Roger Ballen: Spirits and Spaces
Roger Ballen
Thames & Hudson
“‘Colour’ is an indefinable word that has an archetypal essence that everybody implicitly understands but you can’t explain it.”
The Oxford English Dictionary might deliver a different definition of ‘colour’ but we’re dissecting psychological artist Roger Ballen’s understanding of this word, since he debuted his first full-colour monograph, Roger Ballen: Spirits and Spaces, last year.
Ballen decided on the title as “the pictures feel like they’re coming from a physical space, a place that I might have come across. At the same time, they’re places of mind. If they’re good artwork, important artworks, they’re places of everybody’s mind, everybody’s mind registers something when you see that word.”
As for what ‘everybody’s’ mind registers?
“There’s something in this place that reveals something about the invisible world, the spirit world, and everybody’s battling with this word by the concept of one or another,” Ballen explains.
Ever the artistic doyen of depicting the subconscious, Ballen describes the pictures as emulating the feeling of you being brought into a room which you believe you’ve been in before: “They put you into an encounter with ‘invisible forces’, which we’re all aware of and not aware of, and we’re all trying to find the answers to these questions about the invisible world. That’s why Spirits and Spaces really encapsulate the meaning of the word.”
Ballen defines the subconscious as “a complicated word”, yet it can be comprehensively understood by drawing on Jungian and Freudian terminology: “It’s the governor of basic behaviour, the side of behaviour that remains instinctual and linguistic; it’s the part of the mind that society does its best to repress in every way. It’s a primal source of behaviour, the subconscious mind.”
Does engaging with the images — presented in full colour — make for a more ‘realistic’ or potentially subconsciously confrontational viewing experience?
“I think you’re right about that to some degree, I think colour is what we see, black and white is more of an abstract art form. If the world is seen through a colour photograph, it’s more meaningful and more representational than black and white.”
An issue Ballen experiences with a pivotal aspect of colour in photographs is finding a correspondence between the colours: “There has to be a coherent relationship to enforce or to bring forth the meaning that you’re trying to create within the work. If not, the meaning and coherence of the work will be destroyed.”
The title page of Spirits and Spaces displays neither the word ‘images’ nor ‘artworks’, but instead the phrasing ‘With 91 illustrations’. This deliberate decision reflects the artist’s endeavour to metaphorically illustrate the concepts of spirits and spaces, rhetorically questioning: ‘What is the concept? The concept’s in the work. What’s in the work?’ The eternal attempt to discover ‘what’s in the work’ results in a spiralling into infinite circles, with its core remaining unattainable: “If you get to the core circle and get that right, then maybe it’s not an artwork,” he opines.
Unattainable infinite spaces aside, Ballen does apply veritable, finite mathematical figures in his monograph’s table of contents, which is composed of — a countable! — six sections: Childhood, Spectre, Animus, Shadow, Libido, and Chaos.
Ballen didn’t employ these words/concepts to literally depict a ‘childhood’ picture or a ‘spirits’ picture’, he explains. The decision to chapterise a book makes it “more readable” and “gives people a bit of a break … a way of viewing the conceptualisation of the pictures,” he contemplates. “But there are a lot of crossovers in the images so it’s not an arbitrary decision. Some images more easily belong in those definitions but the definitions are also complicated. What do you mean by ‘spectre’? What do you mean by ‘libido’?”
The concrete and abstract act of questioning — whether it stems from a viewer observing Ballen’s artwork or Ballen’s sub/unconscious mind — is, in equal measure, a frequent recurrence concerning analyses and explorations of Ballen’s pictures and psyche.
Cue the following (concrete) question: What significance does asking ‘why?’ or ‘what?’ hold when creating his art?
“People do art for different reasons,” comes the answer, “for me it’s been a journey to explore different parts of myself: my mind, my history, my memory, my future, my relationship to myself.
“I’m an existential artist, I grew up in an existential world, existentialism was an important way for a more philosophical person to view their purpose in the world,” the artist — whose favourite word (understandably) is ‘nothing’ — concludes.
As for his favourite colour?
“Green. It’s pervasive in nature.”
Yet, when asked if Ballen dreams in colour (unconscious mind, here we go!), there’s no definite answer: “This is a big question, I’ve thought about it for years …”
Prolonged pondering culminated in the conclusion that it varies, depending on the changes from dream to dream, and the sequence of the dream, with Ballen finding the presence, or absence, of human senses in dreams far more intriguing: “Do you smell in your dreams? Do you hear in your dreams? Why is it mostly visual? It’s from a biological evolutionary point of view because everything you do is an evolutionary reason, otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.”
The question remains: How would your spirit respond to entering this intricate space?
The Joburg launch of Roger Ballen: Spirits and Spaces is taking place at Love Books on February 4. Further information available on the ST Books’ website.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.