Fine Art: Ruth Sack
PAVED with good intentions, the Right to Hope project was perhaps destined to stumble into predictable pitfalls, especially given its ambition and its hopes.
Consisting of three separate exhibitions in Johannesburg, one of which will tour the world for two years, and a multifarious educational component, it was set up to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Unesco. Its aims were “to show how artists can counteract … prejudice, and communicate across cultures to promote values for human survival and peace …(to express) their hopes for the futures of their communities and of the planet”. Perfect.
Rightly, then, its important achievement is to address seriously the educational dimension of exhibiting art — in numbers of ways that should by now be having a noticeable impact on children and teachers around Johannesburg.
But what of the work itself? The main exhibition manifests everything that might be expected from a call to artists to produce on the theme of “the right to hope”: the didactic, the declamatory, the sentimental, the politically-correct, the kitsch, the illustrative. And also, fortunately, some extraordinarily subtle, surprising and enriching works, in which the notion of the theme is absorbed into a multilevelled complexity, far beyond the obvious.
This is an exhibition partly consisting of words. Each artwork is accompanied by a text, explaining the piece in the artist’s own words. At first this creates a wonderful sense of being spoken to very directly, of having access to the very source. But one should beware the words of artists. Mostly they do themselves a disservice.
Symbols are everywhere: trees, roots, seeds, rocks, the colour ochre. It is an exhibition about symbols, universal or personal.
But it is in the words of the artists that these are pinned down, and usually deprived of life (“the rocks represent the different countries of the world”; “Blue equals universal outlook, the ochre equals justice, burnt sienna equals fertility, eternity…”). The viewer is left with little part to play; no space in which to make new connections, no discovery, no nuance of interpretation. And in most cases, no hint of irony is heard.
And yet the exhibition is entirely saved, and exonerated, by its superb exceptions. There are pieces that set up resonances with their texts: establishing a vibrancy between word-picture and image, where separate currents converge in the viewer’s mind. The best example of this is a piece called Moon, by the Japanese artist Kimio Tsuchiya. Old, weathered slices and segments of a chopped tree, are arranged on the wall in an arc. Each fragment represents a phase in the waxing and waning, rising and falling life of the moon. The words alongside tell a Celtic story, not explaining the piece, but poised against it. It is a work of exquisite tension.
The Gun Carriage is a sombre work in metal; heavily and broodingly it seems to deny the theme of the exhibition, as it stands at the very entrance. Part of a series called Fallen Mortal, its creator, Vivan Sunderam from India, has based all his works on one photograph — a newspaper picture from The Times of India of a man killed in the crossfire of the Hindu-Moslem riots of 1993.
Dark grey metal, on a heavy trolley, it is like the burden of history that we have to drag inexorably with us. “I think it is necessary to recognise,” says Sunderam, “forces of disruption … forces of fragmentation.”
And finally, Willem Boshoff’s piece, Bottled Hope, is a piece that transcends all words, including mine. Only the lists and lists of botanical names alongside his rows of bottled seeds could possibly do the work justice, perhaps, if only in the magic their very sounds evoke.
The seeds are so visually rich, one would have to resort to some old and very formal (maybe archaic) language to begin to capture their textures, colours, shapes, the artist’s arrangements of seed, husk, pip, shell. Even if for this work alone, come and see for yourself.
The Right to Hope is at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until November 5; The Right to Grow runs at the Gertude Posel Gallery, Wits, until November 5; Community Arts Come Together is at the Funda Centre until October 18