HOLYBALLISM: A BRAND NEW RELIGION (A Samson Kambalu interview with Jonathan Willet)

JW: We were talking about Nietzsche and the Death of God. Explain what you mean by the Death of God, in particular your view of faith in a Godless world?

SK: For me Nietzsche is specifically writing about a Christian tradition and how a Christian conception of God has become unbelievable in Western society. There is a wider metaphysical question about what to believe in beyond the material, day to day conditions of everyday life. This marks a crisis in Western thought and my work is a personal response to that crisis. I am working in the void left by the unifying force of a Christian God, as I attempt to define a post – secular existence.

JW: In Africa you were raised with a Christian set of beliefs and received a European education. The belief may have faded but the knowledge has been retained and integrated into your practice. It seems as though the awareness that comes with the knowledge has released you from superstition and that somehow the work is the process of this realization. You retain some religious forms but they are emptied out of their essential or spiritual value.

SK: Yes that’s right. I can identify with Nietzschean thought as a way of dealing with the Christ I inherited as a child in Africa. It is a way of shedding that ‘old housing’ and overcoming the restrictions on self - expression. I have used Nietzsche as a tool to carve out my own post secular position, based on my life experiences. My art is a way of creating new values for myself, an ongoing process of re - evaluation. I take some of the ‘old housing’ with me and use it as creative material. As I have said to you before, it is like moving from the Christian Madonna to the Madonna of Postmodern culture.

JW: Your art as a vehicle for self expression leads us to the second and for me the most significant aspect of Holyballism, Solar Ethics. If the Death of God has been your starting point, then I see Solar Ethics as the energy source for your creative process, a way of externalising and affirming the re – evaluation of your life; ‘bringing the work to the world’ as you say.

SK: My interest in Solar Ethics comes from the Philosopher and Theologian Don Cupitt, who talks about Solar Ethics as a way of life; it’s all about expression, living like the sun. I thought it was cool to live like the sun, to just go out there and express myself, to just do it. Meaning comes from having a creative life; there is no need to search for it. It’s just energy you know and me coming from Africa I found the Solar Ethic seductive, to just rise and shine and be in the here and now. And so I realised that inevitably Holyballism embraces things like fashion and music and all forms of contemporary expression in the here and now. This is part of bringing the world back into my work; it’s affirmative, another way of just doing it.

JW: Although Holyballism cannot be simply reduced to consumerism or the global spread of brands, it does engage with the productive energy of capitalism and the pursuit of happiness through material goods. For example when you say ‘just do it’ are you playing with that same advertising slogan for Nike sportswear?

SK: For me it’s all about attitude. Whereas Nike says ‘just do it’, Holyballism explains why you should do it. The self - conscious consumer can be more creative, more expressive and much more responsible. It’s not just about engaging with the kinds of individuality or self - expression that capitalism bestows on us. I am using a contemporary language of consumerism to communicate a n ethos that goes beyond consumerism, it will transcend the language it employs but needs that language for the Solar Ethic to shine through. When the light goes on the ‘old housing’ no longer eclipses the sun and the sun just shines. Instead of filling the void left by God with consumer goods we can affirm our own lives by producing our own artefacts and ideas. I use contemporary art as my medium but the engineer, teacher, shop assistant, secretary can all go Solar, they can all find something in their everyday experience that will lead to a more self conscious and affirmative life. Everybody can have a life that unfolds as a creative process.

JW: Solar Ethics and attitude seem to be about choosing how to live. They are not really dependent on money or belief but involve creative choices about how to insert yourself into culture. As a friend said to me recently, being cool is about being yourself, not trying to search in vain for who you ‘really’ are. Would you agree?

SK: Yes I like that. It’s all about choices; it’s about looking at life and making choices. Robert De Niro once said that the talent is not in the acting it’s in making choices. You make choices and you make your own cool. There is no prescription, I improvise like the Jazz musician, I borrow from everywhere and play my own tune. To some extent my work is an improvised act of self-creation. This is why I am also interested in the entrepreneurial spirit of hip hop, the self promotion of rap stars who tap into the solar power of the market, even though they may not consciously be engaged with the kind of Solar Ethic that I have been describing.

JW: As the gap between contemporary art and celebrity narrows, is there a danger that all creative activity will be reduced to localized acts of self expression, the whole world as a Fame Academy where everyone becomes ‘famous for 15 minutes’; in other words, can we still refer to something in art that has a wider social importance beyond the individual act?

SK: As I said when we were talking about consumerism it is necessary to adopt a contemporary language as a way of connecting with the world. The culture of celebrity and self - image dominates in today’s society, so I use it self - consciously as another vehicle for expression. Today we worship brands and pop idols, people wait for hours to audition for the ‘X Factor’ but many are not really tuned into their own cool. Consider how society now treats the artist; he is something like a religious being; when we ask What is art? we may have to return to the ‘old housing’ of religion. Art no longer serves the Universal of God, it has been displaced onto the canvas of the self and I use this canvas in a meaningful way. Once the self becomes the universal form then the artist should address this as a wider objective structure. It’s almost as if people cannot live without the opportunity project themselves, they die if they don’t appear. Solar Ethics could be about a poetics of this self. For me it’s quite simple really, with the Death of God art becomes a self - conscious thing, an existential thing, almost as a way of identifying your existence. The artist finds meaning through self – expression, when he becomes conscious that meaning can be found in the creative process itself. It is inevitable that art gravitates towards a Solar Ethics, in our culture the self is the new church.

JW: It seems to me though that the artist works something like a switch between the subjective and objective experience of the world. On the one hand he taps into the vast forces of expression already at work in the social structure, but at the same time learns how to recompose those currents according to a more philosophical creative register. The artist remains aware that his own sense of self is always in question and dependent on the wider social arrangement. If he manages this balancing act it might be possible to move towards an objective critique of the self through the aesthetic re-conception of self–expression.

SK: One way to think about this balancing act between the subjective and the social is to consider Solar Ethics as a dynamic energy of expression. The myth of Phaeton springs to mind, who borrows his fathers sun chariot (the sun) only to let it get out of control; he crashes and burns so to speak because he is not able to properly harness its power. In tapping into the vast semiotic energies of cultural production, the solar artist must learn to be more like the transformer in an electrical circuit, switching between currents he moves up a level to handle high voltages and steps down a level for lower ones. Sometimes the artist becomes overwhelmed by the sheer potential of semiotic energy, but like a transformer maintains the capacity to handle the currents and avoids getting burnt out by them. This energy exchange of expression might offer possibilities for moving towards new ways of thinking objectively from a subjective position. The form of the individual has taken central stage so I look at my own life through the expressive energy of that aesthetic, and from my art it is possible to derive a more universal experience of truth. Maybe life is not so different now, even without God. Art is a way of facing the inevitable and what is most objective, that being our own mortality. We know for sure that one day we are going to die and nothing transcends death. Nietzsche challenges us to live life for what it is without belief or superstition, to affirm it. At a personal level Holyballism is about me affirming my own life, it represents a faith in my art. Beyond that, Holyballism is also about a wider imperative that echoes Nietzsche ‘find your own Holyballism, live life in the here and now – ‘Exercise and Exorcise’ as the slogan goes.

JW : I think this brings us to the final aspect of Holyballism, Eternal Recurrence. My reading of Eternal Recurrence is that it is one of Nietzsche ‘thought experiments’, allowing him to beg the question ‘Without God and with no possibility of beginning or end, how would you live your life’? It is a way of making the choices you talked about earlier; when faced with decisions about our lives what could we live with over and over again for eternity. How can we make life bearable by understanding the art of living? Is this the existential side of Nietzsche’s philosophy and by proxy the existentialism of the Holyball? In other words, ‘Souls are as mortal as bodies’ and we have to live accordingly.

SK : Yes, we are going nowhere, that’s why there can be nothing transcendent, there is no afterlife. In Postmodern society we ask the question ‘Where do we go from here?’ According to Fukuyama, Capitalism is about Eschatology, it’s about the end of history. Holyballism is built on the ruins of this Judeo – Christian perception of history that makes God the author of the Beginning in a sequence of events. Holyballism is part of this historical fallout that now manifests itself as the cyclical time of the commodity. Eternal Recurrence comes in here because it is about the attitude that emerges from this historical impasse – how do we live creatively with the repetition of the workaday world and be happy? This attitude is expressed as the Solar Ethic, and takes the form of Hollyballism as an inquiry into the here and now. ‘Choose Life’ as they say in Trainspotting because it is all that you’ve got anyway. With this realization there comes a kind of enchantment and disenchantment at the same time, it depends on how you look at it…its difficult and easy all at once. Life unfolds as we go and Art can draw our attention to this fact - what you see is what you get. In a way Holyballism kills a Postmodern anxiety about meaning but still manages to re - enchant life in itself. The artist does not represent life to us on a stale canvas, he becomes fully aware in order to understand that th e canvas is life. Imagination powers the Solar Ethic, live everyday as if you have seen the sun rise for the first time.

JW : I would like to conclude with Nietzsche who illustrates Zarathustra’s teaching with a parable of the sun. ‘Happiness for the sun is that its plentiful light is absorbed by the things for which it shines.’ Zarathustra in comparing himself to the sun overcomes his ignorance and turns into the ‘light of the world’, which replaces the light of God. Could Holyballism be another parable of the sun with Samson Kambalu asking us to return to the light of the world?

SK : Holyballism is the rapture of an age. It is happening here and it’s happening out there. I only gave it a name. To return to the light of the world means to return to life. I am one of the many people who are replacing negative attitudes that renounce the world, with those that are an affirmation of life, of the here and now. Like the rap artist Puff Daddy has said, ‘The sun don’t shine forever, but as long as it’s here then we might as well shine together.

Samson Kambalu & Jonathan Willett 2004

Jonathan Willett is an Artist and Writer, who is currently researching for a PhD in Contemporary Art at Nottingham Trent University.



Works cited directly or as background for the interview.

Adams, Philip. Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/great/projects/Adams.htm
Cupitt, Don. Solar Ethics. SCM Press. Canterbury. 1995
Fink, Eugen. Nietzsche’s Philosophy. Trans. Goetz Richter. London. Continuum. 2003.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Perennial. 1993.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, with a Prelude of Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York. Random House. 1974.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human All Too Human : A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1986.