A delicious icky-sticky freedom

Review by Ashraf Jamal

Review of "Love in a Loveless Time" By Brett Seiler x Billy Monk

Billy Monk, The Spurs, 6 February 1968, 1968, Pigment ink on archival paper, Edition of 12, 63 x 42cm

I first discovered Billy Monk’s photographs in the 1990s. They were arranged alongside the men’s toilet in the East wing of the Iziko National Gallery. Their placement was no accident. Monk’s photographs are raw expressions of our bestiality. Piss, shit, sex, debauchery, are their triggers. His images are bare forked records of our animality. Human, all too human.

Bit players in a monumental exhibition entitled Jol – a South African colloquialism denoting partying – Monk’s images took my breath away. Nothing in that monumental celebration of a peculiarly South African manifestation of revelry and pleasure could compete with Monk’s Dionysian repertoire. In those photographs shot in the recesses of dingy nightclubs, where Monk also worked as a bouncer, I discovered an honesty that eclipsed all other records of life in South Africa under apartheid. Why, I wondered, was Monk never championed as a resistor to oppression? Pansexual, multiracial, transgendered, intersexed, they are as explosive then as now.

Billy Monk,The Catacombs, 25 January 1968, 1968, Pigment ink on archival paper, Edition of 12, 63 x 42cm

What gives them their force is Monk’s eye, his way of looking. He never objectifies his subjects. He does not speak on their behalf. Caught in situ, his images possess a grip on life – an animus – as casual as it is canny. They never judge, which is why they are so magnetic. Bouncer-photographer-fieldwork-anthropologist, Monk allows the situation, the story, to reveal itself without scare quotes or moral prurience.

Immanence is key. We are in the middle of an event. The energy is electric. What we see, when we choose to do so, are arabesques of feeling, rueful tenderness, entangled heat, spent pleasure, fleeting complicity. But, above all, human connection. It is life’s brevity and its eternality that compels Monk. We are joined at the hip, our bodies-lusts-yearnings criss-crossed. It is this depth of connectedness – rarely found in South Africa’s image repertoire – that sets Monk apart.

Installation view, Love in a loveless time by Brett Seiler x Billy Monk Collection, AVA Long Gallery, 2020

His estate is now in the youthful hands of Craig Cameron-Mackintosh. It was he who returned Monk to the public sphere in February 2019 at the Cape Town Art Fair. Cameron-Mackintosh, however, is not only a broker on behalf of Monk’s photographs, he is also the keeper of a legend. Given his zeal, it is unsurprising that Cameron- Mackintosh should produce and direct a long overdue documentary on the man. Talk is cheap. One needs conservators and makers to enshrine what is best in us. Cameron-Mackintosh’s documentary – Shot in the dark – is exemplary in this regard. Premiered at the Labia Theatre – Cape Town’s only independent cinema – before travelling to Hong Kong and Tokyo, the film can now be seen at the AVA, on Church Street, in the city’s beating heart.

That Cameron-Mackintosh also chose to combine Monk’s photographs with works by Brett Seiler is another example of his ingenuity and daring. Not content to hang Monk’s photos in a white cube, he and Seiler have created a set, a scene, which echoes the grubby walls and puke strewn floors of the Catacombs, Monk’s notorious focal point and place of work. Graffiti is scratched into aubergine walls. The paintwork is deliberately uneven, sketchy. On the floor is a large sheet of plywood scored and splattered with bitumen. Its stickiness is deliberate – the sum of untold secretions.

Installation view, Love in a loveless time by Brett Seiler x Billy Monk Collection, AVA Long Gallery, 2020

But it is the juxtaposition of Monk’s photographs and Seiler’s agitprop scrawls and cut-outs, – primarily of the ubiquitous coke bottle, which, Seiler reminds me, is a euphemism for a well hung cock – that completes the splice of past and present, the Catacombs and its mock-up. That Cameron-Mackintosh and Seiler’s take is pointedly gay may seem an overstatement, but then it is precisely this seam and alliance that compellingly emerges on revisiting Monk’s photographs. Conventionally perceived as bi-sexual – a double adaptor – what Mackintosh and Seiler have sharpened is Monk’s attenuated attention to, and implication in, gay love and desire.

Sex and Sexuality in Monk’s photographs, even when graphically expressed, is always implicit – something owned. Never an attitude, sex is a lived condition. In emphasising Monk’s love of men, Cameron-Mackintosh and Seiler compel us to rethink desire, the way it works, and why, for Monk, it was integral to the way he saw the world. In his blond blunt nosed stevedore’s body passions careened wildly and indiscriminately. In his life – the inverted other of a mirthless phobic bigoted system, apartheid – there reigned no bitter and twisted censor. In the best sense of the word – much touted by the liberation struggle – Monk lived inside of, and captured, a delicious icky-sticky freedom.