Alex Sudheim
Review of the week
At school we learned all about history. That dry, dusty cupboard full of dates, facts, causes and effects locked into a rigid and inviolable corset of objective truth. You didn’t argue with history. Then we left the incubator of school, blundered around the world, racked up some bitter experience and suddenly realised that history is nothing less than a fiction of the past. And the truth? “There is no such thing,” said Derrida. “Only ideology.”
It is upon this understanding that Emergence – the extended flashback of the past quarter-century of South African art, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Standard Bank National Arts Festival – is based.
“The past and its recollections remain a territory actively contested, and the politics and processes of memory are continually being renegotiated,” say the exhibition’s curators, Julia Charlton and Fiona Rankin-Smith.
With a history as turbulent as ours, the task of defining some sort of coherent trajectory of art in the past 25 years must have been like trying to write a thousand different scripts for the same movie. With history resembling a shattered mirror, finding the true reflections of reality is practically an impossible task.
Which is why Charlton and Rankin-Smith deliberately make no attempt to provide an impartial representation of history. Because everything is in flux, they have taken the lens through which one looks at the past and severely fractured it. Every time one gazes into the viewfinder of time’s camera one has a new angle, a new perspective.
A contemporary South African artist who wrestles with the crucial complexities of history, power and ideology is Willem Boshoff. His stark monuments to the lie of language, called Shredded Remains and Abamfusa Lawula/The Purple Shall Govern, are an astute deconstruction of the complicity of language in the creation of murderous myths.
The innocent-looking Shredded Remains is a large, solid block made up of strips of paper covered in apartheid-era euphemisms such as “Civil Co-Operation Bureau”, “Immorality Police” and “Christian National Education”. The apparent innocuousness of this work is precisely where its terror lies – one might only be looking at neat little phrases composed of essentially harmless words, yet the bloodshed, pain and anguish they represent beyond their clinical abstraction is dramatically accentuated by the apparent guiltlessness of the words themselves.
And if Shredded Remains is the tombstone of apartheid, then Abamfusa Lawula/The Purple Shall Govern is the fading echo of the protester’s cry. Based on the infamous “purple rain” incident in Cape Town in 1987 – where protesters were sprayed with purple dye for later arrest – the work is a lexicon of protesters’ rallying cries from “Here comes a black man, Verwoerd be careful!” and “Joe Modise is a soldier!” to “Once you have touched a woman you have touched a grinding stone.”
Together, these two works form a subtle comment on the inexorable tide of history. Boshoff has collected the man- made mines from the sea of language and demonstrated how, with passing time, even the most vicious of weapons can appear remote and somewhat quaint.
While Boshoff occupies himself with the transmutational properties of language, it becomes apparent when absorbing this compelling, sprawling exhibition that mutation – generally of a brutal, grotesque nature – is a powerful theme running through the nation’s recent history as reflected in its art.
In the sculptural dimension of Emergence, especially, one discovers a morbid fascination with the ability of a “pure” form to be violated and distressed to the degree that it metamorphoses into something altogether darker and more sinister. This, too, is a powerful symbol of the nature of South Africa’s history, where the warping and distortion caused by brutal repression gave birth to an ugly, disturbed social and personal identity.
Like the man who wakes up to discover he has been transformed into a giant beetle in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the works of Joachim Schnfeldt, Brett Murray, Johannes Segogela, Gavin Younge, David Brown, Willie Bester, Ezrom Legae, Phutuma Seoka, Michele Raubenheimer, Leora Farber and Jane Alexander reflect an intense understanding that attempts to brutally crush result not in death but in terrible disfigurement.
One section of the exhibition is surrounded by green plastic sheeting, evoking a sense of the cruelty and clinicism, of a diseased ideology in action. Displayed here are works by other artists whose work seems to pour powerful astringent into the wounds of the past, to simultaneously disinfect them and ensure they never stop bleeding.
Here we see Sam Nhlengethwa’s It Left Him Cold, a chilling cut-and-paste depicting the ominously casual trauma of Steve Biko’s death. Equally disturbing are Sue Williamson’s Wet Bag Torture, Charles Nkosi’s The Tribunal and Robert Hodgins’s deeply scary Ubu Interrogator.
While Emergence dwells necessarily upon the dark ghosts of South Africa’s past, the show is not all self-flagellation and soul- wracking. Walter Batiss’s whimsical Fook Island series provides an air of lightness, while Isolde Krams’s Bugbear and Bonehead nestles seductively on the line dividing playfulness with monstrosity.
Contemporary artists are given a wide platform, with Steven Cohen’s agit-prop antics in a video installation and Clive van den Berg, Penny Siopis and William Kentridge also presenting works in an audio-visual medium.
In an exhibition with the scope and magnitude of Emergence, it would be easy to fault the curators for omitting certain works of art, or of failing to place enough emphasis on one or another particular perspective. Yet Charlton and Rankin-Smith freely admit that “it was not our intention, nor is it possible, to be representative”.
The show is more a rewind and fast- forward through the past quarter-century of the politics and practice of art in South Africa, with the frame regularly freezing upon certain moments of relative significance.
In providing the viewer with a speed-read of recent South African history through the eyes of its artists, Emergence provides a prcis which is deep enough to sketch the outlines of the bigger picture, while never being merely expedient enough to appear reductionist or glib.
Emergence is on show at the Durban Art Gallery until December 5