FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
USING mild terminology to describe Moshekwa Langa’s debut solo exhibition at the Market’s Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery would be tantamount to defining a tidal wave as a ripple. Here’s this newcomer from KwaNdebele, barely out of his high- school blazer — he recently matriculated from the Waldorf School — who is producing work that is nothing short of astounding in terms of its sensitivity to materials and its conceptual sophistication. And the fact that Langa has had no formal art training makes his achievements all the more impressive.
In a sense, Langa belongs to the South African version of that amorphous category known as Generation X. He’s been raised on a mixed diet of urban and rural food, racially flavoured and served with MTV and CNN on the side. He confesses to living in a state of “betwixt and betweenness”, not quite marginalised from, yet not completely fluent in, post-apartheid-speak. But it is precisely his peripheral existence and his ability to channel this sense of dislocation honestly and eloquently that makes his work so resonant.
Drawing on found materials, Langa transforms this flotsam into forms that seem constantly to shift in shape and meaning. Treated with vaseline, turpentine and iodine — solutions used to stiffen and preserve animal skins — and displayed in inventive ways, they become like ink blots in a Rorschach test, or microbes exposed under a microscope. Although fixed to the wall, hung from washing lines or arranged as floor assemblages, they cannot be pinned down. Instead they seem dislodged from their surroundings, in a constant state of becoming.
Their resemblance to animal skins sets up a chain of associations. Hides are used, after all, for their symbolic and functional properties in traditional rural contexts. And like the animal skins which are integral components of this ethos, Langa’s “skins” evoke multiple associations. They function as coverings or protective surfaces, and simultaneously allude to racial classification. But skins can also be shed, and these forms — because they are not what they seem to be — serve more to break down than to cover up. They seem capable of assuming the identity of whatever the wearer (or viewer) wishes them to be.
Langa is clearly exploring issues of identity and classification. His cartographical drawings, resembling tracings from history textbooks, depict the boundaries — geographical and ethnic — that have prescribed his identity. One of his assemblages comprises black exercise books attached to hangers, evoking unavoidable references to the education crisis currently facing South Africa. But the work should not be read solely in terms of its literal allusions. The scribblings of mathematical formulae on the walls suggest a subversion of traditional rites of classification.
To categorise Langa’s work solely in intellectual terms would be to reduce the intuitive aspects of this exhibition. It is as much about feeling and the ineluctable process of making art as it is about cerebral strategies. But in this kind of art, there is always the possibility of allowing instinct to be subsumed by intellect.
There are other dangers facing a young artist possessed of such finely tuned sensibilities. Despite his obvious aversion to categories of any kind, in many respects the artist — like his work — could easily be manipulated to fit an expedient stereotype. After all, he is young, black and from a rural background. His art is part of the process, as well as the product, of felt experience. Yet its concerns are not out of kilter with the discourses and debates in which contemporary art is engaged.
It seems almost inevitable, then, that Langa will be conscripted into trendy cultural causes to which he does not yet subscribe, co-opted into art camps with which he has not aligned himself and given an old skin with a new sheen that might be difficult to shed.
Langa’s show runs until September 27