Newton explained inertia like this: ‘Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare.”
Loosely: every body persists in its state of being, at rest or moving uniformly straight forward, except where it is compelled to change its state by an external force. In the 16th century Galileo, Newton’s predecessor in many ways, hypothesised that, in the absence of (air) resistance, a hammer and a feather would fall at the same rate.
Christiaan Diedericks’s ‘mid-career book”, The Feather Room, is then, perhaps not surprisingly, a weightier matter than its title would suggest: a dark and tender tome of mixed media and emotions, spanning nearly 20 years of work by a man who is compelled by external forces. In the book’s introduction, Hayden Proud describes him as ‘an artist who is continually involved in evolving his own distinctive language around his South African gay identity” with an ‘internal dialectic [—] between a deep sense of longing for love, completion and acceptance and a deep critique of the needless internal pain and suffering that a denial of these inflicts on the other”.
Reading Diedericks’s works in one sitting can be uncomfortable — like making eye contact with a stranger in a lift, but there’s something compelling about its intimacy.
I Miss You Even When I Am with You is the title of one giclée print, men kissing without embracing, a landscape of the Twin Towers floating above; in another work, Diedericks comments on The Pleasures of Being a Boy with a portrait of a man peeing standing up, done in drypoint on urine-stained paper. The publication — the first print run of which is limited to just 99 books — was launched in Cape Town last week, at the same time as Diedericks’s new solo show titled Pretending to be Flesh. Each book includes an original artwork titled Feast of Fools.
Of course, the book itself is an
artwork. In her closing essay in the book Franci Cronjé writes about the deceptively fragile nature of feathers and how they ‘enable the wearer to gain height; leave the mundane and look at the world from a privileged angle”. Fletchers, of course, use feathers to make arrows.
Pretending to be Flesh and The Feather Room are on show until November 29 at Focus Contemporary, 67 Loop Street, Cape Town. www.focuscontemporary.co.za