Art Pig

Alex Dodd

Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!

Arriving in Paris this summer, I checked into the Hotel Beauvoir, dumped my bags and took a long walk through the streets of the Latin Quarter, where, 40 years ago, the students of Paris took to the streets in a social and cultural uprising that went down as one of the greatest upheavals in French society since the Revolution. Half way down Boulevard Saint Michel I came upon a square onto which spilled forty café tables abuzz with students drinking pitchers of table wine in the summer sunshine. In the middle of the square was an installation of large black and white photographs of barricades, overturned cars, students and helmeted police facing off on the very same boulevard 40 years ago. Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!
These are the words resounding in my head two months later as I stroll through Joburg’s Art on Paper gallery taking in the current show of works by South African legend Walter Battiss, simply called Prints. The most exhilarating and unexpected aspect of the show is a series of silkscreen prints made by Battiss in 1969 and 1970, when he visited Hamburg and London. Although these images hum with the same sexual charge that informs the more playful, brightly-hued graphic creations we more readily associate with Battiss, they are completely stylistically different, attesting to the extraordinary diversity of his oeuvre and wondrous capability to constantly reinvent himself.
These remodelled black and white photographic cutups evoke the magazine and cinematic worlds of the late Sixties European underground – the Prague Spring and Paris 1968, when students fought for the right to wear long hair and purple trousers.
In Untitled (artist’s silhouette), the figure of the artist is transposed as a slab of monochromatic white absence onto a black and white image of a beautiful young art school Apollo leaning against a wooden door with his hands in his pockets. A pop art speech bubble suspended above the young man’s head is a similar void of whiteness. It is a wonderfully sexual work, in which the viewer takes up the space of the artist as voyeur, looking upon the beauty of this dreamy young man like the lustfully pained Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
Like other works in this series, which feature the honed bodies of naked young men and long-haired androgynous hippies hanging out on the underground scene in Hamburg, this silkscreen is unapologetically homoerotic.
‘These prints were very radical at the time they were produced,’ says gallerist, Alet Vorster, ‘which is possibly why they weren’t included on exhibitions at the time.’
Now, 40 years down the line, there is something so timeless and alluring about these renegade Battiss prints. They are imbued with all the blurred sexuality and idealism of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, in which the tumultuous political landscape of Paris ’68 serves as the backdrop for a tale about three young cineastes who are drawn together through their passion for film.
And as with Bertolucci’s movie there is something of a bitter-sweet paradox in these images – their immersion in a vital and heady youth culture that is now long gone and defunct. Yet the spirit of the times remains the utopian honey of the bleak contemporary moment.
I am reminded again of Paris and of the number of black skinny jeans-clad, scruffy-haired loners I saw wandering about the Boulevard Saint Germain, each with a different take on Cate Blanchett’s incarnation of Bob Dylan in Todd Hayne’s recent cult biopic, I’m Not There. Why this pop cultural need to inhabit Dylan’s dreamy poetic persona now? Why this harking back to Flower Power and San Francisco circa 1967?
It seems to me that in this much more cynical and broken age, some defiant dreamers are daring to look back over their shoulders at a time when that utopian impulse was a headline-fuelling raison d’etre. There is something strangely hopeful and regenerative in looking back at these images of a lost time when young idealists across the globe staked their destinies on the dream that life could really be different and whole lot better.