M.O.L 29 - GOOD NEIGHBOURS A MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS

Ashraf Jamal

‘This world is but a canvas to our imagination,’ remarked the great solitary, Henry David Thoreau. We forget the infinite pleasure that ‘this world’ affords us when we assign value to art in a restrictive compass – a white cube, say, or a fetish object in a bespoke private home. In their conclusion to Art as Therapy, John Armstrong and Alain de Botton declare that ‘The true purpose of art is to create a world where art is less necessary, and less exceptional; a world where the values currently found, celebrated in concentrated doses in the cloistered halls of museums are scattered more promiscuously across the earth.’

It is this promiscuity, in which the world becomes a canvas, that allows for a greater imagination, insight, and understanding of the value of art. An art fair is a brokerage, a gallery a dealership, the home where art congregates a sedentary fetish. Art’s promiscuous scattering is an entirely different matter. What concerns Armstrong and De Botton is the need for a more democratic grasp of art’s value and purpose. Sceptical of the ‘patronage, ideology, money and education’ that underpins the economy and culture of art, they state with staggering simplicity that ’the main point of engaging with art is to help us lead better lives – to access better versions of ourselves.’ This view is one that Thoreau would enshrine – ‘It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ It is also central to the curatorial vision for Good Neighbours, which opened at NIROX Sculpture Park on 7 May and runs until 31 August.

Visiting NIROX, a rolling green amphitheatre for art, it is this more promiscuous, unbidden, surprising interaction – the kind one experiences in the world – that conjures a more wholesome exchange and understanding of what art is, and its place and function in our individual lives. Barring the Cool Room (a studio space usually occupied by artists-inresidence) and the Screening Room, there is no four-walled structure in which art is exhibited at NIROX. Rather, every sanctum opens outward, onto, and into the world. After Andre Malraux, one could declare NIROX ‘a museum without walls’ – though there is a three-walled sheltered structure, titled the ‘Covered Space,’ that is made of rammed earth and raw pine. My point, however, is that

Manuela Holzer, installation view of Shadow Series, 2014–2020. Steel armature and melted black plastic bags, dimensions variable. Photo: Mafedi Lenake. Courtesy of NIROX Sculpture Park.

NIROX upends the conventions in which art is seen. It places the natural world centre-stage; constructed as the defining framework in and through which to look at things, reappraise their nature, and our grasp thereof.

Tumelo Thuthuka’s Power Play (2017), a series of enlarged, defunct clothes’ pegs strewn across the floor of the Covered Space, or his shrunken cityscapes Egoli I and Egoli II (2009), are a case in point. Shown alongside works by Jackson Hlungwani, Collen Maswanganyi, Shepherd Ndudzo, and Penny Siopis, Thuthuka’s works exemplify the desire for order, on the one hand, and the impossibility thereof. His works form part of a series of evolving exhibitions, spread across the Covered Space and Screening Room, the first of which — co-curated with Obed Mokhuhlani — focuses on “Afropolitanism,” bringing to the fore the various debates that have circulated the term since its inception by Taiye Selasi in 2005.

What I imagine to be the most compelling work on show at NIROX between May and August 2022 is Manuela Holzer’s Shadow Series (2014–20), figures of women – the artist

– that are composed of a steel armature and black, melted plastic bags. The elements for their making are industrial and postindustrial, obscene and anthropocene, their composition achingly poignant, for what we are looking at is ourselves – a human being composed in variations of gestural sorrow or grief or some inscrutable pain that is all too familiar. Holzer’s astonishing sculptures – all the more astonishing given their location in a treed field, cast in dappled light – acutely reflect Armstrong and De Botton’s thesis, that ‘Art reminds us of the legitimate place of sorrow in a good life, so that we panic less about our difficulties and recognise them as parts of a noble existence.’

It is dodgy to sentimentalise place, yet we all do – we cling to the memory of a place, to the sensation it produced, and stay fast to that memory, as though our very lives depended on it. Such is the hold which NIROX, as a sculpture park and artists residency, has upon me. On this occasion, however, the visitation was prompted by a major curatorial project – Good Neighbours. The in-house curators are Yusuf Essop and Sven Christian, yet the exhibition itself is constructed to enable a variety of different perspectives, comprising a further six curators — Lyrene Kühn-Botma, Jade Nair, Genre Pretorius, Wilma Mutize, Tshegofatso Seoka, Tammi Mbambo — who represent tertiary art schools across the country, as well as curators from further afield, Obed Mokhuhlani, Guiyani Monteiro, and Ndeenda Shivute-Nakapunda (of the National Art Gallery of Namibia). The title alone affirms the egalitarian nature of the project, caught as it is in ‘that threshold between private and public life.’ More searchingly, given years of enforced isolation, and the symptomatic heightening of isolation, or now maniacal conviviality, the curators are concerned with the reclamation of ‘the common.’

The curatorial principle is an ideal one, refreshing given the opportunism or righteousness which informs exhibitions right now. But then, ‘if good fences make good neighbours’, as the saying goes, they also make for good police states. A faux advert for a private security company in the exhibition’s newspaper, produced by the artist-duo Carla Busuttil and Gary Charles, captures this sentiment well, as does Rowan Smith’s camo tent or Ângela Ferriera’s Cina Alberta (2011), a 3.5-metre-high aluminium tower, replete with megaphones, that projects the voice of Mozambican investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, assassinated in 2000 for exposing fraud within the country’s largest bank. Therefore, to understand egalitarianism now – as a radical democratic instinct – is also to recognise its foe, totalitarianism, and the isolationism it feeds upon. As with these other works, Holzer’s Shadow Series matters because it captures the anxiety of our current moment, caught as we are betwixt and between hope and damnation.

The scope of the curatorial project wholly grasps this dilemma. We are caught between ‘radical isolation,’ in which we no longer speak each to each, and ‘mass hysteria, where we see all people suddenly behave as though they were members of one family, each multiplying and prolonging the perspective of his neighbour.’ This is Group-Think, with all the terror and terrorism that accompanies it. To address matters of such gravity in a bucolic setting is perverse, but then, after Thoreau, we live in a world that is as stunted as it is beneficent. What matters is not what you look at, but what you see.

David Salle echoes this view in How to See – ‘what binds artists together is not style or generation but something deeper: the motivating psychic structures impacted by a specific time and place.’ This, precisely, is the point of Good Neighbours. What we require from an art show is a psychic glue, something that can connect us, overcome fences, reassign our received values, alter the deckchairs of a foundering ship. In a splendid curatorial document – a piece of history in the making – Sven Christian provides us with some bedtime reading, including Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, Etienne Balibar’s ‘Rights of Man and Rights of the Citizen’, Homi Bhabha’s ‘Our Neighbours, Ourselves: Contemporary Reflections on Survival’, Judith Butler’s ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, etc.

We are left under no illusion. While we may gambol about an idyllic setting, drink champers from a basket on a grassy knoll, we cannot

Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Untitled (Remaining), 2022

ignore Hannah Arendt’s alarum – ‘No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.’ Here Thoreau returns. After Julia Kristeva, we can no longer afford to be ‘Strangers to Ourselves’. After Naomi Klein, we must reclaim ‘the Commons’ – and our commonality. Mine Kleynhans’ interactive work, ‘Abacus for Emotional Transactions (from a suburban fantasy) (2022), embodies (and bodies forth) this yearning for enduring connection, no matter how fragile. Tshegofatso Seoka’s curatorial interpretation, “Realms of Existence” — which includes works by Paballo Majela, Cow Mash, and Caitlin Greenberg (all based at Tshwane University of Technology) — also examines the traversal of boundaries, be they spatial, racial, or cultural. Then again, Kamyar Bineshtarigh considers the actuality of ‘unlikely neighbours,’ the dissonance generated by asynchronous cohabitation. The overall ethos of the exhibition, however, hankers after a healthy conviviality, humanity, compassion, and, all importantly, empathy, which for Roman Krznaric amounts to a radical ethics.

Carla Busuttil and Gary Charles, advert included in the Good Neighbours newspaper for Mosquito Lightning (2014). To learn more about this project, visit: www.mosquitolightning.com. Image courtesy of the artists.

This venture, with its large curatorial body, defies the pedantry one typically encounters in academia, as well as the breast-beating noise of ideologues. Rather, and perhaps because of the in-house curators at NIROX, Yusuf Essop and Sven Christian, academic weightiness is replaced by a more wholesome and encompassing vision of the place of art in the greater world. As Genre Pretorius reminds us ‘Being a good neighbour is not a simple question with an easy answer, but rather, a well needed point of reflection… Being a good neighbour infiltrates and questions every aspect of our interactions’ and, as such, radically reorients one’s received and reserved understanding of care and compassion. And here I’m reminded of another recommendation by the curators, Robert Frost’s poem, ‘Mending Wall’, and its overwhelmingly incorporative opening lines:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.