Jan van der Merwe at the Sanlam Art Gallery
By Kim Gurney
Walking into the Sanlam Art Gallery to view the installations of sculptor Jan van der Merwe is a bit like stepping onto a stage set. The works take on the appearance of familiar domestic props. Yet simultaneously, they are disturbingly surreal. Nothing is what it seems: the table has a video clip where the placemats should be, the chairs are rust-encrusted and the clothes stitched together from steel cans.
The gallery hosts 10 life-size installations that could perhaps be described as scenarios. Each one acts like a stage-setter. It seems we have arrived to witness either the first or the last act. Each installation hinges upon the dramatic tension in this hiatus. We are left to fill in the blanks.
The predominant medium of rusted steel cans gives the exhibition a monotony of colour that links the works visually. It is also inherently part of the message. Van der Merwe literally turns the detritus of society into three-dimensional installations. The cans that were once used for preserving food now preserve some kind of memory instead; partly personal, partly collective.
The medium is also significant because his artworks are anything but elitist. He says: 'There are enough monuments for important people. My works are inside monuments for ordinary people.' This humility is woven into the presentation: viewers have to look down on the works, which are all on the floor.
There is an obsessive quality to his art. His technique shows a painstaking attention to detail in a labour-intensive process. The content is obsessive too, from the repeated domestic elements to the embedded video clips playing endless loops of final gestures.
The experience is strongly visceral, with works clamouring for closer inspection. One elderly woman reportedly visited Van der Merwe's wedding dress installation at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees daily where her repeated thumb-rubbing across the metal left a shiny, smooth surface.
It is that kind of intimate connection Van der Merwe's installations have the power to invoke. Viewers can recognize themselves in the scenarios, perhaps because the works often have very personal starting points and the domestic space is a common recurrence.
Guests, for instance, comprises a table set for a meal with four chairs. But the scene is heavy with the aftermath of some kind of disaster. An irretrievable salvo has been fired and there is no going back to the peaceful life of an hour before. The chairs, strewn with personal belongings, are pulled away from the table.
Where the dinner plates should be are video screens of a pistol being fired. Who shoots whom or what is unclear, but the haunting trajectory of a bullet echoes through the gallery. The guests have left; the family has dispersed. The air is thick with regret.
Other pieces are more broadly about the human experience. Van der Merwe's works often engage with displacement, people uprooted violently and alienated from their environments - whether by politics, disaster or technology.
A long gravel path in Eclipse is bordered by barbed wire fencing leading up to a wall where three video monitors show rose petals falling to the ground. Items of clothing made from rusted steel hang at intervals along the barbed wire like a human version of sheep's wool caught on a farm fence.
Walking up the gravel path feels like the approach to some kind of altar, the scrunching stones disturbing in the stillness. The hanging clothes take on a sinister feel and the walk towards the wall becomes discomforting.
All the works effectively operate on the interface between inner and outer realms. This is often signified through the use of screens, curtains, walls or other separating devices.
One such curtain forms an artwork in itself. Alongside the dinner table hangs a screen of rusted severed envelopes hinged one to the other in a collection of correspondence forever illegible. Unknown is a haunting monument that evokes memories and recollections; an assemblage of thoughts so pressing in their own time they were recorded for posterity. Yet it also hints at the futility of it all: the envelopes are totally impotent in their state of attrition.
One visitor to the gallery said she was reminded of the drawings made by Jewish children in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Her intuitive response also tells of the effectiveness of Van der Merwe's oeuvre. His works speak for themselves.
Yet they still have enough ambiguity of meaning for a poetic quality. Van der Merwe says his aim is to enable people re-think about life; his works are as multi-layered as the rusting steel from which they are constructed. It is up to viewers to add dialogue to the set pieces. As he says: 'I have a movie in my head. This is like a theatre without actors.'
It is a play that is most definitely worth a repeat viewing. There are less successful elements: works like The Red Carpet, for instance, are more didactic in their obvious allusions. And presentation-wise, some of the works feel cramped. Van der Merwe is more recently experimenting with different media and it will be interesting to see how his sculptures incorporate these shifts.
Opens: February 1
Closes: March 24
Sanlam Art Gallery, 2 Strand Road, Bellville
Tel: (021) 947 3559
Email: stefan.hundt@sanlam.co.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 4.30pm
