Title: Scope our World
Medium: Enamel and Watercolour on Digital Print
Unframed: 158cm x 115,5cm
“My work is commentating on society, it is about identity – where do I come from because I am white? But I am an African. So it deals with universal issues. The inspiration comes from a country that is very fucked up, because the morality of the country is weird. So my work deals with that, but I also like to have fun, so some of the work has a sense of humor sometimes, sometimes not” – Wayne Barker, 2004 (SMAC 2010:18).
In the artwork Scope our world, Barker used the front pages of a very controversial magazine from South Africa, SCOPE.
By today’s standards SCOPE would be a pretty tame men’s lifestyle magazine, but in the 70s and 80s it pushed the barriers of soft porn and allowable content banned by the National Government’s censorship board. The magazine was launched in 1966 by Winston Charles Hyman and Jack Shepherd Smith became the long-time editor. Scope magazine would achieve iconic status in South African media as a publication that petitioned for freedom of the press with its censorship-defying content.
The magazine had an on-going battle with the National Party’s Apartheid era policies of media censorship. In 1972, the censor board of South Africa banned the weekly magazine, but this was overturned by the Supreme Court. This marked the seventh time in four years that the board had banned the magazine. The censor board had taken exception to a photograph published in May by the magazine, that showed a black man in New York embracing a white woman. They also took exception to a semi-nude shoot of a model in the forest and at the beach. In other attempts, the board had formerly attempted to ban the magazine because of a cover article on abortion and a story on test tube babies. In 1975, editor Shepherd Smith maintained that fair censorship was impossible in South Africa because of the cultural diversity of the nation “Whose particular way of life are the censors going to help to uphold?”. In May 1976, again the censor board issued a notice banning the magazine (Dickens 2020:1).
According to Simon Njami (SMAC 2010:22) “For better or worse, Wayne Barker has decided never to surrender to the force of morality, good taste, gentry, social codes, and that’s what makes him who he is.”
