WHITE LIES. IT DOES.

BY RONALD SURESH ROBERTS

But, nevertheless, I know what I like. I write what I like. “As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you” said James Baldwin and when he said that he was not attacking whites, but whiteness. Every participant in this exhibition has read very closely a whole deracialising syllabus against whiteness. Some of them have even understood a little bit of what they have read. These good books include Whiteness of a Different Colour by Matthew Frye Jacobson, The Wages of Whiteness by David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness by David Roediger, who seems to be the same guy, The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia Williams, White By Law by Ian Haney-Lopez, Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be White, edited by David Roediger (there’s that same old guy yet again), Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South by Grace Elizabeth Hale, who is not an eighteenth century Puritan, even though her name sounds like something from The Crucible.
Before being permitted to show on whiteness at Blank, each participant certified that he or she had made a careful study of each of these works, as well as hundreds others like them. All of them have certified this. They may have lied, as Bianca Baldi so baldly does, in her certified claim to have named a star. With similar antic bliss the late Lebanese seer, Sebastian Charilaou, offers a one liner called “One-liner”, which protests against one-liners. (after this went to press, Charilaou sabotaged the work, renaming it “No More One-Liners”, which is backwardly literal).
Rejecting the deceased Charilaou’s rather dated cults of ambiguity and literalism (forgivable lapses: the guy’s a corpse, after all), most of these works instead favour a stark and unapologetic positivism. Everything on show here is strictly black and white. Elan Gamaker, the anti-Semitic working class Austrian playwright, both channels and subverts Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Nubian portraits (decried as fascist and pornographic by Susan Sontag). How? Gamaker’s “European Union” speaks not of bureaucracy but of ethnocentric and Eurocentric pornography, unrepentantly confined as it is to four European tongues.
This show’s violently black-and-white emphasis slyly references the Studio 2666 blog, which is to be found—in black and white alone—at http://studio2666.blogspot.com. “A Durban magistrate acquitted a beautiful 24-year old woman yesterday on a charge under the Immorality Act, saying she was three-quarters white and as such ‘a borderline case.’ The man with whom she was charged would also have been acquitted. But he committed suicide a week ago.” That is a newspaper clipping quoted at page 150 of An Act of Immorality, a novel published in 1963 by the pseudonymous Des Troye, the subsequently adopted pseudonym of Christian Nerf. Nerf and longtime collaborator Douglas Gimberg have placed “And Other” in this show, documenting in black and white the numerous versions of the single passenger who has already accompanied them on a journey yet to come, scheduled to take place in June, from Blouberg to Robben Island on a rowboat they built themselves in Paradise, Knysna and the University of Stellenbosch.
Meanwhile the Nigerian critic, Robert Sloon, documents the little known story of Kokomo, a festive beach song with origins in the tragic Cape Town death of a Beach Boy, who was white, although “boys” of the local variety more naturally tend to be black. While consumerist imageries are usually ceded to fascism (as in Paul Gilroy’s recent Against Race), Jonathan Garnham’s work associates commercial branding with Jesse Owen’s subversive presence at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Charles Maggs, references James Baldwin’s classic essay, “A Stranger in the Village,” where Baldwin felt dramatically “othered” in a Swiss village decades ago, has named his piece “I don’t give a shit about your fucking ski holiday.” Achieving a similar reversal, the Zimbabwean, Dan Halter, actually employing violence, has created a black eye on the face of Ed Young, himself the creator of the noted work “Niggers Can’t Be Choosers.” Young meanwhile offers a work teasingly entitled “Don’t Care”, leaving his audience to wonder whether this is an instruction to them (Don’t Care), or a mere statement of personal indifference. Andrew Lamprecht’s rival text is not worth reading..
The semi-pseudonymous June Violence Taylor Addams gives us a boy dressed in her trademark corset and skirts, while Lizza Littlewort offers shitty underpants under the designer label, Below the Belt. Jonathan Garnham’s overgrown abortion (appearing on the invitation although not in the show) practices self-abuse, while Ug Imberg climbs in with an arresting work, “Drunk Fuck”, rooted (as the Australians say) in a newspaper billboard that announces: “Holy Wine then Rape.” And who invited Linda Stupart, not a Studio 2666 member? Overall, this show leaves me cold. It even makes me Afraid.