Kathryn Smith
REVIEW OFTHEWEEK
The commission for a monument to the women of South Africa was recently awarded to the combined team of sculptor Wilma Cruise and architect Marcus Holmes.
As part of the Cabinet’s Legacy Project, administered by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, construction has already begun in a vestibule and amphitheatre at the Union Buildings in Pretoria.
The monument is scheduled for completion on August 9 2000, 44 years to the day when 20E000 members of the Federation of South African Women marched on the headquarters of then prime minister JG Strijdom to demand the repeal of the pass laws.
Dignity, contemplation and unity were major considerations in terms of the proposed design, which takes the rallying cry Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo (Strike the woman, strike the rock) as its motivation and title.
The multimedia project, which includes sculptural elements and sound in a contemporary installation mode, is void of crude sentimentality and seems to leave rainbow-rhetoric at the door. Rather, it uses text, language and metaphor that may seem superficial but is replete with references to history, context and memory, accessible on every level.
The judging panel, which included Wits Galleries curator Rayda Becker, historian Luli Callinicos and culture worker and artist Bongi Dhlomo, sifted through some 65 proposals to reach a decision that will hopefully facelift monuments as we know them.
Taking its cue from May Lin’s seminal Vietnam Memorial in Washington, what makes the design so striking is the sensitive consideration to the Union Buildings’s existing architecture by Herbert Baker, and the fact that Cruise’s work is non-figurative.
The installation site marks the vertical axis of the building, and reflects what Holmes refers to as the “democratic ideals” embodied in Baker’s programme.
The proposed monument’s vestibule is a sanctum sanctorum, a symbol of reconciliation of Boer and Brit that has taken on a new inflection – one that acknowledges the importance of women in the struggle for a new dispensation.
An iconic imbokodo (grinding stone for maize) accompanied by bronze plates set into the sandstone floor forms the central motif, referencing an object that is both particular to the Women’s March and a metaphor of sustenance and nurture.
Text extracted from the original protest letter will be realised in raised bronze letters on the stairs leading up to the vestibule, recreating the processional act. On entering the space, infra-sensors will trigger a myriad of voices repeating the protest phrase in the 11 official languages, creating a sea of sound that ebbs and swells.
Additional elements, to be added if and when funding becomes available, are two museums to the left and right of the site, and four geographical locations relating to the four women (Helen Joseph, Lillian Ngoyi, Rahima Moosa and Sophie Williams) who carried the protests into the buildings, with a fifth site to commemorate the “unknown woman”.
According to Cruise, what this monument attempts to do is avoid a sense of the “heroic” as we have come to expect of bronze and granite monoliths, but in so doing, not to cheat women of their heroism, and to take into account the polyphonic and multivalent qualities of our culture. Her current exhibition rapRACK – comprising larger-than-lifesize ceramic and bronze figures and disembodied, mouthless terracotta heads – is currently installed in the car park (spot the anagram) of the Goodman Gallery.
Crude and cumbersome, these anatomically pathological figures hark back to her earlier works like Three Shades (the bully boys I, II and III). Homo Erectus, a male figure sporting – you guessed it – a rather threatening erection, is provocatively placed behind a tormented female figure dubbed Sacroiliac Dementia. Indeed.
Striated, scarred surfaces and indistinguishable features imply suffocation, as if the figures have been shrouded or wrapped – “wet bag” torture certainly springs to mind. Mouthless or no, the work is certainly not silent or subtle, but in the “personal is political” spirit of her monument, similarly seeks to locate the deeper psychology embedded in experience.
Last Monday Cruise received the South African Architect Project Award 2000, given by the official journal of the South African Institute of Architects.
Wilma Cruise’s rapRACK, Keith Dietrich’s Bodies, Traces, Identities and Brett Murray’s I Love Africa are on view at the Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg until July 1