“Don’t become the story!”
This line is trotted out to journalists in training, and is generally good advice. It has to be balanced by the recognition that — at least since the advent of New Journalism and Gonzo in the 1970s — some of the best journalism breaks the rule. As the recent controversy around investigative journalist Jacques Pauw indicates, however, too much metajournalism (journalism about journalists) tends to reflect poorly on the profession. It means that something has gone wrong; a rule has been flouted, a well-established practice ignored. Pauw’s reputation has been dented, undermining the work of his fellow scribes.
The artist and the journalist are different here: artists regularly make themselves the story. We expect it of them. Indeed, in our solipsistic age, if an artist’s work is purely about documenting others, we can be sceptical. Where is the artist’s statement filtering our interpretive experience through biographical information or ideological claims? Where is the carefully curated public persona to complement (or overwhelm) the work itself?
Artists and journalists also differ in who they choose to cover, and how. Apart from deliberate “everyman” profiles, vox pop pieces and updates on short-lived viral fame, journalists tend to allocate their air time and column inches to Big People: politicians and celebrities, business tycoons and worthies of various stripes. Artists may do this — usually when they are commissioned by wealthy and powerful patrons (the halls of museums are full of portraits of Big People) or when they want to be iconoclastic. But more often than not, the artist’s subject is The Rest of Us, in all our glorious anonymity and insignificance.
The visual arts can thus offer a refreshing alternative and a counter to the relentlessness of the news cycle, as I was reminded this week while viewing Light Years, a combined exhibition of paintings and photographs by Eloise Schoeman and Marnus Strydom at Lizamore & Associates in Johannesburg.
Schoeman’s paintings depict the quiet heroism of the commute: passengers buying tickets, waiting for trains, passing the time on board or disembarking with an air of stoicism in anticipation of the next leg of their journey. There could be nothing more mundane than being a bored and weary traveller, and yet Schoeman invests the experience with significance.
A train carriage, bus or taxi creates a temporary community of people with a common interest, albeit one as banal as progressing towards a destination. Still, few of the passengers interact with or even acknowledge each other; they remain within the bubble of their own thoughts, or the music in their headphones, or the images on their phone screens. This combination of collective experience and individual alienation seems to capture a central dilemma of the human condition.
Indeed, it is tempting to identify something “universal” in the experience. As Schoeman notes, however, her paintings depend on very particular settings (primarily Great British Rail in the UK and the Gautrain in SA, which she used to ride for up to three hours a day as a student). For Strydom, likewise, there is a tension between shared points of reference — the ubiquitous Shell logo, matchmaking smartphone apps, our origins in cosmic stardust — and more idiosyncratic features of identity.
While Schoeman’s subjects are anonymous — we guess at their life circumstances, projecting our own hopes and frustrations onto them — in Strydom’s photographs there is clearly a story behind the image. This could be a personal connection to the artist (a quirky neighbour) or an imagined narrative (a David Lynch-inspired future/past in which swiping right for love results in a robot baby). In each case, Strydom is wrestling with the contradictions of being human: we are stardust, but we are also destroying our little chunk of rock in space.
The works by these two young artists pair effectively in the gallery space, complementing one another in colouration, theme and technique. Schoeman paints from photographs, while Strydom produces painterly photos. They share a cinematic quality, capturing moments or sequences in space and time — the “light” and “years” of the exhibition’s title. Above all, they tell stories not about Big People, but about The Rest of Us.
Light Years is at Lizamore & Associates (3 Hetty Avenue, Fairland) until March 3, or online at https://lizamore.co.za
