A Study by James Wood

* This is a product of a series of performances, educational projects and ruminations in 2015-6. It was improvised and is ever incomplete. To begin with a general overview, refer to the "Parallels" page. Otherwise, happy travels. It is a ludic and ergodic text and is not to be considered definitive. Each reading should deepen each previous, and be reliant upon postexpectant and preexisting readings. Consequently, in a formal sense, it owes much to Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Braxton's Tri-Axium Writings. Sections over- and under-lap, alluding freely within and without themselves. There is no correct method of engaging with it, nor a linear approach. "As we will have seen", many sections explain themselves only through others. It is a philosophical matrix, a web contingent upon all strands and - most crucially of all - an investment of the Reader's sense of Self into the work. Like a metaphor, the Reader must place themselves within the work as the absent tenor or vehicle relevant to each piece (leaning on Graham Harman and Jose Ortega y Gasset). In other words, it is an attempt - a nobly failing attempt - to ensure the Reader - the audience - is as much a creator as the writer. * Not so very long ago a community of people came together and, after a lengthy and luxurious dinner, after which the group found their prepared topics of conversation too incendiary, fetid or dull to suit the evening, decided to invent Art. During the protracted debates that followed, according to the comprehensive minutes of the gathering, Art’s proportions and dispensations were agreed upon: Art was to have no place within quotidian daily life or public policy; it was to be devoid of both educational merit or impetus; it was to arouse emotion but never too strikingly; and was to be deemed the final topic of conversation at dinner, after its natural locutory progenitors science and politics. Feeling pleased, the group dispersed. (It is worth perhaps parenthetically noting that the following morning the host of the party – nursing a fiercely raging headache – found and read over the proposal prior to its distribution. After a while he discovered he disagreed with the entire document and, throwing into the fire, rewrote it entirely. Since this was all done in secret and because his friends are that particular type of people, he stills receives no credit whatsoever in the publication of the document.)

Blue Notes for Bra’ Geoff

In 2004, Bra’ Geoff Matlherane Mphakati died aged 64. In 2009, Aryan Kaganof’s African Noise Foundation directed and released a film in celebration of Bra’ Geoff’s life. The film focuses on an event in Mamelodi Hall, Pretoria, at the funeral service of Bra’ Geoff. A song erupts from the sermon, displeasing the pastor. Trumpets, drums, bass, brass: a fierce and sudden cacophony of mourning. Kgafela oa Magogodi speaks into a microphone without cease. The pastor is stunned.

This mourning, oscillating between other scenes of speeches, interviews and readings, seems to never end. A performing Community bursts into song while the camera slowly walks through them, enacting the communication occurring between the performers. As each player feels they have said their piece, paid their respects in the most fitting means possible, many pack up and leave. Selves flow in and out, Community remains. Eventually, only Bra’ Zim Mgqawana is left playing. Tracing out a path throwing the room while blowing into his sax. The camera, for the most part, stays respectfully distant. No words are said, no editorial cuts are made. Mgqawana’s expression is respected in full. But no words are meant. Words would only limit the totality of the emotion expressed by Mgqawana’s horn. Words would only repress the meaning behind what is played. As his music slowly draws to a close, the camera zooms into Mgqawana’s face, into the natural tears streaming out of his eyes. When the playing is done, we fade to white. We fade not just to the Western symbolic tradition of completion and transcendence, but to blandness, emptiness, nonexistence. To the colour whose totality is holistic, the colour which cannot exist without all others.

Fading to white is not so simplistic to be symbolic, but a demonstration that the ‘empty’ ‘bland’ white frames de-represents, simultaneously fulfilling a symbolic role and connoting that which is beyond the symbolic. It does not represent, but actualises all possible meanings in itself expressed through itself. Perspective and insight are not formed outwardly, but occur in the plenitude within. Only in the emptiness found in the white and the silence after Mgqawana’s mourning can the viewer understand Mgqawana’s expression of both existence and non-existence, as one. ‘Insofar as existence is not identical to the absolute, and as nonexistence does not succeed in erasing its own traces, existence and nonexistence differ in name but are, in the end, the same’.[1]

Mgqawana’s expression is an act of improvisation, simultaneously ephemeral and eternal because of its singularity ephemerality. He does not need to say anything, because anyone can understand that Mgqawana is articulating what Brad Mehldau calls improvised musics most inspired moments, an ‘exalted fuck you to mortality’.[2] To engage in improvisation is to dive into the maelstrom of the perpetual present.[3] They are blue notes for Bra’ Geoff.

Thus we have a clear example of the failures of the western empire of linguistics: Self and Community shown in Blue Notes for Bra’ Geoff is a means of expression filled with emotion, ideology and space. Meaning is immanent and egalitarian.

Knowledge is that which we share with others within a joint effort of work – Bra’ Geoff[4]

Art is not only - and sometimes not at all - a commodity intended for others to consume. It can also be a joyous, defiant enactment of who we are … developing an authentic indigenous cultural identity[5]

[1] Seng Zhao, ‘Bu zhen kong lun’, in Taishô, 45.152a-53a. In In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics by François Jullien, translated by Paula Versano (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 119.

[2] Brad Mehldau, ‘BACK AT THE VANGUARD: THE ART OF THE TRIO, VOLUME 4 (EXCERPT)’ (1999), accessed May 17, 2016, http://www.bradmehldau.com/excerpt-vanguard/.

[3] See: Octavio Paz, ‘In Search of the Present’, Nobel Lecture, December 8 1990, translated by Anthony Stanton, accessed June 12 2016, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1990/paz-lecture.html.

[4] In Blue Notes for Bra’ Geoff. See: Deon Simphiwe Skade, ‘Blue notes for Bra’ Geoff Mphakati’ (2010), accessed May 17 2016, http://kaganof.com/kagablog/?s=bra+geoff.

[5] Gwen Ansell, review of Blue Notes for Bra’ Geoff, Business Day, June 11 2009, accessed May 17 2016, http://kaganof.com/kagablog/?s=bra+geoff.

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