Peeling back layers to find fugitive meaning in the past and present, the concealed and revealed
Afriend of mine is a Jesuit priest. This means he went through a rigorous 15-year training period, much of which entailed academic study of one kind or another.
Still, none of his various degrees was in art history, so when I suggested we visit Moshekwa Langa’s exhibition Fugitive (now coming to the end of its two-month stint at Stevenson Johannesburg), he professed general ignorance on the visual arts and uncertainty about his ability to discern the “meaning” of the work.
You could have fooled me. As we stepped inside the gallery, he launched into a formalist analysis of Langa’s collages that would have made any art critic proud.
It was not easy going; Langa veers from abstraction to heavy symbolism. At times he appears more interested in the textures and colours of his mixed media, and, in particular, with the effect of scoring verticals and diagonals across canvas with strips of masking tape.
At other times, he reproduces grainy black-andwhite photographs of people and objects that are evidently intended to convey some personal or public significance — but this remains unclear.
My companion undertook the task of meaning-making with relish. He started by listing the compositional elements: “These three shapes could be human figures … here I see splotches of turquoise that may be fragments of a greater whole … here are photographs of traditional African pottery, sculpture and dress alongside a carton of commercial umqombothi beer … these look like contour lines on an aerial drawing or photograph — maybe they are connected to that old map over there?”
Such observations laid the groundwork for an exercise in inductive reasoning that would have made Thomas Aquinas or Ignatius of Loyola proud.
Inductive logic is, really, the basis of art criticism as much as it is of science (and of the more convincing theological arguments). You start with what you can see in front of you — call it “evidence” — and establish certain premises, out of which you can develop a reasonable, albeit tentative, conclusion.
While we conversed and hypothesised, a pamphlet from the gallery was twitching in my hand. I knew it contained a curatorial statement, and perhaps a few quotations from Langa himself, that would provide an interpretive key.
After reading about the artist’s intentions, his praxis or the abiding themes in his work, I would be able to navigate my way through the exhibition more confidently.
There is a different kind of logic in this approach: it is based on deductive reasoning. The gallery text provides the viewer with a series of “truths”, which can then be applied to the artworks at his or her discretion. You could call this a priori knowledge. It can empower the viewer, but it also cues a response based on a set of “first principles”.
Most gallerists, artists and curators are attuned to the friction between inductive and deductive approaches to understanding art. They want to “guide” us as viewers but not constrain or circumscribe our experience of the work. Sometimes this results in exasperatingly vague statements, but usually we are given enough to go on.
In the case of Fugitive, we are encouraged to imagine the experimental process by which these images have developed. With collage, it is a layering method in which constitutive elements become partially or fully concealed.
This is apposite to Langa’s thematic concern with “timekeeping and time marking”, but particularly with the erasure of memory over time. The works in Fugitive seem to be an attempt to recollect or recapture aspects of the artist’s past that have been forgotten or have left no physical trace — specifically, we are told, “the landscape of his home town of Bakenberg [near Polokwane] as it changed with the onset of platinum mining”.
They were produced during residencies in Paris and Amsterdam; given the distance in time and space, it is unsurprising that they express a yearning for something lost.
As my astute Jesuit friend put it: “The more you look at them, the more there seems to be something hidden.”