Thirteen artists engage with the magical spaces of Cape Town’s Castle in an exhibition exploring the need to remember. NEVILLE DUBOW reports
IN the latter part of 1989, some months before FW de Klerk made his end-of-era speech in Parliament, a pivotal event occurred in the streets of Cape Town. The government gave permission for a protest march in which banned organisations, banners flying, took their place with the citizenry. As we rounded the Castle, I had a temporary view of a giant red flag, hammer and sickle emblazoned, framed against the Leerdam bastion. One knew then that things would never be the same. The rumble of the fault lines of seismic political movement was there to be felt.
Seven years on, as part of the exhibition component of the Fault Lines project — Inquiries into Truth and Reconciliation — that same Leerdam bastion plays host to a different, but not unlinked, image, a translation of the celebrated photograph by Sam Nzima of Hector Petersen, cradled piet-like in the arms of a comrade. This icon of the Soweto student uprising of 1976 went round the newspapers of the world (with scant recompense for Nzima) and has been the subject of a thousand posters of the protest years.
The artist responsible for transferring and transforming the image on the Castle wall is Kevin Brand, who has used squares of grey and white duct tape to replicate the tonal dots of a newsprint image. When Brand discussed his project with me some months ago, I wondered how he was going to pull it off, or more to the point, stick it on. Well, he has. There are times when an act of monumental simplicity succeeds, where more intellectually complex projects do not. This one succeeds because of its immediacy. While the image is simplified, diffused and scrambled, we recognise it for what it is. Cognition and memory are joined.
The Fault Lines exhibition is all about memory and the need to remember. The show is one of a series of events, organised by Jane Taylor, ”instituted through the conviction that the arts have a keen and critical place in the processes of national transformation”. The purpose of this exhibition is thus ”to explore the relationship between history, memory and representation”.
This is a project of some significance and it raises a host of questions. Whose history? Whose memory? And how may this be represented? In their responses, most of the artists have taken the route of installation, where elements of the work interact with each other, as well as with the particular quality of the space that houses them. In this the Castle offers gifts that no conventional gallery can. Anything installed cannot but interface with the stored associations of what the Castle itself has come to mean in our collective history. Into these magical spaces 13 artists have brought their memorials, their emotional and formal baggage, their perceptions of truth.
Penny Siopis’s installation is heavily dependent on and plays off against the handsome spatial quality of the long gallery, restored as the British Officers Mess in 1840. The antlers on the wall tell their story of another value system, male-dominated and near extinct. The tall windows have been blacked out so that, in the dim half-light, one may discern the shapes of figures strewn on the floor to suggest the aftermath of a massacre. At each end of the room a glowing fireplace provides an ironic touch of false comfort that underscores the palpable horror of what lies in between.
There are no male forms to be seen, a gender nuancing which is spelled out by the title, Mostly Women and Children. This feminist position is edged by the inclusion of personal memorabilia, the army uniform of a husband, the Boy Scout uniform of a friend. The installation is given added point by the fact that it is roped off, leaving a passageway from door to door. You can walk through and pretend it hasn’t happened. But you cannot escape the background music of Henryk G_recki, which, like the installation, is pitched at a level simultaneously self-evident and insistent. Like a soprano hitting a high C, and holding it forever.
On a quieter note, Clive van den Berg gives thanks for our new Constitution, which delegitimises homophobia. Installed in a small room is a tilted plane of grass which carries a pair of graves. The accompanying text makes reference to two men made to walk the plank off Robben Island in 1735, punishment for being lovers. I found this an honest and moving piece. It’s a pity that an accompanying set of small paintings on the theme of homosexual love has been separated from the installation. These share space with a quirky, stilted painting by Alfred Thoba, whose ostensible subject, the transfer of power, is underscored by the ironic splendour of its title: Thank you Mr FW de Klerk for handing over South Africa to Nelson Mandela. Your kindness is so handy.
Elsewhere, there are urban discontents. An accomplished new work by William Kentridge, a projected drawing which revisits familiar urban landscapes, holds one’s attention. It is called The History of the Main Complaint, and is an allegory of sickness: of the body, of the soul, of greed and guilt. It demonstrates Kentridge’s continuing ability to encompass complexity and coherency within a disciplined visual economy.
Colin Richards, using other means and chosen objects, shares some of this economy. Distributed with precision around his space are cherub heads and broken angel wings. Accompanying them are veiled cloths and unveiled meanings. Richards is a skilful imagist in whose work the tension between the polemical theorist and the tactile sensualist may be discerned. The latter is strikingly indicated by the mesmeric angel wing studded with blue eyes.
Lien Botha uses screened religious iconography combined with media-derived images of mutilation and other horrors. These are to be found on washing lines that stretch across two rooms. The metaphor of dirty washing leaps a bit too easily from the work, but it makes its point. Not so in the case of Billy Mandindi, who shows some assured self-portraits which set up a tension with an inchoate sculptural installation.
Moshekwa Langa makes more of the scatter principle. He fills a number of basement rooms with pencil- marked maps which point to the denial of land rights — the absence of entitlement of the locust years from which we are struggling to emerge. The work is called No Title. It’s a piece that needs editing, but the frustration and anger that inform it emerge clearly enough.
There are three further works which need to be noted as significant examples of opposing strategies to be found in the show.
Malcolm Payne’s piece goes the hi-tech route. It has as its focus a wall of open books formed from vacuum-moulded plastic. Some of the transparent forms reveal shredded paper, others are inscribed with liquid light. A central series houses video screens in which bandaged hands turn pages on which are projected binary oppositions such as warm/cold, us/them, truth/lies and so on. So far, so good.
The teasings-out of truth revealed and truth concealed, the many layered meanings, offer themselves readily enough. But there is more going on. There is a multi-speakered sound-track (sound by Warric Sony) with an over-heated script of distinctly am-dram flavour. It’s somewhat like being hooked into a radio play that you would rather switch off.
But stick with it, because it does trigger a moment of high drama: an electronic blip on the soundtrack activates a stuffed cloth figure bound to a steel chair on a raised platform. On command, the figure thrashes frenetically backwards and forwards with an astonishing caged violence that taps into our uneasy awareness of what went on in police interrogation sessions. It is a sustained moment of rawness in a hyperactive, thoroughly post-modern demonstration of Malcolm/alchemy.
At the other end of the spectrum is an installation by Jane Alexander. It offers that quality of utter stillness, a moment for meditation that comes as some relief in a show where sound systems blare through doorways and floors. This is a finely honed piece in the transcendent realist mode Alexander has made her own. There are two components: a shrouded black male figure in ”houseboy” uniform and a seated baboon with a bib embroidered with the text ”Blaas hoog die vlam vir God, volk en vaderland”.
Lift the shroud off the face of the figure and you have an encounter with a pair of eyes which goes beyond the boundary of mimesis. Perhaps this is where meta-mimesis and memory are joined. The work is about recognising common humanity.
So, on another level, perhaps a problematic one, is Randolph Hartzenberg’s Salt Theatre, an installation with a performance component. The installation itself has as its central feature a series of cheap wardrobes holding bags of salt, further salt bags piled up against a corner, empty suitcases chained to a line along the ceiling. Unactivated by performance, its meaning is enigmatic.
I have a regard for Hartzenberg’s work so I made a point of being at the first advertised performance. To give a programmatic account runs the risk of trivialising it. I can only list some salient manoeuvres. These involved the artist moving the chained suitcases; rolling an iron ball round an electric light; breaking a loaf of bread and chewing on its pieces. The kneaded remains pushed across the floor and deposited in a suitcase.
What to make of this? The Iphigenia label on the suitcase suggests innocent sacrifice. The associations of journeying, forced removal, the conjunction of salt and bread, resonate in terms of our history. But, ultimately, one’s response to performances of this kind will depend on whether one agrees with the proposition (advanced by the writer Yoseph Yerushalmi) that the collective memory is transmitted more actively through ritual than chronicle.
What made the experience moving was the fact that, for half its duration, I was the only other person in the room. Far from detracting from the experience, it heightened it. This intense hermetic ritual made me think of other private rituals, perhaps carried out in prison cells, unwitnessed, unrecorded, the private pain of the era we have emerged from, the unknown pain that might yet lie ahead.
Finally, how does one evaluate the Fault Lines exhibition as a whole? It is inevitable, given our historical moment, that an art exhibition with the subtext Inquiries into Truth and Reconciliation is going to reveal as much of where we have come from as where we are now or where we are going. If there is a fault line that runs through the exhibition itself, it is between those works that offer themselves up too seductively and those where one has to work at prising meaning open. There is also the line of tension between effect and affect, between concepts installed and meanings distilled.
Negotiating between history, memory and representation is neither an easy nor a secure experience. But it is a necessary process and the exhibition is an important one. It should be seen, as much for its problematics as for its poetry.
The Fault Lines exhibition is on view at the Castle in Cape Town until July 31