Follow dramatic clues, ignore the artspeak
It may be a good idea to tackle the issue of obscurity — or the obstacles laid purposely or otherwise — for a gentle, own-minded art enthusiast wanting a jolly art gallery experience.
It is clear after wandering around the gloriously neutral white spaces of Stevenson Cape Town, where Kemang Wa Lehulere, 33, has installed his latest work, that he is a very bright artist.
He won the 2017 Deutsche Bank Artist of Year accolade and the 2015 Standard Bank award. And soon this talented Capetonian will be elevated to the ranks of international gallerist acclaim (and business) with a famous London dealer.
Wa Lehulere is an individually voiced artist, one of a kind.
But, as an introduction to the current show — titled a tad obscurely but alluringly poetical as Here I am, A Concrete Man, Throwing Himself into Abstraction — the note to the exhibition reads: “Wa Lehulere foregrounds the poetics of the suspended and the implied, excavating the metaphoric fecundity of the unrealised gesture.” Sic, as they say.
Beyond dyspeptic artspeak (there is more in the note), is this kind of copy not an impediment to art, a barrier to engaging with the reality on the gallery floor and its walls? If it is intended as a humorous sidetrack, it does this fine show no favour.
Wa Lehulere’s installation is dramatic and powerful.
His play of the real and the imagined is masterful.
The associations punted in the odd exhibition title are generously released by the finely tuned placing of objects, their crafty construction and an interesting set of rather beautiful, evocative drawings.
Evocation and spicing the visitor’s imagination are key to Wa Lehulere’s art. He frequently uses texts in his work, one reason why murky arty gobbledygook is no help.
Much is familiar in the current, tight exhibition. There are the signature porcelain dogs in all their kitschy-charged glory as silent sentinels or symbols.
Again old-school desks, their wooden surfaces redolent with scratched youthful memories are dissected, repurposed, their metal legs sculpturally reconfigured and playfully resembled in formal settings. Wooden boxes and staves from the reworked school desks become containers or cages, held together by pure-white shoe laces, woven to patterns of crisscross order, of accounting, of instruction.
The craft in its execution is corporeal and mysterious. Bottles with sand and unread blue paper messages anchor, or are anchored with, white ribbons.
Artworks are teasingly titled — Matric 2015, Detention, They Comet Again and, with a touch of gloom, I Was Never Here (Blackout). Some black ink drawings hint at cosmic beauty, others at mystical abstraction.
A striking orderliness brings poetic purpose to the installations and set-up even though, like in a romantic maze, the visitor must find an own way.
History, memory, ambiguity and humour are imbedded in these artful pawns.
It resembles the decor and set of a stage play, abandoned in an empty theatre. The reminiscence of the play hovers in the air. Is the structured chaos in the viewer’s head or the artist’s?
Wa Lehulere, sussed in the manner and means of actor and audience, sets up the scene as a test of ingenuity.
Like a cerebral detective he leads audiences through the forensics and combat of the drama in his head. His is a kind of theatre of the mind, with a script open to creative invention, one that acknowledges a great art tradition: that viewers have an important, if not equal, role in the casting and outcome.
It’s about a poem or narrative never quite complete, a conclusion indeterminable.
The pleasure of his art is that Wa Lehulere is sharp, energetic, entertaining and so fiercely inventive in setting up these puzzlements for pleasure-seekers in art. So much the pity then that an overseer wants to drag it down with words such as “metaphorical fecundity”.