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Waiting and Remembering

Item date(s): 1986, 1987

Jo-anne Green


Pages: unpaged (25pp)
Size: 405mm


Publisher: The artist

Additional notes:
Livre d'peintre. Painted pages with collages, pencil shavings, beads, bamboo, cloth, wire rods, plastic, photographs and other objects laid in. Containing flaps, cut outs and a painted mylar page.

A double red page quote from "On the Mines" by David Goldblatt.

A cut-out mylar page with a poem "So Is My Life" in the shape of a chair fitting into the black velvet cut-away section on the title page.

Hand-bound in beige buckram and housed in a hand-made, green velvet covered solander case with painted decorations and the artist's name on the inside.

I’m so happy that all of these precious books have a permanent home now; I am particularly grateful that "Waiting and Remembering" is appreciated, as it has lived in the dark for decades and is now seeing the light once more.

The full title is "Waiting and Remembering" I made the book on our kitchen table in Brookline, Massachusetts. Kim made the box and rebound the book when it started bursting out of its original binding. The interior is marbleized paper. The cut-out 'passage' through all of the pages in 'Remembering' represents a walk (time) down the actual passage (space) of the home I grew up in. It appeared in a recurring nightmare I had as young child. Page one of 'Remembering' begins with a shower scene; my nightmare ends with a shower scene. I was intent on merging the personal/political space which I saw as binary back then. More about it here http://sympoietic.net/jo/waiting/notes.htm.

I was born on August 14, 1959 in Johannesburg.

I attended Wits from 1977-1978, and again from 1980-1981 (I spent part of the intervening year in Israel, where I was accepted to Bezalel).

Waiting and Remembering

1986-1987

One of a kind Book, Mixed Media on Paper

20 pages, 20" X 15"

Notes for "Waiting" (pages 1-9) This book was begun as an exploration of ideas for a large-scale, multimedia performance. The chair, drawn from a photograph by South African photographer David Goldblatt, was envisioned as the central prop: it was to be large enough for people to move around beneath it, and the back was to serve as a projection screen. The colors and textures were to be recreated with lighting, and while the chair was to remain on the stage for the duration of the performance, the change in color and the intensity of light was to signify a new scene.

Thematically, I was continuing my "On the Mines" series, which had developed out of the last 5 or 6 pages of Book Two. I had photographed various mining apparatuses on abandoned gold mines around Johannesburg, and the anthropomorphized torsos/heads had served as a metaphor for the miners themselves.

A State of Emergency was declared in South Africa in 1985. I was working on a table in my Brookline apartment, listening to news reports on public radio. South Africa was in the spotlight, and hourly events streamed into my home as they unfolded—children shot in the streets of Soweto, tanks rumbling down highways, protestors taking to the streets of Johannesburg en masse for the first time.

These daily occurrences are recorded in the book: the "Trojan Horse" event, a truck hiding soldiers casually drives down a township street, a child throws a stone and the soldiers respond with machine gun fire; a mother's anguish after the hanging of her son, a nineteen year old poet who had been charged with the murder of a policeman and not given a fair trial, and the authorities' refusal to let her say good-bye to him.

I introduced photographs from newspapers and magazines as "factual evidence" because in conversations with my family in South Africa, the "facts" were refuted as propaganda. Everything I said about these events was denied. It was as if we were being told completely different stories. To some degree, this was true. Television was controlled by the South African government, and all opposition was censored.

Waiting ends with a scene about migrant labour: women left destitute in the rural homelands, their fathers, husbands and sons working on the mines in Johannesburg. photograph (photographer "Unknown"), entitled "SASPU, Compounds, Shaft 5, Crown Mines". The figure in the photograph appears on every page, just as the chair does in Waiting. Here I explore the physical, psychological, economic, and social hardships inflicted on goldminers and their families in Apartheid South Africa.

Notes for Remembering [pages 10-19]

Remembering is the miners' story. It, too, begins with a photograph (photographer "Unknown"), entitled "SASPU, Compounds, Shaft 5, Crown Mines". The figure in the photograph appears on every page, just as the chair does in Waiting. Here I explore the physical, psychological, economic, and social hardships inflicted on goldminers and their families in Apartheid South Africa.

The cut-out "passageway" through all of the pages represents a walk (time) down the actual passageway (space) of the home I grew up in. It appeared in a recurring nightmare I had as young child. Page one of Rememberingbegins with a shower scene; my nightmare ends with a shower scene. I was intent on merging the personal and political spaces which I saw as somewhat binary.

Remembering is developed further in my following series, "Well, as a result of pain..."

Reference note:
Biography: https://sympoietic.net/jo/bio.html

Exhibition notes:
Samplings: South African Artists' Books

Basement Gallery, WAM

26 March to 6 July 2019

Ref: GB/16114











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