A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

Ashraf Jamal

Jennifer Morrison’s first solo show at the Barnard Gallery in Cape Town – The Depth of Things – is inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet who championed depth above surface, profound emotion above irony. If it is a curious title for an exhibition devoted to abstract painting, this is because we have been wired to consider abstraction as a style of art devoted to surface texture. The culprit who is key to this view of abstraction is Clement Greenberg, the impresario behind the US government funded, New York centred art movement, Abstract Expressionism. A counterattack, during the Cold War, against Soviet Social Realism, abstraction was seen as the ideal, par excellence, of democratic freedom – the radical right to one’s subjective instincts, freedom from oppressive political consensus.

Emerging in the 1940s and 50s, exemplified by figures such as Jackson Pollock – ‘Jack the Dripper’ – and Mark Rothko, Abstract Expressionism emphasized the visceral quality of paint, the gestural power of personal expression freed from the need to copy what we think to be objective or real, out there in the world. Instead, the impulse was psychological, personal, in-ward looking, intuitive, obscure. Because there could be no final objective arbitration regarding abstraction, it proved troubling to the general public, until such point, through cultural evolution, it became normative. So much so, that today we no longer find ourselves confounded or outraged by the random fretwork of painted marks. Or, when binge-watching a series on our phones, we fail to see the ubiquitous presence of abstract painting on the walls of the sets, its designed ‘wallpaper’ affect. Abstraction is everywhere, and everywhere not recognized. Unless, of course, we stop to assert the fact that it is ‘reality’, or what we consider such, that is the great hoax.

Today, worldwide in the art world, we are witnessing a striking return to abstract art. No longer merely ubiquitous wallpaper – a dimension of our lifestyle-driven designed world, in which art, according to some bespoke colour palette is sold by the meter – abstraction has re-emerged as the vital antidote to a divisive, oppressive, or hysterically antagonistic world, a world in which civil liberty is denied, freedom of speech muzzled, and we are all forced to subject ourselves to neo-fascist rule. Demagoguery is everywhere, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World a toxic reality. Unsurprisingly, against that world, we find ourselves returning to the liberty which abstraction affords us. Emerging at the start of the twentieth century, it signaled a break from Impressionism, a deconstructive naturalistic style of painting, in favour of one that resisted the power of sight. Inward, spiritual, created by Klee, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, abstraction was ruled by a secular yet spiritual impulse, namely, Theosophy. As such, its beginnings were far removed from Greenberg’s austerely cerebral take in the 1940s. It is this more spiritual understanding of abstraction which I advocate. It is the return of abstraction in this more spiritual guise that is vital. Why? Because it is an antidote to cynicism and irony, worse, to a growing neo-fascistic energy that seeks nothing other than to destroy democracy as a system of governance and as a principle. In South Africa this destruction is troublingly evident in a government that adheres to Communism and its Big Brother complex that seeks nothing other than to curtail our hard-won freedom, our right to free enterprise, and the greater healthier synergy of business and welfare.

Thus, it is against all oppressive systems that we must reconsider the criticality of abstraction. As Paul Klee reminded us in 1919, it is in a time of fear that we find ourselves returning to abstraction. We are now living in yet another era of fear, one driven by psyops, psychographics, misinformation, facial recognition, data capture – every vice designed to commodify our lives, subject us to yet another variant of a slave economy. Capitalism has its pitfalls too.

My point is that we require a heightened vigilance, a greater ability to separate good from bad within a radically ethical personal and collective project. It is in this context too that we must reconsider the value of abstraction. It is neither code nor symbol. Instead, it is an idea-aesthetic-impulse to freedom.

In Jennifer Morrison’s case, we are asked to reconsider the Depth of Things. In her introduction to the Barnard opening, Morrison spoke of her works as a means ‘to bring two kinds of languages together and to see if they clashed or complimented each other, or if they made a sort of new language through their combination, or just left one big question’. These two languages cross the spectrum of painting, from the emotionally gestural to the mathematically ordered. We see this tension at play in Morrison’s disjunctive and abrasive combination of styles – the one echoing the febrile energy of painters in love with the fallible human hand, and those, more systemic, in love with the measured orchestration of colour and pattern. Bridget Riley, the British Op Artist, is the chief architect of the latter, while, for me, William Turner is the early advocate of the former. Morrison straddles both worlds. What she seeks is to understand whether these differing approaches can coexist, or whether they are anathema to each other – whether divisions persist, or whether reconciliation is possible.

If Morrison’s question is a vital one, it is precisely because we live in a highly volatile and incendiary historical moment, one in which intolerance has become increasingly normative. Can we expect continued clashes? Is it possible to arrive at some détente? What role can art play in illuminating and potentially changing our world? This is the key to Morrison’s project, this the key to the best incursions in abstraction worldwide. If Morrison’s exhibition possessed a singular daring, the work of a deftly succinct yet volatile soloist, then the group exhibition of abstract art I saw a day later at The Norval Foundation shone a vivid light on the greater spectrum of African abstraction. Titled ‘Collector’s Focus: The Kilbourn Collection’, the overall array of works presented were strikingly muted and subtle in tone – a strong contrast to Morrison’s toxically lurid palette, which, through paint, celebrated the garish currency of ‘dopamine dressing’. In the Kilbourn collection, organicity seemed to triumph over the synthetic, temperance over excess – though not quite.

Alexandra Karakashian’s oil slick, a calibrated tonal spread from light to dark on raw canvas was, despite the use of toxic material, remarkably consoling. Wallen Mapondera and Patrick Bongoy’s respective manipulation of paper and rubber were similarly therapeutic. What counted was the way in which each artist, in their singular way, addressed the gravity, and bleak poetry, of this Anthropocene moment – a moment exhausted, afflicted by deforestation and extractive mining, the exploitation of the earth, and, as such, deeply discouraging. And yet, at the same time, an occasion that also, morbidly yet exquisitely, presents to us ‘a terrible beauty’.

There are also strikingly vivid and colourful works in the Kilbourn mix, notably Jo Hummel’s shewed geometries, their clean lies deliberately stained, or, Hugh Byrne’s sewn blocks of primary reds, yellow, green, against that great complementary arbitration – white. Or, then again, Turiya Magadlela’s pink stretches of pantihose intercut with soft browns and yellow. Or, for me most astonishing of all, Unathi Mkonto’s blood red and pine assemblage, gutted, inverted, as though one were privy to the innards of the world. Suggestive of reliquaries, yet devoid of its sacred content, Mkonto’s disemboweled relief sculptural forms are a testimony to endless innovation – the African genius for upcycling, renovating waste material, opening ever-new vistas in a damned time. This, to conclude, is the spirit that informs all the artworks discussed – Jennifer Morrison’s deep dive into the grotesque paradox that eternally seems to afflict us – the Apollonian and Dionysian, now further vexed by the fact that humankind can no longer control its nihilistic excesses – and then, the Kilbourn collection, astute, austere, provocative, yet seductively elegant. In both collections, we find a stellar instance of the power of abstraction today.