16 September 1999
Heritage Day on Friday the 24th of September is a time when cultural diversity and creativity will be publicly celebrated. Set aside from the ordinary commerce of daily life, it is a time when the past can be remembered and the future anticipated.
Three South African artists, Ricky Burnett, Neels Coetzee and Kagiso Pat Mautloa have collaborated in curating "Re-Placing", an exhibition of works exhibited through the medium of a labyrinth structure. This exhibition, to be opened at the Pretoria Art Museum on Heritage Day with a dynamic function, particularly seeks to honour these two opportunities - to remember the past and to anticipate the future. Indeed the exhibition suggests that looking back is also a way of creatively looking forward.
Sculptor Neels Coetzee has completed many public sculpture commissions and his most recent is his most visionary. Commissioned to construct a wall around the IDASA building in Pretoria, Neels chose to employ a variety of elements which he felt were definitive of South African spaces, stone walling, palisades, the rippled surfaces of corrugated iron and so on. These elements not only embody their particular material qualities but also stand for cultural and aesthetic values. Under his watchful eye the ancient tradition of stone-walling is re-animated and re-applied to the modern city square. The sculpture then becomes the landscape.
RE-PLACING offers the suggestion that the collaged wall, orchestrated with a sculptural eye and employing diverse traditions and aesthetic signatures, may be a new paradigm for South African public sculpture and therefore a new way to collectively memorialise and commemorate.
The idea is predicated on the fact of wide inclusions - both a sources of inspiration and, practically, in terms of who builds and whose 'handwriting' animates the spaces. This hypothesis may be a revolutionary paradigm that fuses antique traditions with an avante-gardeness, making a truly South African statement.
It is customary to think of commemorative sculpture in terms of figures perched in neutral space. This paradigm asks that we think about 'place-making' - how can special places come to stand for and generate the experience of complexity?
This is an example of what the urban sociologist, Richard Sennett, has called an 'art of exposure.' At the heart of a truly democratic culture we must have places rich in meaning, rich in memory, rich in aesthetic quality, rich in diversity of human sensibility - rich in complexity - to which we can all refer and within which we can make contact with humanness.
The paradigm of the wall, composed as a labyrinth, offers just such an opportunity.
The exhibition, RE-PLACING, is not intended as a complete statement of the idea. It is intended, rather, to poetically demonstrate its virtues and nuances.
The curators would like to place on record their gratitude for the enthusiasm and co-operation of the National Cultural History Museum, and the Pretoria Art Museum.
Neels Coetzee is a Johannesburg based sculptor and winner of many awards and commissions. Kagiso Pat Mautloa lives in Alexandra and has exhibited widely and in many prestigious venues both here and abroad. He is currently exhibiting at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. Ricky Burnett is well known as a curator of exhibitions, having curated the groundbreaking 1985 exhibition TRIBUTARIES and subsequently composing many shows for Newtown Galleries.
Issued by Kimberley Worthington: Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology.
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