exhibition tour: a khaki-clad, pith-helmeted hunter figure surrounded by memorabilia. She asks: “Does this mythic figure yearn for the glory and romance of the Africa of his past? Or is he guilt-ridden and remorseful?”
Ballen flirts with nostalgia in this exhibition — the Tarzan movies of his childhood, for instance — even as he recognises its dangers. Nor is the exhibition forward-looking in an optimistic, activist sense. End of the Game does not, ultimately, hold out much hope for a change in human nature.
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