Lauren Shantall
FINEART
The village of Zuney hasn’t felt the shudder of a locomotive in more than a decade. The abandoned metal tracks have gone to rusty seed, overgrown with weeds, the wooden sleepers lie dormant, rotting.
Once a day, many years ago, the linked carriages en route from Port Elizabeth to Port Alfred would chug through those few lonely farmsteads.
These days Zuney is more lost than ever and the reason it should have attained fame is fading into obscurity along with it.
Located inland near the small village of Alexandria in the Eastern Cape, Zuney is the home of little-known South African “outsider artist” Dirk Cornelius van der Mescht, a man with no formal art training, who was employed for many years as the Zuney porter.
Seeking relief from a drinking problem and job boredom, Van der Mescht assembled a visionary garden of earthly delights a crudely executed yet nonetheless impressive array of nearly 60 sculptures, crafted from wire, straw, cement and enamel paint that spanned the railway tracks near the Zuney platform and his adjoining homestead.
This idiosyncratic world, which Van der Mescht began in 1978, continues to bear testimony to a highly original output: those astonishing fruits borne of an untrained eye coupled with an unusual artistic fervour.
Today the Zuney garden is plantednn with what arennnn still brightly coloured cement statues, homemade model aeroplanes, painted tyres and a host of found objects that, more often than not, have been incorporated into sculptures.
Real horns are set into the concrete of two life-size deer, one ofnn which has bicyclenn reflector eyes; an industrious fisherman bears actual net floats and so on. An archetypal Adam and Eve pairing adorns the gateposts of the house, gazing upon a pastoral scattering of rigid chickens, wild birds frozen in flight, fish swimming in air, a friendly looking bear and several human figurines that are dispersed among larger wild animals, such as giraffe and elephants.
But not all of Van der Mescht’s pieces are this benign. A mounted rifleman taking aim, apparently set there to protect the platform-cum-post office, strikes an ominous note and speaks revealing volumes about a host of unseen threats and fears that must have taunted Van der Mescht, fears that are beyond his habitual source of inspiration in nature books and postcards.
Whatever tensions may have moved the man to this varied outpouring, the garden is now but a faded semblance of its former bloom. Since Van der Mescht’s death at the age of 76 on October 25 1996, the sculptures have deteriorated so noticeably as to be, in some cases, nearing utter dissolution.
Time, the weather and neglect have taken their inevitable, unfortunate toll on works that were built cheaply on the scrapings of a meagre railway pension, with little consideration to their longevity.
Van der Mescht was driven to make them, his elderly widow Sarie explains, because “he felt like making something for the station”.
Keeping himself busy, he ceased to hit the bottle. Yet Van der Mescht sought more than a therapeutic release. He was an impassioned, near obsessive creator a characteristic that is typical of outsider artists the world over. Once the daily train had come through at 2pm, Van der Mescht set to “working every night until 1am or until he was tired”.
This feverish enthusiasm was to peter out in later years as Van der Mescht’s health declined. An asthmatic condition confined him, increasingly, to bed and “when he started to get sick”, says his wife, “he didn’t take any notice any more”.
These days no one, not even one of Van der Mescht’s sons who occasionally assisted him, is left at Zuney to “take any notice” of the sculptures. Sarie is not sure exactly how many are left. A few of the pieces are missing entirely. Some were destroyed by vandals and about five were sold off to those curious pilgrims who filter through to the obscure locale every now and again.
Flaking, sun-bleached paint, water erosion and broken internal armatures are everywhere in evidence on the pieces that remain. Their condition is bound to worsen still.
Sarie, who stays on with two unmarried offspring in the family’s old veranda house, can barely afford to make ends meet with the few hundred rands she earns sorting the Zuney mail, let alone buy materials to maintain her husband’s crumbling legacy.
“I am getting old now,” she admits, “and I don’t know what to do.”
What seems inevitable, at this stage, is the total loss of an extensive example of art brut (raw art); an eventuality that immediately raises the debate about whether outsider environments should be preserved, which are worth saving and by whom. According to his wife, Van der Mescht “didn’t say what should happen to the sculptures after his death”.
Outsider art falls into a void in terms of laws that would govern it after the death of the artist and automatic protection is not granted unless sites have gained National Heritage recognition. Zuney doesn’t have that.
Mark Wilby of the independent Owl House Foundation, which set about restoring the late Helen Martins’s Owl House and Camel Yard in Nieu-Bethesda (a site Van der Mescht never knew), says “the only other way is for an interest group to gain some form of control of the property”. Thereafter, the process involves fundraising and a public awareness campaign.
Neither the Alexandria town council nor any tourism board or separate body has approached Sarie van der Mescht, much as she would like to see the Zuney garden restored. This may well be because few people, both here and abroad, have ever heard of Van der Mescht.
The British reference magazine Raw Vision, which deals with examples of outsider art from around the globe, did not know of the garden.
Nor is Van der Mescht featured in the Musee del’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Awareness is not much greater in South Africa. Susan Imrie Ross’s book This Is My World, about the better-known “outsider” Helen Martins, contains a short interview conducted with a 70-year-old Van der Mescht in November 1990.
A Rhodes University fine art student by the name of Cowley wrote a master’s thesis with special reference to Van der Mescht in 1991, but other than one or two arbitrary newspaper articles printed years back, there has been very little documentation or publicity.
Without such records, Van der Mescht’s sculpture garden won’t merely disappear from the landscape, it will be wiped, like loose chalk dust, from the blackboard of our cultural memory.