Art and visual culture in Ivan Vladislavić’s Portrait with Keys

Abstract

This article argues that South African author Ivan Vladislavić’s fictionalized memoir, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006), through its portrayal of visual culture and an enabling process of what the narrator, Vlad, calls “seeing and then seeing again” (2006: 89), “rehabilitates” (Coombes, 2003: 23) Johannesburg’s potentially alienating post-apartheid urban environment depicted in Portrait as having been indelibly inscribed by the apartheid state. Through the idea of “seeing and then seeing again”, I argue, the author stages an act of cultural rehabilitation, one that constitutes both artistic and ideological revision. Extending Walter Benjamin’s notion that the photographic image uniquely constellates the past and the present — of which “seeing and then seeing again” is therefore a form — I show that through his depiction of visual culture, Vladislavić engages critically with South African history in the present, and, consequently, his own historical position as white and thus always already a beneficiary of the apartheid regime. From this, I go on to argue that the method of “seeing and then seeing again” inverts the genre of Euroimperial travel writing theorized by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes to lay bare questions of scopic power, including Vlad’s own.

What I term Ivan Vladislavić’s fictionalized memoir, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006), ¹ is not only a very writerly text, one acutely aware of its own construction, but it is also very visual. By this I mean that not only does it reference numerous art exhibitions, installations, and informal artworks in its intimate rendering of Eboli, “the City of Gold”, but that the images that Vladislavić depicts assume a painterly or photographic quality. Key 65, for instance, portraying a house that Vladislavić’s autobiographical cipher Vlad had previously rented, describes a “sun-bleached still life [which] brought the sea into the room” (87). ² Vladislavić picks up on Portrait’s visual quality in the afterword, in which he explains the book’s genesis: “Many of the texts have been published as cycles in other contexts. I would not have dealt with the material this way had various writers and artists not asked me to contribute to projects of their own” (202). He was initially invited, for instance, to “write for the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition of David Goldblatt’s photographs”, and this celebrated South African photographer gave him access to his archive while he was preparing the “An Accidental Island” cycle (202). This, in turn, provided the starting point for his more recent novel, Double Negative (2011), first published together with Goldblatt’s Johannesburg photographic retrospective, TJ/Double Negative (2010).

In this article, I synthesize insights from art historian Annie E. Coombes’ book, History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (2003), and Walter Benjamin’s notion that the photographic image brings past and present to bear upon each other to critical effect: Benjamin’s “dialectics at a standstill” (1999/1982: 463). ³ I borrow notions of “rehabilitation” and “cultural translation” as constitutive of acts of agency described by Coombes (2003: 23, 25) to construct an argument about Portrait’s portrayal of visual culture. Through this, I suggest, Vladislavić rehabilitates Johannesburg’s potentially alienating urban environment which the book reveals is authored by the apartheid state in order to display and reproduce its power: Johannesburg is described as “a frontier city, a place of contested boundaries” (173), and “[t]he township is written in longhand across the printed page of the white city” (64). The unique constellation of past and present (Benjamin, 1999/1982: 463) captured by the photographic image is constitutive of Vladislavić’s method of “seeing and then seeing again”. By “rehabilitating” visual culture, Vladislavić engages critically with South African history in the present while making himself accountable, as a white writer, as always already apartheid’s beneficiary. Even if Johannesburg is dismissed by Vlad and his friend Chas as “no more than a mnemonic” (2006: 33), through memory-work the author Vladislavić and his cipher “Vlad” address their own sense of place as white men within the changing urban environment, as well as the processes of social transformation necessary to envisioning a revitalized “new South Africa”. This leads me to argue that Portrait, frequently referred to by critics as part travelogue (see, e.g., Carty, 2006; Morris, 2006; Nuttall, 2011), inverts the genre of Euroimperial travel writing defined by Mary Louise Pratt (1992) to lay bare the consumption of visual culture in the context of the transitional, “postcolonial” state.

The “pentimento” and the “tomason”, terms borrowed from art history, are central motifs in Portrait constituting acts of rehabilitation and cultural translation. A “pentimento”, Vlad writes, “is a place where the painter ‘repented’ or changed his mind, revealed with the passage of time as the concealing paint ages and becomes transparent” (89). The depiction of the Ndebele mural in Key 10, discussed below, is one example of Vladislavić’s reworking of this concept. A “tomason”, a term “coined” by Japanese artist Genpei Akasegawa and exemplified by the concrete pole Vlad stumbles across, “describe[s] a purposeless object found in a city street, […] a thing that has become detached from its original purpose” (163). Common to the pentimento and the tomason is a process Vlad calls “seeing and then seeing again”, which he attributes specifically to the pentimento but that can be applied to both (89). Here, Vladislavić draws upon the work of dramatist Lillian Hellman, one of whose memoirs is titled Pentimento (1973). In the case of the pentimento, visual culture travels primarily through time, while in that of the tomason, it travels primarily through space; yet this journeying, both in its temporal and spatial manifestations, requires the consumer or viewer to reconsider (re-view or “see again”) the visual object. Thus “seeing and then seeing again” represents Vladislavić’s method of cultural rehabilitation, and constitutes a revision that is both artistic and ideological. Rather than predominantly signifying creolization, as Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael loosely schematize it in its contemporary popular South African form (2000: 6), visual culture provides Vladislavić with the vehicle by which to explore the continuing racial lines along which the city is in fact scored (motifs of walls and boundaries proliferate to this end), as well as his own sense of responsibility and accountability as a white South African writer for South Africa’s segregationist past. Both Vladislavić and Coombes question how, in the present day, we negotiate and live with a past like apartheid if we are to build a better, more equitable, future.

To elucidate my argument, I turn to an early segment of the book, Key 9. At first glance, the portrait it paints of 18 Eleanor Street, a house neighbouring Vlad’s own, is not an obvious example of the process of “seeing and then seeing again”. I quote the passage at length in order to explore Vladislavić’s method of “visuality”:

The house at 18 Eleanor Street is another Portuguese modernization, but more restrained. It once had three notable features, all of them amulets against danger, but only one has survived. In the left-hand corner of the severely cropped lawn sat a life-size statue of a German shepherd dog, with painted fur and a grinning jaw. It looked like a large-scale version of the SPCA collection boxes that used to stand on shop counters. On the right-hand facade [sic] of the house, the second and third amulets were arranged symmetrically on either side of the central window (a bedroom, to judge by lacy curtains behind Spanish bars), like icons at an altar. On the left, a rectangular panel composed of six blue ceramic tiles, together depicting the Virgin Mary; on the right, a signboard, of exactly the same size and colour, declaring that the house was protected by the NISS armed response company.

This house has been sold to a coloured family, who apparently have no taste for Roman Catholic iconography. After tolerating her presence for a few months, they chiselled the Madonna of Eleanor Street off the wall, leaving behind a patch of white plaster as clear as a conscience in the cream-coloured paintwork. Or was it the previous owner who came back to fetch her? The dog is gone too, but the NISS sign endures.

The spot where David Webster was shot dead by an apartheid assassin is just across the road. (2006: 25–26)

Particularly striking about this passage is the way in which the portrait depicts two images of the same house, inviting the reader, who becomes a notional “viewer”, to look and “see again”: the image that the narrator Vlad recalls from memory is superimposed in the manner of the photographic negative over the photographic image onto the present-day one with its missing statuettes of a dog and Madonna, but still-evident security sign. This device is not unlike Toni Morrison’s notion of “rememory” (2004/1987: 41) in the context of North American slave histories and, like Benjamin’s theory of the photographic image, brings the past and present to bear upon each other in complex, dialectical ways. These visual markers — the “restrained” European architecture, the missing statues but prevailing security sign — encode a fraught colonial and apartheid history as well as the historical present of the post-apartheid state, what we might read as an encrypted condensation of South African history.

The “restraint” of the house connotes the supposed sophistication and refinement (cultural hegemony) of its European architectural pretensions, qualities identified as the preserve of the upper echelons of a stratified society, as Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) critique of the judgement of taste has demonstrated. In Vlad’s visual representation of 18 Eleanor Street “restraint” is mediated through a reflexive device, ekphrasis: we are presented with Vlad’s interpretation of the visual scene (and as Vladislavić shows, such interpretations are always constrained by the ways in which the interpreter is interpellated). Here, as throughout the book, it is through descriptions of visual culture (ekphrasis) that Vlad’s position as cultural consumer is most clearly exposed.

In the portrait of 18 Eleanor Street a contemporary Joburger’s almost pathological preoccupation with security and violent crime surfaces in references to the three “amulets against danger”: the security sign and the missing statues of the Alsatian dog and the Madonna. The Alsatian, habitually employed as a guard dog to protect private property, in turn draws out the militaristic imagery of the “severely cropped lawn”, which is not unlike a soldier’s cropped hair. This dog, we are told, resembles an SPCA charity box of the kind that “used” to be found on shop counters. By setting this statement in the past tense, the text suggests that the high incidence of theft has meant that it is no longer safe to leave even petty cash unguarded; or alternatively, that contemporary South African culture is plagued by a loss of charitable feeling symptomatic of the dehumanizing effects of present-day crime and the resultant tightening of security measures. The missing Madonna, apparently chiselled away by the new residents, who by South African designation are “coloured”, leaves a patch of white plaster as “clear as a conscience”. All that remains is the security sign, which encrypts continuing anxieties about crime. We understand from the passage that the demographics of the city are changing: the “invisibility” of whiteness (Dyer, 1996: 3) suggests that the previous residents of 18 Eleanor Street were white — indeed, the whiteness of the plaster may well encode this; likewise, “tolerance” is a term frequently associated with race talk. The expression of a clear conscience suggests the rightful sense of entitlement experienced by heretofore marginalized communities whose access to the privileged whites-only residential areas, except to carry out menial work, was denied. If confession in South Africa became part of the national psyche in the years following the inauguration of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the new residents, in Vlad’s representation of the missing icon, apparently feel unencumbered by the desire to confess. The scene of Key 9 depicting these changes to the demographics of Eleanor Street is punctuated by the bald statement about the assassination on the very same street (by government secret services) of David Webster, anthropologist and anti-apartheid activist. Through these juxtaposed images we are provided with a stark reminder of the legacy of apartheid history: contemporary crime is tacitly acknowledged to be a throwback to the “legal illegality” (Coetzee, 1992: 363) perpetrated by the apartheid state.

Via a process of what I call textual mapping, whereby the reader makes thematic associations across the text not unlike Fredric Jameson’s (1991) concept of cognitive mapping and exemplified by Vladislavić’s use at the end of Portrait of “itineraries” (that is, suggested thematic “routes”), the missing statuettes of 18 Eleanor Street call to mind the subject of Key 13: Sophie Calle’s exhibition, The Detachment/Die Entfernung, shown at Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1995. In Vlad’s words, Calle

describes her way of working: “I visited places from which symbols of the former East Germany have been effaced. I asked passers-by to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces. I photographed the absence and replaced the missing monuments with their memories.” […] [T]here are also photographs of the old times, when the symbols of power still occupied their places with confidence, and these allow us to stand in judgement on the veracity of the recorded memories. (32–33)

Similarly, Coombes considers how the newly elected Government of National Unity would manage the problem of the continuing presence of monuments to the apartheid state such as the Voortrekker monument that Vlad, reminiscing about his childhood in Pretoria, tells us, “squat[s] on the distant horizon” (35). Coombes reflects upon

how far it is possible to disinvest such an icon of its Afrikaner nationalist associations and reinscribe it with new resonances that enable it to remain a highly public monument despite a new democratic government whose future is premised on the demise of everything the monument has always stood for. (2003: 23)

Calle’s East German exhibition thus facilitates the rehabilitation of the monuments through public memory work, employing what I call a photographic negative effect by juxtaposing the rememories and photographs of the empty sites with photographs of the monuments in their heyday. In such a way, by “allow[ing] us to stand in judgement on the veracity of the recorded memories”, we are invited to engage actively, and thus critically, with the exhibition and are thereby constructed as cultural translators. In turn, the textual mapping between the images of the missing monuments depicted by Calle and the missing statues of Eleanor Street require us to reconsider what has been lost and what has been gained in the rehabilitation of post-apartheid public space. Following her analysis of the very different ways in which the Voortrekker Monument has been “reinvented” by different communities within South Africa with divergent political agendas, Coombes writes:

My concern here is to reinstate the concept of agency as a way of understanding how this commemorative “shrine” has been reinvented post-apartheid. Sometimes serendipitous, sometimes strategic, and sometimes opportunistic, the monument seems to have become a staging post for self-fashioning for both white and black constituencies across the political spectrum. […] The semantic distance between them foregrounds the extent to which even an apparent stable signifier of monolithic nationalist associations can be undercut by the necessarily hybridizing effects of different acts of translation. (2003: 25)

Crucially, Vladislavić painstakingly constructs our own position as visual consumers. Immediately following the depiction of the exhibition, Vlad, who has been perusing it, encounters the eviction of a street child from the gallery housing it and then, unsure whether to reveal them to the authorities, leaves two other homeless children undiscovered by security guards as he exits. Vlad tells us,

Like a true art lover, I go on my way ambivalently, turning the options over in my mind. I pass through the empty halls, past African crafts and nineteenth-century oils, I go down the steps into the parking lot, and the guard locks the door behind me. (33)

Here, the exclusive enclave of the art gallery, punctuated by the security guard locking the gallery door behind Vlad as he departs, is emphasized by the presence of these children. Even the deliberate act of rehabilitation, presented through the description of Calle’s exhibition, is called into question by the book’s very form as the scenes of child poverty juxtaposing it remind the reader that the art world in which such gestures are made is typically the preserve of an educated elite. And Vlad’s status as “ambivalent art lover” emphasizes the critical distance established by the text from what Vlad sees — and so that which we, as readers, in a sense “see again” — within the gallery walls.

Indeed, through this dialogic engagement with the South African art world debate, Portrait raises questions about how we value art and the possibilities of inclusivity and relevance in the post-apartheid state (see Coombes, 2003: 44; Marschall, 2004; Nuttall and Michael, 2000). Vlad’s friend Liz — who presumably is black, because she chastises Vlad, “That’s why you whites like [the Ndebele mural] so much. Nice and tidy” (28) — provides a foil to Vlad’s enthusiasm for the mural painted on the neighbour’s garden wall. It is another friend, Louise, who marvels at the inventiveness of Joburg’s homeless: “It tickled her […] that such utilitarian spaces should have been appropriated and domesticated, transformed into repositories of privacy for those compelled to live their lives in public” (50). Here, it is Vlad who provides the counter-voice: “It’s pathetic”, he says, “that people are so poor they have to store their belongings in holes in the ground” (50).

Vladislavić’s artful construction of the visual consumer carries over, I would argue, to questions of genre. As mentioned above, several critics describe Portrait as part travelogue; the blurb for the UK edition classifies it as “travel writing”. In fact, the text is far more slippery. Vladislavić’s “longstanding canniness in relation to the narrator-author function” has been frequently noted (Nuttall, 2011: 329) — the dust jacket of the South African edition, subtitled Joburg & What-What, declares it is “an oblique self-portrait”. The marketing of Portrait as travel writing to an international readership might be attributed to its very visual quality, yet the author has said in an interview that this was in fact a publishing error, that the book, in fact, is “the opposite of a travel book — it’s actually a stay-at-home book” (Reid, 2010). Yet to read the text against itself, “as” travel writing, is a useful exercise if we consider the question of scopic power and in particular the association between power in its colonialist forms and the traveller’s act of looking, as suggested by the title of Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). The final chapter of Pratt’s account of “Euroimperial” travel writing spanning the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, in which Pratt analyses the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” genre (1992: 201), focuses on scopic power and “the relation of mastery predicated between seer and the seen”, a thread that runs through the volume “off and on” (1992: 204); the introduction, for instance, defines “seeing man” as “he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess” (1992: 7).

The monarch-of-all-I-survey genre typically contains the “standard elements of the imperial trope”: namely, “the mastery of the landscape, the estheticizing adjectives, the broad panorama anchored in the seer” (Pratt, 1992: 209). Pratt describes how the genre manifests itself in more recent travel writing, citing Alberto Moravia’s Which Tribe Do You Belong To? (1972) and Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express (1978), in which the monarch-of-all-I-survey is the twentieth-century tourist looking down from the “panoramic” view of his hotel. Compare with the description of Vlad in Portrait looking down from the Carlton Centre in his childhood, where he was “master” of “all [he] surveyed” (16–17); the singularity of Vladislavić’s (and Vlad’s) account is the knowing problematizing of looking, which Vladislavić achieves by staging it meticulously within a discourse inflected by colonialist and apartheid paradigms. Vladislavić constructs Vlad as such a monarch, only to demystify this role both within the present of the narrative and through the distancing effect established through inverting the Euroimperial travelogue, as well as through the genre of memoir, which necessarily entails the selfconscious juxtaposition of the construction and then reconstruction of the self. The newly reconstituted subject thus views itself through “new eyes”.

Vladislavić’s self-reflexivity is in part achieved by the inversion of the key tropes of the imperial travelogue: the journeys Vlad describes emphasize their temporal aspect and the micro-spatial, rather than geo-spatial exemplified by the panoramic scope of imperial eyes. Here, again, temporality facilitates revision. In general, imperial travelogues prioritize the geo-spatial over the temporal (although Daniel Defoe’s quasi-travelogue Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its striking preoccupation with the passage of time would be an exception). Portrait is organized around two points of a journey, Point A and Point B: the numbered sections or keys in Point A loosely describe the period leading up to Vlad’s departure from Joburg; those of Point B loosely describe his return. I stress the organization is loose because much of the book is a recounting — sometimes nostalgic, sometimes not — of the story of the city from its inception as a gold-mining settlement in the nineteenth century to its recent history in the post-apartheid state. Throughout the text Vlad actually remains within Johannesburg (this is, after all, Vladislavić’s “staying-at-home book”). His journeys operate on a micro-spatial level as Vlad walks the city streets (and critics have noted that these cover a very small area indeed [Morris, 2006]), and, as in the case of the tomason where everyday objects themselves journey from one spatial context to another, in the process accrue new meanings. Again inverting the Euroimperial travelogue, the text registers a shift from a monumental to a micro-spatial scale of perception and, by this means, to the gaze turned inward and the questioning of the self. The passage I quoted at the beginning of this article, describing the photographic negative effect of 18 Eleanor Street, illustrates Vlad’s temporal journey very nicely, constellating past and present, in Benjamin’s words, to establish “dialectics at a standstill” (1999/1982: 463). The inversion of contemporary Euroimperial travel writing, in the process, effects a reversal of the tendency identified by Pratt in such narratives “of representing other parts of the world as having no history”. “Such are the logic and rhetoric”, Pratt concludes, “of unexamined prejudice” (1992: 219; emphasis added). So, unlike the Euroimperial travelogue, Portrait is steeped in the question of history, and, through a process of “seeing and then seeing again”, puts “unexamined prejudice” itself under scrutiny.

Nuttall theorizes the interrelationship of surface and depth in her reading of Portrait. She reads an “entanglement of surface and depth” in its “historical and psychic senses”, arguing that “Johannesburg is a city of surfaces, capitalist brashness, but one which carries with it, too, a subliminal memory of life below the surface, of suffering, alienation, rebellion, insurrection” (2011: 327). Nuttall argues that it is the depth narrative or “underneath” that will tend to subsume the surface one (“[f]or the author-narrator, even as he examines its surfaces, the truth of the city is largely to be found in its underneath” [2011: 333]), and advocates refocusing our attention on the “hermeneutic space” of the surface as signifying the transitional period through which South Africa has been passing (2011: 335). Yet if we are to associate depth with historical memory (the “subliminal memory of life below the surface”) and surface with the postmodernist city, which Fredric Jameson would argue necessarily embeds a “weakening of historicity” (1991: 6), Neil Lazarus’ comments about the likes of Gordimer, Coetzee, and Brink as “white writers” of 1980s South Africa still ring true for the twenty-first century, post-apartheid writings of Vladislavić:

[I]f the specter of the apocalypse confronts these writers when they look ahead, simple honesty prevents them from turning their backs on the present and future and taking refuge in any nostalgic representation of the past. For when they look to the past they tend to see little worth celebrating; instead, they see only what Michel Foucault, in a different context, has described as “the history of the present” — in other words, only that violence and domination which have served to make the present what it is, and which, presumably, in the eyes of these writers, are precisely what guarantee that this present will turn into that future. (Lazarus, 1986–87: 132; original emphasis)

If, as Nuttall seems to be claiming, the depth narrative is analogous to the past and the surface to the transitional present (and thus the future as well), then I would argue, as Lazarus does, that to endeavour to separate out this triad of past, present, and future is misguided.

Key 10, depicting the painting of the Ndebele mural in Vlad’s neighbourhood in “the early nineties” (28), neatly captures the transitional moment in South African history: it is in this mural that the constellation of past, present, and future is perhaps most distinctly distilled. As Sabine Marschall argues, Ndebele murals constitute creolized artefacts, and are unique among other South African wall paintings because of their “thematic flexibility and adaptability” (2002: 42). They represent “a model of cross-cultural fertilization, incorporating Western images and, sometimes, popular icons that are interpreted and translated into the typical stylized designs and patterns” (Marschall, 2004: 44). Unlike for Vlad’s friend Liz, for whom Ndebele murals are “kitsch” and “like that braai sauce people slosh over everything to give it an African flavour” (27), for Vlad the mural signifies a “metaphor for the social transformation we are living through” (28). Vlad takes issue with Liz’s claim about the lack of authenticity of such murals — “Someone just made it up”, she says (27) — on the grounds that “that’s how culture evolves” and newness enters the world: “People make things up”. “Why shouldn’t we have Ndebele patterns on suburban walls?”, he asks; “only someone with a custodial view of African culture would regard as ‘traditional’ an art form that arose so recently” (27). As with the arrival of the “coloured” family in Eleanor Street, in Vlad’s account, the mural signals a new demographic in a previously whites-only area. Despite Liz’s claim that, “That’s why you whites like it so much. Nice and tidy”, Vlad finds it “bravely optimistic … Africa was coming to the suburbs in the nicest possible way” (28). And Vlad’s utopic reading of the mural is rewarded: despite his fears, the mural is not defaced by the racist “bile” he anticipates (28). Coombes (2003) discusses the means by which monuments to the Afrikaner state are “disinvested” of old meanings and then “reinscribed” with new. In the example of the mural the process is complex: it rehabilitates hegemonic cultural referents — in Portrait, whites-only residencies. Yet the mural’s presence in a heretofore “white” neighbourhood lends it new meaning as well, as do the encrypted “Western” references embedded within it. Taken together, these shifting cultural signifiers serve, in Vlad’s eyes, to offer a metaphor for cultural transformation.

Before we settle into an all-too-easy (and thus premature) celebration of cultural transition — what has become known popularly as “rainbowism” — we are confronted in Key 40 with the mural’s demise. Beneath the utilitarian brushstrokes of the painter and decorator who comes to paint over it, it becomes a ghostly image:

He was hacking into the pattern, obliterating it with extravagant swipes of the roller. Standing back, from time to time, to admire his handiwork. As if there was anything to be seen but an act of vandalism. The man must be a brute, I thought. It would be a man, too, the very antithesis of the woman who had painted the mural. I tried to remember her, but she had faded in my memory. I saw a middle-aged woman with a blanket knotted about her, wearing neck rings and a beaded headdress — but this was Esther Mahlangu, the painter of the BMW, whose photograph had been in the newspapers many times! In any event, they were not opposites. She was not an artist and he was not a vandal. They were simply people employed by the owners of a suburban house to perform a task. What the one had been employed to do, the other had now been employed to undo… The new owner was remaking the place in his own style. (61)

Recalling the photographic negative effect of the portrait of 18 Eleanor Street which leads to our “seeing and then seeing again”, Vlad notes how under the new, “lemony yellow with green trim”, “you could still see the African geometry developing, like a Polaroid image, as the paint dried” (61). In the manner of the black corpse resurfacing on Mehring’s farm in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974), the mural and its cultural inscriptions come to haunt the still-dominant narratives of segregationist capitalist modernity within South Africa.

Although Vlad, reflecting on the mural, celebrates newness and cultural transformation, plans for the “Great Wall of Jeff”, a “wall of remembrance”, hark back nostalgically to a way of life that is perceived by artist-friend Jeff Lok and Vlad to be dying. The friends mourn a city that is “passing away”: “We must build ourselves a memorial while there is still time”. The Great Wall of Jeff will be an inclusive project, incorporating an “object” “donate[d]” by “[e]very person in the Greater Johannesburg area, identified by the voters’ roll” (47). Of course, those not registered on the roll — the homeless, for instance — will be left out of the project. Here, we encounter rehabilitation in its most obvious form: the everyday object revivified as art but celebrated for its ordinariness (New Historicists would speak about a shift from “wonder” — an “exalting” aestheticism — towards “resonance” — the potentially multiple ways the artefact signifies [Greenblatt, 1991: 42]). As Jeff says, “We’re looking for a little thing the donor can be induced to part with. It could be nothing more than a button or a piece of string. Everyone has something they could live without” (48). Satirizing the contemporary South African arts and heritage debate of which Coombes (2003: 44) writes and which, as Marschall points out, centres on the question of funding at a time in South Africa when the majority continue to endure crippling poverty (2004: 78), Vlad and Jeff settle on it being called a “public works project” rather than an “art work”, which, Vlad says, “will create the wrong impression” (48). Vladislavić narrativizes the debate this spawns on “the question of values”. Jeff suggests each donor puts a price on the value of their object to reflect the fact that Johannesburg is the “Golden City”: the “capital of buying and selling”; Vlad questions the very use of a wall as a framing device for the objects, given the symbolic associations walls have with exclusion and marginalization as well as the attendant anxieties about violent crime (49).

The raising of the everyday object to the status of artwork calls to mind the kind of cultural museum represented in the work of Cape Town’s now famous District Six Museum, which commemorates the everyday lives of the residents of District Six, forcibly removed from the area between the late 1960s and early 1980s to make room for whites. The “Mementoes of District Six” exhibition, referred to in Key 60 and, significantly, juxtaposed within the same key to the story of the stolen biscuit tin containing Vlad’s grandfather’s badges, “is a cabin made of resin blocks. Enclosed in each block is an object or fragment that the artist Sue Williamson collected among the ruins of District Six after the removals: a shard of pottery, a scrap of wallpaper, a hairclip, a doll’s shoe” (81). Even Vlad’s friend Liz, exacting critic though she is, is moved to tears by the exhibition:

Really, I’m no pushover, but it was just so moving, standing there like a kid in a Wendy house surrounded by these relics, worthless things made to seem precious, glowing like candles. As if each trinket and scrap had been a treasure to someone. (81)

In a similar fashion, the description of Vlad’s grandfather’s badges and their theft in Key 59 resonates with human experience and loss: indeed, the badges are reanimated by their positioning within the text.

Not only is the debate about cultural values and taste between Vlad and Jeff thematically relevant, but the dialogism it effects serves to establish a critical distance between reader and text: we are ceaselessly constructed not as visual consumers but as critical readers and viewers of the “texts” and cultural artefacts we encounter. Indeed, the quotidian is endorsed by Vladislavić as a standard of self-reflexivity. In an interview with Shaun de Waal, Vladislavić advocates the value of “small stories”, of “accustoming oneself to marginality, engaging with something that makes no claim to completeness” (1996: 3). The rediscovery of “smallness” — taken in this article to be synonymous with Njabulo Ndebele’s (2006/1991) notion of “ordinariness” — is a means by which an alienated community rehumanizes or lays bare the narratives of national identity bolstered by apartheid monumentalism. As Andreas Huyssen argues in the context of Nazi Germany (2003: 38–39), monumentalism has the dual effect of supporting nationalist rhetoric while reifying the marginalization of the alienated majority. The incompleteness attached to smallness is suggestive of a kind of dialogism — different “voices” will contribute towards the constitution (meaning) of the “small” object — and, in turn, of Vladislavić’s refusal to offer prescriptive narratives of the “new South Africa”.

In the context of apartheid, the consumption of visual culture is complicated by the fact, discussed above, that the act of looking engenders scopic power and inequity. These legacies of apartheid are perpetuated in the post-apartheid period, where South African society continues to be sharply drawn along economic, and thus largely racial, lines and where the esoteric environment of the art world, such as the Johannesburg Art Museum where the Calle exhibition was shown (Key 13), will generate largely elite constituencies. Likewise, the depiction in Key 93 of Herman Wald’s Leaping Impala sculpture, originally installed in Ernest Oppenheimer Park in 1960, obliquely raises the problem of the public consumption of visual culture.

Capturing its monumental proportions, Vlad’s description of Leaping Impala — a “ton and a half of venison in bronze” (127) — resonates with the colonialist discourse attendant to African game reserves and game hunting and integral to nineteenth-century Boer culture: a means by which men could exercise their masculinity in a deeply patriarchal society (Beinart and Hughes, 2009: 64). At the same time, the description impresses the racist notion of separate amenities on those using the park; we learn that, “In the sixties and seventies, fountains splashed the flanks of the stampeding buck, while office workers ate their lunch-time sandwiches on whites-only benches” (127). Vladislavić draws out colonialist associations with hunting and conservationism with his choice of hunting diction. The sculpture is subsequently rehabilitated by local metal thieves described as “poachers” who hack at the metal:

Although the park deteriorated along with the inner city in the following decades, until it came to be used primarily as a storage depot by hawkers, the herd of impala seemed set to survive the century unscathed. But towards the end of 1999, poachers started carving away at it, lopping heads and legs with blow-torches and hacksaws. (127)

As William Beinart and Lotte Hughes have shown, conservationism was embedded in imperialism and its history (2009: 1). As a consequence of the failure of game laws, from the late nineteenth century both the colonial and Boer authorities designated protected areas, including the Transvaal in the Sabi area, which would later become part of the Kruger National Park. Wildlife preservation and national parks were modelled on the national parks of the US like Yellowstone, and, as Beinart and Hughes comment, they “became particularly important to southern African colonial societies, and were increasingly justified by strict scientific preservationism” (2009: 73–74). So Vladislavić’s hunting motifs tacitly allude to the ways in which the imposing structure and attendant Afrikaner nationalist ideology of the Leaping Impala sculpture have been irreverently rehabilitated (dismantled) in the post-apartheid state: once redolent of white power, the sculpture now reflects petty urban crime and the failed promises of the post-apartheid state.

Yet, despite Vlad’s nostalgia for a city described as “passing away” (47), for example when he reminisces, “These were the days of the garden-variety wire fence, long before the advent of the candy-striped boom and the two-metre wall” (17), the sentimentalism identified by Pratt in her analyses of Euroimperial travel writing is not allowed to flourish in Vladislavić’s account of the post-apartheid city: Vlad’s nostalgia is scrutinized through processes of “seeing and then seeing again”. According to Pratt, sentimental anti-conquest writing constructs the “innocent”, a figure apparently oblivious to the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony. Pratt explains,

the term “anti-conquest” was chosen because, as I argue, in travel and exploration writings these strategies of innocence are constituted in relation to older imperial rhetorics of conquest associated with the absolutist era. The main protagonist of the anti-conquest is a figure I sometimes call the “seeing-man”, an admittedly unfriendly label for the European male subject of European landscape discourse — he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess. (1992: 7)

This question of innocence returns us to the problem of genre raised at the beginning of this article: I argue that because we are dealing in Portrait with a fictionalized memoir, the distance Vladislavić creates between himself, as author, and Vlad, the character he constructs, establishes a critical distance between his own values and ideology and those of his cipher. The temporal distance created in representations of visual culture between past and present and captured in the image as “dialectics at a standstill” reinforces this. Moreover, Vladislavić the author embeds dialogue and debate between the characters that populate Vlad’s life about the nature of representation, rendering the text dialogic. One only has to think of the debate and conflict the presence of the Ndebele mural elicits, both between Vlad and his friend Liz, and what we draw from the thinly-veiled racism encoded in Vlad’s brother Branko’s comments that the owners of the property are having the mural painted over because “They haven’t found a buyer, […] and it’s no bloody wonder” (61).

The problem of nostalgia is usefully addressed by Coombes, who, borrowing from Svetlana Boym’s writings on post-Soviet Russia, distinguishes between nostalgia in its “reflective” and “restorative” forms. This is how Boym delineates these distinctions:

Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt. Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals; it knows two main plots — the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones; it loves detail, not symbols. (2001: xviii)

If we distinguish between the present of Vlad’s narrative, when nostalgia on occasion surfaces in its restorative form, and the present of our reading of Portrait, when nostalgia manifests in its reflexive form, I would argue that the latter subsumes the former. In other words, Vladislavić’s (if not Vlad’s) nostalgia is self-aware, drawing the text away from the kind of “anti-conquest” travel narrative of which Pratt writes, that, while endeavouring to engage reciprocally with colonial and postcolonial societies, is still characterized by a skewed power dynamic and an absence of autocritique.

Vladislavić’s writing about visual culture constellates past and present (and future as well) in the photographic image to set, in Benjamin’s words, “dialectics at a standstill”. By staging a process of “seeing and then seeing again” through his narratives of visual culture, Vladislavić lays bare the association between scopic power and the white, male South African gaze, thereby subjecting himself to the autocritical process. By capturing past and present within its frame, the visual image clears the ground for ideological revision and reconstruction. From this, we might conclude that “transition”, for Vladislavić, is about the ways in which the vicissitudes of visual culture unsettle easy, prescribed narratives of national belonging and identity.