World Changing: More tales of paint and dirt

You never quite know which version you'll get - the intently busy one, hanging works and adding last touches before his show or the anarchic, loose cannon rambling under the influence of another glass of gin.

When I went to his studio/apartment in New Doornfontein to interview him Barker was taking a break from preparations for his new show, so as we sipped gins he tried his best to guide me through the thinking and events that have inspired his new obsession with silkscreen printing.

It all started last year in New York when Barker was there to exhibit works from his last show, The Normal Man. He'd taken the original of his Zulu Lulu series, hoping to have them reproduced by a master silkscreen printer while he was in town.

Barker was a little paranoid that the content of the series may have been a little too hot to handle for an America in the throes of Black Lives Matter, but with a little encouragement from a chance encounter with a black writer in a coffee shop he made the prints.

Inspired by what he'd seen in the silkscreen studio, Barker was full of ideas for new work using the medium as he boarded his SAA flight back to Johannesburg. Of course, SAA air hostesses may not be familiar with some of the legendary antics of South African artists.

As Barker recalls the incident he was "drawing with a spyrograph and I say to the hostess, 'Can I have another gin?' and she says 'No. Too much'. And I say, 'What do you mean too much?'

"So then I'm drawing and there's been like 'fuck you' and 'no, fuck you' between me and the hostess and she's thrown her badge at me, which I still have."

"As we land everyone's standing to get their bags and there's an announcement: 'Excuse me, can you all please sit down'. And they came to arrest me. They took me out of the aeroplane. I asked them what they were doing and they put me on a taxi. I was like, 'Howzit Jozi'."

A month later Barker tried to find a silkscreen printer to transfer his aeroplane drawings into prints but that proved more difficult than he thought. Eventually, he bought the equipment and moved it into his studio. It's there, taking up a large part of the studio as we walk around.

Although he's worked with digital printing before, silkscreen is a form of what Barker calls "analogue art" and it's a difficult medium to work with for those who haven't really used it before.

Barker's new show is predominantly made up of works where he's painted on silkscreen images, giving them his distinctive, cheeky touch in bright colours. He says that he's "more comfortable painting on shit that I've made than shit where I've just pushed the print button. It's amazing to be hands-on with the medium."

The show uses some images from a book Barker picked up called Images that Changed the World.

Piled all over his studio are prints of works by Goya, a photograph by Diane Arbus, one of Pele and others that are in various stages of production.

Some are works of frustration when the silkscreen has not been to Barker's liking and he's reacted by smearing them with paint. These are not part of the show which is titled The World that Changed the Images.

What's ultimately kept Barker so busy over the last year is that he's "really enjoying the medium because I work in layers and the silkscreen medium is all about layers and paint and dirt".

Some may say the same of Barker himself, who wryly quips that the big lesson he's learned over the last year is to "drink gin on aeroplanes".

• The World that Changed the Images is on at The Everard Read Gallery from February 4 to March 4.

http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2016/02/02/World-Changing-More-tales-of-paint-and-dirt