“The skyline is burning” goes the song I’m playing in my car. The track is titled The Horizon is the Beltway and it’s appropriate (in that way that random things often are) because I’m driving around looking for vantage points from which to photograph the Sandton skyline. Now that I’m introducing Sandton into my work – for this is where the real centre of economic gravity in the city is, now – I need reference images. In the end, the best vantage point proves to be the Bryanston Shopping Centre, but the light is fading and I abandon my quest.
I think, a lot, about the Joburg skyline. This is because I spend a lot of time painting the city I both love and hate, and it’s not possible to signal that This Painting is About Joburg without including the way the city shapes the horizon.
Skylines define cities. We forget this sometimes, because we live amidst the concrete towers and navigate along the streets, our eyes fixed on the next set of robots. We focus on detail; to appreciate a skyline you need distance. Since I work in a messy, imprecise medium – lipstick, which is why all of this work is so red – I need iconography that signals, even to a casual observer, that I’m depicting my ideas about a particular place.
This view of the city is only a suggestion, but the presence of the tower hints that it’s Johannesburg. Appropriately enough in this city of elevated anxiety levels, it was painted while having a panic attack, so it’s titled (obviously) “Panic”:
Would the Joburg skyline be recognisable without the Hillbrow tower? Probably not. In this respect, Joburg is typical of many cities around the world. Paris, Seattle, Toronto and, to a lesser extent, Berlin: their skylines are all dominated by towers. It would be much harder to sell pens and fridge magnets and T-shirts without this kind of architectural priapism. (Joburg, then, is very definitely male, the yin to Cape Town’s motherly mountain yang.)
That the Hillbrow Tower should reign unchallenged as the key icon of the city is of course deeply ironic, given the aversion to its setting harboured by the suburban ratepayers who inhabit the world’s largest manmade forest (or so the tourist literature claims). Hillbrow remains the dark concrete heart of Johannesburg, and though the tower stretches into the sky and its telecommunications dishes reach into the ether beyond, it is also rooted in the fetid mulch of layer upon layer upon layer of urban decay. If any book evokes the feral spirit of the inner city, it is Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City; after reading it, I painted this image of the tower, then scratched images of animals into the surface of the paint:
Usually I paint the view from the north, because that’s the one that feels familiar and comfortable. But the truth is that this is the worst angle from which to look at Johannesburg: the city centre is hidden behind the ridge, the Hillbrow Tower is ridiculously tall, and the only other building visible in any meaningful way is Ponte City. The views from the south or the west are much more interesting if you’re looking to punctuate the flat line of the horizon with the more visually arresting crenellations of mothballed skyscrapers. This is a view of the city from another angle:
I’ve titled it Irrational Exuberance. The familiar outline of the city’s iconic buildings marks it as a depiction of Joburg, but the real meaning is contained in the amorphous space beneath, in the words – in this work, street names associated with the stock markets and reflections on the hope we invest in the city where we imagine we will make our fortunes. The city is a canvas onto which we project our frustrations, our aspirations, our fears. The skyline shapes the horizon, but everything above and below it is us.
Sandton is not the economic hub of City, just an expression of everything that is wrong with our country.
I like to think the best view of the City is from the Observatory’s platform on the Ridge. But Telkom’s sad disfigurement of the Hillbrow Tower with the Ball presently is liable to wreck any painting.
Sarah, your pictures have a major failing, they don’t tell a story, especially one that I care to remember. Secondly, your writing about them re-enforces that failing. Perhaps your should consider a communication strategy, before you put lipstick to paper. But, keep trying all the same.
All I can say, Sarah, is thanks for being so observant. One of the things that makes New York, Paris or London great cities is the care with which they are memorialized–in all of the various forms. And, as far as I know, none of those three has ever been memorialized in lipstick!
Now, i realize that lipstick lends itself to broad strokes (ok, I really do not know that from personal experience, but it stands to reason–i think), and your paintings detail the city on a larger scale–emotive landscapes, almost–but some of the most memorable and evocative pieces of those other cities manage to capture some of the gritty, minute small scale aspects of life as well as the broad brush strokes.
I don’t know if that is possible in lipstick, and maybe this is something that you accomplish when you overwrite on the lipstick (hard to tell, because that detail doesn’t really come thru from this distance). But just an observation, fwiw.
Top painting is superb. Impressed. Like.
Very interesting perception of Jhb icons to someone who remembers a time when neither the tower nor Ponte existed, Did you know that they closed access to the tower down because they feared terrorists/freedom fighters trying to take over.bomb it?
For me, the icons of Jhb will forever remain mine dumps. They were there in 1959 when I arrived in SA and still are there today. I know that some are being re-mined, but that’s a huge amount of yellow dust to hide; don’t think anyone will ever manage it.
A really good view of Jhb exists looking from the top of the Carlton Centre to the south; more typical, less congested, but if your paintings are panic therapy, all I can really say is: 1) I hope they help the panic and 2) don’t quit your day job.
Joburg. My home city, where I spent 40 years of my life. I love the lipstick and would like to be able to see the detail (animals and words).
For years there was nothing nicer than flying home at night and seeing the bright city lights welcoming with recognisable buildings and TWO towers. In the last 10 years the lights of the city have got dimmer and dimmer until now only those who look will actually find it. So sad. But, I guess this is also environmentally friendly.
As a teenager I wanted to use high rise lights for advertising – programming lights to stay on at night to produce company logos and product names. A different set of lights for seven days a week and all sides of a building – what a marketing canvas!
The Hillbrow Tower is an icon. Just too bad it belongs to Telkom whose pvc advert really destroys and cheapens this Jozi landmark. Will the parisians to it to the Eiffel Tower? No. The French have to much class!
When will Telkom come to their senses and remove their cheap plastic banner from our city landmark.
Probably never!
Why do we have to put up with this rubbish ? This chick was canned by The Times and now peddles her trash here.
Surely M&G can do better than to publish this undert Thought Leadership ?
Great sketches and I like the volatility of the use of the colours! There IS a lot of emotion there … almost if the city is painted as a wall between the painter and “what is out there” (perhaps to hide from what makes you panic …). May you have many more sleepless nights then … as long as you share your art with us!
there’s something backwards about all this. it’s as if the living city of people is completely erased. perhaps related to your inversion of “yin” and “yang” — you got the masculine and feminine reversed.
The Hillbrow Tower symbolises more than the city. In its day it represented fairly up-to-date microwave communication technology, an icon of the country’s trying to stay up-to-date with communication. The appropriate icon today would be workmen digging up pavements to lay fibre-optic cable for the Internet.
Sadly, thanks to Telkom’s abuse of its monopoly, we are lagging far behind the rest of the globe, including other bits of Africa, with communications. This also symbolises the government’s impulse to control the flow of information with the Secrecy Bill and the refusal of many ministers to answer to Parliament. (Is this the democracy the ANC waited 100 years for?)
The Hillbrow Tower to me says you are in now in South Africa’s Big City. I spent pieces of my childhood with my grandparents who resided in Goldreich Street (off Claim) and have fond memories of the area back then in the seventies, the smell of the lifts, Levis jeans from Highpoint for only R9.95, watching the occasional car getting torched in a backstreet parking lot and… Squad Cars! (@ 7.30 p.m sharp) every Friday night. Good times. Forget I-Max and reality TV, you listened to Squaddies from a 6th floor balcony as they were live-torching the car down below whilst chewing on Granny’s ham sandwich washed down with a tetrahedron-packed Hi-C.
To a child visiting Joburg (back then) perhaps the biggest rush was the last 50 km streak down through the N3 freeway yellow lights and seeing this massive night-time silhoutte that was the Joburg city skyline.
But these days that tower just looks like a concrete hard on with the word Telkom tattooed to it.
@ Adam Quill, why don’t you go hang?
@ Andre, thanks for your opinion. Sometimes though, you need to be smart to see beneath the covers. That’s art for you – if you don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there. It just means you’re too blind to see it. It’s a loss to you I’m afraid, and that’s all it is. Better luck next time.
@ Sarah, great article and great art. Keep it up!