HOME TRUTHS. DOMESTIC INTERIORS IN SOUTH AFRICAN COLLECTIONS. An exhibition curated by Michael Godby at the Iziko South African Gallery until October 23. LUCINDA JOLLY reviews.
THE exhibition begins with a “readymade” - a photograph of an ornate Victorian type welcome mat, and ends with a painting of a bombed out dwelling from WWII by journalist and painter Enslin du Plessis. Du Plessis’s Bombed out Interior is situated in the company of two black and white photographic images which show a more insidious type of war, civil war.
One is of a shelled apartment block in Kuito, Angola, where people are still living, by Guy Tillim and the other by Sue Williamson of a District Six house reduced to rubble in the forced removals.
The exhibition covers four themes and although it is curated to read in a particular order it does not have to be followed. It begins with Interior World and ends with Inside Out and includes Behind Closed Doors and The World Outside. The art works are from different periods – the 17th century to contemporary and by very different artists who explore home as a refuge and as a prison (or place of trauma) and many interpretations that lie between these two polarities. They range from the photograph of a beautifully conceived traditional Interior of a Beehive Dwelling: the Home of MiIdred Nene, KwaCeza, KwaZulu by David Goldblatt, a burrow in the ground in Jon Riordan’s photograph’s to Gwelo Goodman’s painting of the interior of Groot Constantia. The works have been grouped that they trigger each other, drawing on both their sometimes surprising similarities and unexpected differences.
There’s the almost obscene opulence of Penny Siopis’s drawing Salon, possibly commenting on the gross imbalance of SA society in the late 70’s and 80’s, next to Santu Mofokeng’s poignant photograph The Mkansi Kitchen which appears chaotic, but when you understand its context, that of a child-headed household, it takes on its own particular order, reading as a homage to the impossible.
The title Home Truths is a play on the saying home truth, but is not limited to its meaning of “an unpleasant fact about oneself, especially as pointed out by another person”.
On the first two rungs of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is human need for physiological security, which needs to be satisfied before self-realisation can be considered. This is an impossible realisation for many locals given that half the population live below the poverty line and millions lack access to adequate housing.
Although Godby’s choice of art works undeniably reflects political and social aspects of both traditionalism, colonialism, apartheid and current conditions in SA, for Godby it’s really a reflection of class, particularly “working and middle class”. He acknowledges the role race plays, but for him it’s really about class systems.
Godby’s choice for the exhibition rested on two challenges, and developed organically. Having already curated exhibitions around still life and landscape, he was looking for the challenge of a different theme. Secondly, he came to the realization that although the interior has “been painted very, very often interior has never been a recognized subject”. He recognized that it was always part of something else.
The success of an exhibition of this kind depends largely on context. And the first thing that Godby did was provide Home Truths a local context. It has a friendly beginning and then it hits hard with gritty realities of home.
The wall texts point out that while our constitution doesn’t specify the right to a home, indirectly it suggests that all citizens should have one. The images of lack of shelter or makeshift shelter as in David Southwood’s photo of shacks from Victoria Mxenge TT and Jon Riordan’s District Six burrows is a recognition that despite our constitution the “huge majority of the inhabitants in Cape Town are living in shacks” or makeshift shelter.
These images are in powerful contrast to Lisa Brice’s installation Make your Home your Castle. Made of security mesh associated with burglar bars it operates as a comment on suburban paranoia for safety which peaked during the early years of democracy. And yet as the wall text’s points out “all these conceptions of home demonstrate the same basic need for shelter, comfort and some form of individuation”.
Godby writes that the domestic interior appears frequently in Western art even if this isn’t recognised by academia. In Home Truths he pays his respects to various art movements from expressionism to pop art. There is the Bauhaus in Justine Brett’s apartment and De Stijl in Richard Hamilton’s Interior with monochrome.
In Tommy Motswai’s colorful Happy Mother’s Day Mom an oppressed mother at work in her organized kitchen finds herself in the company of the tonal 17th century Dutch painting Interior; Looking out on Water by Peter de Hooch, which references our colonial past.
There’s the home as refuge and then the home as the seat of domestic violence. The place where you should be most protected becomes a place where you are most at risk. These peak with the vivid chilling scenes of domestic violence in Trevor Makhoba’s The Writing’s on the Wall, where children bear witness to the bloody criss cross bites of a sjambok on their mother’s body by their father and Motseoka Thibeletsa‘s Child Abuse, where a suburban woman returns to discover every mothers nightmare.
A quieter no less profound violence associated with the HIV/Aids pandemic is found in Zwelethu Mthethwa’s photograph, Empty Bed.
Throughout the exhibition there is a good balance of the tragic with the life affirming. Godby pointed out three art works; Sam Nhlengethwa’s collage Room in a Shack, Tyrone Appolis’s painting Gone to the Neighbours and Ronnie Levitan’s photograph Khayelitsha Interior, where in spite of an absence of books and paintings found in more affluent neighbourhoods, colour has been used as “an expression of the self” and more importantly “colour as a sense of resistance to subjugation” particularly when seen in relation to apartheid and poverty.
Colour peaks with Deborah Poynton’s jewel like painting Interior with a Red Tub which lights up the whole of the Inside Out section. And Zander Blom supplies wry humour in his The Black Hole Universe Chapter 2, Scene 041 a photograph taken of the corner of a room with its allusion to the female pubis.
Look out for the work of emerging young artists such as Michaelis School of Fine art masters student Thuli Gamedze’s atmospheric black and white photograph Untitled (Doorway) from the series Odds and Endings. It was developed from a role of film after the end of a relationship which in hindsight seemed to foretell the relationships demise. There is also the three oils on paper works by Ian Grose’s Colour Separation which won him the Absa L’Atelier award in 2011.
Home Truths is as Godby writes, not about “the history of interior decoration … nor social history”. Rather it’s an invitation to look at paintings “guided” by the theme of home. And in the end we are left with a feeling best expressed by scholar Mario Paz about the resilience of humankind expressed through our relationship with the dwelling. “The house will rise again, and men will furnish houses as long as there is breath in them”.
A neat catalogue accompanies the exhibition. This layered, diverse and intelligently curated exhibition is a must see.
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