I destroyed "Apies River" in a performance in a black working class bar for an SABC television show on the artist Braam Kruger, who was living in town. The bar was called Avanganye, "lets be friends". I destroyed the work while being filmed and interviewed, saying "this is the violence, this is the workers...10"

Pierneef "Apies River, Pretoria" oil on canvas on panel, 140 X 126.5cm, 1932

In order to understand Barker's unsettling attack on this painting, we need to also consider Pierneef's original monumental picture which preceded it, and which seems so innocent to our eyes. "Apies River" is one of thirty-two panels commissioned by the South African government in 1929 for the Johannesburg railway staton. Other panels include similarly majestic rural scenes of the Drakensberg mountains and the Karoo, as well as picturesque depictions of quiant towns like Hermanus and Graaf-Reinet.

Pierneef's landscapes are often dominated by an expanse of sky with a heroic stack of clouds, or a mountain silhouette taking up two-thirds of the frame. Pierneef rarely painted people into these pictures. Characteristic too was his stark, flat, and almost monochromatic use of color, his prismatic atmospheric effects, and his imposition of, "the logic of science on his perception of the logic of nature.11" After his travels abroad in 1925-26 he was aware of roughly contemporary developments in art in Europe, and post-cubist forms of geometric abstraction and decorative ideas from Art Nouveau made their way into his designs for landscape painting12.

Is it ironic that as one of the earliest South African artists to integrate European modernist trends in his work, Pierneef has been called "the foremost interpreter of the South African landscape"? So much so that, in her celebratory discussion of the Johannesburg Station panels, Rina de Villiers could claim:

Pierneef had so intensely made the South African landscape his own, had interpreted it in such a way, that South Africans learnt to see their country through his eyes. Just as certain parts of Provence are regarded as Cezanne's landscape, and the environs of Arles carry van Gogh's stamp, so we identify Pierneef with the Transvaal Bushveld12.

In Pierneef's painting the South African landscape is cast as God's land, and by extension the providence of His Chosen People, the Afrikaner volk. His view of Apies River, Pretoria, is one purged of any evidence of the Ndebele and other African people who were defeated by Boer commanodoes and scattered as labor onto white farms near Pretoria after 188319. Also erased from the picturesque landscape of rolling hills and bubbling stream is any hint of the city of Pretoria itself, especially the Union Buildings, which would have been an irksome reminder of British rule20. Pierneef's landscapes represent a form of idyl more extreme even than the utopic fantasies of some of his Afrikaner Nationalist colleagues. He grew up in Pretoria at the turn of the century, when it was still a small town. In his pictures of the place, it seems, he wished it would have stayed that way. His art blocked from view the urban industrial congestion, and the presence of gold and diamond mines. His view of the country was void of the Afrikaner's fears of a swart gevaar, of the impending danger of blacks swamping the cities-- an idea which was used to bring the Nationalists to political power in 194821. For Pierneef the landscape was frozen in a state of empty apartness, perpetually ready for white settlement, and timelessly open for the prospect of white prosperity22. His was a utopian fantasy of what the South African landscape never actually was, a big white lie of a rose-colored purist ideology of the land -- sparkling clean, but rotten at its core. Pierneef was not an iconoclast, he was a good old boy. Still, his paintings performed their own kind of symbolic rubbing out of the history of the land.

W. Barker "Apies River" oil and enamel on canvas, 1989

For Asraf Jamal, what is at stake in Wayne Barker's attack on Pierneef's paintings is a double indictment, "against the classical landscape art of Pierneef, [and] against the lies upon which power -- aesthetic and imperial -- subsists.23" Barker's iconoclasm brings to the surface that which the Johannesburg Station Panels repress: all the horrors censored behind a screen of white purity, the empty land presided over by God, and the political ideology of Apartheid which was their bolster. For Wayne Barker, the Station Panels, in their simplicity and in their placement, were a kind of South African popular art, monumentally ensconced in their niches in the large central hall of the train station24. Everyone coming and going to work would have seen them every day.

Barker, like Pierneef, grew up in Pretoria and his upbringing was also in a military family -- his father was a pilot -- and staunchly Afrikaner Nationalist. But he identified with a different generation of Afrikaner youth, many of whom wanted nothing to do with Apartheid and chose to live in the inner city, where the streets were dangerous and the art scene, and the party scene, was more multiracial than in the suburbs. Most white people fled the inner city of Johannesburg after the Pass Laws, designed to keep Africans out of the cities, were abolished in 1986. But a small number of intrepid artists of all races moved into downtown, which became a sort of "grey" area -- neither purely "black" nor "white" according to Apartheid urban areas restrictions. At the time he painted over the Pierneefs, Barker was living in the center of town, squatting in a gallery he had founded, jokingly called "Famous International Gallery". As if still piqued somewhat by the memory, Barker described his iconoclastic relationship to Pierneef's paintings to me:

My initial feeling was instinct: there were these paintings, and they represented [President] Paul Kruger, the [Voortrekker] Monument, the [train] stations, the air force -- it was like one melting pot of like this fucking Apartheid that I was against. There was a state of emergency in Johannesburg. There was chaos. . . . I was very interested in pop art. For me they were the first pop images, they were the [train] station panels, originally. So the third class citizen comes to work for the white guy. . . And then he gets these magnificent landscapes, that are overwhelming. And he's the worker. That can really fuck with your mind25.

Barker took offense at these "cleansed landscapes, uninhabited by people, least of all blacks.26" Asraf Jamal comments: "The land was never an Eden, never a site for pure contemplation, never a sphere which affirmed the perceiver's being in a manner which could be regarded as 'pure'. Rather, the South African landscape has always invoked anxiety and fear, has always been subject to the 'dreamwork' born of cultural and material domination. . . a boundless zone condemned to exploitation.27"

Barker comments that his Pierneef series, "dealt with breaking down the icons of the apartheid era.28" In retrospect, he chose Pierneef because,

His monumental landscapes represented the newfound land of the Afrikaner nation, which they believed was given to them by god in a covenant against the black people, which were heathen and barbarian in their view. They saw themselves not only as superior but as a "chosen people" in a "promised land". The irony of Pierneef paintings is that they are "landscapes" of the land taken from the native black people. The style of these monumental portrayals of the land enshrined a white supremacist- colonial view, which was used to consolidate the Afrikaner national identity.

I re-created the paintings in 1989 as almost perfect pastiches of the originals commissioned by the government for exhibition at the main railway station in Johannesburg. . . . I then created an intervention on the surface of these pastiches using found objects that deconstructed these images and questioned the appropriation of land, exploitation of labor and raised notions of culture in transit29.

As I understand it, Pierneef was a kind of propagandist for the white view of South Africa. He belonged to a ruling class and invented South Africa for that class. I try in my work to pull that vision apart by bringing in other possibilities30.

W. Barker "Images on Metal" 1989

In his discussion of nudity in art, Freedberg notes that in the history of Christian censorship, a central motivation has been to keep the spiritual uncontaminated by the "fleshy", by the material sensual world. The divine and the everyday need to be kept clearly separate32. Where Pierneef's art enacts a similar kind of censorship, separating the image of the "divine land" from the people living within it, Barker slaps them back together roughly. He puts manifest destiny back into bed with the mine dumps and the mass graves. Barker's Pierneef's don't remove the hated symbols of the old order, they are kept around, roughed up a bit, and cast in a new mold -- or, should we say, the mold from which they were cast is what is revealed, and the mold is what we are left with in the end? Here destruction is in the service of re-creation, and in this case of a re-inclusion, by means of scratching-over, what is censored out iconographically, aesthetically, and ideologically from pictures of the South African countryside.

W. Barker "Man made man made man made" 1989

In Pierneef's paintings the land is a vast graveyard, pretending there is no funeral going on -- when the funeral was actually in full swing: it was a protest marching through the center of town. By the time Barker attacked the older master's work hundreds of political activists had been brutally murdered, thousands had died in inhumane conditions on the mines, the last scraps of arable land was being appropriated from the native population, tens of thousands were banned or detained, many of them children, many of them without trial. By the late 1980s, too, the resistance movement had made the black townships almost ungovernable, was bombing "soft targets" in the cities, and mass-protests in the form of funerals had become a regular feature of South African life.

Within this context, Barker's painting imposed a very different geology on the South African landscape: he takes us down the mine shaft and shows who is getting shafted there. He pulls up Pierneef's dead craggy trees and spreads their rotting roots over the flat gound -- thus flattening Pierneef's (and the Apartheid ideologists') three-dimensional picture-perfect view of the place. Barker's iconoclasm enacts a return of the repressed. Pierneef's paintings, though calm on the surface, are, in Jamal's terms "anxious" -- and Barkers symbolic destruction of them placed all the censored anxiety out on their surface.

10 Wayne Barker, interview with the author, 7/1/02. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotes by the artist are from this interview.
11 Esme Berman Art and Artists of South Africa Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1983, p.330.
12 Pierneef's aesthetic ideas were influenced by the later impressionists, by the prismatic art of Feininger and Delaunay, and the decorative art theory of Willem Van Konijnenburg. See Berman, p.329; and Rina de Villiers J H Pierneef Pretorian, Transvaler, South African Pretoria Art Museum, 1986, p. 11.
13 de Villiers, p.12.
14 Berman, p. 328.
15 ibid. A reference to the mythology of the Great Trek, the mass emigration of Dutch-speaking farmers from the Cape province in their ox-drawn covered wagons in order to escape from British rule after 1835. The Great Trek is the pivotal national narrative for the Afrikaner people, an assertion of their independent spirit and their rights to the settled land.
16 Begun in the late 19th Century, the culmination of this effort at creating a national mythology for the Afrikaner volk was the establishment of a secret society, the Borederbond; the standardization of Afrikaans grammar and spelling; the institution of the Great Trek and the Day of the Vow as legitimizing narratives of the Afrikaner's divine right to settle the "empty" land of the South African interior and to bring God and civilization to the native people; and the development of the idea of "separate development" and separate amenities for the different "races" into a political ideology after the Afrikaner Nationalists came to power in the elections of 1948. Broederbond members included most South African Prime Ministers, Afrikaans university and corporation chairmen, and heads of the South African Broadcasting Corporation and the parastatal weapons contractor ARMSCOR. For a detailed account of this history and analysis of the contradictions inherent to the myth of Afrikaner purity, see Leonard Thompson The Political Mythology of Apartheid New Haven: Yale, 1985.
17 For the 19th Century Voortrekkers the laager was a tight circle of ox wagons lashed together, a way of hemming themselves in against attacks by those native people whose land they were encroaching upon.
18 Cited in Thompson, p. 43.
19 For a history of the Ndzundza Ndebele and their mural art see Elizabeth Schnieder Paint, Pride, and Politics: Aesthetic and Meaning in Transvaal Ndebele Wall Art Ph.D. Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1986.
20 This idealized absence in Pierneef's Pretoria landscapes is noted by de Villiers, p.10.
21 Discussed in Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido (eds) The Politics of Race, Class, and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa London: Longman, 1987.
22 For a valuable discussion of the ideololgy of landscape art which brings W.J.T. Mitchell's Landscape and Power and J.M. Coetzee's White Writing to bear on recent South African art, see Ashraf Jamal "Zero Panoramas, Ruins in Reverse, Monumental Vacancies: Contemporary perceptions of landscape in South African Art" in K. Geers (ed) Contemporary South African Art: The Gencor Collection Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 1997.
23 Jamal, p.162.
24 Barker saw them there when he was a child. In 1980 the panels were eventually moved to a museum built for them near the train station, and to the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
25 The artist's notes rephrase this idea: "They were in a sense the first South African 'pop images' created for commuters on their way to and from work. At this time the majority of the population (being black) could only travel 3rd class and could not sit or stand in the 'whites only' areas."
26 Anthea Bristowe "Barker's energy now focused" Business Day September 28, 1992.
27 Jamal, p. 158-9.
28 Barker, unpublished notes on his work, artist's scrapbook, n.d. Emphasis mine.
29 Ibid.
30 Quoted in Ivor Powell, "Catching SA art with its pants down" Daily Mail 16 July, 1990. Emphasis mine.
31 See David Freedberg The Power of Images Chicago: Univerity of Chicago, 1989, p.390 et passim.
32 Freedberg, p.368 et passim.