SPECTRA. A group exhibition. At Johans Borman Fine Art gallery until September 19. DANNY SHORKEND reviews
ART perhaps cannot be clearly, ontologically defined, but we can understand it by virtue of its function. One such function in rather simple terms is that art has the capacity to uplift, enliven and elevate one’s moods.
Even an ostensibly unhappy work of art functions in such a way that one can empathise with the work and the artist, and in forging a human link, one somewhat transcends ones own negative emotions. Artist and viewer – without creating a necessary hierarchy here – converse, and in that conversation or fusion, consciousness results.
Yet, in this exhibition the overwhelming impulse is positive and certainly – in rather crude terms – made my day better. Spectra is indeed a spectrum and glorification of colour, movement and line and an upward mobility and energy that emphasises that art and aesthetics is a kind of feng shui, a tonic that remedies the less than savoury side of life.
Of course this assessment may smack of simplicity. “Ugliness”, social critique, the abject and the grotesque are as much part of the modernist and post-modern life-world, no less than art-world, and the cloistered ivory tower of art is perhaps a thing of the past.
Yet here there is a tension: On the one hand the works on offer (and here I comment in general) are formally beautiful, at least in my estimation. They exhibit an understanding of colour theory; they seem to take their cue from Arnheims “art of perception”; they do not seem to embroil themselves in the messiness of the day to day, of the mundane and the like.
On the other hand, conceived as such, in their formal purity do they not eschew cognitive content or cause insidious erasures in terms of political and social awareness and critique?
Notwithstanding this tension, I found myself energised and buoyant at the gallery. Bridget Riley, Erik Laubscher, Giovanna Biallo and Walter Battiss are some of the masters on show. More current artists such as Andrzej Urbanski, Cathy Layzell, Albert Coertse and Gavin Rain offer a delightful perceptual (and conceptual) discovery. I also particularly enjoyed Antony Lane’s enamel on MDF sculptures’ – a series of patterns and scientifically well conceived structures that are balanced, surprising and solid.
One work, which I recommend for those with a dampened spirit, is Nigel Mullins Please, wherein flowers or perhaps butterflies surge around the canvas space – flying, fluttering and playing. The colours serve to transport the viewer (or so I would hope) to a paradise of sorts. It is at once a kind of prayer, a plea and thus is named Please and a way of saying “yes, more…”.
On a philosophical note and with respect to the quandary hitherto mentioned, namely the disjunction between form and meaning, one resolution is in fact not to deny aesthetics conceptual depth. In fact, aesthetics is pivotal in any given epoch and is alarmingly powerful when serving political ends or even the fashion of the day. Thus, rather than retreat to that which is supposedly “above” and beyond”, or to metaphysics, perhaps one ought to embrace aesthetics and diffuse it to all facets of life: clothing, sport, friendship, homemaking, the scientific laboratory, car design – what in academic parlance is called aesthetics of the everyday.
And it is art that suggests this possibility, not as an autonomous sphere of human practice, impervious to the vicissitudes of life, but an active agent in suggesting creative aesthetic solutions or questions. In the process, a creative dialectic is established between art and life. In such terms, formalism is given new currency without the failure of modernism.
Accordingly, I envisage a continuum between art and other facets of life, an integrated field that encompasses body and mind. Of course, I venture to say this having being inspired by the “purity” of the art gallery as its delightful ambiance stayed with me even until when driving away I noticed an interesting design on the back of the motor vehicle just ahead.
l At 16 Kildare Road, Newlands, 021 683 6863, www.johansborman.co.za