A good way to spend a Sunday is to buy a picnic at Spier Estate and wander the banks of the Eerste Rivier. Besides the usual pleasures of lolling about, you can take in the artworks that make up Waterway, the Spier outdoor sculpture biennial.
According to Kevin Brand, director of Public Eye (the organisation that has brought the Cape so much interesting public art in the past few years), the works are “designed to complement the estate’s topography and entertain its broad range of visitors”. The exhibition as a whole achieves the latter, but some of the works fail to adequately use the space in which they find themselves.
The best thing about public art is that anybody can look at it and anyone can criticise it. I overheard a portly gentleman explaining a sculpture on Waterway to his querulous companion: “No, it does nothing. That’s it, as it lies.”
It is a comment that could usefully stand in as criticism of the weaker works. Several of them don’t talk of, or to, their situation. There is no dialogue between the environs and the art that would help prompt understanding or pleasure in the passers-by.
Some of the work is facile at best. For her Golden Passage, Carlotta Brunetti has painted boulders in the river gold, drawing a ludicrous analogy between the importance of gold to South Africa’s economy and the value of water as a life-giving resource. Squatting there like some precious version of Ken Kesey’s Day-Glo-painted trees, the boulders appear to come from the same school of art that gave us those gilt tissue boxes in the backs of large Mercs. They at least mirror the Spier muse sculptures, those god-awful golden tarts that scar the bank outside the Spier Amphitheatre like expensively erupting pimples.
Jacques Coetzee’s Corporate Spirit, sponsored by SABMiller, is a large Lego-like figure made out of beer crates. The work is neither aesthetically pleasing, nor intellectually challenging. It is just a stack of beer crates. I noticed that the ground around the sculpture is littered with dozens of offcuts from the plastic cable ties used to bind the work. This displays an amusing contempt for the environment, especially in an artist who professes to be “committed to social responsibility”.
Enough of the negative, though. There are several hugely successful works that reward a visit to Spier. Sanell Aggenbach’s Lemmings consists of a series of long-legged garden chairs, seemingly dancing in mid-air, advancing down a gentle incline into the shallow Eerste Rivier. On the opening night, this seemed a trite conceit. With the paths and grassy clearings filled with a roiling mass of trendy artists, precious critics and the odd drunken lout, Aggenbach’s work seemed an unnecessarily smart-arsed invasion of the usually peaceful landscape.
This impression changed entirely on my second visit to the exhibition. On a boiling hot, blustery summer’s day, with the wind whistling through the wire mesh of the chairs, they are revealed as a perfect South African articulation of culture and environment. Nostalgia and indomitable kitsch shape the space in which they find themselves. It is an apt lesson about public art: as much as the artist has to consider the particulars of the environment, so the viewer has to allow the environment that frames the artwork to do its work.
Also successful is Colin Payne’s Bubbles. A life-sized child figure, named Skrachet, shambles through a field of glass bubble domes, each containing a vaguely abstract shape — broken eggs, a garishly pastel ice-cream turd, globular yellow nodules. Skrachet himself is all bulging eyes and no mouth, a big-footed and gawky kid loping through nature. The bubbles are a brutal imposition on the landscape around them, but they imply that this is always the case — indeed, you only get the landscape that you make up. The bubbles are a visual echo of the greenish rocks protruding from the scum on the lake, but also of the umbrellas of picnickers across the lake, the Camembert and Chardonnays littering their blankets as exotic and alien as the weird bubble-covered shapes of Payne’s work.
The most gentle of the sculptures is Johan van der Schijff’s Tools of the Trade. Labourers’ implements — a spade, a pitchfork, a rake — are mounted on red and white poles, and they mimic the growth and line of the flowerbeds in which they are unobtrusively placed. The work draws attention to the flowers, and at the same time startles the viewer into thinking about the weight of history necessary to fertilise those flowers. It is an installation that questions the social and ideological conditions in which it finds itself, but doesn’t take the easy way of merely condemning the contradictions necessary to bring manicured landscape to South Africa. It reclaims the land for the people who laboured to create it, while at the same time proclaiming the necessary naivety of a statement like that.