In last week’s column, I expressed a less-than-sanguine view about the apes known as Homo sapiens. I’d visited Cruise at Krut 2020, in which Wilma Cruise’s maudlin chess-playing baboons and gnomic pigs become characters in a cautionary tale, warning the viewer not to think too highly of the human animal. Paradoxically, art and abstract thought, the foundations of any exceptionalist claims made on behalf of our species, are also the means by which we can criticise such claims.
Scepticism about humanity is healthy and necessary, but it can all too easily slip into a kind of jaundiced cynicism. For long stretches of this annus horribilis, many of us have found misanthropy to be our default setting. But before we start thinking about 2020 as “the year that was” (as if a magic wand will be waved on New Year’s Eve and all of our problems will disappear), there are opportunities to remind ourselves of what can be salvaged from the wreckage.
One of these is just up the road from David Krut Projects in Parkwood, where Cruise’s exhibition has just closed (the online version is still available): the oasis of the Blue House bookstore at 151 Jan Smuts Avenue, where the group exhibition Pictures Worth a Thousand Words incorporates works by artists who have collaborated with the gallery over the course of 2020.
The David Krut team who curated the exhibition describe it as evidence of the ways in which the artists have “made the best of the limitations” imposed on them by Covid-19. This is, in fact, one possible definition of art: what is the act of creation but the exercise of infinite imagination within finite boundaries — of genre, material, subject and context?
It is often precisely because of these constraints that new prospects, methods and insights emerge. Take, for instance, Maja Maljevic’s 4 U series, which developed through a new set of practices necessitated by the onset of lockdown in March; incomplete prints and their various constituent parts (produced by different techniques, from intaglio to silk screen, woodcut and linocut) were shuttled between Maljevic’s home and the print workshop, and assembled independently.
Other artists included in the show found the lockdown to be a barrier to creation. Elize de Beer’s recollection is no doubt one shared by many non-artists: on social media, she watched her peers worldwide “being productive and motivated to work and make things”, while for her the opposite occurred. So she retreated into a “simple and honest” approach, drawing “the first thing that came to mind” — a writing desk. The result, the etching Waiting for Inspiration, is a starkly beautiful rendering of the always-at-home phenomenon.
My favourite piece in this exhibition is Zhi Zulu’s Bridge Over Troubled Giraffe. In its primary intention, this print is not a depiction of a specifically 2020 experience. The giraffe, always a creature walking a fine line between gracefulness and clumsiness, poise and comedy, is now an object of pity. The bridge in question is the Nelson Mandela Bridge, spanning the train lines running into downtown Johannesburg, and it has become a net in which the giraffe is caught.
For Zulu, this conveys the disorientation felt by newcomers to SA’s major city, and indeed the giraffe’s plight evokes this feeling powerfully. Yet for much of this year, the urban energy associated with Joburg — its business and busyness — has been held at bay, the city left somewhat quieter, emptier, perhaps even gentler. Instead, I see in the giraffe not just a Jozi ingénue, lost and alone, but a version of all of us at one point or another in 2020: entangled, stalled, vulnerable, trapped.
With Zulu’s giraffe we are back in anthropomorphic territory. It is a terrain of shadows, shared with the faceless subjects in Olivia Botha’s You’re Not Alone series (the titles alluding not to the comfort of company but the threat of violence against women), matching the landscapes and still-life paintings in the exhibition that are suffused with human moods, needs and fears. Despite all this, among the thousands of words implicit in these works, against the odds, are Hope and Redemption.
• Pictures Worth a Thousand Words is on show at the David Krut Bookstore in Johannesburg until January 16 2021.
