Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet, my melancholic earworm this week, is a meditation on mortality: Dylan wrote the song in 1997 after a brush with death. When he sings “I was born here, and I’ll die against my will”, he is expressing the defining feature of the human condition — borrowed, in this wording, from the Jewish Talmud (though it could be from Buddhism, Stoicism or another philosophical tradition).
The inevitability of death from the moment we are born is both emboldening and terrifying. Yet it’s not just the individual journey from cradle to grave that lends this track its elegiac quality, landing somewhere between mourning and grim determination. When Dylan bemoans a “world of lies” in which he finds no encouragement “in anyone’s eyes”, a political undercurrent comes briefly to the surface.
With this in mind, the refrain “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there” captures the sense of foreboding that most of us have when we are reminded of the fascist ambitions of the US’s Trump 2.0, or we see the latest news on Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, or we learn more about the planet’s plunge into climate crisis.
Still, there is also some comfort in the approach of darkness. The night can bring relief after a difficult day — the promise of something better tomorrow. The earth’s diurnal patterns, monthly cycles and seasonal rhythms offer the reassuring consistency of change. Our ancestors developed rituals to celebrate this. Summer’s sunshine gives way to winter’s darkness; we harvest, preparing for what lies ahead, knowing that there will eventually be renewal.
When the days get a little shorter and cooler, South Africans look for signs from Mother Nature. On the Highveld, city parks are awash with pink and white cosmos flowers. Along the east coast, the humidity drops, but misty mornings become more frequent. In the Western Cape, green vine leaves turn red, bringing the promise of rain.
Autumn in the winelands brings another cherished ritual: Light Art at Spier. As darkness descends on the farm each evening, so too do patrons of all ages, eager to discover what will be magicked up for them by the creative luminaries invited to participate. There is always a “wow factor” here — installations shimmering across the water, a quirky interactive piece, a puzzling projection.
As in recent years, however, curators Jay Pather and Vaughan Sadie are careful not to grant Spier’s visitors easy escapism. Many of the artists exhibited have something urgent to say about economic inequality, labour relations, forced migration, (anti) social media or ecological damage.
Swiss artist Sophie Guyot grabbed the site-specific bull by the horns for her work, Everywhere, inviting Spier’s employees “to share their experience and vision of the farm’s soil, animals and ecosystem” and thus to be her co-creators. The resulting neon declaration, Power to our voice, is hearteningly at odds with the history of exploitation characterising agriculture in the region — which, in turn, is the subject of Gina-Rose Bolligello’s video installation The Working Farm. Hashim Tarmahomed and Joshil Naran, too, compare the past and present of Spier’s spaces in their Ghost Landscapes.
The pastoral idyll is also refused by Sue Clark, Ross Juterbock and Carla Prins, whose City Lights/Izibani Zedolobha brings urban frenzy into the green world of Spier’s lakeside lawns. These five mixed media artworks resist the “pessimism and defeatism” of much discourse around SA cities, seeking to “strike a visual balance between growth and decay”. The LightUp programme’s Infrastructures of Freedom, using solar jars, likewise draws our attention to unequal experiences of citizenship while pointing to prospective solutions. Elgin Rust, Jane Appleby and Duncan Greenwood’s Cloud, made from recycled plastic waterbottles, is similarly upbeat about sustainability even as it addresses the subject of waste and pollution.
The tension between despair and hope, between anxiety and playfulness, between critique and beauty, is captured in a different key by Karla Nixon’s Psst, Look at My Feed, with its shimmering sequin panels asking us to rethink our phone-and-social-media obsession.
Less ambiguous are Florian Bach’s Halid and Serge Alain Nitegeka’s Camp, which offer a sobering conclusion to the Spier Light Art journey. On a large field, under the vast night sky, these installations are vivid reminders of the brute systemic violence and permanent displacement experienced by millions of humans.
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