CHRIS THURMAN: Upending the myth of ‘a quiet corner of art history’

It had been a day of criss-crossing Gauteng, driving between galleries and museums in Johannesburg and Pretoria. I’d filled up my schedule, jokingly justifying the fine art overload by saying I needed to get fit for Contra.Joburg by the end of the month.

Contra.Joburg (which takes place on August 30-31) is billed as “Johannesburg’s most radical visual arts festival”: 48 hours, 12 spaces, 170 artists. It may seem a bit daunting, but participants have the benefit of a hop-on-hop-off shuttle and a relatively contained precinct in the inner city. Like a would-be athlete preparing for a 5km fun run using an ultra-marathon training programme, I’d been spending my energy on the wrong tasks — mostly travelling up and down the N1.

My sensory cup was overflowing, even though my petrol tank was empty. I was trying to process a plethora of artworks and concept statements. Fragments of provocative exhibitions were swimming around in my mind with news headlines about war and corruption. As I drove, I watched the urban fabric knit and unknit itself endlessly through the windscreen of my car. At traffic lights, I filled the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds’ worth of smartphone dopamine infusion.

I was overwhelmed by the spectacle, the too-muchness of it all. It was with relief, then, that I arrived at my final arts destination for the day — the Blue House at David Krut Projects on Jan Smuts Avenue — and crossed the threshold. I felt that I had passed through a portal into a different temporal mode. Everything slowed down.

I had come to see Still Life: A Contemporary Arrangement, a group show curated by Amé Bell. The still life is a form that demands pause. It suggests contemplation, as if deliberation requires the deliberate arrangement of objects. Yet the result is not necessarily tranquillity or reassurance. As Bell writes, this genre “has always been more than a quiet corner of art history”. Intimate, precise, following “the semantics of close observation”, the still life can also be “a site of subtle rebellion”.

For example, Peter Cohen’s mixed media collage, executed in his distinctive black and grey style through a combination of linocut, watercolour and etching, contains the traditional elements: fruit, flowers, vessels. But whereas historically these have signified “abundance, order and symbolic reflection”, Cohen seeks to convey “fragmentation, memory and interference”. A partially obscured portrait inserted into the scene introduces a human subject whose presence is usually implied rather than shown directly in the still life form. Stephen Langa also includes a photograph among the objects in A Chapter of Change and Wisdom, but it is indistinct.

A number of the artists in the exhibition similarly depict people who are by turns hidden and revealed. Bodies and faces seem to appear, only to disappear. Heidi Fourie and Phumulani Ntuli disregard the unwritten rule. Boemo Diale follows it, technically, but her monotypes of vases are decorated with swirling, dancing figures. Anna van der Ploeg’s flowers are held, as if presented to the viewer, between the thumb and forefinger of an ethereal hand.

Flowers are common in still life works, and Roxy Kaczmarek foregrounds the connection they represent to natural cycles of “growth, decay and renewal”. For David Krut Workshop printmaker Sbongiseni Khulu, however, still life works also acknowledge that “nature is not always within reach” — they offer “a way to hold onto the ephemeral” for, as sure as cut flowers will eventually droop and wilt, “every moment is fleeting”.

The philosopher Heraclitus explained the evanescence of experience through a watery metaphor: “You cannot step into the same river twice.”

This paradox of permanent flux has a quirky corollary in Adele van Heerden’s bathroom scene, in which a dog stares quizzically at a tub full of water. Like many still life compositions, this is not truly “still”. Yet it captures a break from what Van Heerden calls the “relentless movement” we experience in public.

The domestic, interior space is juxtaposed with the world beyond. The privacy of a bathtub is “a cocoon in which we may rest” — an indulgence, perhaps, but one that prepares us to venture outside, where we must then navigate “the unpredictable and adventurous open waters of the sea”.