James Webb: Reaping the harvest

By Patrick Burnett

Okiep, a small town near the Namibian border 560 kilometres from Cape Town, isn’t usually the kind of place you would be likely to bump into James Webb, the winner of the prestigious 2008 Absa l’Altelier award who has a CV running to several pages which details his growing list of exhibitions in capitals around the world.
Once the centre of copper mining in South Africa, many of Okiep’s residents spend long days in dusty streets with no hope of gainful employment. The local bottle store has a steady stream of customers in search of cheap wine.It’s also the home of Dawn Langdown, an inspirational choreographer and dancer who grew up in Okiep and returned to teach local dancers. As part of a unique collaborative project that links artists from different disciplines to see what kind of magical synergies will result, Webb, who has a growing international reputation for his use of sound in his artistic creations, found himself in Okiep recently working on a project with Langdown.
Matching the urban sophistication of Cape Town-based Webb with the tough and lively Langdown produces a result that sleepy Okiep has never seen before and isn’t likely to see again.
Working with Langdown’s dancers, the collaboration culminates in blindfolded dancers pouring out a circle of wine in the dusty ground of a part of town where wine drinkers gather. They then dance bare foot and blindfolded on shards of crushed up glass placed in the circle. The residents, to say the least, are stunned.
The collaboration is different for Webb in the sense that it didn’t involve sound – or recorded sound which features in much of his work – but it’s similar for the way in which it forces the observers to turn the lens in on themselves. In this case, by seeing the association of alcohol, the blindfolds and the painful image of bare feet on crushed glass, a powerful statement is made about alcohol abuse.
Described variously as “one of the most crazy but creative artists out there” or “an undercover agent whose conceptual pranks are aimed directly at the art world itself” his ability to probe the inner self and the unknown seems to be one of the hallmarks of much of Webb’s work.
His work contains themes of isolation and alienation that are in no way unique to artistic expression, but somehow the way in which he tackles them with a combination
of humour and dark observation accentuates the message, drawing the subject in, almost coercing them. He won the 2008 Absa l’Atelier prize for his work ‘Auto Hagiography’, a black chaise longue with speakers fitted underneath that play recordings of the artist speaking under hypnosis.
Even more grand in concept was ‘Black Passage’ (2006), which took listeners three kilometres underground through the sounds of a metal cage descending into the earth, forcing an engagement with the mining industry, the source of wealth, but also associations with the mythology of the underworld.
“You feel it in your teeth, your shoes, your gut. The experience shatters your emotional equilibrium,” wrote Robyn Sassen about the work in Art South Africa.
A sense of mischievousness frequently manifests.
In ‘Wa’ (2003), he spread the word that a famous Japanese DJ was going to be performing at an event at the Castle in Cape Town and then hired a Korean tourist to act the DJ and broadcast an assault of sound at the thousands of revellers.
Webb grew up us as an English speaker on a farm in Stellenbosch, which gives a hint as to the source of feelings of alienation. His interest in the immersive potentials of
sound track back to his experience of nature on the farm.
He now sees his penchant for sound as something of a hobby which has taken him all over the world, to the Brazilian Amazon, parts of China and Europe.
He describes his work as process-orientated and the field recordings he makes as a process that might lead towards “some sort of work or a way of rethinking a work”. Put another way it’s a method of generating ideas, “my form of sketching”.
But for Webb, whose academic background is in theatre, comparative religion, classics and advertising, sound is only a carrier for the message and he resists being categorised as a sound artist.
“My theory about the way I work with sound is I’m more interested in the juxtaposition between sound and space that could create some