gauteng reviews

There is also, in the case of a deceased colleague and prominent art professional, the temptation to equate work and life, to curate work for more personal or anecdotal reasons than would ordinarily be so. With 'A Fearless Vision' thankfully this is not the case, with the family photo album only utilised, with due respect, in the handsome accompanying catalogue for the show. The fine, though very different, essays in the catalogue by Karel Nel and Karin Skawran, provide judicious explanatory glosses on different sections of the show.

Crump produced most of his extensive watercolour output in specific series on a particular subject, and the exhibition has been organised to group these together in conceptually or thematically coherent ways, rather than chronologically. Separate to the watercolours though is an extensive showing of early work, in drypoint etchings and prints, as well as two striking sculptural works, Lull and Danzig. These register Crump’s detour through an ‘anti-aesthetic’ approach influenced by his exposure to the contemporary American scene when he spent time there as a Fulbright scholar after qualifying from Michaelis; and his stints as studio assistant to Vito Acconci and Richard Serra in New York.

Danzig, in particular, demonstrates Crump’s sensibilities in his early career. A rough cast bronze resembling a crude club, or even, with its long rough hewn handle and bulbous head, a spermatozoa, it is stamped at the head with the single place name of the title – the Polish city significant for its role in early twentieth century European politics and the interwar identity of Weimar. The dark and threatening object is contextualised by the single word in a no less threatening way. The other sculptural piece, Lull, contains that word meticulously carved into a piece of smoothed, rough-edged marble which resembles a tombstone, or a headboard. This beguiling, unsettling deployment of the power of a single word out of context, or recontextualised, occurs again in the Wedge Series of drawings from 1978 – ironically a couple of years before he took up his academic post at Wits Fine Art in the department’s buildings known as the Wedge. The rough paintstick application on heavy paper produces sinister architectural constructions, punctuated in one by the word ‘corridor’ – evincing the claustrophobia of the palette and composition, squeezing the viewer into a metaphorical corner.

Work from the decade of the 1980s is conspicuous by its absence, perhaps explained by Crump taking over the Wits department and becoming deeply embroiled in the South African art world’s institutions. From the 1990s until the end of his life, however, his characteristic watercolour series dominate. As both Nel and Skawran suggest, the watercolour landscape genre is a difficult one to extract from its connotations of pallid amateurism. Like most of the Sunday afternoon impressionists, Crump’s landscapes contain no trace of human figuration. Unlike the conventions of most of the genre, however, his are overdetermined with cultural symbolism and subtle political allusion.

The several views of mining landscapes done throughout the 1990s demonstrate in microcosm Crump’s style and thematic preoccupations in his use of the watercolour medium and the landscape as a trope. They appear in a wide palette, reflecting both the impact of light and the different types of mines they depict. Seen together in the show, they offer an unsettling memoir of a particular South African topography, that of the Highveld mine dump, now gradually changing as the global economic landscape recontextualises SA’s mining industry. While the pictures of gold mine dumps, shale and coal mines are notionally figurative, there is an abstractly symbolic style which slashes across them all in bold, dark swathes, conveying graphically the damage the mining operations have inflicted on these different landscapes.

The felicitous decision to exhibit a series of watercolours of the East Rand Proprietary Mine in Boksburg in close proximity to a series depicting burnt and ravaged forestry in Mapelane demonstrates Crump’s consistent framing of landscapes as essentially human – or cultural – rather than natural. All of these images are of artificial or damaged topographies, and do carry political force. Though both series were painted in the early 1990s, Crump would doubtless have known that the once-famous ERPM mine has been all but reclaimed by nature, its dumps largely recycled and flattened; and that the ravaging of farmed forests continues unabated, as SA has to import timber.

Nel’s catalogue essay characterises the approach as one focused on land and power, and yet the mutability and softness of the medium makes the political point a subtle and delicate one. This is only augmented by the technique Crump often used of tilting the landscape up and towards the viewer, foreshortening perspective and lending an uncomfortably vertiginous aspect to the viewing.

The final, elegiac series of portraits of the Camphor trees at Vergelegen, planted by van der Stel, rounds off the artist’s career retrospective with a comforting finality. The beautiful abstractions of these ancient, powerful foreign objects (they were brought from Japan) speak of their mute witness to centuries of tumult and change in this country. From the angry and threatening intensity of his early work, to these calm, subtle and profound portraits, the show is ultimately a fitting and full portrait of an important South African artist’s life.   

James Sey is an academic, writer and curator based in Johannesburg.