Chess games at the end of animalistic time
Cruise at Krut 2020 is at David Krut Projects (142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood) until December 11 and online at davidkrutportal.com
The Queen’s Gambit is the most satisfying show on television, gushed Rachel Syme in The New Yorker magazine — and few people who have watched the series, finding in it much-needed succour as this torrid year draws to a close, would disagree.
But there is also something irksome about what Syme identifies as the show’s appeal: “An unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style.”
She’s right, but this is such a predictable New Yorker take (heady interiority, sensuality, style), written as if 2020 never happened. Or as if Beth Harmon, chess player extraordinaire, is an everywoman.
Two opponents, sitting across a chess board, present a rather flattering view of human beings — unique animals whose enormous brains can reconcile time future and time past, identifying patterns and creating stratagems.
The side of Beth Harmon that we all relate to, however, is not the chess genius but the demon-wrestler who seeks to escape or dull higher-level cerebral activity: the scared, vulnerable animal, driven by basic desires for security and belonging, that side of human experience not dominated by the prefrontal cortex but by the primal brain. This year, we have been reminded that our deepest needs are those we share with our fellow apes.
It seems to me that, despite the allure of The Queen’s Gambit, a more accurate depiction of our collective state can be found in Wilma Cruise’s etchings, displayed at the David Krut projects space in Johannesburg and via the viewing rooms in the gallery’s online portal. Cruise at Krut 2020 is a renovation of a series Cruise produced in 2015, including works such as The Queen and The End Game, in which baboons sit playing chess.
There is something disconsolate about the primates in these images — they are hapless, or perhaps simply hopeless, not just presiding over the end of a chess game but (in the artist’s words) “contemplating the conundrum of the end of the world as they know it”.
In collaboration with KimLee Loggenberg, Cruise has used printed fresh editions, adding to them and reworking them as collages. In the new series, The Thirteenth Hour, it is as if that previous world indeed has come to an end, and the creatures now occupy a bleak, Beckettian post-apocalypse.
Yet the title alludes not to Samuel Beckett but to George Orwell, whose dystopian novel
1984 opens with a clock striking thirteen in a post-truth world of propaganda and state violence. This connection establishes a challenging paradox in Cruise’s anthropomorphism, which also seems to invoke Orwell’s
Animal Farm through the figures of pigs, those humananimals who crudely exercise power over others.
The pig in the artist’s 2015 series is, however, not an allegory for human politics but an impenetrable cipher undermining the assumption that everything centres on people:
The All-knowing Pig “smiles out of her frame sealed in her hermetic world of ‘pigness’ ... a world closed to us”. This pig is a Cheshire Cat — another literary allusion, to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (confirmed in the title of the earlier exhibition, Advice From a Caterpillar). Like Alice perplexed by the smiling cat, we humans “have no access to the particular epistemology” of the mysterious pig.
Five years ago, then, Cruise sought to collapse the hierarchy that places humans above other animal species. Insisting on animals’ autonomy, and on their equality with humans, she even posed the rhetorical question, “what would happen if the animals were in charge and treated us as we treat them?”
The answer is that we cannot know, because we are stuck in human paradigms that employ mixed metaphors: those who are abused are described as being “treated like animals” even while those who do the abusing are castigated for “behaving like animals”.
In 2020, the revised works of Cruise and Loggenberg present the human animal in all its pathos and its woundedness — but also, cheeringly, its playfulness and its cleverness.