This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

13th September 2008

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When characterising this country’s two major cities, most South Africans follow a handful of largely unchallenged assumptions: Johannesburg represents the new, the hyper-urban, the frenzy of commerce; Cape Town stands for “tradition” (or at least, established collective habits), for a laid-back approach to life, for natural beauty.

It’s intriguing, then, that new exhibitions at some of the major art galleries in these cities invert such associations. At Johannesburg’s Everard Read Gallery, British artist John Caple’s “To The Quiet Moon” both invokes and evokes a rural – one might even say “rustic” – idiom. On the other hand, there is “Print ’08: Myth, Memory and Archive” at the Bell-Roberts Gallery, which has relocated from the Cape Town city bowl to Fairweather House in the gritty suburb of Woodstock. Like “Monomania”, which was recently hosted by the Goodman Gallery Cape (neighbour to the Bell-Roberts), “Print ’08” is strongly tied to the material concerns of a modern metropolis.

Caple hails from Somerset in south-west England, and his work is more than merely inflected by that provenance; indeed, the current exhibition is dedicated to the landscapes and characters of the region. More specifically, his paintings – all mixed media on board – celebrate the Mendip Hills, or Mendips, where his family have been part of the farming community for generations.

It seems, in some ways, a severe environment. The inhabitants of the area are depicted as austere folk: they stand proprietorially outside their houses, wearing plain but practical clothing, their faces frequently expressionless (or, if anything, sombre). This is partly explained by the fact that some of Caple’s forebears were members of the puritanical Plymouth Brethren.

The po-faced exteriors, however, belie a rich spiritual and ritual life that contains large doses of superstition: “May Eve” shows a group of women enacting the belief that dancing barefoot around hawthorn trees and collecting dew to wash your face brings good health, while in other paintings lonely figures carry twigs or jingle silver coins to ward off bad luck. The menacing look of the figure in “Collecting Moonwort” suggests a different kind of drama. The exhibition catalogue explains that the plant “should be gathered under a full moon and is said to allow a cunning man the ability to perform many enchantments” – these are simple people, but not simpletons.

The moon in its various stages is a ubiquitous presence, and in its soft light natural objects have a supernatural or, as with the white horse in “Dewpond”, a mythical quality. In contrast to the empty bowls, jugs and other containers that frequently appear in these scenes, water glimmers in the rivers and canals running alongside empty village streets; likewise, although most of the trees are bare of leaves, there are birds, butterflies, blossoms and flowering bushes to show the land’s fecundity.

Despite the strong contrasts of dark and light – whitewashed walls and white clothing, hinting at the limestone rock of the Mendip Hills, stark against the shadowy browns, deep blues and pale greys of the evening – these are not dichromatic scenes. Instead, the moonlight creates an atmosphere of romance or nostalgia; the title of the exhibition suggests that it pays tribute “to the quiet moon”, but Caple’s seemingly anachronistic work is also a kind of ode to a way of life that has all but disappeared.

The exhibitions at Fairweather House, by contrast, document consciously contemporary artistic practices and concerns. With “Monomania”, the Goodman Gallery Cape endorsed Marina van Zuylen’s attempt to revitalise that term, considering the “curative, therapeutic attributes of single-minded, repetitive behaviours and practices of artists” – such as collecting discarded everyday objects, or constantly returning to the same subject matter – rather than simply accepting the psychological label of “obsessive compulsive behaviour”. “Print ’08” is a continuation of the Bell-Roberts Gallery’s previous attempts to “educate the uninitiated and remind the initiated” about the range of artworks produced under the umbrella term “print-making”, combining the work of established and emerging printmakers (including students from the universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch).

The newspaper-style catalogue of “Print ’08” foregrounds the dissolution of generic boundaries: the “print” is no longer simply a two-dimensional surface, but includes “three-dimensional projects or curated displays”, and printmakers “see themselves as curators of images and objects, producing books, portfolios, installations and video”. One could argue that this broad categorisation is dubious because it makes anything a potential print, but the all-encompassing definition does mean that “Print ’08” – set in the gallery’s sparse white interior – is anything but monotonous.

There are lithographs, woodcuts, screen prints, laser engravings and embossed prints, but there are also video installations, prints from digital media archives and, of course, the flavour of the day in art circles: “found objects” removed from their mundane context and given new significance through the very act of displaying (Dominic Thorburn’s “Memory Boxes” provide an uninspiring example).

A personal favourite in the exhibition is Sanell Aggenbach’s work, from the “Perfectly Still” series, which subtly shows the “double identity” of so many South Africans by superimposing positive and negative versions of the same black-and-white photographic image.

Also prominent is Katherine Bull’s “Data Capture: Larger than Life”, a digital drawing performance in which the video projection demonstrating the artist’s computer-based capture of her subject is of more significance than the final product, a life-sized portrait produced on a large format digital printer.

Various other works emphasise texture and material over “meaning” (the artists’ explanations in the catalogue offer some hermeneutic purchase, but the works remain opaque to the viewer): Jeremy Sales’s “White Oval”, Lyn Smuts’s “The Shape of Silence” diptych or Lyndi Sales’s “No Particular Destination”.

There is a place, however, for commentary on political or social issues. William Scarborough’s “Forgotten” presents video stills of a minor tragedy that occurred on the morning of September 11, 2001 – not the attack on the World Trade Centre, but the scheduled demolition of two gas towers in which a group of homeless people were sheltering – in order to redeem individual human lives from the amnesia of the media archive. Pamela Stretton’s “The Ambivalence of Eating” is a triptych of sensual mouths made up of small squares on which have been printed the contradictory messages surrounding food that circulate in the media and on packaging: diet culture depends on linguistic cues like “slim” or “low-fat”, but at the same time consumer are told to reward themselves with “decadent” or “creamy” treats.

Jordan Tryon’s “Mutatis Mutandis” makes a somewhat obscure reference to the 34 constitutional principles that, in post-apartheid South Africa, are inconsistently upheld. South Africa’s ambiguous relationship with other countries is also explored: Ernestine White reflects on her residency in Sri Lanka, while Kiluanji Kia Henda gestures towards the increasing (but not new) Chinese presence in Africa and its implications for the de-exoticising effects of globalisation.

A more familiar form of imperialism is the subject of Paul Birchall’s “The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor”, which seems both to mock and to pity the anonymous moustachioed men who travelled in their thousands to serve Queen, country and themselves at the outer reaches of the British Empire: medals, buttons, postcards and miniature portraits accompany a video montage and an elegiac soundtrack.

There are some self-indulgent pieces – Zhané Warren’s bland set of “fears” typed on edible paper (which, presumably, is gagging her mouth in the photograph set “Is Spoken By Her”) and Roelof Louw’s “Book of Job” (a response to the autonomy-vs-authority binary with which the artist characterises his Calvinist upbringing).

Ultimately, however, the prevalence of flora and fauna in this exhibition – the work of Fritha Hagerman, Diane Victor, Barbara Wildenboer, Kai Lossgott, Cara van der Westhuizen and others – indicates a public rather than a private preoccupation. This is not entirely unrelated to John Caple’s rural emphasis; the proliferation of “print culture” (both manual and electronic) may be associated with modernity, but so is a collective ecological anxiety – a submerged desire, perhaps, to escape print.