Reimagining the readymade in SA’s many vernaculars
The human brain is constantly performing astonishing computational feats as it merges different data sets and temporal states. Each moment is experienced primarily through the senses, but all the information travelling up and down our neural pathways is reconciled with past experience and used to anticipate actions or events.
Most of the time, this occurs without any conscious awareness on our part; paying too much attention to such processes would be disabling. But every now and then, something happens that reminds us of the infinite synaptic activity that connects our internal and external worlds – a concatenation of times and places, feelings and sensations, memory and imagination. I experienced this overwhelming effect while visiting the Wits Art Museum, where past, present and future collide in three concurrent exhibitions. In the main atrium, Beyond
the Readymade (which closes this weekend) is a selection of works from WAM’s permanent collection that reflects on a centrally important but also much abused notion in modern and contemporary art: the “found object”. At its worst, this can seem like an excuse for conceptual or technical laziness. Take a thing, call it art, summon the ghost of Marcel Duchamp – job done. At its best, however, the “readymade” can challenge our assumptions about objects and their meanings; it can make the familiar unfamiliar, a disjunction that by turns delights or horrifies us.
It is tempting to propose that this exhibition stands for the present, for the everyday world around us. And yet each object incorporated into the art works carries with it an unknown past. Where did it come from? Who did it belong to? How was it lost?
In mixed media paintings by David Koloane and Bronwen Findlay, the 3D objects fused with the two-dimensional plane of a canvas suggest personal, intimate histories. Other works refer to collective pasts and to national history: Antonio Ole and Brett Murray offer figurative and literal treatments of “the land” and its conquest, while Willie Bester’s densely allusive
Sukungena e Bisho (Keep out of Bisho) reads like a visual synopsis of late-apartheid SA.
Dozens of bones in Judith Mason’s Secular Reliquary portray a quieter violence. Like the painted skull that hovers behind them, these bones depict the ancient theme of memento mori – a reminder that death will come to us all – and thus invoke anxieties not about the past but about the future. Upstairs, Sabelo Mlangeni’s Umlindelo wamaKholwa (running until 28 October) documents life among two Zionist church communities. The black-and-white photographs imply something timeless about their subjects, and often the practices of churches such as the ZCC are described as “traditional”, but it would be reductive to associate this exhibition with a reified African past.
For one thing, the local history of the Zionist church movement is in fact a transnational
one, embedded in the contradictions not only of colonial missionary activity but also of evangelicalism in the US. For another, the people in Mlangeni’s photographs are navigating the complexities and challenges of SA today – a reality evident in the foreground or background of each image.
Finally, there is Digital Imaginaries: Premonition in WAM’s downstairs exhibition area (until 23 September), billed as “an exploration by artists who imagine and critique how globalised digital technology
systems shape and shift African futures”. Indeed, the visitor’s experience of a number of these art works – including virtual reality headsets, interactive screens and augmented reality apps – has futuristic features.
Once again, however, the trajectory of past, present and future is undermined. For instance: if binary coding is the basis of our digitised present and future, can it also be identified in artistic practices such as beadwork, associated with a “traditional” African past? This is the contention of a group of scholars and artists developing “a vocabulary for vernacular algorithms”. Other pieces in the exhibition use digital technologies to revivify items from the museum’s historical African art collection.
Like the decorative and ceremonial objects included in
Beyond the Readymade – initiate staffs, isitipe (shawls) and nceka (cloth) embellished by the plastic detritus of global consumerism – this connection of past and future is an invigorating way of subverting narrow definitions of what constitutes “tradition” in SA.