Notes

JH Pierneef’s iconic landscape paintings became the subject of parody and hijack by counter-cultural artists in the 1980s. Wayne Barker was not the first artist to lampoon Pierneef’s stylised compositions, but he was arguably the most merciless. In 1989, he destroyed a parody work depicting Pierneef’s Apies River scene from his celebrated Johannesburg Station Panels (1929-32) during a SABC television show devoted to artist Braam Kruger. At the time, Barker was living in the Famous International Gallery in central Johannesburg. The area’s working-class consumer culture greatly invigorated his pop-influenced paintings.

Barker’s earliest process involved projecting Pierneef’s works onto a canvas and completing them paint-by-numbers style. “His paintings were easy to copy because of their Tintin comic vibe.”¹ Barker then applied various motifs and objects, including commercial brands, painted targets a la Jasper Johns, rudimentary figures in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat and found objects that evoked the assemblage paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and David Koloane. “The works bristled with relevance, and Barker expected them to be greeted more favourably than they were by the art establishment,” his biographer Charl Blignaut noted.² Undeterred, Barker persisted with Pierneef. A durable antagonist, Barker has deployed Pierneef’s work to comment on globalisation, history and memory in a changing South Africa

His post-2000 output includes large glass-bead compositions made in collaboration with artisans, as well as works incorporating oil, enamel, printed vinyl and neon. The distinctive modes of laying down his source image matter less than the animating idea. Barker considers Pierneef a pop artist and his much-debated Station Panels as South Africa’s “first pop images”.³ “I was brought up with his iconography. He was a target I could attack. He was employed to paint this beautiful landscape to get the Afrikaans nation to say who they are, which, in a way, is quite charming in retrospect, but during the apartheid years I was f—furious.”⁴

A diminishing rage underpins this tribute work, which centrally depicts murdered political activist Chris Hani against Pierneef’s stately Rustenburg Kloof. It pre-empted a series of similarly styled works from 2010-12 that memorialise, even lionise Black artists, musicians and politicians against Pierneef’s resplendent nature.

^1. Chad Rossouw (2010) ‘You are super Boring’, in Art South Africa, No. 8.3, page 61.
^2. Charl Blignaut (2000) Wayne Barker, Johannesburg: Chalkham Press, page 28.
^3. John Peffer (2009) Art and the End of Apartheid, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, page 227.
^4. Rossouw, page 61.