TERRITORY OF PARADOXES

Graham Wood spoke to acclaimed Joburg artist Gerard Marx about his latest exhibition, Ecstatic Archive

When Gerard Marx started using snipped-up fragments of maps to create collages, he would join the lines you find on maps — sections of the red marks that indicate roads, for example — to draw a face, a foot, a skull, and so forth.

He was also drawing with all the meanings that cling to the lines he was using: the cultural, political, scientific and historical associations and implications that they carry. He was taking a line that already meant something to us — or which we are accustomed to reading in a certain way — and forcing it to express something new: the colonial will to dominate or control the landscape, for example, or attempts to establish ownership. Or his intention was simply to make us understand the geology, orient ourselves or find shelter or identity in relation to the landscape in the new images. But they became personal, even emotional.

For the mesmerising new works in his show Ecstatic Archive at the Goodman Gallery in Joburg, Marx has turned away from the lines “inside” maps. “I’m drawing with the central device of the map, which is the frame,” he says. “I think of that frame as a kind of colonialist viewpoint.”

The “drawings” themselves tend to be Escher-like trick geometries. Much like the work of the famed Dutch graphic artist MC Escher, the shapes in Marx’s pieces should make sense, but somehow slip their own logic and, floating in what looks like mapped territory, become groundless. Sometimes background and foreground reverse spontaneously, or space descends into infinity. Planes distort and surfaces seem in conflict with their own logic.

On a fundamental level, Marx takes the bird’seye view of the map — the “eye that wants to claim and control” — and “brings that view back down” and “forces it into perspective”, he says. “When you do this [force a map into a perspectival view], the map becomes the landscape.

“Both are about positioning your body,” he says. “Whereas a map is about positioning it in relation to the earth, perspective is about positioning it in relation to the picture plane.” Perspective is a development of the

Enlightenment; as Marx puts it, “actually locating your body in the centre of the world, so that perspective comes towards you as an individual”. That alone, he says, “has philosophical implications”.

Then, in addition to forcing a perspective representative of one worldview into another, he starts playing games with Gestalt theory — not just the geometric tricks where foreground and background reverse, or the logic defeats itself, but “the way your eye will complete things to find order among chaos”. The Gestalt theory he’s playing with — drawing with implication and a minimum of information — creates a “sense of things coming together and flying apart at the same time”.

The more you look at the maps becoming landscapes, the more they become insubstantial — the ground seems to vanish beneath your feet. There’s a kind of dizziness in not quite knowing where you stand in relation to the maps, or the territory in front of you.

“It’s something that implicates your whole physicality,” says Marx.

Breaking the flatness of a map is a way of rupturing the certainty the map provides