HAZEL FRIEDMAN went to two exhibitions that explore the latent art of historical documentation
SO many stories to be told. So few ways of really telling them. This is the conclusion some viewers will draw after seeing Roger Meintjies’s visual essay on the Suez/Aida Project and Chinchona Project.
Now don’t get me wrong. Meintjies, a South African artist now living abroad, is an extremely intelligent practitioner. He is also one of an intrepid few prepared to meander beyond the discipline of photography as documentary truth-teller into the realm of story-telling, and from the empirical aspects of the medium into a more complex conceptual arena.
As the exhibition press release points out, Meintjies’s approach is “to blur the boundaries between art exhibit and anthropological museum, in an effort to create work that is accessible to countries such as South Africa.” He has chosen as his thematic fulcrums the chinchona tree and the Suez/Aida Project – two subjects about which little is known in South Africa. To those unfamiliar with the chinchona, this is the tree that produces quinine, the drug that assisted the European penetration of Africa in the 19th century, thanks to its medicinal properties that protected the colonisers from certain diseases endemic to the “dark” continent.
Using photographic images from archives, libraries and private collections, Meintjies has traced the movement of chinchona from the Andes, where it originated, through its evolution as commodity, currency and consumable.
The Suez/Aida Project has a 8x5m banner hung outside the front window of the Rembrandt Gallery, filled with columns of apparently unconnected names, places, rivers, animals and plants. This aspect of the exhibition works most effectively. Not because it depicts Europe’s imperial aspirations in planning the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and its connection with the world premiere of the opera Aida. Rather, its resonance lies in its minimalism and the associations the viewer is forced to make or dismiss between language and its referents – whether real or imagined.
As Meintjies seems to suggest, such is the stuff of which history is made. And the viewer cannot simply gaze at the material object – as one might a landscape – for comprehension and edification. Access demands active engagement with the work and an attempt to read both on and between the lines. The paradox is that even though the emphasis in this work is not on finished product but on process, the former cannot possibly encapsulate the latter.
The less successful component of Meintjies’s show is the chinchona essay. While it works as a general pictorial overview of the chinchona tree genus, it offers little insight into the imperatives behind its commodification and consumption. Meintjies has provided only cursory information on labels accompanying the images. His attempt to address the complexities of documentary photography without the crutch of textual accompaniment is courageous. But ultimately the essay reads a bit like a oarless sailboat in uncharted seas.
And yet the stories, whether they are about the poppy flower, the marula tree or the baobab, are waiting to be told. And this one, despite its inevitable shortcomings, certainly deserves to be read.
The Chinchona Project and the Suez/Aida Project are on at the Museum Africa and the Rembrandt Gallery respectively
This is one of the most beguiling characteristics of conceptualism: its identification of art not as object but information. This information is presented not as a given, fixed reality, but rather as an accumulated, reconstructed process.