The first work of art I ever bought was a large-scale charcoal drawing by Mark Hipper. It was part of the controversial show that earned him a banning order from the new regime at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 1998. The exhibition, which touched on the awkward area of children and eroticism, was one of the first flourishes of South African public life that prompted the new state to reveal its inherent moral conservativism.

My purchase was informed less by the so-called edgy and explicit nature of the show than with the context of its reception and the complexity of moral dogmatism. The work I fell in love with was a bold charcoal drawing that now hangs in my study opposite a poster from a show I saw at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1997. The Stenberg Brothers: Constructing a Revolution in Soviet Design was a show that celebrated the beauty – the seductive eye candy – of Soviet propaganda.

But back to Hipper. In the central strip of a large sheet of crisp white paper is a black-and-white image of a young girl’s face. She gazes directly at the viewer through a pair of spectacles and, in optometrist’s lettering in the white strip above her face, are the enigmatic words: ‘Good vision should be maintained.’ What do the words mean? That we should have our eyes checked regularly? That is it important to maintain a good outlook on life? Well, of course it is.

But there is an unnerving fascist twinge to the phrase: an insistence on good vision at any cost. And what is ‘good’ vision? Who determines what is ‘good’ and what is not? Having grown up in apartheid South Africa and lived through the blinding idealism that fuelled the transition to a new nationalism – that although not remotely as dire as the previous version, is still nationalism and still flawed – these are ideas that really get under my skin.
In my office the bespectacled girl in the Hipper drawing faces a bespectacled man in the Stenberg Brothers poster – two figures eternally locked into an unspeakable tension between different ways of seeing.

Between them is the chair where I sit and write, hoping that their refracted and separate visions will always somehow inform mine.

At Hipper’s latest solo at the Obert Contemporary I was thrilled to discover that he is still exploring the same difficult territory with the same exacting attention to the pristine sensuality of his surfaces. After a Model features a series of not exactly black and white, but valium grey paintings, several of which could quite happily adorn a contemporary edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Sharing a highly refined aesthetic with the work of
Sanell Achenbach and Doreen Southwood, Hipper’s paintings are all about memory and desire, social discipline and awkward personal submission to controlled group behaviour.
They are drawn from 1950s Department of Education manuals for physical education instructors, and anatomy books that illustrate a particular directive or lesson. Imbued with the ominous nationalism of the era, these images are also strangely, unnervingly erotic. The pale white tones of the young girls’ thighs are highlighted by the blackness of their regulation shorts and crisp white sport shirts as they run, jump and do cartwheels, casting their strange shadows across the blank sports field…

My next excursion to the opening of siblings Alexandra and David Ross’s In Camera at Resolution Gallery was a continuation of the erotically charged black and white theme. Alexandra Ross’s series of dimly lit nude self portraits are printed onto metal plates referencing Victorian daguerrotypes. You have to get up really close to see the luscious curves of the naked body in her strip of images, evoking a naughty through-the-keyhole feeling.
Whereas her images are small, dark and provocative, the large-scale photographs that face them are flooded with grainy light. David Ross shot his bedroom scenes with a cell phone and enlarged the low-res files almost to the point of disintegration, giving one the dreamy sense that the figure in the image is only half there – an ideal medium for the portrayal of that ‘morning after the night before’ sense of absence and perhaps even loss.

Whereas Alexandra’s images have a Victorian studio feel, David’s recall the sexuality of Jean Luc Goddard movies. Both series are unashamedly nostalgic in feel – adding to that sense of something that is not quite there, bodies that can’t quite be had or experienced in full – this being an essential ingredient in the visual or literary sense of the erotic. Not having, not fully remembering, not being able to go back… so we’re left with the decided desire for more.