DANNY SHORKEND reviews
The artists included are well known: Colbert Mashile, Enzo Shabangu and now Stephen Hobbs, Deborah Bell and Diane Victor. Specialising in prints, drawings and books, this fine taste also includes William Kentridge.
While I am usually most satisfied with paint, colour and gesture, these narratives in well-
considered line and what I would term as “symbolic narrative”, certainly strike a chord and leave an impression.
Mashile’s works are the first to attract attention: enigmatic, raw and yet seeming social commentary. Operating on perceptively many levels, one might attach terms such as religious fervour; militant compliance; the city bustle; and the dangerous unity at times of war.
The exhibition theme is to register movement first within the artist’s personal experience (and Shabangu is also dealing with a a particular personal story is this respect), then within a South African context and yet still as a microcosm of the massive movements of people the world over in the 21st century.
Mashile’s alternating between odd figures, helmets or masks and repetitive designs offers the viewer a glimpse into a dynamic shift in the way things are, as opposed to how they could be. Does our imagination eventually materialise with enough effort or will?
Can one generate an outcome through generating certain thoughts and emotions, in the same way that, by analogy, in the quantum world the observer influences - even creates - the observed or reality? Consciousness is complicit in reality - the difference between the animate and the inanimate may not be as great as we might believe.
So Mashile’s images evolved through process, experiment, chance and intention.
Tucked away neatly in one of the rooms are a series of smallish works called the Seven Social Sins by Diane Victor, and each picture is a clever representational symbol of this theme.
There is something intimate about drawing. Painting is embellishment. Sculpture is even heavier in most respects. Even new media may have begun with a simple sketch. So, drawing is the architecture of architecture, a stripping away to the root, the skeleton, the core.
It is curious in the first place why humans would draw. And why it predates writing by some thousands of years.
Many scholars have suggested that the first impulse to draw was inspired by a sense of magical belief that in representing something, they experienced they may have some control over that reality or see within something of
the spirit.
As to writing, the naming and categorising of “things” does not precede the visual contact.
Writing is an afterthought or it may bring concepts to frame experience, taming it into communicable bits to say something to another without the physical limitations inherent in speech.
On the other hand, drawing is also only a fragment, a divided world, and often instead of some magical control over the external world, merely results in a venerating of that thing or even more curiously, of the em bodied representation of that thing.
Thence it may be canonised as part of art history and filter into theoretical speculation around art and related disciplines.
Drawing, then is the fundamental art form and one may go further and say writing, which also has a visual correlation, is then a kind of drawing.
In this light, one may view the multiple images of Kentridge’s images on texts series, or so I dub it. The text becomes texture; the image a symbol for the word of that thing so represented.
When I was at the gallery, the lights were off at the time and that attuned my eye to line without recourse to much colour.
Yet the black outline, sometimes with light colouring of the surface and certain technical innovations of the artist on show, is hypnotically powerful.
What the line then becomes is uncertain globally, though one can possibly act locally and so slowly draw into the future.