M.O.L.1 - A BLESSING OF UNICORNS Ashraf Jamal’s Monthly Column

M.O.L .1

A BLESSING OF UNICORNS:

Looking at art while sick

By Ashraf Jamal

After a night at the Alexander Theatre on Strand Street in Cape Town, my flu-clogged brain bludgeoned by dialogue penned by a Brit and spat out with a lethal force, I slumped on a brocaded chair in the lounge and ordered two double-whiskeys and another for my companion, a former student of mine who’d spent the past year trying to wrench me out from under a rock. That booze-fuelled night segued into another, this time in my home in Observatory, with me in woolly pyjamas watching two friends beat the mental crap out of each other – their heated focal point the appalling fate of America. Watching Federer v. Nadal sprang to mind, my bruised brain lurching left to right as I polished off the Bells.

There’s a moral here, somewhere. While watching back-to-back drama was a good idea, mixing these with booze as I succumbed to a plague with scythe hand was not. So, when it came to boarding a plane to Johannesburg two days later, en route to an exhibition I was co-curating with Maria Fidel Regueros, it was not surprising that I felt terribly sorry for myself. Thankfully the two seats adjacent to mine were unoccupied, allowing me to crumple my carcass into a jagged question mark.

Self-inflicted or fated, sickness levels any fantasy we might have of being immune and indestructible. The embodied sense of ourselves as self-possessed sentient beings echoes an age-old Apollonian myth. Sickness blasts wide-open this classical vision, because as we groan in a fever-stricken and drenching sweat, it is the all-too-human Dionysian swamp that consumes us. The vagaries of our bodies – our sickness and health – is therefore also the sum of our understanding of art – Apollo v. Dionysus, Beauty v. the Sublime. Federer v. Nadal.

Byron berry, Float, 2019, Giclee on cotton rag, 84x119cm

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At the Sandton station – the Gautrain from O.R. Tambo prompting the delusion of racing through sleek Germany – I was picked up by another former student, Byron Berry, notorious for burying his rolls of film in his back-garden in his family home in Fairways, or dunking them in jars of pickles, or nuking them with acid before developing them. Was my own body – my ‘film’ as it were – going through a comparably ruinous rite of passage? Because there was no doubt, as I pathetically handed over my luggage to which I’d clung as though to a colostomy bag, that I was no longer what I’d imagined myself to be. Reason had foundered, and along with it any Apollonian notion of volumetric perfection, depth, and certainty. What gripped me far more was a Dionysian ooze – the awareness that nothing is whole, everything quivers, blurs, and opens itself to an infinity which cannot be tagged. It was this hapless awareness which allowed me to think about sculpture, and what it might mean today.

Juddering in the only plastic chair in a bunker at St Johns College, the venue for the show I’d titled ‘Bunka Kulcha’, I watched lithe bodies haul in Jake Singer’s ‘murmurations’, magisterial stainless steel sculptures that twisted and spun into oblivion. The stark contrast between Singer’s flights of fancy and my own state – me in a Puffer like parboiled offal in an off-grid cooker – was achingly apparent. A murmuration describes the swoop and arc of Starlings, the on-rush of a giddily exquisite pattern of movement. It speaks to the ineffable yearnings of a great artist whose reach, at that point, I was woefully unable to match.

Which is why, contritely, I turned my gaze to the works by Kobus la Grange. Made from the wooden off-cuts of signage for the food-chain, Spur, these works, however, were in no way compromised by the banality of their origin. Wood, after all, is wood, despite the abuses it may undergo. La Grange’s sculptures – ‘Remnant Girl’ and ‘Remnant Boy’ – chose to edify waste. If Singer’s works are baroque in their twisted yet rectilinear intensity, then La Grange’s figures of a boy and girl evoke a calm inwardness, conditions poised yet restful. Here, in the works of Singer and La Grange, was our Yin and Yang, the point and counterpoint which allowed us to believe in balance in an otherwise indifferent world.

Amber Grace Geldenhuis

Chris Soal

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Kobus le Grange, Remnant Boy, 2019, Jetulong wood, 120x90x80cm

Sven Christian, A Happier Shipwreck, 2019, Inflatable, steel, spraypaint,pool noodles, glitter, plastic balls, oil paint on canvas.

It was then, reflecting on these dualistic yet interdependent states, that I picked up the contented gurgle of two girls in the distance to my right. They were seated cross-legged on the floor assembling hexagonal shapes with spanners. The pieces were the laser cut stainless steel elements which served as the building blocks of Amber- Jade Geldenhuys’s assemblages.

An advocate for DIY, a culture from which South Africans generally shy away – and the reason why IKEA’s flat-pack ethos has never taken root – Geldenhuys, unlike Singer and La Grange, believes in sculpture as a communal activity, as something that can be made, then remade. She is a ‘fixer’, someone who galvanises and empowers – a quality I desperately needed, stranded as I was like a battery discharging in a void. Watching two young girls building worlds from relative scratch proved a greater tonic than watching a mauve Linctagon tablet fizz in a bottle of still water in my one trembling hand as I glugged copious draughts of Prospan cough syrup – having tossed aside the measuring cup – from the other.

At that point I concluded that Comte de Caylus, reflecting on sculpture in 1759, was wrong – sculpture was not ‘less visible’ than painting even though it was ‘harder to move’. As to whether it was ‘slower in its operations and less extensive in its compositions’? Whether it was truly more restrictive than painting? Whatever one’s view, I was certain of one thing – sculpture did not ‘cloud an artistic career’.

This conclusion was potently reinforced as I looked at two works by Chris Soal, the one balanced against a white flat, the other, evidently heavy, being achingly shifted into place. Both works were

inspired by birch, the staple for the production of tooth picks, which is Soal’s core resource and point of inspiration. The free-standing sculpture, titled ‘The embrace across time’, comprised two birch logs, each filed to a fine point the shape and length of a tooth pick, held in their ‘embrace’ by clasps of concrete. Solid yet delicate, this remarkable work affirmed the precariousness of life. Everything it seemed was tenuous and fragile, everything poised at the cusp of a yearning. The other work, entitled ‘Love in a loveless time’, suggested the contrary – the desire for a wholeness forever denied. For here we found matter that churned and writhed and seemed to split apart at every point of convergence. And yet, despite the churn which gave this work its energy, there remained the belief in ‘love’, in connectedness. Soal, it seemed, wanted nothing more than to bring together the opposing and conflicted sides of our being – our desire for a perfected stillness and union and the imperfect fact that we ceaselessly morph.

Chastened by this paradox, I finally turned to the sculpture which at that moment summarised my hapless state. Inspired by Gericault’s famous painting, ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, it was a reworking of a ready-made – an inflatable plastic unicorn used to stay afloat in pools. Sven Christian however had blackened this once-spangled toy. In the centre of the tube lay a gaudy painting of Teletubbies. About its circumference lay crumpled black plastic sheeting sprinkled with blue glitter. The effect was phosphorescent yet gloomy, a sensation amplified the more by the fact that, at that point, the work was partially deflated, the unicorn’s head – like my own – forlornly sunk. There was a pathos in this curious sculpture that reminded me of innumerable examples across time of sculptures infused with solemnity and despair.

When first exhibited in the early 1800’s, a cynic, appraising Gericault’s beautiful and tragic painting, enquired as to why the artist had not painted ‘a happier shipwreck’. Like most ironic barbs this one was monstrous. But then, in our own depraved and immoral time this cruel barb still possesses its sting, which is why Christian has given us his dark and eerie riposte. As I mused upon this work I was interrupted by the chief art teacher at St John’s College’s Preparatory School, Bridget Shelton, who, following the trajectory of my bowed head, sagely reminded me that the collective noun for unicorns is ‘a blessing’.

Jake Singer, Dawn Chorus, 2019, Marine grade stainless steel, 2800x2400x2000mm

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