Matt Watt

VIRTUAL TOUR

ARTIST CATALOGUE

DraadSitter

Draadsitter interrogates a version of post-apartheid masculinity. In this instance, it defines its lineage as a set of historically produced practices, currently reimagined and re-inscribed as mechanisms of contemporary power politics within the orders of historically advantaged South Africans.

The project references the morality of things, a concept by Hans Achterhuis that extends the analysis of power relations to material culture, revealing how objects and spaces function as conduits of ideology, delegating moral authority to the physical environment. It is how we allow objects to define us. It is how these objects have become contaminated through their historical association with us – our language, context and [white] culture.

These objects or cultural identifiers have naively submitted to the violent connotations and contexts they now inhabit. If removed from the suburban South African garage or carpeted living rooms, some contexts may temporarily be disregarded or pardoned. But the adoption of these objects into the man caves and lapas of the 1980s Joburg South has tainted our objects with traces of societal systemic and structural violence, leaving them to their own devices and allowing objects to generate collective narratives as a way for us to understand them and interpret them in their current form, however tragic the outcome.

The work does not propose a redemptive narrative. It instead confronts the comic failures and unresolved tensions that haunt the intergenerational shifts in South African masculine identity. Situated within a lineage marked by militaristic inheritance, I attempt to navigate the absurdity that underlies the performance of manhood. My great grandfather, grandfather, father and brother have all served in the military to some capacity. The project critiques and satirises the whiteness that I was born into.

But when troubled by these objects and their adoption of violent strategies, one is comforted by the Duchampian afterthought that this is not permanent, that contexts evolve and change, and that “in order for an object to have a life of its own, it must also acquire its own death.”