Kathryn Smith
Fauna seems to be the order of the day at this year’s Standard Bank National
Arts Festival in Grahamstown. Two of the featured exhibitions on this year’s
main programme revolve around the semantics of the animal world, whether it’s
Walter Oltmann’s monumental insects fashioned from woven wire and tubing, or
Willie Bester’s take on the much-televised footage of police dogs attacking illegal immigrants.
Bester is one of a handful of South African artists who are creating major rumbles in the jungles of the international art market. The success of artists
like Bester is so often eclipsed by the phenomenal dominance of William Kentridge, but Bester has scored a coup with a major retrospective of his work
destined to tour United States art museums in 2003.
Situated in the cavernous Gallery-in-the-Round at the Settlers’ Monument, Bester’s multimedia sculptural installation, facilitated by the Johannesburg-
based Goodman Gallery, asks the question (as does that song) Who Let the Dogs
Out?
An artist we see far too little of these days, as his schedule and collectors
take him globe-trotting (predominantly to the US and Europe), Bester’s new work
bears shades of his more familiar painted box-constructions and scrap metal assemblages, but has taken on a more streamlined, vaguely cyborgian identity.
And like many of our established art stars, Bester has embraced the brave new
world of multimedia and includes sound and video in this aggressive, but rather
spectacular work.
Working in found metal objects and scrap, which are then galvanised to a brittle
silver sheen, Bester has taken the action from the sensational footage, and recreated the main protagonists (a policemen, a cameraman, a victim and a dog)
as lifesize sculptures-in-the-round. The only larger-than-life (size) figure is
the dog, which, although it only has one head, resembles an out of proportion,
millennial Cerberus lording over its victim.
The victim is rendered mute by an object inserted into his mouth. The cameraman
is without arms. A cop, holding the dog’s leash and muzzle in his hand, commands
the beast with one outstretched finger.
When the work is installed, visitors will walk among his figures hearing soundbytes from the video footage. News footage of the incident will be visible
through a peephole in the corner of the installation.
Bester’s work, while retaining complexity on the level of material transformation, often verges on the didactic. Whether the origin of the internal
narrative is known to the viewer is not the issue. Nor does it pose a problem
when it comes to interpretation. His forceful and often brutal sculptural language is given additional impact by his choice of materials.
As he says: “It’s the only way I can use my skill and my language. The energy
that was given to this incident across local and international media was like
watching the hideous exercises of our past being replayed in this moment.”
Bester’s recent work has been focusing on the equally “hideous exercises” of
violence on South African farms. As always, his work is socially and politically
focused, and pulls no punches, promoting his belief that art offers the possibility of moral regeneration, or at least catharsis: “Art is an opportunity
to make oneself a better person,” he states.
For Walter Oltmann, recipient of the 2001 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for
Visual Art, the insect world provides an unending source of fascination. Researching colonial study drawings of the flora and fauna of South Africa, as
well as the etchings of Albrecht Drer, Oltmann has found a way of combining
these illustrative, linear depictions with the wirecraft found on the curio- laden pavements of the country’s towns.
Working in brass, copper and aluminium wire and tubing, Oltmann’s latest body of work has developed from his gigantic Silverfish that adorns a wall in the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Only now the work is more elaborate, verging on the
decorative, with intricate detail sewn on to the woven forms.
Fast making a name for himself as the desirable artist to grace the walls and
atria of major corporate giants, his work can be seen in the Billiton Collection, the International Convention Centre in Durban and the Sandton Convention Centre.
He succeeds for one simple reason: these huge spaces find a counterpoint in Oltmann’s work that is about making hand-worked processes look industrial, even
if only by virtue of his objects’ monstrous scale leading to the question “how’d
he do that?”
His ability to turn the micro world into a macro one is unnerving, especially
when you consider the time it must take to intricately weave these creatures
that inspire loathing and even fear.
Seduced by the tensions inherent in what he makes, Oltmann has also taken to
creating what he calls “lava suits” anthropomorphic insects, or rather, humanoid protective exoskeletons he traces back to illustrations of regalia worn
by conquistadors and early explorers during the time of the voyages of discovery. As he comments, “The linear depiction of weaving also stems from an
illustration of a European carved in ivory by a North African artist. It suggested the way I should make these.”
This tension between media, labour and imagery results in a new kind of mondo
exotica that allows Oltmann to transgress the oft debated no-man’s-land between
art and craft. Brenda Schmahmann’s catalogue essay for the exhibition picks up
on this, as well as that other aspect of transgression abjection and related
phobias that come into play here. Passion flowers with violently protruding
stamens and a sleeping serpent round off the collection and bring with them allusions to the biblical.
Like last year’s Young Artist winner Alan Alborough, Oltmann is something of a
virtuoso when it comes to working with low-tech, inexpensive materials and performing artistic alchemy. Like other Natal artists of his generation (Andries
Botha, Peter Schutz and some early works by Jeremy Wafer), his ethos owes much
to the art and craft history of the province.
Whereas Oltmann’s world is more magical realism than Bester’s hardcore political
commentary, these two bodies of work sit unusually comfortably side by side. And
for those unable to do Grahamstown, you can experience the world according to
two of our most established artists when Bester and Oltmann present solo exhibitions later this year at the Goodman Gallery, with Bester featuring in
November and Oltmann alongside Peter Schutz in September/October.