In the exhibitions Appellations (Cape Town) and Speculations on Drawing (Johannesburg), Meleko Mokgosi returns to a practice often relegated to the margins, treating it instead as a primary mode of thought. The works on view at Stevenson trace a vocabulary that is both gestural and interrogative, situating the drawn mark as a site where subjecthood, subjugation, and becoming are continuously negotiated.
Across his practice, Mokgosi asks how histories and theories become legible in form, and how drawing, in its most open and contingent sense, can make space for new kinds of knowledge. In conversation with the artist, we navigate the tension between drawing as a bodily index and drawing as a space of speculation; at its capacity to hold what is seen, remembered, and yet-to-be-said.
The exhibition title foregrounds “appellations” — acts of naming. How do the politics of naming, titling, or classification manifest within the visual language of this body of work?
The exhibition in Cape Town focuses on a project I began several years ago, which is an examination of the 1980 film, The Gods Must be Crazy. As most people here know, it is both an iconic and problematic film in terms of how it depicts a specific indigenous population in Southern Africa. This group has and continues to be called many things, including “Bushmen”, San, Khoisan, or Basarwa to name a few. It is important to note that appellations – or the practice of naming speaks to notions of selfhood, the history of identifications, and the fact that naming something functions as a way of partial ownership and formally codifying something within language. For example, Khoisan is derived from Koїsan; a term coined by German anthropologist Leonard Schultze. Khoikhoin on the other hand means ‘genuine people’ (singular: a people person); and Sa means ‘to gather’, while the plural (with –n) means ‘gatherers’ (of veldkos /ʹfeltkɔs/ i.e. wild edible plants). The names Hottentotten (Hottentots) and Bosjesmannen (Bushmen) were given to indigenous southern African peoples by the Dutch.
So by using the complex and difficult history around how to refer to the indigenous peoples in southern Africa as a point of departure, the work reveals this as symptomatic of how indigenous peoples in the region are treated, dispossessed, and misrepresented by both black African citizens and governments, and Eurocentric perspectives and cultural production such as The Gods Must be Crazy films.
In Speculations on Drawing, the index (as a trace of the body) becomes central. Do you see drawing as a form of embodied thinking? If so, how does this shift our understanding of what drawing does?
I am afraid of speculating on what a drawing or any art can do. The utility of an aesthetic object or experience is a difficult topic to cover, and one that I do not think I am capable of speaking about. However as a practitioner whose studio work comes out of drawing, I am committed to draftsmanship as not only a way of representing, but also as a process of mapping one’s experiences onto fields of representation. I am also wary of saying drawing is a way of thinking because thinking involves the ways in which our mind abstracts the stimuli that our bodies receive. So when we experience something through our senses, our minds, in both the conscious and unconscious registers, try to reconcile these experiences. The body however, lets say the hand, when it is used to make a mark, this mark making part of our body is functioning at the level of things that are almost always unrepeatable and univariable; namely, the mark making mechanism we use is functioning within a set of contingencies that belong to both systemized languages and languages that are yet to be known; or latent forms of representation. All this to say, I would propose that the practice of drawing is another method of abstraction; but this abstraction differs to that of thinking.
The works incorporate domestic interiors, guard dog posters, and modernist figurines. How do these motifs function in relation to memory, desire, or the psychic architecture of the subject?
This is a great question. All of these motifs refer to objects that populate the life-worlds of people in this part of the world. And so by referring to these objects, which in turn reference certain lived experience all point to how we understand history and the past. We can all acknowledge that the psychic architecture of the subject, and you rightly point out, is manufactured through past experiences. Therefore it is important to examine what is retained by the subject, how this is interpreted and the effects it has on the subject; and equally important, what is not retained by the subject and therefore not immediately absorbed as part of the psychic architecture. Here I would like to point to Hayden White’s useful differentiation between history as discursive construct and the past as that which escapes the discursive parameters of history. He argues that history is manufactured by professional historians. But in this construction of history, they will leave some things out, and these remainders he calls the past; and in order to study the past we need instruments and modes of analysis that the professional historians do not possess. But coming back to the motifs in the paintings, my main aim is to stage a context. All of the images I make understand themselves to be constructed. We can substitute the word fiction for construct because this might allow us more nuance. Conventionally fiction is said to be the absence of truth, but it is worth noting that in the 18th century the opposite of ‘fact’ or ‘truth’ was not ‘fiction,’ but rather ‘fancy’ or ‘error.’ With this in mind, we can claim that all knowledge involves a certain amount of fiction in the original sense of the word; that is, as a certain amount of molding and shaping pre-existing material. Therefore the word ‘fiction’ refers to poetic modes of making that are key to how people form literature, including history. By emphasizing this idea of fiction or a constructed site or image or history, I hope that this allows the viewer to move towards historiography and away history.
Theorists such as Stefano Milani suggest that drawing is a cognitive tool rather than purely aesthetic. How does your work engage drawing as a mode of thinking, beyond the visual?
I am not sure my answer will do justice to your question but my first impulse is to question the relationship between thinking and drawing. Thinking is a particular kind of cognitive activity. Drawing on the other hand is a materialist exploration that involves the body and some kind of marking instrument that lies outside of the body. This is not to say that drawing is not a kind of thinking, or thinking cant be a kind of drawing; but what I find interesting in this question is how thinking is used as a metaphor to understand drawing both as a practice and concept. This kind of metaphorical operation and theorizing, I believe, points us to something very compelling about drawing, which is our desire to understand drawing outside of itself, and also to understand drawing within and beyond the pleasure or seduction it produces for both the artist and the viewer. Not only is all of this pleasurable, but it is also pleasurable to speculate and theorize on drawing. And so I believe if we were to begin examining the links between drawing and thinking, I propose to start with the question of pleasure.
You cite Foucault’s theories on subjection. How does your work engage with or depart from his framing of power and the self in visual terms?
Michel Foucault used the term subjection, from around 1981 onwards, to examine how the formation of the human subject was linked to structures of power. In his theory of domination, Foucault refines the relationship between the human and structural mechanisms by insisting on the process of how we acquire subjectivity by being subordinated by and use of power. Therefore, power in its various manifestations determines the relations of subjection that reproduce subjecthood. This by no means suggests that the subject is passive. Both Foucault and Althusser reject the determinist view that the individual is passive as it faces forces that subject it to apparatuses of power. The individual, to paraphrase Althusser is interpellated as an individual with free will and consequently accepts their subjection freely; therefore, “there are no individuals except by and for their subjection.” In addition to this, Foucault and Althusser stress the idea that power is not centralized but rather power is dispersed through many forms that we come into contact with and utilize as individuals. In this respect, power is not a top-down thing but a field of relations. So my current project interprets and most likely misinterprets some of Foucault ideas about power. However, the paintings and other artworks don’t try to illustrate some of these theoretical ideas but use them to construct and analyze different forms of representation.
In Appellations and Speculations on Drawing, the material heterogeneity (chine collé, drypoint, digital drawing) creates a shifting visual grammar. How did you navigate coherence versus rupture in the way these different registers sit together?
This is a really interesting question. I have never thought much about coherence. To an extent, I think an emphasis on coherence becomes a commitment to style and signature. My studio work has and continues to take on many forms and materials explorations (which is also to say that not everything that is made in the studio is presented in public). I believe it is important for artists to constantly work away from style or signature, even though this is very difficult.
To draw is often to trace, but your engagement with indexicality complicates that. Do you see your drawings as evidence, residue, or proposition?
By highlighting the indexical, my hope is that there is less focus on the outcome of the drawing, or that the drawing offers realistic representations, but rather that drawing is seen as a process through which things unravel, appear, and somethings disappear or remain out of view or latent.
You’ve said before that representation anticipates an interlocutor. Who is the interlocutor in Appellations and Speculations on Drawing? Is it a public, a self, a future?
Indeed, all forms of communication, even if its with oneself, anticipates some kind of partner to interaction. While I do not know who this could possibly be, my hope is that the viewer or interlocutor is someone who will welcome the level of intimacy in looking that the paintings ask for. Therefore for the viewer to accept and engage with this intimacy in reading, they will have to accept two things: firstly that the representations being offered are presented and made under conditions of deep care; and second, for the viewer to enter this space of viewership, they will have to deal with the idea of attempting to other themselves, that is, to try and see things from a position outside of their own. My argument therefore is not that the viewer accepts or approves of the work, but rather they commit to the terms of the work and the conceptual space that the work asks for.