FINE ART: Ivor Powell
LET’S talk materials here. On the Newtown Galleries’=20 exhibition by Marc Edwards, Albert Munyai and Jeremy=20 Wafer is a piece titled Form .Evolved From a Force –=20 also described as “on loan from Barnett Auto Spares”.=20 Edwards’ work is the hideously mangled, shattered and=20 bloodstained wreckage of a car that has been involved=20 in a head-on collision.=20
You think “yuk” and “shock” when you first look at it,=20 but in fact the wreck serves as an index to what it is=20 that binds the exhibition together. By exhibiting the=20 mangled metal, Edwards is drawing attention to a basic=20 premise of contemporary art: that materials are capable=20 of carrying residues of their history and their use;=20 and that in such residual histories, meaning can be=20 both found and created.
Of course, Edwards has gone a couple of steps further=20 than this: the melding of the human and the inanimate=20 material is chillingly literal in the object he has=20 chosen to exhibit, the material horribly eloquent of=20 the situation out of which it comes. Nevertheless, the=20 work informs the way one looks at Edwards’ blanket- wrapped figures: they’re more about what you can’t see=20 than what you can. =20
In this, Edwards has much in common with the way Wafer=20 generates significance in his work, and, less=20 obviously, with the peculiar sculptural work of Munyai.
In one of Wafer’s pieces, two black and white=20 photographs are hung side by side. One shows a crowded=20 beach, the other a lonely sea. Just that: before and=20 after, or perhaps after and before. But what the work=20 communicates is precisely that there is no before or=20 after; they are not separate things. When you look at=20 the pictures, you are forced to register, in a kind of=20 Zen koan, the crowd in the emptiness of the ocean; the=20 emptiness in the bustle of holiday-makers.=20
The minimal and meditative response that Wafer induces=20 is picked up in an entirely different register (at=20 least in the context of this exhibition) by Munyai.=20 Munyai’s use of wood at once integrates subject matter=20 with material and creates disjunctions between them.=20 Thus while he explores the expected quasi-mythological=20 subjects (Bird Man, for instance), he also creates odd=20 disjunctions between the materiality of the wood and=20 its representational functions. Thus, in the above- mentioned work, man becomes bird mainly because of a=20 formal imbalance in the original piece of wood. In=20 another, a ladder is as organic, as possessed of=20 consciousness, as the figure that clambers up its=20 angled planes.
Asked before the show what he thought would bind it=20 together, Burnett said, somewhat dismissively:=20 “Exhibitions can also work on disjunctions.” This show=20 certainly proves that they can. It also provides=20 evidence that you can find meaningful ways of relating=20 distinctively African art to much that is being made in=20 Western-influenced “high art” circles — without=20 trampling the hothouse cultural lilies in the process.