FINE ART: Ruth Sack
`METALS seem to have been in fair supply for weapons and tools, but perhaps not in sufficient quantity to allow for much ornamental use, as only one bangle was found, and no other ornaments, of iron or copper …”
So wrote archaeologist TM Maggs of findings from the Iron Age in the southern highveld. Times have changed. But Images of Metal, showing at the Gertrude Posel Gallery at Wits University, shows that, still hardly ornamental, metals are even now being used as tools, and as weapons — tools of expression, which wield an extraordinary range of meaning. Paradoxically, given the weight, strength and recalcitrance associated with steel and bronze, much of the work speaks of lightness, wit, gentleness, energy and emotion.
And weapons of satire and blistering disdain, as in David Brown’s One Man and His Dog (against “war and things like that”, says Brown) and Gavin Younge’s Crossing the Kunene (where, like “finned missiles”, his hanging fish condemn South African militarism).
This exhibition — curated by Elizabeth Rankin — is intended to reveal “process”: the physical process of producing metal sculpture; the process of each artist’s thought and artistic development; the process of change in our perceptions of what constitutes sculpture and who is making it.
But just as revealing is the curatorial process itself, and how this has changed over the past few years. Not very long ago (as recently as the Art and Ambiguity exhibition, or Rankin’s own Images of Wood), curated exhibitions, with the best will in the world, involved mostly a dialogue between academics and the informed — at which the uninformed could only stand “outside” and gaze in awe.
Later, going to the opposite extreme but even more alienating in its effect, museum directors and art curators took it upon themselves to direct and educate, with numerous texts on walls, “scaffolding” (ie access points and explanations), pointers to our understanding, telling us how and what to see. This may have “demystified” things, but it also tended to deprive viewers of opportunities for judgment, intelligent participation and a sense of discovery.
Images of Metal begins to find the right balance. Clearly a teaching exhibition, it raises questions and makes connections in fairly simple ways; but ways that invite participation and investigation.
It raises questions about the opportunities available to sculptors, and about both their traditional and non- conventional responses to materials and resources; about audiences, and whose culture it is. Many of the works use popular imagery, South African icons and symbols; but 1970s graduates were clearly drawn by the Caro-esque languages of international modernism.
The “open” form of the exhibition, its readable but rich catalogue (published by Wits University Press), and the extrovert nature of the works chosen, seem to unite. Rankin, with the sensitive, humane scholarship and detailed care that she has led us to expect of her, sets up conjunctions between rituals and narratives, jokes and anguish, toys and artworks, that take the testing of boundaries into far more subtle and nuanced areas than before.