Mining the aesthetic from the stuff of extraction
WWhen I think about SA art and mining, the drawings and paintings of Jeanette Unite in particular come to mind. Unite responds to what might be called the “aesthetics of mining” by discerning the beauty to be found amid heavy industry; at the same time, she offers a critique of the environmental damage, the violence and exploitation in which mining is imbricated.
Unite’s work presents an interesting counterpoint to that of Alexander Calvelli, which I discovered while travelling in the Harz region in central Germany. Calvelli’s exhibition WeltErbeBilder aus dem Harz (Images of World Heritage from Harz) is at Rammelsberg, where mining continued for more than a thousand years until 1988.
The title refers to Rammelsberg’s status as a Unesco world heritage project an unusual form of recognition for an industrial site which it shares with the nearby town of Goslar and the Upper Harz Water Management System, a vast but intricate system of dams, ditches and tunnels developed from the 16th century onwards to provide for an expanding network of mines.
Today these waterways complement the natural beauty of the region: huge pine forests cover rolling hills and low mountains. As you descend to the valleys, farmers’ fields stretch across the floodplains between tiny villages and larger towns old in story. It’s all very pleasing to the eye.
Slap-bang in the middle is Goslar, also full of history and impressive architecture, but basically a wealthy mining town; like Johannesburg, it owes its existence to the culmination of aeons of geological activity and the accidental discovery of mineral deposits. Evidence of ore mining in the Harz mountains dates back to Roman and Saxon times, but Goslar was founded in the 10th century as extraction from Rammelsberg began in earnest (first silver, then lead, copper and zinc).
This is where the comparison with Joburg falls flat: unlike the explosion of mining activity across SA’s highveld, the mines of the Harz region developed slowly over centuries, their scale limited by geography and by technological capacity even after the Industrial Revolution. When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote lyrically about the mountains and people of Harz, he did so not as leisure traveller but as a commissioner of mines. He saw no contradiction then nor do Germans today.
Race and class politics prevent the figure of the British coal miner or the eGoli gold miner from being romanticised; not so with the cheery Harz miner, who is readily recruited into a cosy touristic image through the local phrase “Glück auf!”, which translates roughly to “Happy mining!”
It makes sense, then, that Calvelli sees little difference between portraying the heavy mining infrastructure of Harz and the quaint streets of its picturesque settlements. Both present varied colour palettes and pleasing geometries, and they are rendered in remarkable photorealistic detail.
In his previous work exploring the aesthetics of industry, Calvelli has renounced “ideology and interpretation”. This is less convincing. Rammelsberg’s distant past is one thing, but not too long ago it was central to the vision of a man called Adolf Hitler.
The Führer had first encountered the mine as a Johnny-come-lately to politics, using it to advance his career; years later, as the Third Reich built its war machine, Rammelsberg received a rejuvenating boost. The spectre of Nazism suggests that not even Harz mining is free of ideology.