Entering the exhibition, one’s immediate attention is drawn to Penny Siopis’s vivid Terra Incognita (1991). Here, the exploitation of the land is coterminous with the exploitation of its indigenous peoples – it is literally built, in the painting, on the back of a black female figure – as signalled through the ground of representation: layers and layers of cut-out figures and infrastructure from apartheid-era textbooks. The surface terrain of painting is activated by the partly obscured palimpsest of the past: the South African Landscape formed through the dynamic strata of history, memory and representation. Siopis’s work thus strategically locates many of the concerns that will be addressed in the course of the exhibition.
The exhibition is organised according to five overlapping themes. These speak across and undermine any linear narratives of the colonial to the contemporary, and include a remarkably representative sample of the genre as a whole. This is particularly evident with regard to late nineteenth and early twentieth century works (by artists both well-known and relatively neglected by art historical enquiry). The visitor begins with 'Interfaces', in which Godby positions Landscape as the threshold of different systems of knowledge, each of which variously cast the land according to its own terms of reference. Landscape becomes, for example, a way of understanding the space that lies between the known and the unknown, best figured in paintings and maps depicting barriers to passage, behind which lies the familiar and beyond which stretches terra incognita (such as Nils Anderson’s Crossing the Berg, 1939, which serves to commemorate and validate the Great Trek).
The wilderness is also constructed, on the one hand, as fearsomely hostile or awe-inspiringly sublime (seen, for example, in Robert Hodgin’s Wilderness, 2009, Jo Ratcliffe’s photolithograph Nadir, 1988, or Regina Buthelezi’s tapestry Once There Came a Terrible Beast, 1960s) and, on the other, as Arcadian (such as Samuel Danielle’s early nineteenth century vision of A Kaffer Village, in which the amaXhosa have been rendered according to classical ideals). Landscapes are also invested with both secular and spiritual resonances, a theme which Sandra Klopper explores in her catalogue essay.
Having visited institutional and private collections around the country, Godby has unearthed some extraordinary images. One such is Thomas Bowler’s leading of a group of art students into the Berg River (From the Centre of the Berg River, Paarl, 1861), intent on inundating them with the beauty of creation. Thomas Baines’s Gold and Ivory: Elephants Charging over Quartzose Country (1874), with its vivid colours and detail which rush towards the viewer, reveals that nature, even at its ‘wildest’, had already been marked and measured according to how it could be harnessed. While many of the nineteenth and early twentieth century images are seen through colonial eyes, Godby also draws attention to how black artists worked within, appropriated, and interrogated largely western conventions for depicting Landscape, including works by, among others, Gerard Sekoto, Gerard Bhengu and Moses Tladi.
Situated in the transitional spaces in and around the stairwell are artworks dealing with 'Contestations', all of which summon the spectres of dispossession, violence and conflict that haunt South Africa’s present in the face of its colonial and apartheid past. Godby here invokes William Kentridge’s assertion that ‘Landscape hides its history... Scenes of battles, great and small, disappear, are absorbed by the terrain, except in those few places where memorials are specifically erected, monuments established, as outposts, as defences against this process of disremembering and absorption’. David Goldblatt’s Crosses erected on 16 June 2004, mounted off the N1 near Polokwane, appear almost as theodolite markings on the photographic surface (recalling Kentridge's Colonial Landscape series) – but here their geometric regularity is used to apportion physical and psychic space to memory, to mark the landscape as a site of violence buried, but not forgotten.
Set alongside Cecil Skotnes’s Visit to a Battlesite (1974-5), where the formal distortion and scale of the work makes it impossible to tell whether the figures in the landscape are live agents or buried corpses, and echoed above on the landing by Kim Berman’s dimly-lit Landscape of the Truth Commission (1998) and Paul Stopforth’s haunting Altarpiece for Thomas Kasire (1983), in which the rocks all but hide an ephemeral figure, the curation evocatively establishes the link between landscape, violence and traumatic memory.
Reaching the top of the slightly shadowy staircase, the mood shifts as one enters the light-filled upper room of the Old Town House. One side examines the various 'Inventions' projected onto South Africa’s land according to shifting sentiment and rhetorical strategy, from meditations on nature in harmony to images imbued with variously colonial, Afrikaner and black nationalism. Godby sets up a particularly compelling sequence of agricultural images to demonstrate how labour on, and cultivation of, the land is naturalised as a validation of property rights. The series culminates in Pieter Hugo’s stark and monumental effigy of waste: Discarded Tomatoes and Chillies in the Veld, Messina/Musina (2007).
The other side of the room (leading into several smaller spaces) reflects on mankind’s myriad 'Interventions' into nature. Communication and transport systems, border and boundary lines, are revealed as integral to the process of owning and controlling the land. These interventions range from the stark intrusion of barbed wire in Robert Watermeyer’s Border Control Fence, Beit Bridge Port of Entry, 11th September 2008 (2008), alluding to contemporary anxiety over immigration, or that of the railroad scarring the undulating landscape of Irma Stern’s Umgababa (1922), reflecting the ravages of industrialisation wrought on nature and people, to the more naturalised order established in the suburban garden. The latter is, in a moment of wonderful curatorial whimsy, demonstrated through the echoed diagonal between a nude resident intently mowing his lawn in David Goldblatt’s Saturday Afternoon in Sunward Park, April 1979 (1982) and Peter Schütz’s painted jelutong sculpture of a Suburban Garden and Home (2000), which juts out from the wall below it.
In the final section of the exhibition, 'Interrogations', Godby questions the genre’s problematic formal and ideological history. Many of the works deal with the specific formal techniques and modes of viewing which frame our understanding of the land. For example, Gavin Younge’s In Camera (2010) places the camera itself in front of the objectifying lens, and Keith Dietrich’s Horizons of Babel: Hottentotsberg (2005) presents a series of painted fragments arranged to present the illusion of a photographic panorama – with its attendant truth claims and authoritative viewpoint – that has been stitched together like a tourist montage.
A beleaguered Pierneef bears the brunt of it all; from Avant Car Guard’s irreverent encounter with the artist’s grave to Wayne Barker’s Super Boring, which announces Pierneef’s contemporary irrelevance (despite the continued commercial success of his work within the art market) with neon tubing affixed to an upside-down and graffiti-defaced caricature of Pierneef’s trademark tree (the original of which sold for £14 million on a recent London auction). Even Brett Murray’s Empire conjures up Pierneef’s late woodcuts. Installed above the old colonial Town House’s hearth, the work links the wrought iron contours of the land to ideological edifices. The materiality of South Africa’s soil (in a jar which also contains fragments of pottery as a cipher of the breadth of time interred by the landscape) is subordinated to the rhetoric of its framing in the image alongside the shiny commemorative plaque to Empire. The techniques of oil painting, photography and print-making – the cultural capital they carry and the commanding views they encompass – are particularly implicated in these interrogations.
Given the imbrication of these media with the genre of Landscape, one thing the exhibition lacks is much beyond these media in the way of sculpture, video and installation work. While this decision may have been due to the nature of the exhibition space, one can’t help but wonder whether the small adjoining rooms in which Godby explored permutations within specific themes could have been more productively used as spaces for showcasing video and installation works that ‘think’ Landscape differently. What about a site-specific sound intervention by James Webb? A topographic installation by Sean Slemon? Video works by urban geographer Ismael Farouk, one of Dan Halter’s Space Invader pieces, or Berni Searle’s recent meditations on the interrelationship of land, history, identity and memory (I’m thinking here of Alibama, which speaks to many of the exhibition’s concerns)? These would provide a provocative counterpoint to the largely two-dimensional offerings arranged against the museum’s walls, producing both formal and spatial variety for the visitor to negotiate, as well as a different way of seeing and, in turn, knowing the land.
That said, this is an extremely comprehensive exhibition, which manages to deal with a large and complex tradition in a coherent and scholarly, yet nonetheless accessible, manner. Following on from Godby’s examination of the genre of still life in the 2007-8 exhibition Is There Still Life?, this exhibition is a milestone in the ongoing examination of South African visual history. In the midst of ongoing land disputes, the rise of racialised nationalism and xenophobia, and the ravages of the land being wrought by climate change, it is an exhibition which poses durable questions about the place and power of art: it thus demands – and deserves – our attention.
