Finally — an uncontrived black-and-white pairing
Black-and-white pairings in SA tend to be inappropriate — especially when they make comparisons or seek similarity. The Nobel Peace Prize committee set us off on the wrong foot in the 1990s by suggesting an equivalence, moral and personal, between Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk. The country is still dealing with the consequences of that manufactured likeness.
Nowadays, a thousand sentences starting, “Jacob Zuma is no worse than …” or “Jacob Zuma is no better than …” are uttered daily. None of these analogies gives an adequate account of the unfettered villainy of the president, his handlers and his circle of patronage. Moreover, no one making them can hope to say something sensible about the ostensible counterparts: apartheid cronyism, Broederbond nepotism and “white monopoly capital”.
Then there is that old chestnut, according to which racism against blacks is no worse than “racism” against whites. Western Cape Premier Helen Zille and writer Rian Malan have much to say about the stirring up of ignorant angry black masses against innocent whites.
Formal media coverage and social media commentary has paired these two exponents of white fright up with black doppelgangers. DA provincial legislature member in KwaZulu-Natal Mbali Ntuli has had the misfortune of becoming the other half of a duo with Zille because both are involved in party disciplinary proceedings (never mind that Ntuli will be arraigned on a technicality, while Zille has yet to be given a date to face more serious charges).
Malan responded to commentator Sisonke Msimang’s critique of his reportage on the violence in Coligny by making her into an archetypal necessity, the yin to his yang: “Msimang and I are both,” he affirmed, “to some extent in thrall to the dictates of our genes” as black and white South Africans, respectively (never mind that a white media analyst, Nicky Falkof, found him wanting on similar grounds to Msimang).
You can imagine, then, that I might be apprehensive about the pairing of a white and a black artist in the gallery space at Lizamore & Associates, where MJ Lourens and JM Tshikhuthula have exhibitions on display until May 27. Teresa Lizamore and her team are expert curators however and the twinning of Lourens’s In Situ with Tshikhuthula’s Muta requires no contrivance — aesthetic, political or otherwise.
Both artists engage with the tradition of landscape painting, disrupting the genre as an appropriate response to industrialisation. They both recognise that the vistas they depict (for Lourens, the periurban stretches of the Highveld; for Tshikhuthula, the semibushveld of Limpopo and North West) tempt the viewer into sentimentality and lyricism even when these landscapes refuse to conform to the clichés of a rural idyll.
Lourens employs a style that is close to photorealism but jolts with reminders that his scenes, while familiar, are imagined. The artifice is made explicit through the insertion of colourful cubes.
Sometimes these are piled into towers that break the horizontal panoramas with their anomalous verticals, mimicking and mocking the skyscrapers, factories and commercial beacons of the city. Sometimes they form pixelated sections imposed on an otherwise naturalistic rendering, showing the palette used by the artist.
Ubiquitous in Lourens’s paintings are the skeletons of billboards, which make neat geometric silhouettes against the sunset sky and clouds; one imagines that they will stand thus, after some future apocalypse, when all the adverts and all the products and all the consumers have been wiped out.
These structures resonate with the square water tanks in Tshikhuthula’s pastel drawings, which in turn form part of a visual vocabulary linked to the manufacturing and plumbing work carried out by the artist’s father and grandfather: pumps, pipes, dams, windmills. In Tshikhuthula’s almost abstract impressionist rendering, the metal appears to be crumbling and buckling; the picture is fractured, lines and colours are pulled apart as if being wracked by a gale. As a body of work, this “ode” to the artist’s paternal line is caught between “nostalgic” recollection and an acknowledgement that his family’s history is one of “troubled migrant labour”.
In their different ways, Lourens and Tshikhuthula emphasise that landscapes — beautiful, ugly or otherwise — acquire significance through the memories and associations they invoke.