Zach Taljaard: A Boy and his Toys

Zach Taljaard is forever, in my head, the boy who plays with dolls. I first met Taljaard, who hails from the Eastern Cape, when he started his residency at the Bag Factory in August last year. For this period, he was paired with the most unlikely companion, Arash Hanaei from Iran.

The two, whose appearances seem to represent very dissimilar versions of masculinity, struck up an interesting synergy in their way of working. And although the two had other methods in common (identity issues and a sense of humour), what was the most interesting and unusual commonality was that they both ‘played’ with dolls.

This sense of ‘play’ is evident in all Taljaard’s work and by this I do not necessarily mean that it is completely light hearted. Taljaard’s early work dealt with childhood memories, self realization though experiences, disillusionment, growing up as a male - a boy blushing, strained by a pair of boxing gloves, a child superhero about to dive head first to the ground, a baby poised on a ladder.

Taljaard’s entry, What Goes Up, for the PPC Young Sculptors Award Exhibition in 2000 was described as ‘an exercise in technical virtuosity if there ever was one’ This statement can be used to sum up most of his work which is labour intensive and beautifully crafted.

‘My later works then looked at the objects we give children to play with,’ says Taljaard. ‘How children through game playing become these objects. Plastic motorbikes, guns, teddy bears and a rugby ball become stereotypes for the male identity.’

On the surface, Taljaard’s work borrows from Pop Art but there is always an underlying current – a long adult shadow falling across the jungle gym on a hot day.

Sometimes this shadow is sinister as in the case of Initiation ritual: our little secret, 2003 but more often it is a subtler melancholy - the inevitable disillusionment of childhood – that one must grow older, ‘be a man’ and that this journey is fraught with potential/inevitable failure.

Taljaard’s latest work examines the complexity of masculine identity. ‘CON/FRONT”, Taljaard’s solo show at the National Arts Festival 2006 was exhibited in Fort Selwyn, an old fort guarding over Grahamstown. The fort was built as a watch and signal tower during the frontier wars and today is a national monument.

‘This evidently male created space with its function to protect against the ‘enemy’ inspired a body of work which dealt with confrontation.’

Here, Taljaard exhibited three works/installations: Ghost Images, The Kiss and The Match. Working with moulded busts, the aesthetic of ancient classical Greek sculpture and the pop of the present-day, plastic, poseable figurine the artist explores the ‘impressions’ or ‘moulding’ made by society on the individual and the various versions of masculinity portrayed in history from the effeminate classical Greek and the sterile and stoic Roman bust to the camp, plastic G.I. Joe.

His work The Match played homage to his earlier work with many symbols of childhood, as used in other works, being represented – this time on a giant game board or miniature playing field. The last battle of the child as he struggles to find his place as a man.

The comparison between his work and the work of Arash Hanaei is interesting, as their common interests demonstrate that the struggle for male identity in our current context is not limited by race, nationality or sexual orientation.

This struggle is by no means new nor is it original, yet what sets Taljaard’s work apart is its almost self-aware but unavoidable innocence.

Artists such as Hentie van der Merwe, Clive van den Berg and Paul Emmanuel have worked with the themes of army life, war and masculinity in specific relation to gay male identity, but Taljaard’s work takes a slightly different angle.

Whilst his predecessors explore these topics in an attempt to position gay male identity somewhere in a blurred field of perceptions around appropriate and inappropriate masculine behavior, Taljaard seems to be ‘trying on’ these ideas in an attempt to find a concept of manhood that best fits his complex man-boy character.

In an almost literal demonstration of this action, Taljaard’s piece The Damage Is Done 2006 (from his Bag Factory residency show Self/destruct) depicts five personas: four life-size, self-portrait busts in different attire and a fifth on a television screen.

Of the busts one is shirtless, another dressed in a suit. The third wears a military uniform while the last was based on a Roman emperor.
‘The tradition of portrait busts comes a long way and was usually used to symbolize power and immortalize bravery. These portraits looked all but brave and proud and had a kind of sadness and loss about them. They wore their robes like mill stones around their necks, the weight of centuries of lust for power, destruction and wealth clearly burdening their shoulders.’

But what burdens these figures more, is that none of the personas quite fit. The robes give the impression of dress up; both the garments and the guilt are inherited.

The fifth persona, represented on the television screen, shows the shirtless bust with a projection from a video arcade war plane simulator. The soundtrack is a mix of the game’s own electronic sounds and children laughing as they shoot away at the enemy, lost in playing the game. Guns blazing, the game stops to show their score after the words “Game Over”.

In this video Taljaard returns to the themes of childhood and it is here that the work feels more comfortable with itself – revisiting the accoutrements of adolescence instead of the ill fitting outfits of manhood.

As an emerging artist, Taljaard may still be trying to find his feet and an area of investigation uniquely his own. For now he is resolved to re-examine the questions sometimes asked by others, but he does not appear to rage against these questions and ask why? Rather he plays with the questions, asks them again in slightly different ways and asks, why not?

Rat Western