“The line is a boundary between the inside and the outside, between form and shape and the world around it. It is the job of the artist to create a boundary in an amorphous world, separating the abstract from the concrete to create a reality that feels alive,” Roger Ballen observes, revealing the complex nature of the art, the artist, and the world in which they both live in an an exhibition titled “Lines, Marks, and Drawings: Through the Lens of Roger Ballen”, which will be on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art from June 19 through February 9, 2014. The exhibition features 55 works from over four decades of exploration of this topic. A catalogue for the exhibition will be published by Prestel.
“The mark is more amorphous than the line. It is an undefined thing; it could be a splatter, a dot, a rip or a tear, dirt…it’s out there. But the line takes shape further. The line is a construction of the mind through the hand. It is impossible to understand how the mind instructs the hand; perhaps each time I make a drawing I am making a portraiture of the mind behind the hand.”
That presence makes itself known in Ballen’s photographs. It is that which makes his work distinguished, distinctive, and compelling in its intense meditation on the conditions of life as mediated by the act of making an image. It is that thing that finds itself in both the form of the object and the space in which it appears, the stagelike settings that become shadowboxes for fantasies, dreams, nightmares that run through our mind and body as we stand before a Ballen photograph.
Ballen’s work is otherworldly in that it is a landscape of a place no one else knows, the world inside the line, inside the mind, inside the artist’s soul. “Nothing is intentional. I am not doing this to shock. I am not doing this for anyone else. I am doing this intuitively to find myself and to challenge myself. I don’t know about anyone else’s reactions; it’s impossible to predict. Some people find the pictures dark, disturbing, funny, brilliant, un-PC. The pictures are strong and have an intensity; they have an affect,” Ballen observes.
It is this affect that resonates deeply in the viewer as they look, listen, and learn to the sounds of the words echoing in their own mind, to the blood rushing through their veins as it pumps back to their heart. As Susan Sontag said of his photographic series Platteland, Images of Rural South Africa (1986–1994), it is “the most impressive sequence of portraits I have seen in years. Roger Ballen has used the power of photography to instruct, to shock, and to discomfit with an exemplary integrity of purpose.”
It is precisely that purpose that makes Ballen’s work so powerful; his commitment to using art to explore his inner mind, and to create a public space where these energies can be made manifest, where the image stands alone, without words, without explanation, simply the mind of Ballen staring back at us.
Ballen notes, “You will never know how your own mind works; nor will you will never know what you kidneys, your liver and other parts of your body are doing at this exact moment. It is a guessing game. The mind behind the mind instructing me to draw has many faces, it is hard to ever know what this force consists of. Perhaps that is the goal of my drawing.
“The line of the artist is a means of creating order. The writer and poet do this with language. The line, for the artist, is the mechanism. The brain, eye and the hand attempt to create order in their interaction with the physical world. They are defining themselves all the time. It is extremely fluid. A serious photographer is always trying to locate their identity through their camera. It is a process of objectification.”
The best pictures speak across without ever uttering a single word. The photograph is a language of its own, and Roger Ballen is a philosopher poet whose worldview takes us deep into another realm, into a world of black and white, of line, mark, and drawing, of a place where the art of seeing is a means to exploring the self, the world, and the energies that cross back and forth between the porous boundaries of flesh, bone, and muscle.
Miss Rosen
