1990 - 2000
In 1988 Payne is invited by the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town to act as external examiner for their graduate degrees. It is suggested to him that he apply for the painting post vacated by Stanley Pinker. After a lengthly interview he is appointed, but not to the satisfaction of a disgruntled section of the student body who have a preferred candidate (who also applied) that acted in the position prior to Payne's appointment. The school is petitioned in that regard to Payne's discomfort on his arrival at the school in February 1989.Payne purchases an apartment block in upper Long Street and sets up studio and living space. The building will later house the Axeage Private Press co-founded with Pippa Skotnes.He commences a body of large scale polymorphic heavily incrusted paintings on the theme of the "mineral revolution" of South Africa entitled Market Forces, after which he concentrates on artists books, etchings and video.
Some of the early paintings and etchings are informed by a Sanoid Bandage that enacts its use in a series of printed images of the techniques of bandaging injuries.
Sanoid assist 2. 1989-1990. Acrylic and broken mirror on canvas. 2010 mm x 1650 mm.
Sanoid assist 1. 1989. Acrylic, glass and broken mirror on canvas. 2010 mm x 1650 mm.
Sanoid assist 1 & 2 (above) are the first paintings Payne produces in his Long Street studio in Cape Town. It is the precursor to the series that followed entitled Market Forces.
Tunnel Vision. 1992. From Market Forces. Collection: South African National Gallery.
Tunnel vision. (Detail)
Oppenheimer seduces Foucault. 1992. From Market Forces. Collection Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Fredric Jameson in Witbank. 1992. From Market Forces. Collection University of Cape Town.
After co-founding the Axeage Private Press with Pippa Skotnes, Payne re-visited his Mafikeng Head project. Therein lay rich material for developing an intervention in museum display and a collaborative artists book.The Lydenburg Heads were displayed in the South African Museum in a liminal space, on a landing between two floors in glassed wall niches as archaeological specimens, not as artworks.Payne negotiated the re-positioning of the heads to accompany his Mafikeng Heads in an installation in the South African Museum in 1993.
see: http://www.arc.uct.ac.za/the_visual_university/-face_value
Installation views: Face Value: old heads in modern masks. The exhibition included seven supermarket trollies, a large black dot painted on the west wall, seven wall mounted vitrines (all estroyed), The Lydenburg Heads, the Mafikeng Heads and 14 etchings.
The Ventriloquist. 1993. Copperplate etching, 200 mm x 400 mm.
Breath of Life. 1993. Copperplate etching, 200 mm x 400 mm.
Punctuating Time. 1993. Copperplate etching, 200 mm x 400 mm.
The etchings below are the first three Payne produced at the Axeage Private Press. These prints suggest much of what was to come, both formally and iconographically in the Market Forces series. Sanoid 1 & 2 were painted concurrently.
The Market Place.1990. Etching and aquatint.
Oppenheimer seduces Foucault. 1990. Etching and aquatint.
Tunnel vision. 1990. Etching and aquatint.
Blind spots and gods. 1991. Screenprint. Printed by Malcolm Christian, Caversham Press.
Precursor to Venice Biennale, 1995: The Lager. 1994.Wayne Barker curates an exhibition for the 1st Johannesburg Biennale, entitled: The Lager. He arranges a series of shipping containers in a lager format. A number of artists are invited to install their work, each in a container. Payne decided to brick up the front of his so as to prevent entry. Within the brick facade a funerary urn (reliquary) was interred. It is labeled with a date of death "1995" but no date of birth that suggests the end of an era. The work is entitled: Mistaken identity. The source for this work and the later walls for Venice stem from visits to the Bo-Kaap area of Cape Town where many derelict houses have door way and window openings bricked up to prevent occupation.
Rose Street, Bo Kaap, Cape Town.
Detail.
Mistaken identity. 1984.
Venice Biennale, 1995.Following on from Mistaken Identity Payne constructs three walls at the gates to the Biennale gardens in Venice (see chronology for more detail).The walls contain forty two glass fronted funerary urn inclusions, six of which are commissioned. Brett Murray, Randolph Hartzenberg, Kagiso Pat Mautloa and Payne make two each. The rest are named after black South African artists who are dead. Donald Judd, Picasso and Pollock are included.Christiaan Boltanski contributed a peculiar irony with his work that plastered the front of the Italian pavilion. He stenciled the names of all the artists that had exhibited since the advent of the biennale on its facade. I did not see Cecil Skotnes however. Payne's work named most of the South African artists that never had the opportunity to represent their country at this event.
An inverted digital clock is inserted into the back of each wall.
Untitled (USA), Untitled (Holland), Untitles (UK). 1995. (Demolished after the exhibition)Fault Lines: inquiries into truth and reconciliation.ExhibitsTitle in Progress on the exhibition Fault Lines: inquiries into truth and reconciliation, curated by Jane Taylor, The Castle, Cape Town, June 16t 1996 to July 31 1996. Funded by the Royal Netherlands Embassy.
Artists and writers were invited by Jane Taylor to make works that engage with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which attempted to reveal and redress the wrong doings of the past under apartheid rule.
Payne chose to represent torture and the shredding of evidence in a multi-media installation that include a commissioned sound track by Warrick Swinney (Warrick Sony), television monitors, motorized puppet and vacuum-formed book forms, some with photographic images of a male bound to a chair.
Swinny's sound collage preceded an am-dram argument between Soloman and Jack (Where's the text Jack?) as to who has the text that seems lost. Soloman's last words are: If you have lost the test, have you lost God ... bring the text back now! Jack replies: The text is in the images. Just give me the images and I'll bring back the text.
At the end of the sound collage it cues in the dialogue as well as stimulating a motorized half size 'anybody' puppet bound to a chair to thrash back and forth. The chair smacks the pedestal with considerable force partly obliterating the dialogue.
Each monitor shows bandaged blackened hands turning blank pages of books. Binaries intermittently float above the pages: anger/calm, love/hate, mother/father, and so on.
Title in Progress: 1986.All pages under construction
