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PRIMORDIAL BEASTLY Ashraf Jamal Photos Dirk Mostert
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n Pauline Gutter’s world there is no reason why one should separate Man from Beast, other than narcissism, or vainglory. It is Reason, misguidedly deployed, which codes blood, and makes monsters of men. It was G.W.F. Hegel who notoriously declared Africa, after the pyramids, the barbaric domain of madness and unreason, unfit for civilized men – a cynical pretext, no doubt, to legitimate white rule on a putatively ‘dark continent’. It took another German, with infinitely greater feeling, to remind us that such overweening hubris is bullshit. In his final hate mail, Contra Wagner, Nietzsche championed Bizet as the greater ‘African’ artist. What this great misunderstood philosopher enshrined was the vitality of the human, and its inextricable connection to the greater chain of being. In his astonishing monograph on the German philosopher, more psychodrama than critical commentary, Stefan Zweig explains Nietzsche’s deep distrust of ‘malodorous Judaism’, and Christianity, which ‘crushed and stifled sensuality … causing moral paralysis in what was once a genuine life force’. For Nietzsche, the problem is deeper still, it is Socratic, it is Greek. His loathing of Greek sculpture stems from its absence of vitality, its narcissistic looping back to the idealised body and face, and the supposedly perfected Reason which informed it.
For the South African sculptor, Bruce Arnott, the preferential treatment given to an entitled Western art history stems from ‘the dead hand of Classical formalism’ which failed to grasp a deeper primordial vitality. There is a reason for this failure – Western art, with its obsession with representation, chose to transform the world into a picture, the better, after James Hall, to ensure ‘control’ and observe events ‘from a fixed and privileged vantage point’. For the South African painter, Pauline Gutter, a similar revulsion kicks into gear. She does not
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Pauline Gutter.
paint static projections or contained dynamics. Her paintings veer away from the controlling hand that is its executor. Looking at her paintings I find no controlling fulcrum, no balancing act, but a charged and highly volatile energy field. The techniques applied may be classical – painting is a Western art form – but its execution, in the loosest Nietzschean sense, is ‘African’. For Nietzsche, who never travelled to Africa, but who was acutely aware of the starkly different realms of Northern and Southern Europe – the former suffocating, the latter liberating – ‘Africa’ was a metaphor for a Dionysian force, ‘free … vinous … light of foot … pagan’. As Zweig resumes, Nietzsche
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