In his inaugural address on the 10th of with ‘no hesitation’, that every citizen ‘is as intimately attached to the soil of this beloved country as are the famous jacaranda of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld. Each time one of us touches the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal… We are moved by a sense of joy and exhilaration when the grass turns green and the flowers bloom’. The natural motif central to Mandela’s speech was by no means accidental, for what the great leader sought to foreground was the inextricability of nature and humankind, place and citizenry, and the seamless interface of the so-called ‘alien’ jacaranda and indigenous mimosa. ‘That spiritual and physical oneness we all share with this common homeland explains the depth of the pain we all carried in our hearts as we saw our country tear itself apart in a terrible conflict and as we saw it spurned, outlawed and isolated by the peoples of the world, precisely because it has become the universal base of the pernicious ideology and practice of racism and racial oppression’.
Fast forward thirty years and, today, we find ourselves still striving to overcome a pernicious ideology that informs the instability and turbulence of the current moment. But it cannot be ignored that, finally, we are revisiting Mandela’s great ethos in a bid to build a government of national unity, a reconciled and wholly inclusive citizenry, a new era as wondrous as greening grass and blooming flowers, as joined as the jacaranda and mimosa. It is in this greater unifying spirit that Karen Cullinan, curator and director of Artyli Gallery in Sandton, Johannesburg, presented a group show, titled Soil, in which the earth we all occupy, through which we are natally and historically shaped, proved the decisive connective tissue. For as Mandela optimistically reminded us, when we touch ‘the soil of this land, we feel a sense of personal renewal’.
While this generative power is certainly the core spirit of the group show, we cannot ignore the toll of history and burden of pain which informed the art of Frans Thoka in particular, because for him the rind of earth on which we stand also conceals a deeper loss and hardship – the historical fact that in 1913, under the Natives Land Act, 90% of the land was handed to a white minority, and the black majority left landless, displaced, without the ability to truly root themselves. The traumatic consequence of this loss remains trenchant, and, in a conversation with the artist, it could not be suppressed. For if the land is a key motif in his paintings of cacti, irrigated earth, gravesites, scarified patterns that conjure wormholes and terrestrial rupture, what cannot be ignored is the surface on which Thoka’s unsettling pastoral scenes are cut and threaded – namely, Basotho or ‘prison’ blankets in grey with white stripes. An archetypal and generic material, a cipher for warmth and rest, but also for displacement and migrancy, the blanket is a Janus-faced emblem-medium-tool. While the affect of Thoka’s paintings is easeful, the grey palette quietly consoling, the artist nevertheless remains insistent regarding the continued unrest which an artwork, formed from a definitional trope of bondage, conceals or suppresses. If Thoka’s vision is burdened by pain, if, for him, a graveyard is a sacred place to which one returns, through which one protects oneself, for Asanda Kupa, say, it is not a place as despairing. His thickly painted pastoral scenes, in which black community is the central seam, express a ‘subterranean solidarity’, some hidden connectivity that overcomes any internecine conflict or rupture. His community is bonded to the land and inseparably allied with the heavens. If Thoka remains snagged within history, Kupa’s vision is metaphysical. If, after John Fowles, ‘It is far less nature itself that is yet in danger than our attitude to it’, then, for Kupa, what should be changed is our ‘attitude’ – how we relate to the earth, to community, to nationhood, how we construct and reimagine a sense of place. This is certainly seminal to Mandela’s inaugural speech, in which hate must be overcome, despair endured, hope, above all, cherished. This temperament is markedly present in Fumani Maluleke’s paintings made on grass mats. Another staple and symbol for rest, it conjures Maluleke’s record of his birth, precisely on one of these mats, and, more metaphorically, its generative relationship to the earth. After all, grass mats come from the earth, they are woven, collectively made and used, long before their imaginative retooling as supports for painting. However, if the miner’s or prisoner’s blanket carries an ominous history, the grass mat is wholly affirming – as beautiful as Mandela’s vision of greening grass. As for the content of Maluleke’s paintings? They too are largely records of pastoral or bucolic scenes, with benign visions of townships thrown into the mix. This is because Maluleke resists sorrow, because his vision is bonded to a fecund and nurturing earth. As for the overcast skies in his paintings? They are only portentous in so far as they auger rainfall. That Maluleke chooses to tear apart the matting, allowing the dried grass to break away from the two-dimensionality of its planar surface, suggests an artist for whom materiality is as vital as the representational. This formal self-awareness is as evident in Kupa’s raw and rough painterly surfaces as it is evident in Thoka’s indented and stitched blankets. In each artist’s work the surface is distended. In each there is a keen grasp that art is never neutral, always uniquely made.
That Africans, in particular, have demonstrated a stratospheric reimaging and retooling of global post-industrial waste – computer innards, say, global surplus of all kinds more generally – proves an acute reminder that no continent is better equipped to survive human excess. In the case of the paintings of Frans Thoka, Asanda Kupa, and Fumani Maluleke, we find a potent grasp of community, survival, and transfiguration. Yet another artist shown at Artyli, and present in the shared conversation, was Henrico Greyling. A sculptor rather than a painter – though he practices in numerous styles and forms – Greyling too is acutely aware of the criticality of the earth as our beginning and end. However, if Maluleke has titled a show ‘No time like the future’, Greyling has titled his seminal installation ‘Archway to yesterday’. Maluleke’s vision is anticipatory, while Greyling’s is nostalgic. This is because he understands the vitality of the past as a site for renewal. His deconstructed steel archway – imaginatively conceived as a way- finder, a portal through which to return to his grandmother – is a reminder, after the great poet, TS Eliot, that ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past’. In other words, time does no operate causally, it possesses no beginning-middle-end, but is caught always in some ‘eternal present’. If Eliot’s view is timely, it is because it reminds us that all of life, whether good or bad, returns, that evolution is elusive and illusionary. After all, ‘What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present’. Perhaps this is the lesson we must learn. That Mandela’s inaugural speech delivered thirty years ago remains ever- present. That the momentous historical moment in which we now find ourselves – the creation of a government of national unity on June 14 / the fight for liberation on June 16 – are the signals of promise in the now, in this moment, in which we also find ourselves reflecting on the art of four artists. What they express are different stories and feelings. When seen together, they offer us a greater vision of our lives – the struggles we continue to endure, the triumphs in our midst, as well as those that await us in this great land, on this good earth – in a future that is also eternally present.
