Review of the week : Brenda Atkinson
Roger van Wyk, all Capetonian cool and soft round vowels and mad professor hair, has had two espressos, and he’s on a roll, his lucid rapid-fire monologue dragging my morning brain into foreign terrain.
In Van Wyk’s world, the world of Transmission – his show at the Rembrandt Van Rijn Art Gallery – the I-Ching and Chaos Theory, Shakras and Newtonian Physics, art and dialogue collide in a code that defies Cartesian rationalism and kicks the gut of linear-minded sceptics of commensurate realities.
Walk into the gallery venue and you stumble upon what Van Wyk describes as “a vandalised exploratorium”, a sideways exhibition, a not-exhibition made up of crystal radio sets, divining tools as used by sangomas, surveillance monitors, microphones, ancient radio paraphernalia, a home-made camera obscura, a medical chart of the eye, and an art work depicting the 64 Triads of the oracular four centuries- old I-Ching (which, coincidentally, replicate the structure of the body’s DNA helix).
But wait, that doesn’t help, does it? Perhaps I could reluctantly describe the mission of Transmission by paraphrasing the gallery press release: it is an exploration of the random (or not so random) links between physics and metaphysics, a suggestion that the empiricism of our technological revolution finds echoes and affinities in the spiritual, even supernatural, realm.
According to Van Wyk, the idea behind Transmission is of “a bridge between the mystical and the scientific. It began with an interest in radio – the transmission of sound – but then gained a variety of associations.”
A healer who walked into the show has told Van Wyk that the body’s shakras (energy fields that govern our wellbeing) function in much the same way as radio transformers: they allow us to “tune in” to the world and to each other. Clearly thrilled at this unsolicited information, Van Wyk explains: “It’s this kind of engagement that I’m interested in catalysing; I’m less interested in competing, through this show, at the level of artistic elitism than I am in inspiring dialogue across disciplines.”
As such, Transmission is perhaps a little less art and a lot more adventure: the levels of Van Wyk’s research are multiple and complex; connections between the natural and the paranormal pop up everywhere in the final product, such as it is, as well as in the process of putting it all together.
Van Wyk likes “working with chance”, and where he has received personal references from people, he has gradually incorporated objects and participants in the evolution of the show. The most recent additions were an old reel-to-reel recording of paranormal “voices” picked up on tape where there were no people, and a respected psychic called Katharine Lee, who offered to talk to visitors about her own experience of psychic transmission.
If this is sounding like another dubious bout of New Age indulgence, it’s not: Van Wyk maintains a distance from, and a respect for, both aspects of his subject matter. A self confessed sceptic and worldly cynic, his own journey has been to find – and communicate – a balance between the intellectual and spiritual, a dichotomy which plays out in other ways: male/female, black/white, reality/illusion, and so on.
“Mind and matter are not separable”, says Van Wyk, backing up this observation with an artillery of examples from the field of particle physics. “I want to make a link between obvious forms of transmission, and the spiritual dimension in forms of communication. `Logic’ is fallible, and the border between things is always infinitely frayed. I think African and Eastern cultures understand this better than any others: that our consensus reality is made up of shades and illusions.”
10-4 Van Wyk. I read you loud and clear.
– On Saturday November 14, 11am to 2pm: Katherine Lee and Chris Rall demonstrate psychometry and do flower readings. Bring your own flower