Chimera and a little chisel

MADE FOR THE SCREEN

MINNETTE VÁRI

When thinking about writing for this catalogue, I found it almost impossible to penetrate into that capsule that was the University of Pretoria (UP) in the mid-eighties. I needed an instrument, a tool. A little wedge. Perhaps a little chisel. I will be summoning N.P. van Wyk Louw’s Beiteltjie (page 131), and if I may be so bold as to conflate the tool of making with the creation itself (because I insist that art must be useful), I am going to speak about one of my works: Chimera (2001).

But first: Casting my mind back in time to the place that was the University of Pretoria when I first entered it in 1986 has been unexpectedly daunting. Almost 36 years on, it is inconceivable that such a place was even possible: unimaginable that that seventeen year-old moved through, as a sleepwalker might, routinely and fairly unruffled by the grotesque fact that only white people like herself were eligible for that privilege, having arrived on the conveyor belt of a whites-only school system. See what I did there: it’s “her”, not “me”. I have had to stand at least one good pace back, build in a remove. Because it frightens me to confront the fact that I was so deeply unaware. Nobody entering our universities today will be able to imagine such a snow-white snow- blind circumstance.

I spent all my student years travelling past the Voortrekker Monument on my way to UP and back. The unique structure, on its little green koppie, is visible for miles around (Figure 1). It would be a decade before I would figure out how to begin to chisel away at the conundrum of that history carved in stone, a history inextricably linked to the university I was attending. Figure 1: The Voortrekker Monument. Courtesy of Trip.com

Where was my mind? I have often thought back to my family situation and wondered where, too, were the minds of my parents. My father was almost aggressively anti-political. Rudolph Minne Vári came to South Africa in 1948 at the age of eight, the eldest child of a Dutch-Hungarian family, and was – in my opinion – ill-advisedly enrolled in an Afrikaans school. An awkward boy, he was ruthlessly bullied and grew a loathing of almost everything that symbolised Afrikaner culture. Imagine his horror when, in high school, I expressed the desire to join the Voortrekkers (the Afrikaans version of the Scouts). For a year or so I joined all my friends learning how to tie various useful knots, how to determine due south from the stars of the Southern Cross. We sang the song of the Vierkleur flag. On auspicious dates, we were brought to the Voortrekker Monument to stand guard at the four corners of the Cenotaph upon which is inscribed “Ons Vir Jou Suid Afrika” (Figures 2 and 3). Five of us would rotate. The fifth girl had to guard the Eternal Flame, not visible from the mezzanine in the Hall of Heroes: an ideal opportunity to get up to mischief and disturb the solemn faces the others were expected to maintain.

Figure 2 (left): Inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument, 1949. Courtesy of Morné van Rooyen, Wikipedia. Figure 3 (centre and right): The Cenotaph, located at the centre of the Voortrekker Monument. Courtesy of Käyttäjä:Joonasl, Wikipedia, and flowcomm.

Fun, yes, but more and more the quasi-military overtones began to scratch and itch a little. I did not understand the discomfort, really, didn’t analyse it. I was simply never one to gladly follow rules.

Now, for a change of pace. Two years ago, an exhibition in Brussels1 of the Sindika Dokolo collection of contemporary African art, to which I was invited to contribute, called for participating artists to engage with a film titled Statues Also Die (Les Statues Meurent Aussi), a 1953 French essay film directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais about historical African art and the effects colonialism

has had on how it is perceived.

In an essay titled African Art as Philosophy – Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude, Souleymane Bachir Diagne has this to say about the relation between the museum and the colonial undertaking: Ethnographic museums are a negation of art because they prevent the objects on display from really looking at us. Because ethnography is constituted, at its colonial origins, as a science of what is radically other, it is in its nature to fabricate strangeness, otherness, separateness. An object in an ethnographic museum is kept at a distance, prevented from touching us because it is petrified […] Art is the evidence of African philosophy and, conversely, we do not attain full comprehension of African art without understanding the metaphysics from which it proceeds. This metaphysics, to present it in a word, is a metaphysics of rhythm which, according to Senghor, is at the core of African thought and experience (Diagne 2012 [O]).

This is the point taken up by Statues Also Die (1953). As Marker and Resnais explains in their film treatment:

When men are dead, they enter into History. When statues are dead, they enter into Art. This botany of death is what we call culture. […] An object dies when the living glance trained upon it has disappeared [images of heads without busts looking away]. And when we disappear, our objects will be confined to the place where we send those of the blacks, to the museum (voice-over). [Images of heads without bust looking straight to the spectator.] […] And then they die, in their turn. Classified, labelled, conserved in the ice of showcases and collections, they enter into the history of art (Marker & Resnais 1953).

One of my responses to these questions, and to the deeper, unspoken questions about whiteness and my place in the whites- only institutions I’ve mentioned, was a four-channel video installation entitled Chimera (2001). Here, too, is rhythm. Along with the rhythmically sensitive compositions of the Voortrekker Monument’s frieze carvings, the handheld camera also captured my ambling motion around the Hall of Heroes. An inherent quality of instability is brought about. The Chimera is a monster in the true sense, pieced together from mismatched parts. Seductive, treacherous, lethal. What appears as a fairly linear narrative, upon deeper inspection is revealed to be made up piecemeal in its re- membering; put together according to a set agenda that would culminate in a 1949 inauguration of the Monument, also around this time that apartheid policies began to take shape in earnest. Let me be clear that most historical narratives have aspects of this editorial dissonance. But here there are overtures toward a

volk caught up in a single-minded utopian odyssey. Yet, it is full of slippage and lapses in memory. Not a homogenous group – the Trekkers. It included people of colour who were mostly indentured slaves – very much part of the story. Yet, such realities do not surface in the marble panels. Yvette Greslé, in a thesis on the work, writes:

Vári’s Chimera (2001)…enters into a dialogue with the imaginary of The Great Trek, from the Cape Colony in the nineteenth century, commemorated by the Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria, and the frieze located in its Hall of Heroes. [She], as a white artist, engages [with] histories of racial violence in South Africa, without reinscribing, through visual forms, processes of objectification and erasure. Vári’s account of her lived proximity to the Voortrekker Monument offered valuable insights into the nuances of her relationship, as woman, and as artist, to this site of apartheid memory. Chimera counters the heteronormative female Other constituted by the ideologies and discourses of the apartheid state and lodged in the architecture and sculpture of the Voortrekker Monument. The chimerical figures which appear and disappear throughout [the work] are an irreverent, parodic and disruptive presence working to subvert the Voortrekker Monument’s discursive and ideological fixing of knowledge about the world (Greslé 2015).

Frozen in time and in stone, and visited these days mainly by foreign tourists, have they all become more of a curiosity? I wonder how ‘alive’ these sculptures are, in terms of what they were truly meant to represent to the cult and culture. Raising their rifles and raining down their spears: have they also all died in what would be a contemporary reading? Can they still be clung to and gazed upon, or have these imaginings become as dust, signifying less than the sum of their parts?

In one scene, in the frieze of the Voortrekker Monument the work of Laurika Postma (the only female in the group of sculptors responsible for the frieze), depicts the “moedelose manne”

Figure 4 (top): Laurika Postma, Women spur men on, 1949. Marble. Courtesy of VTM; photo Russell Scott.

Figure 5 (bottom): Minnette Vári, Chimera (White Edition), 2001. Four-Channel Video Installation with Audio. Dimensions Variable. Still from Video. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 6 (above and facing page top row): Minnette Vári, Chimera (White Edition), 2001. Four-Channel Video Installation with Audio. Dimensions Variable. Installation view. Courtesy of the Luzerne Museum of Art.

(disheartened men) that Postma had chiselled in plaster, later to be replicated in Italian Querceta marble (Figure 4). I can see her working: I’m peering over her shoulder at the historic moment as she imagines it. A woman in the scene gestures with an outstretched arm, “Forwards!”. And then my Chimera appears, floating above the figures while lifting her robe to bare her sex (Figure 5). Again, it’s “her”, not “me”. Sometimes a little distance is required to survey the fissures. How do you cleave to “Volk”, when a cleft is the power that you have? When the grooves of separation run deep? History made fluid: the Chimera here creates a small tear in the fabric, a pause to take in the perversity of a manufactured heroism. Things that cleave together must always already know how to fall apart.

Figure 7: Minnette Vári, Chimera (White Edition), 2001.Four-Channel Video. Installation with Audio. Dimensions Variable. Stills from Video. Courtesy of the artist.

The idea of the chimerical statue, shifting its shape and identity, was one way in which I could embody my relationship to my own work (Figures 6 and 7) as it was formed through and beyond institutions that wanted to fix it in a particular way, through the lens of whiteness. But it was also a way of commenting on the conditions of those institutions themselves, and how their monumentalising and colonial apartheid identity had to be denied and shifted. Small gestures, sometimes one word or chisel-blow at a time, is how we begin to reimagine ourselves, our universe. The dust doesn’t settle and the work is never done. One small split in time.

ENDNOTES

1 incarNATIONS: The Sindika Dokolo Collection, 2019, curated by Kendell Geers at BOZAR, Brussels. 2 Available: https://groups.google.com/g/soc.culture.south- africa.afrikaans/c/itLXji-pRr4

REFERENCES

Diagne, S.B. 2012. African Art as Philosophy – Senghor, Bergson and the Idea of Negritude. Art Africa, issue 07. [O]. Available: https://artafricamagazine.org/african-art-as- philosophy-2/ Accessed December 2021.

Gresle, Y.M. 2015. Precarious video: historical events, trauma and memory in South African video art (Jo Ractliffe, Penny Siopis, Berni Searle, Minnette Vári). Doctoral thesis, University College London. Marker, C., Resnais, A. 1953. Statues Also Die (Les Statues Meurent Aussi) film. [O]. France: Présence Africaine and Tadié Cinéma. Available: https://shadesofnoir.org.uk/les-statues-meurentaussi-statues-also-die%EF%BB%BF/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Minnette Vári (b. Pretoria 1968) completed a Master’s degree in Fine Art at the University of Pretoria in 1997. Known for her video installations, her early work bore witness to the fall of apartheid, and her research focuses on obscure or neglected histories, identities and mythologies.

Group exhibitions include the Second Johannesburg Biennale (1997) and the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2007). Notable monographic exhibitions are Minnette Vári, Art Museum Lucerne (2004) and Of Darkness and of Light, Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg (2016). Often the focus of academic writing, other publications featuring her work include Sue Williamson’s South African Art Now and 10 years 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa, Sophie Perryer (Ed).

Vári lives in Johannesburg and lectures in visual arts at the University of Johannesburg.

DIE BEITELTJIE2 N.P. van Wyk Louw

Ek kry ‘n klein klein beiteltjie, ek tik hom en hy klink; toe slyp ek en ek slyp hom totdat hy klink en blink.

Ek sit ‘n klippie op ‘n rots: – mens moet jou vergewis: ‘n beitel moet kan klip breek as hy ‘n beitel is –

ek slaat hom met my beiteltjie en dié was sterk genoeg: daar spring die klippie stukkend so skoon soos langs ‘n voeg:

toe, onder my tien vingers bars die grys rots middeldeur en langs my voete voel ek die sagte aarde skeur,

die donker naat loop deur my land en kloof hom wortel toe –só moet ‘n beitel slaan wat beitel is, of hoé?

Dan, met twee goue afgronde val die planeet aan twee en oor die kranse, kokend, verdwyn die vlak groen see

en op die dag sien ek die nag daar anderkant gaan oop met ‘n bars wat van my beitel af dwarsdeur die sterre loop.

THE LITTLE CHISEL

N.P. van Wyk Louw

Here in my hands a small cold-chisel, I tap it and it rings; and I hone it and I stone it until its bright edge sings.

I prop a pebble on a rock; – you’ve got to get this clear: a chisel that’s a real cold-chisel can crack a boulder sheer –

I slam it with my chisel edge, its toughness is a gift: straight the pebble flies apart as clean as on a rift:

next, under my ten fingers split, the granite rock divides, below my feet I start to feel the softened earth subside,

and dark the seam runs through my land and cleaves it to the core –so a chisel cuts that truly is a chisel, or what’s it for?

Then with two gold-red chasms the planet falls in two and down the rockfalls boiling, drains the ocean flat and blue

and in the day I see the night below me open far with a crack that from my chisel blow runs to the furthest star.

Translation by Uys Krige and Jack Cope