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| Opening speech - Dr Gary Minkley |
| Panacea exhibition - Ann Bryant Art Gallery– September 2005, East London, South Africa. |
As one of South Africa’s and certainly the Eastern Cape’s leading landscape artists, this becomes a very special and exciting occasion to view, admire and even acquire new or additional works.
Schultz has been producing ground-breaking landscape art - in form and content - for a long time. Recent shows reflect Schultz’s concerns: Landscape; Landscape Reviewed; Beyond Frontiers; Frequency and Panacea. He has exhibited jointly and in solo shows around the world and in the country and his work emphasizes a reinvestment of drawing, graphic trace and medium in an era increasingly dominated by installation and intermedia work.
As representative as one of South Africa’s leading landscape artists, then, I want to start by saying a little bit about landscape:
WJT Mitchell has defined landscape as a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its representation”. So landscape is both a place and a ‘way of seeing’, both a sensibility and a lived relation. For some, landscape is a ‘text’, part of the cultural ‘signifying systems’ through which we make sense of our worlds; for others it is a produced space, a form, a socially transformed portion of the earth’s surface. And through all these meanings – indeed integral to each of them – are the relations of life and death, of meaning and forgetting, of violence as well as beauty that always and everywhere structure our lives.
I want to draw on some of these ideas to frame what I want to say about Schultz’s work
The ‘seeing’ of the African landscape by the appropriating gaze of the traveler, and then the settler has a long history or ordering of the world to approximate a european gaze and order. Schultz, I want to suggest, while drawing on the medium aspects of this tradition, overturns it and provides new ways of seeing landscape (As Virginia Mackenny has pointed out), From Le Valliant to Burchell, Bowler, Baines and Pierneef, the white male came with an eye to exploring/ acquiring the land. Seeing it through a western lens, the colonists laid claim to what they saw, not only by obliterating the presence of the indigenous population, but also by romanticisizing the open spaces with the language of the Sublime and the Picturesque. In this way they emptied the land of the local and then pictured it into a vision of pure nature, majestic primal forces of rock and sky. In these works a particular fact of nature is isolated and all idea of process or history is abandoned. These paintings, of landscape in a state of grace, are essentially documents of disremembering.
I know that Schultz paints against this - what William Kentridge has called this “plague of the picturesque” – where celebrated landscape singularities: the kloof, the escarpment, the tree – are differently reimagined/ revisioned in Schultz’s work. This re-imagining is visible all around us.
What we have, through Schultz’s landscapes are pictures that feel much more like home – not thought of as across a sea or a continent or of ‘pure nature’ or emptied of process and history. They are about being in a real place and about remembering its meanings and possibilities.
The older traditional conventions of landscape, then, are supplanted in Schultz’s work by a sense of grappling with the complexity of the terrain in ways that challenge the viewers own boundaries and the conventions of romanticising and picturing the landscape – moving beyond its own field of conventional ‘europeanised’ and naturalized framings.
In this sense, Schultz’s landscapes show an acute awareness of the historical, geographical and political implications of style and aesthetics in landscape conventions and invite us to challenge and revise how we see them, and through our engagements, see ourselves, in these histories and identities.
A second strand to Schultz’s work relates to what might be termed a scientific discourse about the ‘culture of collecting’. Benedict Anderson persuasively suggested that it was the census, map and museum that defined the cultural boundaries of colonialism/ nationalism and that it was the museum, its collections and its strategies of display that not only recorded, but also ordered the world in uneven and unequal ways.
Schultz’s insertion of these forms of display into that of the landscape achieves two inter-related possibilities: firstly - it visually connects landscape and order – or ordering of symbols and systems of value, knowledge, recognition and representation. Local plants, in bunches, or singularly, roots (and previously the wings of birds, for example) are bound and framed in un-named grid-like ‘scientific’ systems of display. Here they serve as a reminder of what we have all but forgotten and no longer see or recognize as we ab-sail, 4x4 and power our way over local landscapes.
In other words they force recognition and draw, ironically, on conferring value through placing them in visual frames of powerful reference and value – the scientific display case/ frame. To display landscape in this manner de-naturalises it and curiously, simultaneously, re-animates a concern and relationship with the natural in new ways.
Secondly, though, they are also ‘objects’ that are not commonly ‘displayed’ in this manner, and have real local and ‘traditional’ meaning and healing properties and associations. Displayed and represented as they are here, they thus serve to invoke a desired and important need to belong to and be a part of local landscapes.
As such they assert indigeneity in and of the landscape if you like, and – evoke the real healing ‘scientific’ possibilities the real ‘cure-all’ in these local ‘home’ forms of value, recognition and belonging.
The conscious recognition of the viewer as an inextricable part of any landscape, is also increasingly apparent in Schultz’s own self-reflexivity in the process of producing these landscapes and ‘collections’.
Instead of only the external recording of the visible topography, Schultz has increasingly turned inwards as well, mapping and signifying an interior landscape – of disease (sickness, ills, the Gallium Search triptych,2005), remedy and healing.
Here the work, from the overwhelming tones of ‘redness’ ( – blood, danger, alert, through to its invocations of tradition and indigeneity – think of Zakes Mda’s Heart of Redness) through to the microscopic internal figurations of ‘diseased’ blood cells (with the words ameliorate, regenerate, palliative, restorative, and so on) acknowledges a leakage or diffusion across the boundaries of outside/ inside.
Instead of claiming dominion over the external world he posits the landscape’s interconnectedness with other, private, internal geographies that are hidden, forbidden and mysterious; bearing unknown, unintended or under appreciated and little recognized meanings and possibilities (as shown in the burning and blurring borders of some of the works). Are these ‘alchemised’ borders illness or cure? Panacea (2005)– the title - suggests its line of resolution.
Through the metaphor of landscape, then, Schultz examines the connections and borders of identity, and of illness and well-being, reflecting on, and mapping a critical position in relation to the separation of inside and outside worlds (and as such can be seen as a critique of what is seen as a rampant and increasingly globalised materiality of plunder and destruction) Other landscapes are themselves, bound – as means of protection/ as bandage. What is so fascinating, though, is the way in which landscape, through these bindings, on closer scrutiny, reveal the signs of ecological travesty, but are simultaneously inscapes for the soul.
These landscapes hold within them things other than pure nature – the scenery, in other words, is composed of wounds/ illnesses/ evils that seen closer up bear witness to environmental damage – a literal grounding of human-rights violations; but also that out of this landscape comes the alchemy – to reimagine differences and different possibilities.
Schultz always invites us to see beyond the frame, or around the edge – for there are always other windows, views, reflections: some subject to the alchemy of nature – ‘fired’; others through internal windows; yet others through a metaphor of collections and the invocations of local landscapes.
Finally, then, I think it is fitting that at Schultz’s first hometown exhibition, that its real power, for me, is about picturing places that feel like home; in a real sense, in an imagined sense and in a home of the imagination. Perhaps, it is here, in this sense of home and belonging, bringing together landscape, body and imagination, that Panacea – as “cure-all” and as healing - coheres. |
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