Marx’s magic with maps prompts a trip down rabbit holes of geology and history
Long-time readers of this column will know that over the years I have spent — and arguably wasted — a fair bit of energy griping about artists’ statements. From choreographers writing about the concept behind a dance piece to musicians describing a new album, there is often a feeling of bathos; the art work may be brilliant but the words fall short. Perhaps this is inevitable when one is striving to capture the ineffable.
At their best, however, artists speaking or writing about their own work can achieve something astonishing. They can gently guide us in our encounter with their creations, plant a few seeds, without overdetermining our experience or delimiting our interpretation. Sometimes we just need a bit of context or a nudge in the right direction.
The visual arts present a particular challenge. Too much information and the viewer loses his or her sense of freedom. Too little and he or she is adrift in a sea of images. There again, isn’t art supposed to “speak for itself”? Yes and no.
The work is self-contained, as is our unadorned response to it — an autonomous moment of affective, intellectual and neurocognitive beauty — and this should remain in the foreground, but any sustained engagement with the work can only benefit from attention to the background.
A gesture towards ideas, aesthetics and influence; a flash of insight into process and technique; a brief personal revelation — carefully presented, these enrich the anonymous but meaningful interaction between artist and viewer.
An excellent example is Gerhard Marx’s “Five thoughts towards an exhibition”: only a few paragraphs about Near Distant, his new body of work on display at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, but their contents spur a hundred thoughts in response.
I went down some thrilling archaeological, architectural, astronomical and art historical rabbit holes thanks to Marx’s prompting and some internet searching. I learnt about the Anasazi people who thrived and then, in the 13th century, disappeared, leaving behind cliffside constructions in the desert of what is today the American southwest.
I discovered the ancient Chinese practice of displaying gongshi, scholar’s rocks — suiseki in Japan — to celebrate the artistry of geological forces.
I looked again at Giotto’s famous frescoes, encouraged by Marx to study how they were painted “before perspective constructed the illusion that landscape, the built world and the human shared the same horizon”: “These architectures are not mere backdrops to the scenes that they were meant to hold. They fold, jut, tower and lean with a drama of their own. They are backgrounds foregrounded, contexts as object.”
I returned to WG Sebald’s masterful novel Austerlitz, which describes the fortifications around the Belgian city of Antwerp and observes that “our mightiest projects most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity”.
And I was reminded of the significance of the pile of rocks atop Table Mountain known as Maclear’s Beacon: an inspiring tale of scientific patience and precision ... but also, of course, a story bound up in SA’s colonial history and the inexorable mess of Cape Town’s social and spatial segregation.
This last “thought” insists, then, that though the wide geographical and historical scope of Marx’s points of reference might tempt us into looking only from afar, the artist also wants us to look close up — that is, at the urban spaces all around us, at their hierarchies and their fragmentation, their upside-downness and their fundamental inequality.
Regarding this exhibition in the gallery space, we may observe from a distance the artist’s playfulness with cuboid (Cubist?) shapes and Escheresque geometries. As we draw near to the surface of each work, we admire the precision with which he has cut and collaged dozens of maps to create each line and plane.
Once we have done this, we can no longer see only abstraction. Instead we see dwellings, city streets, mountains, rooftops, building plans, exploded views. There is thus a continuation of Marx’s previous work, in two dimensions as well as with sculpture, in which he has investigated our material habitats — the way we occupy land — while also asking broader philosophical questions about how we see ourselves in these (un) familiar landscapes.
Near Distant is at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg until September 8. Book an appointment to facilitate physical distancing.