ECLECTICA: DESIGN & ART. Various artists and designers. At Eclectica Design and Art Gallery, 179 Buitengracht Street, Gardens. From September 4. Ongoing with intermittent rotation. DANNY SHORKEND reviews
VILAYANUR Ramachandran, a neuroscientist cites ethnologist Niko Tinbergen who showed that herring-gulls respond to anything beak-like in order to procure food, like a long yellow stick with three stripes and subsequently peck at the stick and even more so than had it been a real beak. From a neurological point of view, there are visual circuits in the visual pathways of the chick’s brain that are specialised to detect a beak as soon as the chick hatches and because of such wiring actually respond more powerfully to the stick with three stripes than to the real thing (that is, an abstraction of the real, such as an image).
Extrapolating and applied to art, Ramachandran claims that art fulfils a similar function or equivalent to that mock-beak – that human artists “have discovered the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar”. If this is a sound way to see art or to understand it, then Eclectica, with its highly polished sensitivity to visual pattern in art, defined not simply as fine arts but as encompassing design and ceramics offers fundamental, elemental forms that titillate the soul or less mystically: the brain.
The vision for the gallery is to create a space for high quality art that draws its inspiration from the principles of the Bauhaus as developed by Gropias and other leading figures, especially architects seeking a more unified vision. And it works. At first my eye was simply drawn to the walls – to some highly accomplished paintings by Natasha Barnes, Richard Scott and Mathew Hindley to name a few. Furniture seemed a hindrance – a chair, a table, a cupboard are merely functional and lack meaning and philosophical depth I initially thought to myself. Then (with admittedly by some prompting by the owner Shamiela Tyer), I began to see that such designs were creative whose prime motivation is aesthetic beauty, alternative conceptual and perceptual visions for domestic and other uses with obvious artistic quality. Consider Vladamir Kagen’s organic sofas as an alternative to stark and harsh common furniture designs and the Mondrion-inspired “after Rietveld” chair design and Liz Lacey’s well-conceived and well-crafted glassware.
The point is that whether one is talking about the traditional Enlightenment conception of the fine arts or the seemingly kitsch, such as furniture design, in fact neither maintain an Archimedean position above and beyond its own time and place – both reflect and are affected by society at the time. Yet in bringing them together and in reintroducing aspects from the previous century into 21st century art and design that universal grammar intimated above may be more readily found. That is, the beak-like function that is art attracts one, draws one in and feeds one – metaphorically – by delighting the senses, in particular the eye – only in order to conceptualise both art and design in terms of philosophical content and in terms of utility. Beautiful things are comforting, comfortable and life-enhancing.
However, balance, order, beauty, harmony and proportion are relative concepts, that are defined variously in different cultures and according to individual predilection (assuming the individual is beyond his/her socialisation in the first place). Furthermore, it is precisely the “ugly” that usually begins a new aesthetic, later to be co-opted as beautiful only to then set in motion the possibility of a further deviation or aberrant aesthetic. In this regard, consider Hindley’s The impossibility of death in the mind of someone living III where clearly a “pretty’ surface marks a philosophical rumination on the age old curiosity concerning death. In other words, beauty, skin, surface… is but a code, language and formal device to that which is unperceivable, beyond the sensory – the aesthetic – and thus expanding this idea one may articulate that the quality on show is but a material embodiment of extra-aesthetic values, beliefs and speculations, that which is unseen or that which can be seen in a multitude of ways, ranging from the chair one is sitting on here in this time and place to a painting on the wall.
Whether the stick with three stripes metaphor for art is understood or not, humans are attracted to form and unlike birds create a rather big hullabaloo around it. Yet if indeed art taps into this “universal grammar”, then such a fiasco tells us much about what it is to be human and the brain is perhaps the key to such an understanding.
l 021 422 0327, www.eclecticadesign andart.co.za