Two works form the crux of the exhibition of Joachim Schönfeldt. The first, a sculpture in wood where a set of body parts — chalked out, chain-sawed, planed, whittled, sanded and held together with tension cables and keyhole joints — forms an imposingly magnificent, stately life-size rendering of a three-headed lioness. The second — a series of extended ideas presented almost as technical plans — is more ephemeral and ramifies throughout the show. Mapping the artist’s process of thought, these plans collectively outline the context within which the works were made.
Schönfeldt’s central premise seems to be that ideas manifest as objects which, in turn, lead to further ideas leading to new material commodities. A domino effect of connections, it is this concept of generously infinite stimulation that has led to collaborations between the artist and writers like Andries Oliphant and Ivan Vladislavic. So while the objects — the plans and drawings, prints and casts, maquettes and multiples — make specific points, it is the mapped network of intangible in-between perspectives that articulates its nervous system. Neither of these come cheap.
The lioness, in partnership with a peafowl hen, an eagle and a cow — retails unashamedly at R1,5-million. For the quartet of three-headed animals this is a hefty price tag, a charge that puts in place what the media release describes as the ”ceremonial combat between the artist and society”. Collectively, the work is titled Roar, and seems to imply not only the regal growl of the queen of the cats, but the simultaneous scream of 12 voices in absurd cacophony. Schönfeldt proposes to later take this one step further and, with reference to Italian sculptor Maurizio Catalan, outlines plans to execute these animals in all their taxidermied glory. His intention is to have the quartet balance atop each other, the hen at the base and cow precariously mooing from the apex of this unstable pyramid of four. The concept is formed around the tale of the musicians of Bremen, and the music Schönfeldt is commissioning to accompany this next step will be performed as long blasts of brass band air.
Sculpture dominates, with completed works and models, scaled plans and drawings, prints and vacu-formed plastic — all on show — sketching the procession from idea to full-scale realisation. The collection presents a clear, almost linear visualisation of Schönfeldt’s creative process. Animal parts and how they fit together give way to modular, block-like postmodern toy animals which, in turn, manifest as the exploded views in his digital prints. It is in these latter works where the viewer gets a clear understanding of the mechanical, methodical, anatomically analytical, constructive anarchism of the artist: how to blow things apart; how to reconstruct them into new forms; how to make things surrender their established denotations in favour of new assignations and multiple meanings.
By free or intended association, with this show the artist creates a series of new symbols in his method of unsanctioned iconography. This intention is clear in the light of Schönfeldt’s academic and curatorial experiences with African art. Dense with social nuance, it is this branch of art history that, in its real-time application in contemporary African practice, seems to occupy the artist’s mind. It is a field where the material intersects with the ephemeral, and where meanings are intertwined with their symbols. It is a discipline where the oral and aural cross-stitch the physical; where stories knit time into objects, and where symbols become garments of visualised rites. With this collection Schönfeldt seems determined to return the discarded context to the material object, or to provide a new context to replace the interment of the forgotten. This, for me, is the key strength of ”The life and times of Roar”.
The artist provides the exhilarating possibility that it is not the material itself that is the end point, but merely a step to a further thought. This process is, traditionally, the pathway to spiritual belief. In direct counter to the ironic religious fervour that accompanies Western contemporary culture — a place and time where the object is the new god, consumers the worshiping congregation and economy religion — it is almost an epiphany to believe that it is the spirit that lives on infinitely through the power of thought. And because of the inevitable decomposition of the object, it is the idea itself that will, eventually, have the last word. Amen.
Joachim Schönfeldt’s exhibition runs at Art on Paper 44 Stanley Street, Milpark, Johannesburg until June 3