kagablog

In art I always find myself chasing something.

I relentlessly and irrationally pursue that which reveals itself in pieces, that which taunts and seduces me. The pursuit is never complete. It is a lasting cycle spinning around us and through us. When it comes for me, it comes for me with colour ten times rounder than the colour of wine, smell, ten times the familiarity of a jersey with your lover in it, sound, ten times more than the panting of life, blowing in an ear and feeling, ten times the electric pulse of hormone in a vein.
It spins. It totally ruptures me until the point where I am faced with my own insides, confused about the frailty of being.
I dry my body in rose and in steam. Bacon’s fleshy pinks are us: we are carcasses in suits.
I open my thought and the shutter. Rothko dawns exist: daily colours melt into one spirit as twilight knits night and day in a quick and intense embrace.
I touch myself in blue tones. Picasso’s absinthe drinker rocks me to sleep.
After midnight it’s often Goya. He rips my dream.

And that is the hour when I just can’t sleep.

I’m sitting in the sun socializing with friends, braaing on a Sunday afternoon. My daughter is playing with two other girls, slightly older than her. They are excluding her from their games. She tries hard to get their attention, first by being mean and when she see’s that doesn’t work, she tries all kinds of methods to fit into the two girls’ “circle”. I’m tripping out on space cake, observing this very carefully. Ultimately I can interfere but would the learning process not be more effective without my involvement? Then the scene just sort of freezes: two girls sitting on a blanket on the grass, playing with little plastic tea cups and saucers and my daughter, the third girl, standing about a metre away in the shadow of the umbrella, for that moment just staring into nothing.

Beautiful, beautiful outsider, standing in an orange dress and curls, shining in the sun. The light is turning into that rich melancholic yellow that only happens on Sunday afternoons as the weekend fades. I feel breathless, as if someone tore out my heart, ready to put on that braai.

How it kills me sometimes.

Our security guard (well, the dude basically just opens the gate for us and watches our cars at night) has a wife of twenty years old. They have three children, she being four months pregnant. She goes to the doctor with fever. He diagnoses her with malaria without doing a single blood test on her. She goes home and takes the tablets. (the people here are not even educated about what they should or should not take when pregnant.) Next day she is much worse. She is turning all yellow and the fever is very high. Goes to the hospital, they tell her to go home and rest. Next day she can’t walk, has fever and starts becoming delirious. After four days they finally admit her. Kept saying they are still waiting for tests. They even start speculating that it could be yellow fever, which only exists in the north, really. Next day they had to revive her. Following day our guard goes to the hospital at eleven in the morning to see his wife, they told him to come back at 18:00. In the meantime, we ask one of the doctors we know to go and check on his wife. Turns out she died of a liver failure at seven in the morning (four hours before they told her husband to leave and come back.) My husband had to call him and tell him his wife has died.

Anybody living in these parts of the world know that malaria tablets ain’t the best thing for you liver. If one of the dudes could just put two and two together, actually test her before giving her pills, she would still be alive.

But hey, she has fever, let’s just give her tablets and see the next patient.
I’m so sorry. Sometimes i just have to vent about something like….hmmm, staying alive.

www.rashmag.blogspot.com

sucking scar under a dead moon
you rise under and in me

as the night ejaculates

Howl when he fills your moon
Hibernate, there’s rape in the street
Replicate your ouma’s ways
sit up straight, eat your meat
Breed planned, don’t overspend
Lie low when your male is watching the game
Take your pills when the coast is clear
Make sure that it all stays the same

Still borns are really still:
No one wants to talk about it.

Scream when it hurts like hell
Run when the shit hits the fan
Take a dump in the veld
For god’s sake, be a man.
Fuck when she’s on heat
Eat a blue steak without a knife
Do what it takes to survive
Protect your property, take a life.

I saw a self portrait in the window
Displayed at R8000
I never knew a soul could be on special.

I knew I’d seen him before
reading me fluently
in ancient myself with an accent

so he knows I am scared
so he does, I am human
so he knows I am crying
so he does, I am oman
so he knows I want you
so he does, I am beast

so he knows that I know

that he knows I know

I know I might not be able to offer an academic view on this, I am simple minded and my logic has a simple quality. For me, art on screen is mentally and aesthetically very real and very valuable. It is priceless when it comes to critique, feedback, praise and insult, exposure and creation. Sometimes I create pieces especially for the kagablog. When my muses party too hard and they all lie with hangovers, the blog serves as perfect inspiration to create something. Blogs are muses, critics, art communities…but it’s not exactly putting bread on the table. Is the only way to survive as a fine artist to make a name for yourself by hanging work in a gallery, where people actually enter to potentially go an buy something? If your work has previously been posted on the internet, are your works still ‘ exclusive’ to the ones who roam the galleries? Is it like a photograph or a print with one print made instead of 1000? Is posting on the net not like making a 1000 prints and exclusively exhibiting in a gallery like making one print? work has more commercial value in a gallery. I think. The tangible still has the biggest impact on the eye.

I don’t know, I just want to know.
??