CONTEMPORARY SAN EXHIBITION. At Kalk Bay Modern, until December 15. DANNY SHORKEND reviews.
WHILE the artist Henri Rousseau would be considered a naïve artist, if not a forerunner of surreal experimentation, one might also connect such concerns with the lesser-known and untapped artistic potential of cultures not usually associated with mainstream art.
In this regard, the Contemporary San exhibition at Kalk Bay Modern offers a voice or, shall one say, a space, for people, dispossessed of their land, eking out meagre livings and part of a culture that is at risk of being lost. An example is the Ju’hoansi community who live in a remote settlement in the Eastern Omaheke region of Namibia.
Furthermore, art has always been a part of San culture, beginning with rock paintings dating back thousands of years, so that initiatives such as the Kuru Art Project (Botswana) and the Omba Arts Trust (Namibia), have been instrumental in facilitating the expression and sharing of contemporary San art with a wider audience.
I mentioned Rousseau, and one might equally recall Dubuffet, Klee, Matisse and Miro. For when viewing works by artists like Cgoma Simon, Jan Tcega, Kg’akg’am Tshabu, Qhaqhoo X’are and Qgocgae Cao, one gets a sense that indeed there appear to be overlapping concerns between those artists of yesteryear and the art on show now.
Although one ought to be careful in claiming a universal aesthetic, or subsuming other aesthetics as part of the “story” of the so-called mainstream narrative. Nevertheless, I think its is fair to say that there can be some commonalities, similarities and crossovers that stretch beyond a single time frame and encompass this broad notion we call art. Now, what can these overlaps consist of?
There is a sense of magic. What Matisse may have sought in, for example, his colour collages and Fauvist outbursts, was a sense of euphoria in nature. And these artists under discussion, many of whom may have the skills of tracking in the land or may at least be adept at reading the language of the land, indeed express a certain supernatural quality in their feel for animals, a sense of cellular movement of the land and its flora and fauna.
There is a dream-like opticality, a kind of hallucinogenic ebb and flow of line and patterning that one equally finds in Klee and Miro, an almost organic sense of form as it reaches from being inanimate toward consciousness. In these respects, such art – whether Western or not – is not simply child-like or simple. It resonates as a sensitivity towards and integration of human and animal, and yet transcends that as a certain numinous quality is brought forth. That is, there is an incantation of a certain universal oneness or unity. And that quality described, sensed and named as such in various ways by different cultures and, in particular, through art, is revealed via the very elements of their artistic language. While I have been speaking generally, the viewer may or may not sense this, as some of the individual artists, each in their unique way – I would argue – suggest this vision.
One will also find prints (mainly linocut) and wood sculptures at the gallery. The former, by a number of artists, show a marked degree of observational skill, but continuing the theme hitherto described, possess a sense of magic, a real reverence for the wonder that is nature and its symbolic value as it is enmeshed in human lives.
The latter are light-weight sculptures of birds that perhaps are rather more craft than fine art as such, yet this does not detract from their sense of joyfulness and freedom. And this is perhaps what I liked most about the show: a sense of directness of application, a lack of fear and the weight of history, or art history, means that many of the works are unfettered by theoretical complexity. Yet the sad thing is, although many of these artists have been represented on the larger art-world scale, such as the Venice Biennale this year, and featured in several books and publications, these artists probably serve “other voices” and agendas and will remain a dying language and a culture merely to be collected and collated by a few. Nonetheless, it is because of this, and in spite of this, that this exhibition is significant and important to see.
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