New York, September 2016:  Democratic Intuition—for those preoccupied by a tumultuous election season, the title has a timely ring. But Meleko Mokgosi’s expansive project, now halfway through its eight planned chapters, has little to do with the drama that is U.S. presidential politics. The artist, who painstakingly researches and storyboards his enormous paintings, had mapped out his newest works long before anyone had ever imagined a Trump/Hillary showdown in the cards.

Lerato and Comrades II, the latest instalments in Democratic Intuition (2014–present), are currently shown across Jack Shainman Gallery’s two Chelsea spaces. The project’s overarching title is inspired by a Gayatri Spivak lecture on equal access to education: “You can, in fact, describe the democratic impulse as other people’s children, not just yours.” In this vein, Mokgosi’s “intuition” abstractly refers to a drive to participate, and to make judgments not only for oneself. But the project also considers those who have historically been denied opportunities to engage in democracy. The source materials for his figurative paintings derive from southern African history and the artist’s native Botswana, with works opening onto labor, politics, and liberation movements. The latest chapters take on the subjects of allegory, Lerato (“love”), and language, like the solidarity and tensions captured in a word like “comrade.”

Despite the narrative specificity, the scope of Mokgosi’s paintings is tremendous. They at once enlist and undermine the tropes of the art historical cannon: from his canvas shapes and compositions to his precise mark-making, which slips in and out of figurative and abstract vernaculars. These are not simply history paintings bringing visibility to little commemorated events; they are paintings about history painting, and about the inscription of history more broadly. How do we register memory and the past? How are communities and identities imagined, nations shaped? Who makes those decisions, and how are they passed on?

On the eve of his New York openings, Mokgosi took the time to answer some questions about these latest bodies of work.

Meleko Mokgosi, Installation view of Democratic Intuition: Lerato at Jack Shainman Gallery, West 20th Street, September 8–October 22, 2016.
© Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Andrea Alessi: Let’s start with love—or, more specifically, Lerato. How do you see these concepts relate to the idea of democracy or the democratic impulse?

Meleko Mokgosi: I chose the title Lerato (translated as “love”) because something in the texture and life of this word cannot be translated; namely, the fact that it is in my mother tongue, and also because culturally, the word “love” cannot and does not occupy a similar position in the world. The fact that Lerato names a strong affection for something or someone, and it functions as a proper noun mostly designated to females, is all-important.

As with previous projects, psychoanalysis as a theoretical tool played a part in this chapter. Like many, I bought the argument that if there is one way to investigate how we as subjects invest emotions into things, then psychoanalysis would be able to provide some ways of looking at this question. In Lacan on Love, Bruce Fink charts the various ways in which psychoanalysis can be used to examine the force that binds subjects together. Fink charts out some of the normative manifestation of love, including: natural love, attachment, friendship, agape, hatred, attraction, fixation on the human form, physical love, courtly love, romantic love, and falling in love. Friendship, for example, requires a specific kind of love, one in which you both want nothing more than good to come towards one another: that is, to wish each other well. In old European tongue, the term philia [the subtitle of two works in Lerato] is used to describe being committed to your friend’s well-being without reservation, wanting the best for him or her.

In many ways, this is what the democratic requires from any citizen; namely, to take other people’s children in friendship—to wish them well and want the best for them while at the same time ensuring that your freedoms as an individual are recognized. Love, then, is the infinite source that compels us to always project ourselves as the subject of all narratives that we communicate about ourselves, and ensures recognition. In a sense, I am saying that for citizens to recognize each other, there needs to be a general kind of love that binds them. No doubt, this is not the whole story about democracy because one needs to have access to the nation-state in order to practice it.

Meleko Mokgosi, Installation view of Democratic Intuition: Lerato at Jack Shainman Gallery, West 20th Street, September 8–October 22, 2016.
© Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

AA: In an interview this January you spoke about the “violence of representation” existing on both optical and political levels. Can you elaborate on this idea and how your work addresses it?

MM: Through my work, I try to pose questions that are related to issues of power, oppression, colonialism, as well as the limitations and violence of grand narratives. This project follows Pax Kaffaria (2010–2014), which specifically dealt with national identification and xenophobia. As someone who tries to negotiate the world conscientiously and with a certain level of criticality, the way in which particular publics are systematically denied access to state apparatuses that grant a movement towards self-actualization and participation in governance (codenamed democracy)—this has been bothersome to me for some time. Hence the current project, which tries to find ways of using representation to pose questions such as: if democracy is founded on the often impossible choice between exercising my nation-state-granted freedoms as an individual and having to recognize the individual freedoms of another, then how can one reciprocate democracy?

To try to address your question more, I would say that the work tries to address questions of representation because as someone from southern Africa, there is an already established and taken-for-granted grand narrative about our history, culture, and its population, obviously written from outside of our control, so my work seems to always fight against these narratives that in many ways have the privilege of not having to fight back because they have been so normalized. In other words, it becomes a question of having to figure out how I can contribute to an unlearning of how the general public, mostly in the West, have been conditioned to read and imagine where I come from, which has been called many things like the Third World and so forth. And no doubt, this essentializing is violent.

Meleko Mokgosi, Installation view of Democratic Intuition: Comrades II at Jack Shainman Gallery, West 24th Street, September 8–October 22, 2016.
© Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

AA: Stories, painted in untranslated Setswana text, feature prominently in Comrades. Are Setswana speakers your ideal audience, or do words have another function here? Is there something to be gained through not understanding?

MM: No, I would be lying if I said there is something to be gained from not understanding. Comrades is my attempt at examining the ways in which language was used to articulate the fight for freedom and outlining the kind of political goals and democratic state that was sought for during the fight for liberation in the 1960s. Here, I ask how the idea of democracy, articulated during the struggle, has and continues to shape the current state of citizens’ experience and reciprocation of democracy. No doubt, issues of language and education are central. Following the French revolution, the term “comrade” has always had political resonance and was developed as a form of address between socialists and workers. Comrade then, was meant to refer to egalitarianism, thus becoming a demonstrative form of address that was supposed to cut across gender, racial, ethnic, and class lines. In southern African liberation movements and politics, comrade was specifically used to refer to members of particular parties. In Zimbabwe and South Africa, the term has and is still used to refer to those affiliated with ZANU (PF) and the ANC respectively.

Comrades is comprised of figurative paintings and text-based work, the first time I have paired the two. The paintings are oil on canvas, while the text-based paintings are made by painting with bleach on portrait linen. Both the figurative and the text-based paintings aim to examine the relationship between these historically worn yet significant terms, and the consequences they have had in southern Africa. The texts themselves are referred to as Dinaane in Setswana. As you rightly point out, there have been questions about levels of legibility, but I hope that the viewer will appreciate that these specific and rather odd stories come from an oral tradition, which I want to honor, hence there are no translations of them in the exhibition (however gallery staff will be on-hand to narrate whatever story the viewer may wish to hear).

Secondly, I wanted to use these Setswana texts as a way of providing already existing tools—that some might say are not Eurocentric—that can allow us to think about various things from capitalism to power to greed and an engagement with the ethical. So instead of referring to Marx or Lacan or Foucault, these texts provide analytical tools in narrative form that are obviously not the same as texts produced by historical figures such as Marx, but are a starting point to understand one or two things.

I have always been uneasy about translation because, as a process that tries to close the gap between two languages, it is based on Western conventions (here anthropological, there ethnographic) of reality, representation, and knowledge. In this way translation is always a representation of something that already exists with the aim of making that thing transparent or known—i.e., part of the episteme on the side of the translator. Translation, then, is an interlingual and intertextual process that is in many ways overdetermined, and hence produces an overdetermined subject from the colonial site/orient: overdetermined in the sense that it is produced by multiple discourses on multiple sites, and gives rise to a multiplicity of practices.

Meleko Mokgosi, Comrades, 2015, Oil on canvas, left: 96 1/16 x 108 inches, center: 96 1/16 x 132 inches, right: 84 x 72 1/16 inches.
© Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

AA: Formal decisions, like scale and composition, have clear conceptual weight in your work—but what about the application of paint? You typically paint figures with clear, economical precision. But there are also passages that incorporate more gestural or perhaps symbolic applications: the seemingly redacted figures in Full Belly II, for example, or the way space might dissolve into contours and sketch marks. Can you speak a bit about your technique and this coupling of representational mark-making with more abstract or unfinished passages?

MM: Absolutely, this is a fantastic question, which I think I cannot do justice to no matter how well I try to answer. The answer though, perhaps is in the question: my aim as a painter is to try to find a balance between experimentation and economy of expression and materials, and between entertainment and conceptual rigor. The abstract and minimal brush mark has a history of connoting a particular performativity of painterly-ness, and revealing something visceral about the construction of that mark. For all these reasons, and more, it has become a source of entertainment because it looks and acts like “painting” and “art.” I use abstraction as a kind of fake painterly-ness, and as a way of mapping things out with more economy.

The quality of the unfinished surface however functions differently—to open up the pictorial space so that the paintings are not too cumbersome for the viewer. This has become more important when I deal with installations that are made up of eight to ten canvases that are nine feet by twelve feet each. So putting this many paintings in a single room, and as one work, has to allow for some breathing room.

I think the “modernist” abstract marks are also meant to contradict the genre in which the paintings fall into, namely, history painting. As the championed genre, history painting in Europe went beyond being about a particular style; it was, to quote a colleague, a summation of western moral and aesthetic principles, and the medium via which early modern society saw its ideals in images. Those ideals included knowledge, reason, and honor, but also bellicosity, the sovereignty of elites, white supremacy, and the dominance of men. In addition to this, it was a genre that was strategically used in relation to the European imperial mission, so in many ways, it was complicit with European imperialism.

Meleko Mokgosi, Democratic Intuition, Exordium, 2013–present, Oil and charcoal on canvas, installed dimensions variable. 
© Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

AA: Also on the subject of technique—a remarkable aspect of your work is that you don’t treat your canvasses with gesso, which eliminates room for simply painting over errors. Do mistakes ever figure into your finished paintings?

MM: For archival reasons, the canvases are treated with a clear ground, but as you say, even then there is no room for error. I storyboard all the paintings for about six to eight months. I spend many hours doing line drawings of all the paintings, and after I am certain about the composition, I begin painting. This way, there is little room for error or improvising. So mistakes do not really figure in the work, and if they do, they tend to be minor and unnoticeable.

AA: Your work is often described as cinematic. Are there specific films or directors who influence you?

MM: I have mainly looked at the cinematic in terms of theory and how the image is constructed. Hence my interest was in learning about the conventions of cinema. Yet I have always admired the work of Harun Farocki, Isaac Julien, and Fernando Ezequiel Solanas. The ways they create narratives and use tropes of cinema has been very informative for my process.

Meleko Mokgosi, Installation view of Democratic Intuition: Lerato at Jack Shainman Gallery, West 20th Street, September 8–October 22, 2016.
© Meleko Mokgosi. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

AA: Representing and interrogating southern African and postcolonial histories is central to your practice. But exhibiting Democratic Intuition in New York at the height of this election season, I imagine local viewers will bring contemporary baggage to their reading of the work. Many of the themes you explore certainly resonant today: xenophobia, nationalism, race, even abstract judgment and civic responsibility. What are your thoughts on gaps between the ostensive narrative and that imposed by the viewer?

MM: I think these are the most important and informative gaps because they give me a chance to learn from viewers. I have always believed that the very nature of the specificity of my case study (southern African histories and politics) makes the work more abstract and therefore open for the viewer. So the more specific the work is, the more it becomes possible for the viewer to conscientiously project their reading. But sometimes I do fear that the specificity could lead to a kind of generalization and essentialization regarding the work, but this too I cannot control.

—Andrea Alessi

ArtSlant would like to thank Meleko Mokgosi for his assistance in making this interview possible.