It was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who advised “when ideas fail, words come in handy”.
This aphorism can be read cynically — consider the persuasive bluster of corrupt politicians, bigoted populists and warmongers, hiding intellectual or ethical bankruptcy behind empty rhetoric. Yet Goethe’s quip can also be a source of comfort. When we stare into the void, confronting grim existential realities, language keeps us anchored and sane.
But what do we do when words fail us? When we can’t quite match a word with a concept, a feeling, an action, a vision? Acclaimed SA artist Gerhard Marx has been wrestling with this problem in trying to identify, or create, a “visual language” that is able to express “that which is the outside, but simultaneously surrounds, envelopes, and includes me”. It means depicting a scene on which he gazes, of which he is also a part.
Traditionally, in the artistic lexicon, such a scene might be called a landscape. For Marx, however, this doesn’t quite fit a looking-outwards that is also a looking-inwards, a looking-upwards that is also a looking-downwards, or a looking-through … hence the title of his latest exhibition, Landscape Would Be The Wrong Word.
As viewers, we are likewise encouraged to continually adjust the focus of our gaze. Those familiar with Marx’s work will know that he is an ardent experimenter with perspective. In one moment, we are looking down at the earth from a great height, then we plunge into an abyss, then we stare up at the stars, then we find ourselves inspecting something in microscopic detail.
This new show prompts similar adjustments. A trio of sculptures, whose angles, planes and holes may be studied from all sides, are named to invoke the geometry of Small Constellations. This kind of astral contemplation — the infinitely far represented as extremely close — is inverted in the pair Garden Drawings, for which Marx employs plant matter (dried nasturtium stems, hydrangea heads and poppy stalks). Burnished and golden on a black background, these organic materials could equally be root systems, bronchioles or distant galaxies; in this case, tiny, familiar things take on cosmic proportions.
In his other plant drawings, Marx lays out rigid, right-angled patterns — grids and lattices that, tricking the eye, take us through the two-dimensional surface into new depths. Marx’s avowed aim here is “immersion”. With him, we are part of the worlds (above and below earth) that are portrayed. Indeed, instead of being an “endless over-there”, these worlds constitute “a vast interior”: they are, it turns out, inside us.
This is not just sublime romanticism. In an SA context, paying attention to the subterranean — as in Marx’s Isometric Drawing of the Afterthought Mine — also means acknowledging a form of complicity with our country’s history of exploitation and inequality. These works are not mere abstraction; their “landscapes” are densely populated, even if there are no visible human figures.
So it proves with Marx’s other favourite medium and method, which is to deconstruct maps and to recreate them with fragments. Through this process, the artist wishes to “destabilise the authority” of maps as putatively “neutral instruments of order”. Viewed glancingly, these cartographic signifiers and the patterns Marx creates with them suggest coherence (when ideas and words fail, as Goethe might have said, maps come in handy).
As we approach each surface, however, the layered strips begin to dance and swim; we are disoriented, directionless. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that we are lost. For Marx, an artistic object is a place — a space that has been invested with meaning, “a nest, a dwelling”. In short, a home.
This place remains precarious. Though the thin sticks and tentative buds in the wall-mounted sculptures Espalier and Lattice are cast in bronze filigree, they seem as though they could snap at the lightest touch. Still, Marx, who presents himself as an artist going out into the world, gathering and returning to weave his nest, achieves what TS Eliot described as “the end of all our exploring”: “to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time”.
- ‘Landscape Would Be The Wrong Word’ is at the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg until November 1.
