Carl Becker
Carl Becker was born in 1956, Johannesburg. He graduated cum laude with a BA in Fine Arts from Rhodes University in 1980, and went on to do his Masters in Fine Arts, also graduating cum laude.Carl Becker has taken part in numerous group shows over the years and has had seven solo exhibitions since 1991.
Reviews:
“Mindscaping the mine Dumps” - Mail & Guardian, December 1999Humour is subtly present in most of Carl Becker’s work currently on show at the Karen McKerron Gallery, writes Alex Dodd.
“There’s nothing like taking a look at something familiar from a different angle. A mere change of vantage point can entirely reinvent a thing to which you’ve grown inured. New Life: It’s simply not what you thought it was before. In Carl Becker’s paintings and pencil drawings, that something is the city of Johannesburg.
Becker has forsaken the distant, deluding postcard views of a sparkling Johannesburg form the North. He hasn’t even got snagged on the distinctive flashing red Coke sign of the Ponte Tower that, in a delightfully ironic twist, has taken on the iconographic power of a statue of Liberty or and Eiffel Towel. Rather, Becker images Johannesburg from the South.
The blocky Jo’burg skyline, not far removed from that of any other major Western city, is suddenly just a backdrop. Fore-grounded are the strange wastelands that surround the mine dumps - those odd humps of earth that embody the essential mythology of this entire city. The periphery takes centre stage. The outskirts become the big story.
Becker spends days wandering about the dumps with his box of tricks like some oddly displaced 19th Century landscape artist on a fieldtrip. “In a sense I actually come from the tradition of romantic landscape painters,” says Becker. “They were my precursors.
“I’ve been looking at Jo’burg for a long time. I did my first drawings in the city in the ’70s,” he says. “But I’ve had a very discontinuous painting career. I left painting when I left art school for the first time in 1980. I was disillusioned with it so I did all sorts of things - got into activism and opstook, doing media work in the days of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and stuff. I designed their logo.”
Laughter that is intended to say a lot of things – not all funny. It’s a quiet kind of laugher that seems to lurk inside Becker - and amusement at the surrealism of his own and other’s circumstances. This humour is subtly present in most of the works currently on show at Karen McKerron Gallery. But it peppers images that are epic in content. Vast trajectories of the time and space play themselves out through small human gestures. Sometimes the landscapes become abstract territories in which Victorian ladies, African warriors, women carrying buckets on their heads, miners and magnates stake their turf and tussle over things. Human forms are dwarfed by the vast stretches of space and time. Huge waves of history render individual importance comedic. Humans are little and almost cartoon-like in Becker’s work.
It was when he returned to Johannesburg in 1991, after completing his Master’s at Rhodes, that Becker began engaging with the landscape of the mine dumps with all their strange magnetism. “I suppose I feel ambivalent about this landscape,” he says. “I have a sort of sentimental attachment to it. I grew up in Bedfordview. I live in Yeoville. My father used to work in Germinston. But there’s no real reason for sentimentality. As a landscape, it’s often bland and non-descript. But I think it has to do with the mine dumps representing our history. For me, they represent Jo’burg’s uniqueness. Otherwise it could be some middle-American city - except it isn’t. It’s just too decaying.
“There are all those dumps along the M2 East, which is actually the original Main Reef. If you drive along there you realise it’s changing all the time. Somebody in some office somewhere has got a programme, but we don’t know what it is. Things disappear in the landscape. I go away and return a few months later and something will have gone. Entire dumps disappear. But as these things get taken out, you suddenly see views you haven’t seen before.
“I drive along and don’t really know who the mine dumps belong to. I’m probably not even allowed there. But one comes across these weird shapes and discarded objects: curious mechanical remnants; prefabricated houses - with people living in them – which used to be the mine manager’s office. You come across unexpected things. It’s a really dislocated landscape that sets off a whole train of thought visually. It’s a landscape where nothing is solid.”
