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PAST AND FUTURE NOW

24 MAY – 7 JULY 2012

MICHAEL MACGARRY

Yannick from DR Congo, from Chocolate City

gPrivate Grammar I

2011

District 9 assault rifle, cleat nails, nails, screws, epoxy

21 x 46 x 135cm

3

The future is here; it’s just not very evenly distributed.

William Gibson, in an interview on NPR

There comes a time when we realise that the machine is a form of magic. No bugle call, no ring

tone heralds this understanding. It arrives with an accidentally dropped smart phone: strips of

plastic and metal welded by a Vietnamese child labourer now lying uselessly at our feet. We gaze

down at talismans decipherable only to the initiated – the rolling bones of a sangoma. We are no

more capable of fixing our dead phone than we are of resurrecting a corpse.

In that instant, we are reminded that we are alone. This

should not be confused with garden variety existentialism:

God may well be dead, but that’s a minor inconvenience

compared to what lies shattered beneath us. Technology has

left us behind. There are no phonesmiths, or computermen.

Just webs of patents and networks of post-industrial tech-

heads. We are choked off from the past by digital shamans;

the only way forward is forward.

Which is, of course, mightily, brutally un-African.

Consider, then, the works in this catalogue a means by

which to decipher the bones at our feet. Our sangoma is either a futurist or an artist – ultimately,

it doesn’t matter. His name is Michael MacGarry, and his atelier is a version of Marty McFly’s

jacked up DeLorean, odometer set for the year 2050, flaming skidmarks criss-crossing this vast

continent. For him, there is a shard of gallows humour embedded in the future – as we drive

relentlessly onward, we end up tumbling backward. For MacGarry, fetishising progress is a form of

moral rot. And he makes it his business to imagine how progress shall metastasize, so that we will

know the tumour when we see it, will marvel at it, will Tweet the pictures.

THIS IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE ALIVE RIGHT NOW

RICHARD POPLAK

*

Yes, some African cities conform to the

bombed-out, dust-strewn dystopias that

flicker to life at the end of cable news

reports. But we are long past the historical

point where the utopian and the dystopian

can exist as opposites. The rules of capital

have made bedfellows of them. Take

Kinshasa’s Gombe, consulates and NGO

headquarters dotted along a rolling stretch of the Congo River, Club Med idyllic. Contrast this

with nearby Ngaliema, in which a klatch of rural/urban wraiths live between the gravestones of a

necropolis – a community of the walking dead.

Every African city has its own nature, its own vibrato, its own soul. There are, however,

links. Most are carried along by the same precarious present, a stage of economic and social

development that offers no real clues as to what the future might hold. Vertigo grips locals and

visitors alike – it comes in waves, brought on by change so rapid that it warps time. For a species

that intrinsically understands reality through landscape, this is not a happy feeling. All predictive

capacity is tossed away with the morning’s newsfeed.

African cities are striated, layered, unimaginably fecund. At the top, a caste of super-rich

that glide over potholes in four-ton bulletproof Maybachs, for whom the city is a vector to further

wealth, linked to a world that is by turns a playground and an ATM. They are paradoxes – at once

highly visible, and masters of obscurity. They exist in shadow realm, a hologram version of the city,

where everything is available, everything consumable.

In this, they are the photo-negative of the ultra-poor, the ragdolls who haunt the streets as

a scavenging underclass. It is necessary for those living in an African city to erase these people,

to transform them into white noise, to place them in their own parallel hologram. When they are

acknowledged, their misery is reduced to theatre: they are a reminder of how close we all stand

to the edge.

Chinese Iron Ore Frigates off the Coast of Dar es Salaam, 2048, 2012, oil on canvas, 250 x 110cm

5

Then there is the elusive middle, a caste so disparate that its existence is purely a matter

of convenience. The red blood cells, the oxygen carriers common to any city, linked to the rest

of the world by the computers in their hands. Pundits salivate when they speak of this group.

The ‘emerging African middle class’, the planet’s ‘last untouched group of consumers’. Despite

their manifest differences, these Africans are a target, a strategic position in a battle. Like any

target, they are constantly strafed, not with weapons, but with possibility. To be in the middle, to

be a bull’s eye, is to live in a state of constant unease. I’m thinking money every moment thinking

money, spits Rick Ross. I bust a nut then I’m back to thinking money.

Not just money, though. This feeling of being passed by, passed over, of the world hurtling

forward at an unimaginable pace. Urban Africans do not get to escape the digital hustle, which

simultaneously erases borders and enforces them. An SMS from a cousin in Guangzhou, from

a sister in Marseilles. A Tweet from Paul Kagame, a Facebook status update from Rihanna. The

dream of a better world, like Johannesburg, or Europe, or the States. The fear that this place, this

city was supposed to be a better world, and that, perhaps, no such place exists.

*

This is MacGarry’s canvas; he knows the tropes well.

Once, you would have described a show like The Other Half as

‘multimedia’. Now, that seems like a dead term. How else to convey the

real-time frenzy: pen, camera, laser, paint, rice liquor, e-ticket, boarding

pass, bodybuilder, gun. The above compendium is entirely descriptive,

a Discovery Channel documentary of what it feels like to be alive right

now. In MacGarry’s prehensile brain, everything is fair game, everything a ‘found object’.

Take the boda-boda – the 125cc motorcycles that are a staple in Nairobi, Kampala, Lagos

(where they are called achaba), and Kinshasa (where they are called wey-wah). These cheap

Chinese or Indian-made machines have transformed the way people move through African

cities. With Motorcycle Fetish, MacGarry has catapulted the boda-boda into the near future. He’s

festooned it with the rotted matter of city life, studded it with nails and chunks of metal. Now, the

boda-boda is alive, fully expressive of its prehistoric nature as a sort of microbe, zipping people

and things through clogged arteries, coughing poison into the air. The boda-boda is infinitely

Motorcycle Fetish, 2012, found object, steel nails, tubing, bolts, pressed steel, enamel paint, 108 x 205 x 74cm

customisable, it has a specific cultural cachet everywhere it is used. It is a marker of the African

present, and thus an arbiter of what is to come.

It has a companion in the FARO™ RLV 3-10, a weapon built by the Federal Nigerian Army,

circa 2052. The way MacGarry sees it, the United States will attack the Federal Nigerian Republic

in the next 30 years or so; the FARO, an unmanned artillery field cannon, is designed to strike

back. Its kinship with the boda-boda is obvious: it is an object built for the city, crusted over with

the city. It is both mechanical, and utterly alive, its insect-like legs bringing to mind inyenzi –

cockroach – a term ushered into common usage on the

Rwandan killing fields during the mid-1990s.

Then, the Festooned series, seven sculptures that

remind us of ceremonial masks, unbeautiful creations

mashed together from what looks to be the world’s

largest garbage dump. A coin for an eye, an orthodontic

impression for a mouth, a pig’s snout for a nose. We

can imagine these masks donned by the same digital

shamans who graph our future, dancing over silicon

chips and cell-phone chargers, conjuring avatars from

plastic and dust.

Now, we start to see a narrative emerging. Not

a story, necessarily, but a sense of things – the same

way we cobble together a coherent memory of a cage

fight, blow after blow added to the account, so we can

say: this is what happened. We start to understand

that MacGarry’s reconstituted objects have a relationship to the atavistic – they’re an umbilical

cord, mimicking the cultural lifeline that has lashed Africa to its ancestral past since the first

humanoids came down from the trees.

Presiding over all of this: Iceman, a portrait of the artist as a Mixed Martial Arts fighter,

action-figure ripped – body borrowed from the plaster cast of a bodybuilder. In the next room:

from the 1000 Suns series, a large-format painted canvas of Maputo, juiced on growth from

newfound oil reserves, thrust into the latter half of the 21st century. Also, a model of African

Union Headquarters, Addis Ababa, 2048, a reboot of the recently inaugurated headquarters,

built and paid for by the Chinese government.

FARO™ RLV 3-10, 2012, laser-cut steel, found and bought objects, enamel paint, 160 x 246 x 203cm

7

*

Our new friends, the Chinese. Our boon companions in human rights violations and plunder.

Providers of cheap, strings-free capital and soccer stadiums and plastic sandals. The wild card

in Africa’s development miracle, the catalyst that has sparked all the growth, all the talk of

emerging markets. Chocolate City, a series of photographs by MacGarry accompanied by four

pieces of his micro-fiction, is The Other Half’s sad-eyed, neon-bathed soul.

The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, one of the shining lights of the Pearl River

Delta, the greatest experiment in free market capitalism in the history of our species. In

1985, the delta was mostly farmland with a GDP of

$8-billion. By the late 1990s, it was driving Chinese

growth, a humid monument to the rise of Red

Capitalism, generating $89-billion a year. African

leaders came to gawp. Africans came to work. And

so rose the neighbourhood of Chocolate City, the

name a reference to the skin colour of those that

hustled its streets.

Despite all the talk of Sino-African kinship, the

Chinese authorities have not exactly embraced the

newcomers. The size of Chocolate City’s population

has shrunk over the past few years, and nascent

families have been separated by fathers or mothers forced to return to Lagos or Dakar or

Cape Town. MacGarry records faces, he documents clothing shops and discothèques and

high-rise compounds.

But in the two lonely images of mixed-race China Born Babies, or CBBs, the themes of The

Other Half coalesce. These are creatures born of technology – long-haul flights and biometric

scanning devices and late-night techno music hook-ups. But they are also born of love. They

are hybrids, yes, but more than that, they are human. We gaze at their pictures, and we feel the

stream of life course through us. We feel the meaning of the word future.

Mother and China-Born Baby (CBB) at the Deng Feng Market, from Chocolate City

Nas, from Nigeria, and his Chinese girlfriend Lily at the GBOOZA club night at TownBar on Zeng Cha Road,

Baiyun, Guangzhou, from Chocolate City

*

A story: the Obstetrics Ward, CHS

Hospital, Gondar, District of Ethiopia.

Meet the firstborn son of Gabra Heitch,

remarkable for any number of reasons,

but mostly because he is the eight

billionth human on earth. The year is

2024, but the way MacGarry imagines it,

there is nothing foreign about the room

and the baby within it. There is nothing

foreign about the future. It is merely the

present, with the volume turned up. It is

the past, flipped on its head, digitized.

But The Other Half wouldn’t be what it is if it were only concerned with soothsaying. Here’s

something that MacGarry knows about the vast African urban middle ground, that last untouched

group of consumers. He knows that they are not a herd of bovine zombies. They are in the fight,

throwing punches, deflecting blows. Everything they touch, they change.

Every object, every concept that MacGarry generates carries their fingerprints. He

reminds us that the consumers are individuals; he links them with what came before, and what

will come after.

The Other Half is a tracer round fired from a FARO™ RLV 3-10, a brief arc of luminescence

that we follow into the dark. MacGarry creates objects for a time when he will be dead, when you

will be dead. He rolls the bones. And in doing so, fuses the future to the past. Which is, of course,

mightily, gloriously African. Like a form of chemo, he shrinks the size of progress’s tumour. He

allows us to feel a little less adrift, and a little less alone.

9

Historical Materialism

2011

Bronze (verde patina)

77 x 40 x 38cm

Edition of 3

Appoggiatura

2012

Graphite, pencil crayon, enamel paint

112 x 77.5cm

11

Jet Black Pope

From the Festooned series

2012

Marble

36 x 24 x 27.5cm

We Travel Long Distances for Short Meetings

2012

Graphite, pencil crayon, Copic marker

112 x 77.5cm

gAdult Fun

From the Festooned series

2012

Cast polyurethane

50 x 21 x 32.5cm

gFARO™ RLV 3-10

2012

Laser-cut steel

210 x 150 x 120cm

Gaudeamus Igitur

From the Festooned series

2012

Marble

41.5 x 24 x 26.5cm

15

17

Fuller, Further, Faster, Better

2012

Polyurethane, epoxy, South African pine, nylon hair

256cm diameter x 154cm

19

fHeard You Was a Screamer

From the Festooned series

2012

Cast polyurethane

48.5 x 22 x 25cm

Young, Loud, Fat Communists

2012

Graphite, pencil crayon,

enamel paint

112 x 77.5cm

Motorcycle Fetish

2012

Found object, steel nails, tubing, bolts, pressed steel, enamel paint

108 x 205 x 74cm

23

fRiddle Me This

From the Festooned series

2012

Mixed media

55 x 21.5 x 27cm

Surplus Passion

2012

Wheelbarrow, metal tubing, stamped metal, acrylic paint

138 x 74 x 61cm

27

Dutch Coward

From the Festooned series

2012

Cast polyurethane

41 x 31.5 x 34.5cm

fInsects

2012

Polyurethane, wood, nylon hair, metal

200 x 132 x 95cm

29

Reclining Figure, 1959

2000

Digital video

Duration 30 seconds

f La Maison d’une Artiste

2012

MDF, 56-note mechanical musical movement

66 x 65 x 63cm

The Healthy World of Primitive Building Methods

1999

Digital video

Duration 30 seconds

gAfrican Union Headquarters, Addis Ababa, 2032

2012

Polyurethane, marble, brass

85 x 95cm diameter

Disappear and Be Replaced

2012

Graphite, pencil crayon, Copic marker

112 x 77.5cm

33

Long Youth

2012

Polyurethane, industrial foam, acrylic paint

190 x 82 x 39cm

g Iceman

2012

Mixed media

118 x 37 x 33cm

Maputo, Mozambique, 2046

2012

Oil on canvas

108 x 218.5cm

The Price of Being Wrong

From the Festooned series

2012

Cast polyurethane

58 x 24.5 x 35.5 cm

37

Packs and Swarms V

2012

Found petrol tank, metal

63 x 48 x 31cm

CAPE TOWN

Buchanan Building

160 Sir Lowry Road

Woodstock 7925

PO Box 616

Green Point 8051

T +27 (0)21 462 1500

F +27 (0)21 462 1501

JOHANNESBURG

62 Juta Street

Braamfontein 2001

Postnet Suite 281

Private Bag x9

Melville 2109

T +27 (0)11 326 0034/41

F +27 (0)86 275 1918

info@stevenson.info

www.stevenson.info

Catalogue 64

June 2012

© 2012 Text: the author

© 2012 For works by Michael MacGarry: the artist

Front cover Gaudeamus Igitur, from the Festooned series, 2012,

marble, 41.5 x 24 x 26.5cm

Inside front cover Riddle Me This, from the Festooned series,

2012, mixed media, 55 x 21.5 x 27cm

Inside back cover The Model That Couldn’t, from the Festooned

series, 2012, cast polyurethane, 51 x 24.5 x 28.5cm

Back cover Long Youth, 2012, polyurethane, industrial foam,

acrylic paint, 190 x 82 x 39cm

Editor Sophie Perryer

Design Michael MacGarry

Photography and image repro Mario Todeschini

Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town

Michael MacGarry (born 1978 in Durban; lives in Cape Town)

holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of

the Witwatersrand. He was the Standard Bank Young Artist

for Visual Art 2010 and is the recipient of a Gordon Institute

for Performing and Creative Arts Fellowship, University of

Cape Town, for 2012. He has previously held solo exhibitions

at Stevenson Johannesburg in 2011 and 2010. Recent group

exhibitions include Contested Terrains at Tate Modern,

London (2011); ARS 11 at Kiasma Museum for Contemporary

Art, Helsinki (2011); and Life Less Ordinary: Performance and

Display in South African Art at Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham,

and Ffotogallery, Cardiff (2009-10).