Behind the door of ‘Plato’s Cave’
IT WAS a sunny Sunday in Cape Town — the first the city had enjoyed in weeks — and the locals hanging around Government Avenue were making the most of it as they basked in the slanting light of the late afternoon. My interest, however, lay indoors. There aren’t many galleries that stay open seven days a week, but fortunately the Iziko SA National Gallery can be relied on in this regard; there’s something vaguely reassuring about its obligation, as a public institution, to do so.
Of course, the gallery has courted its fair share of controversy over the years, and this is as it should be — debates about our country’s priorities result in contestation over the use of public spaces and resources. Perhaps because of such disagreements, those who curate the National Gallery, its temporary exhibitions and its permanent collection are forced into a process of continuing selfassessment. What is our purpose? Why do we own the works that we do? What can be proudly displayed and what would we rather hide? How do we justify our recent purchases or revivify staid material?
These questions provide the impetus for Objects in the Tide of Time, a long-term exhibition (on until March) in which items from the gallery’s permanent collection are dated by the year of their completion and by the year in which they were acquired. These dates emphasise how “the prized museum acquisitions of yesteryear may well not appeal to our presentday tastes or even relate to our self-definition in the political present. What seems ‘new’ and fresh in contemporary art inevitably becomes ‘period’.”
It is useful to bear this in mind when one comes to another exhibition at the gallery, Opening “Plato’s Cave”: The Legacy of Kevin Atkinson (on until February).
Atkinson, who died in 2007, formed a kind of one-man avantgarde in the 1960s and 1970s. He experimented widely with different media and materials; he explored the possibilities of performance art while these were still being theorised and formalised elsewhere; he sought to merge aesthetics, physics and metaphysics; and he pioneered conceptual and abstract art at a time when many parochial but vocal South African critics — a few decades behind the rest of the world — were still in the thrall of realism and mimesis.
Atkinson did achieve some institutional recognition. In 1966, for example, he won the South African Breweries Art Competition; a few years later he was entrenched at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. He also managed, in 1972, to escape the growing cultural isolation of apartheid and participate in the Edinburgh Festival with a largescale installation in the grounds of Hopetoun House.
Such abstraction did not, however, obtain the same enthusiastic endorsement at home. When Atkinson’s “yellow triangles” were displayed in Durban, he was taken to task by arts writers and councillors for wasting taxpayers’ money (an outrageous R160) on shipping and installing the work. Curators Hayden Proud and Stephen Croeser have included displays with newspaper clippings to show the conservatism Atkinson was up against.
The desire to lend a concrete tangibility to Atkinson’s life and times has also resulted in a partial recreation of his studio, nicknamed Plato’s Cave, where his work has been stored along with that of his late wife, Patricia Pierce-Atkinson. Other material exhibited gives visitors insight into the artist’s practices and processes. This was crucial to Atkinson’s view of his vocation — as his seminal “I am a Verb” series (1973) showed, he was interested in life and art as “doing” and not just “being”.
Nonetheless, while Atkinson was attuned to the necessary immediacy (and therefore partial ephemerality) of art, there is an almost archival quality to many of the works displayed. They represent a particular time and place and set of ideas; they are, to use a word invoked in Objects in the Tide of Time, “dated”. But other works remain vital, visually arresting and intellectually puzzling.
Atkinson was not confined, note Proud and Croeser, to “calculated, dispassionate and rigorously ‘formalist’ approaches to picture-making” — he was also “in pursuit of the romantic and apocalyptic ‘sublime’”.