Roger Ballen
"Roger Ballen" by Ashley Johnson, Fall 2009, pp. 154-156
The anthropologist Victor Turner defined the word liminality as “betwixt and between.” It is a transitional state that involves moving between two existential planes; normal restraints on behaviour and understanding are relaxed, leading to new perspectives. Roger Ballen’s photographs epitomize this process.
His exhibition “Boarding House” is a mini-retrospective. Ballen, originally from New York, is based in Johannesburg, where he has touched a nerve in Afrikaner society with provocative images (like Casie and Dresie, Twins, from his book Platteland) that expose a concealed history of poverty and inbreeding.
His early work is documentary, but Ballen’s interest in transitional processes like decay is already apparent. Many works in his Outland series presented people with their domestic animals, yet in an extraordinary way. There is the cruelty of Cat Catcher, in which the protagonist holds a cat up by the scruff of its neck while peering maniacally at it through the twisted, mangled bars of a wire cage. Here Ballen evokes emotions reminiscent of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. There is also the beauty of Puppy Between Feet, which is a superb reinterpretation of a well-known André Kertész theme. Ballen’s image contrasts gnarled and unkempt feet with a newborn pup cradled in a hand.
In his Shadow Chamber series, Ballen shows us meticulously constructed pictorial realities in which the boundaries between figure and ground and between 2-D and 3-D disintegrate. In this mad universe, nothing is as expected. Walls are activated by expressive doodles while twisted wires extend lines into space. The floors are littered with plastic dinosaurs and kitsch paraphernalia while dolls are nailed to walls and electrical cables go nowhere. People are insinuated into these environments, hiding behind beds or under cupboards, and domestic animals are unsettling too. Are they dead, stuffed or coerced into poses? It is a highly indeterminate reality.
A dilapidated building in Johannesburg is the setting for Ballen’s Boarding House series, which shows us a succession of bizarre scenarios. The images explore a very shallow space, and the compositions’ formal tensions are enhanced by Ballen’s trademark square format. Humans are reduced to fragments here, overwhelmed by the space that swells around them. In Bewilderment, a mattress embellished by an upended stickman cartoon fills a doorway. The door and walls are covered in graffiti and a few hanging wires. A small dog pokes its way through the doorway at the bottom of the mattress. It is astonishing work; Ballen shows us a slice of human madness that is undeniably part of the present.
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