Anthea Garman
REVIEW OFTHEWEEK
Being bothered about place (as in the actual ground under your feet) is not something you do in a big city with an international airport. But when you live in a small town, off the national road, and you are surrounded by countryside impervious to your human needs (both physical and mental), place becomes very dominating indeed.
Mark Wilby, who runs the Ibis Gallery in Nieu-Bethesda, “curated” (or inspired) the first !Xoe site-specific exhibition in 1998. Wilby was drawn to Nieu-Bethesda after working with Athol Fugard and becoming interested in the town and in the Owl House.
After living there for a short time with his wife and two children he became conscious that curious city-dwellers usually zoom off the main road, take the rickety 25km dirt trip into Nieu-Bethesda to gawk at Helen Martins’s insanity for an hour and then speed off back to real life at the other end of the N1.
!Xoe was a response to that impulse. Wilby was looking for a way for both artists and onlookers to engage with the space, area and place that is the Karoo. To stomp around it, feel it, think it, know it, question it.
!Xoe (a !Xam word meaning place) was fascinating. While the Ibis Gallery (in town) held clues, drawings and documentation to give insight to the site- specific work based on farms, in the bush and up mountains (as well as down the main street of Nieu-Bethesda) attending this exhibition took two days of walking and engaging with the town and the inhabitants (you kept on bumping into them!) and the artists.
I had been to Nieu-Bethesda before !Xoe and agreed with the person in the Owl House guest book who wrote “Helen, I will be back”, but it was that exhibition that started to hook the nagging questions deep down in my self about centre and periphery, city and rural and the power flowing between them.
This year Wilby is curating !Xoe2, which has two dimensions: site-specific in Nieu- Bethesda and simultaneously gallery art in Grahamstown during the National Arts Festival. !Xoe2 enlarges its concerns and takes on the hallowed gallery as the place (and only place) to view art. A dialogue is set up between two tiny towns – both off the beaten track, both desperately in need of visitors to justify their existences. But of course the one has “art” status and the other doesn’t – just outsider art status.
The artists involved in this backchat are Andries Botha, Anton Brink, Mark Haywood, Jacki McInnes-Graham, Georgie Papageorge, Greg Streak, Jeremy Wafer, Helen Weldrick, Mark Wilby, Gavin Younge and RAM and Natal Technikon students in collaboration.
Haywood, head of the Rhodes art school,which hosts !Xoe2 in Grahamstown, has set up a “classical” plinth made of plaster under the face of the Kompasberg, Nieu-Bethesda’s imposing and distinctive mountain sentinel.
The plinth appears again in the art school gallery where it is surmounted by a model of the Rhodes art school – a porticoed building with rooms arranged around a central atrium. The is the temple of culture modelled on the ancient classical temple.
Haywood points out that in the 18th century the aristocracy of England would undertake the grand tour of Europe, returning with souvenir art works. Many of them then remodelled their ancestral homes to echo the architecture they’d seen and to store their art. In Victorian times the pillared portico became a standard form of architecture for museums and galleries and today the icon on maps to indicate such a building is a miniature portico.
So which is the true gallery, the real site? In the shadow of the Kompasberg or on Rhodes campus (with all its historical echoes)? You decide.
!Xoe2 is on the National Arts Festival main programme but extends until 29 July in both Nieu Bethesda and Grahamstown