Brenda Atkinson : On show in Johannesburg
Jeremy Wafer and Sue Williamson, both established and widely respected artists in South Africa and abroad, make an odd couple within the same exhibition space. Currently exhibiting at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery, the two tackle their subjects and materials with vastly different conceptual approaches and to disjunctive formal effect.
Wafer’s New Works carry the artist’s familiar signatures: powerfully seductive, beautiful and formally perfect, they are as aesthetically moving as they are confounding. Wafer’s love affair with surface, shape and form continues in an exhibition that is, to an extent, continuous with his previous work, diverging and progressing in its focus and formal refinement.
The Red Ovals works follow from a series started in 1996 (now in the Smithsonian’s Museum of African Art), and consist of nine fibreglass oval relief sculptures polished with red shoe polish. Overtly sensual and suggestively anatomical, the ovals – which also hint at African carving and ceramic motifs – are themselves indented with concave ovals.
Their sculptural counterparts, the Spindle Series, take similar form but are covered with bulbous nodes. The spindle sculptures are in turn echoed in two-dimensional medium in a set of glass paintings, also developed in 1996, depicting black spindle shapes located on a white field. Finally, a group of 20 framed photographs of antholes hangs as a single piece, framed by a row of place-names: Ariamsvlei, Rietfontein, Ficksburg Bridge, and other “border” localities.
The resonances of Wafer’s work unfold and reinforce each other as each component of the show is viewed and revisited: formal relations and their diverse permutations gradually reveal questions concerning human endeavour, the political and aesthetic conjunctions (and disjunctures) of African artistic production and Modernist imperatives, and the body-as-fetish and social organism within these.
Sue Williamson’s Truth Games is possibly even more confusing than Wafer’s work, as much because of its conceptual intent as its realisation. Addressing the horror and healing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Williamson has made an extensive series of “interactive” works: each framed piece depicts an accuser, a defender, and an image of the event (all laserprints), and is overlaid with a loose grid of perspex slats printed with transcripts from each particular case. Viewers are invited to move the slats – which slide along aluminium rails – and create their own version of historical events.
Williamson’s subject is potentially potent and controversial: while local media have provided extensive coverage of TRC proceedings in various forms, there has as yet been little evidence of the commission’s process in visual artistic production.
But what happens in this series is a neutralisation of the visceral, emotional, and political power of these events, perhaps because Williamson has opted for a conceptual underpinning that, while it encourages viewer participation, fails to implicate or draw us into its painful mess.
In a recent interview on SABC’s aRt, Williamson described another project she is working on in relation to Truth Games. A dedicated collector of those tourist-kitsch glass globes in which snowflakes fall on miniature foreign cities when shaken, Williamson has started to make some of her own. In these works, it is not snow that falls, but chairs, ropes, people.
And this, it seems, is the kind of conceptual take that confirms Williamson’s position as one of our foremost artists.
While the works on Truth Games want to achieve a dialogue that meditates on revelation and concealment, on the numerous and often conflicting stories that constitute “history”, the literalness of their presentation offers only a self- conscious and too-easy fait accompli.
Jeremy Wafer’s New Works and Sue Williamson’s Truth Games can be viewed Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg, until 1 August