M.O.L 32 - DIVINATION Ashraf Jamal Column

M.O.L 31 DIVINATION

Ashraf Jamal

Following Jackson Hlungwani’s monumental retrospective at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town in 2019 – Alt and Omega – we now rediscover the artist’s work, in an elegantly economical scale, at Outskirts, an outlier exhibition and performance space north of Johannesburg, run by curator Nisha Merit and director of Gallery MOMO, Monna Mokoena. A low, thick-set, stone building, designed to withstand brutal cold and arid heat, Outskirts signals the relentless advance of South Africa’s art world. In this regard, it is not alone. A five-minute drive away, the Claire and Edoardo Villa Will Trust and NIROX have partnered to open the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture, under the curatorial direction of Sven Christian.

Is it a fortuitous concurrence that two new art centres should open in such close rural proximity? I think not. NIROX is an established focal point on the South African art map, with global traction, while Outskirts, Gallery MOMO’s newest speculative creative venture, signals the tentacular reach of a leading South African dealership that best straddles both the Modern and Contemporary. If auction houses capitalise on South Africa’s great Modern artists, Mokoena, more consistently than any other dealer, exhibits and narrates their life and work – most recently, at the Johannesburg Art Fair, that of Durant Sihlali. Black African Modernity substantially defines MOMO’s remit and support, along with the likes of Vivien Kohler, a young contemporary South African artist who now walks in the footsteps of the great Black African Modernists – a fact also celebrated by the Johannesburg Art Fair, which placed a monumental work by Kohler at its entry point.

Made with bonded corrugated cardboard, Kohler’s major relief work matters here because, like the works of Jackson Hlungwani, it is concerned with faith, with spirituality, always integral to Black Modernity. Doubtless, it is Hlungwani who towers above all others in his grasp of an African spirituality that intersects with Christianity. But lest we forget, the interconnection is complex; it is never orthodox but always profoundly personal, because, for Hlungwani, faith is a life-condition that overrides all systemic belief systems.

If Hlungwani matters profoundly today, and if Kohler can be seen to follow in his wake, it is because art is no longer a religion for atheists, no longer a palliative or antidote for the faithless. Rather, art stands at the forefront of an epistemic global shift away from cynicism, irony, parody, pop. More and more, the values and tastes which inform the art world are being shaped by yearnings for the unknowable and inexplicable, a desire to override rationalism, which misguidedly placed the Self at the epicenter of human value, and embrace a greater collective and subterranean consciousness. The return to spirituality is a striking indicator in this regard.

Speaking alongside Johan Thom and Carolyn Jean Martin, as part of a webinar “The Question of ‘Africanness’ and the Expanded Field of Sculpture” — the first to be hosted at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture — Olu Oguibe makes the striking claim that ‘The encounter between African and European art, especially at the end of the nineteenth and the turn of the twentieth centuries, stripped European art of its pretensions and often misinformed allusions to classical Greek and Roman art, especially in sculpture,’ adding that ‘while leading European artists directly modelled their new forms after objects and traditions from Africa, the most significant change was that those objects and traditions from Africa liberated European, and eventually all modern and contemporary artists globally.’ How so? By giving ‘them licence, as it were, to think of art, and form, and colour, and concept in entirely new ways, without inhibition or limitations on the imagination.’ Observing the liberator role of Africa’s varied art forms on the global stage, Oguibe notes:

Vivien Kohler, Of reason and requiem, 2022

Looking at objects and art traditions from Africa, and realising that a sculptor did not have to use stone like Michelangelo did… or create formulaic bronze figures, groups narrating or approximating romanticist neo-classical allegories along stiflingly narrow and often repetitive parameters, but instead, could break out and reimagine form, and discard singular perspective, and use or incorporate hitherto decidedly nonsculptural materials, going by European academic standards, and create assemblage or collage or animated situations once consigned to puppetry or the circus, and recombine these with dance, with theatre, [… bringing] it all under the rubric of art, with or without delineations. This realisation also encouraged artists to then go back to other traditions within their own cultures that they were otherwise want to ignore in favour of the Western academic tradition and rediscover and study and try to reclaim those other traditions and reinsert them, to an extent, in modern and contemporary practices. That I think is the ultimate element of “Africanness” in the expanded field of sculpture. And that freedom, that liberty, to stretch the definitions of sculpture and sculptural traditions beyond ideas of making or imaging that had existed for centuries in Europe and to create integrated, multivalent mediations that draw not just on form and space but multiple realms of existence and experience and impact on all the senses, and that element of limitless possibility… and the jest and subterfuge and implausible inventiveness, that is what most contemporary art still rides on.

In the case of Hlungwani, whose works are beautifully enshrined at Outskirts, it is the tethering of earth to sky, body to the soul, that is immediately sensed. Through a gaping portal on a sun-struck noon day, I find myself precisely placed between shadow and light, rolling pale yellow hills and an inner-sanctum in which wooden sculptures, defined by nature’s urgencies (and not the will of the artist) produce a choreography in which grace, much sought after today, proves the elan and spirit of the work. Standing at the portal between worlds, I am once again reminded of the words of Saint Anselm of Canterbury – Credo ut Intellegam (‘I believe so that I can understand’), because now, as we desperately search for atonement, we also realise that this is only possible when faith and understanding conjoin.

A collaborative sculptural work, produced as part of Carving X.

This, I believe, is why we find ourselves introduced to a vanguard in the art world that devotes itself to human transubstantiation – Outskirts and the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture are cases in point. As for Edoardo Villa and Lucas Legodi? Their collaboration spanned over forty years; beginning with a serendipitous encounter between two people that occurred at just the moment in the 70s when Villa had begun making larger, heavier works. If Legodi is the lesser known, that error has now been corrected. As for the medium? In this case it is primarily steel. This is crucial, because sculpture straddles many different materials. It is as organic as it is inorganic, as pure as it is syncretic, as singular as it is mixed. This is unsurprising, given this eclectic mixed bag of a time in which we live. Nevertheless, even within this seemingly mismatch of materials, an alchemy must exist – a story that best tells us of this Anthropocene moment, in which the earth is mistakenly and vainly made in “Man’s” image. It is this hubris which has resulted in our nihilistic drive to destroy the earth, this hubris that artists – most exemplarily Hlungwani – have striven to steer us away from. Its stark and mortifying inverse is the ‘Plastiglomerate’ – works in which the organic and inorganic are fused for all time, in the case of plastics fused with rock. Thus, when we look at art now, when we sense its radioactive toxicity or its grace, we do so to know our end or our beginning, our fall or rise, nadir or rapture. Our art is the measure of our demise or salvation. The signs are everywhere. Despite its nihilistic eradication by cynical systems, choice remains ours. It is up to us whether we choose to play Russian Roulette. Better options, better decisions lie in wait.

A collaborative sculptural work, produced as part of Carving X — a four-week workshop with artists Collen Maswanganyi, Amorous Maswanganyi, Richard Chauke, and Ben Tuge at NIROX — is a case in point and manifests this rise; this emergent drive to hold fast to grace in the midst of despair. On a vast tree trunk, struck down by lightning — and previously used by Noria Mabasa, while in residency in May — the carvers chose to narrate the story of Jonah and the Whale. As the story goes, Jonah is assigned by God to prophecy the destruction of Nineveh, one of the great, now lost and destroyed, cities. On a ship he is blamed for a storm and tossed overboard, after which God saves him by housing him in the belly of a whale. No matter what one may think of parables or riddles, of God’s agency, or the capacity for redemption in the midst of destruction, that the story has

survived, that the four carvers at NIROX should choose to retell it through wood, once again sounds my primary point – that resurrection, irrespective of the method and means, is integral to our endurance. And if wood carving is all the more vital as a means to do so, it is because it is a material that is organically inductive – it releases the world, unveils its grace. Like Hlungwani’s, the works of both Maswanganyi’s, Chauke, and Tuge possess a haptic intelligence – tactile, intuitive, expressive – that coaxes truth and feeling through touch. It is the wood that speaks or tongues. The artists are its ventriloquists, its conjurers – mediums for divination, or some inscrutable vibration.

All the artists I’ve briefly reflected on – Hlungwani, Kohler, Villa, Legodi, the Mawanganyis, Chauke, and Tuge – have in differing ways drawn our attention to the power of truth in and through art. Whether through wood or steel, the organic or inorganic, the artists reflect upon life’s elemental dance. The expression in the case of Villa may be abstract and obtuse, but in the case of the Maswanganyis, Tuge, and Chauke, parabolic and illustrative, or, after Kohler, elegiac, or, then again, in the case of Hlungwani, more gnomic in its structures of feeling, what cannot be doubted is the urgency of their respective drives. My point? That an undivided divinity traverses all things, and all riven, confused, and fearful mortals. These artists remind us of what we have squandered and laid waste, and to what we must now return. That we must make our pilgrimage to new meccas for sculpture such as Momo’s Outskirts and the Villa-Legodi Centre at NIROX is to be expected. We are all on a novel journey, and it is reassuring to know that all of us, the art lovers, patrons, dealers, architects, builders, and makers of art, must come together. We cannot survive if we do not. This is, after all, the point of Carving X, to explore ‘the role of collaboration,’ and to grapple ‘with questions of authorship, individual and collective identity, and the role of community in the making process.’ Indeed. And for me, at least, there is something especially galvanising about sculpture in this quest on behalf of a lost and betrayed state of grace.