FINE ART: Brenda Atkinson
DURING World War II, a man called Hugh Mcfarlane was commissioned to take “scientific” photographs of South African soldiers stationed in Namibia. He photographed over 1 000 men, each one naked against a tiled white wall, standing on a small, numbered podium.
The strangled subtexts of discipline and desire in the photos – now ironically in the possession of Pretoria’s Gay and Lesbian Association, in a suitcase marked “Crown Property” – are the inspiration for Hentie van der Merwe’s first solo show.
The slippage between public and private bodies, between military precision and the photographer’s illicit desire, is the first of several Van der Merwe sets up, at a deliberate distance from the viewer.
Mcfarlane’s military documents are installed to recall the tiled locker-room grid of the photos, which becomes the thematic nub of the show. They cover the black walls of the gallery’s upstairs room, sealed off from visitors by a thick glass plate. The text on the glass tells us these were the possessions of Mr Mcfarlane, who kept them years after their taxonomic value had expired.
Van der Merwe’s diorama mimes the objectifying impulse of disciplinary regimes, and thwarts our own voyeuristic desire. It is the logical premise for his own large photographs downstairs, which are intended to personalise the issues of violence and gay male sexuality.
Outside the diorama are enlarged portraits of some faces from Mcfarlane’s collection – some apparently no older than 16 years; some beautiful; some clearly afraid. Van der Merwe has placed his own portrait in the series of catalogue postcards, a gesture that underlines his intensely personal investment in the works.
Although the exhibition is Van der Merwe’s painful, and at times awkward, attempt at coming to grips with his Namibian roots – with violence, sexuality and memory in two countries in which aggressive masculinity is applauded – it articulates these dilemmas through a relentlessly clinical aesthetic.
Van der Merwe’s own photographs, the liquid centre of a rigidly constructed show, are evocative perhaps because they are so oblique. Swimming pools – one empty, one full – and a waterfall, suggest further slippages: aridity and flood, control and the yearning to swoon, the discipline of school PT lessons and the furtive longings of hot chlorine-skinned days.
Hentie van der Merwe’s show runs at the Generator Art Space until June 20. He will conduct a walkabout for the public at the gallery on June 20 at 1pm