A P A R T / A P A R T
November 2020
Apart / A Part Curatorial Statement:
A group exhibition showing socially distant art
It can feel heavy with longing, and heavy with longing, in my mind, is preferable to hollow, which one also feels. If I'm heavy with longing, at least I have some idea of what I want. Robert Pinsky
This year has forced us to live, create and become apart. As the pandemic crept across the globe, the reality of living separate lives crawled into the global consciousness, like an ever-advancing flood. Yet, as humanity have been forced to be Apart, we remain A Part of the greater whole. The uncertainty, the loss of surefootedness, the general feeling of the very earth shifting constantly only served as confirmation that nothing will ever be certain again. We, the storytellers, illustrators, creators responded by observing, researching, reflecting the new social reality. We did what we do best, we made meaning of an utterly incomprehensible reality. Months into the pandemic, the first Lockdown themed exhibitions started appearing. Galleries both locally and abroad strove to regain some footing by launching online exhibitions, almost universally with a lockdown theme. Calls went out across the world for artists to submit work they created during lockdown, all social platforms were flooded with masked portraits, scenes from mundane life, even horrific reflections of the impact of the pandemic. Recent comments and reactions on social media reflect a sense of lockdown art Ad Nauseum, leaving you, the reader to wonder what new sense could still be made from this “fresh hell“(Meade 1989:i).
Apart / A Part is not intended to explore the banality nor the cliché of lockdown art. The intention of this group exhibition is to delve into the human psyche, to explore the longing, the reflection, and the horror of living social distant lives: as artists we almost universally create in isolation. Solitude provides rich and fertile soil for creation; we are no strangers to it. However, what has become apparent over the past few months is an interesting manifestation of the longing of the human psyche for connection. Within the pandemic zeitgeist, three universal themes have emerged as indicators of where the human soul searches for connection. These themes: The Mundane, The Sublime and The Abject, are reflected in the work created by selected invited artists. Within these spheres, we see the reflection of the human condition as it manifests when connections are stretched, severed or temporarily suspended. As the artists submitted work for this exhibition an interesting phenomenon emerged: the themes overlapped, they intermingled, it became a beautiful organic process, completely unplanned. I have come to realize that all of life is essentially a dance on the precipice between the mundane, sublime and abject.
Laurette de Jager (Curator)
Source:
Pinsky. R 2019. The Mind Has Cliffs of Fall: Poems at the Extremes of Feeling. New York: WW Norton Publishing
Meade, M. 1989. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York : Penguin
The Mundane
It’s the simple things in your life that make up the bulk of it. The mundane is where we live and we end up missing most of it. We find it again in the silence and in attention of everyday life (Overby 2019:2)
The Mundane reflects a slice of life approach, wherein artists interpret their daily surroundings. The iconography is simple; the bread they had for breakfast, family heirlooms, pillows and furniture, everyday objects. There is a nostalgic element to this theme, a longing for simpler times, a yearning for the safe, the familiar.
Reminiscent of the Intimism of the late 19th and 20th century, these works will serve, now and in times to come, as a reminder to the time we spent indoors, confined to the safety of home and family. Although thematically similar there are a variety of stylistic approaches and media, ranging from photo-realism to naturalistic representations of everyday objects. The beauty of the mundane is simple yet poignant. These works evoke a sense of the real, an affirmation of the only certainty existing is to be found in the current moment. The selection resists traditional stylised still life compositions, focussing on a Slice of Life approach rather than an idealised interpretation.
Source: Overby, E. 2019. 17 Haiku Poems.Lulu.com
The Mundane reflects a slice of life approach, wherein artists interpret their daily surroundings. The iconography is simple; the bread they had for breakfast, family heirlooms, pillows and furniture, everyday objects. There is a nostalgic element to this theme, a longing for simpler times, a yearning for the safe, the familiar.
Reminiscent of the Intimism of the late 19th and 20th century, these works will serve, now and in times to come, as a reminder to the time we spent indoors, confined to the safety of home and family. Although thematically similar there are a variety of stylistic approaches and media, ranging from photo-realism to naturalistic representations of everyday objects. The beauty of the mundane is simple yet poignant. These works evoke a sense of the real, an affirmation of the only certainty existing is to be found in the current moment. The selection resists traditional stylised still life compositions, focussing on a Slice of Life approach rather than an idealised interpretation.
Source: Overby, E. 2019. 17 Haiku Poems.Lulu.com
The Sublime
Beauty is Terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. (Tartt 1993:45)
The Sublime in art originates from the British philosophical concept that the sublime in nature is distinct from beauty, following Burke’s (1844) statement that sublimity and beauty are mutually exclusive. Khalepa ta kala, beauty evokes terror. Whereas the beauty in the mundane is consolatory, even soothing in its familiarity, the greatness of the sublime evokes the purification of being devoured by something far greater, and more boundless than mere beauty. There is, among the works created during the pandemic, a resurgence in the sublime. Not only the transcendentalist yearning to return to nature but being consumed by the sublimity of nature. Thematically beyond mere reproductions of natural landscapes and idyllic beauty, these works do not rely on mere mimesis, they evoke a sense of overwhelming greatness.
A beauty that not only terrifies but leave the viewer in the grip of Stendhal syndrome, overcome and consumed. Therefore, the selection resists traditional landscape and nature paintings, focussing instead on the psychological response to being consumed by greatness, as an emotional response to humanity’s overwhelming sense of a loss of control and of urgency for something greater to look toward to.
Source: Burke. E. 1844. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Harper.
Tartt. D. 1993. The Secret History. New York: Penguin
The Sublime in art originates from the British philosophical concept that the sublime in nature is distinct from beauty, following Burke’s (1844) statement that sublimity and beauty are mutually exclusive. Khalepa ta kala, beauty evokes terror. Whereas the beauty in the mundane is consolatory, even soothing in its familiarity, the greatness of the sublime evokes the purification of being devoured by something far greater, and more boundless than mere beauty. There is, among the works created during the pandemic, a resurgence in the sublime. Not only the transcendentalist yearning to return to nature but being consumed by the sublimity of nature. Thematically beyond mere reproductions of natural landscapes and idyllic beauty, these works do not rely on mere mimesis, they evoke a sense of overwhelming greatness.
A beauty that not only terrifies but leave the viewer in the grip of Stendhal syndrome, overcome and consumed. Therefore, the selection resists traditional landscape and nature paintings, focussing instead on the psychological response to being consumed by greatness, as an emotional response to humanity’s overwhelming sense of a loss of control and of urgency for something greater to look toward to.
Source: Burke. E. 1844. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Harper.
Tartt. D. 1993. The Secret History. New York: Penguin
The Abject
But that word, "fear"- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. (Kristeva 1982:6)
The Abject resides where the sublime meets horror, evoking a deep-seated fear, a dread of the incomprehensible, and the uncanny. The viewer cannot help but be enthralled by the abject, it is a part of human nature: Kristeva’s (1982) concept of becoming corpse as ultimate abjection, corresponds to Burke’s (1844) philosophical enquiry into the sublime in that the sublime essentially evokes overwhelming feelings of dread and melancholy in its terrifying infinity (De Jager 2019:85).
The pandemic conjured up images of death, and destruction. In the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Bruegel the Elder and more recently David Wojnarowicz, these artists grappled with making sense not only of our finitude, but of death on a grand scale. Artists working during the pandemic turned to the abject as a means of trying to make sense of the horror of global loss. The selection refrains from literal masked (be they gas or surgical masks) depictions, instead artists who invoke the uncanny, the strange as symbol for these strange times, were invited to exhibit works which speaks to horror on a conceptual and symbolic level.
Source:
Kristeva, J. t. b. L. S. R. 1982. Powers of Horror. illustrated reprint ed. [Sl]: Columbia University Press.
De Jager, L. 2019. The Poesis of Decay: A Painter’s Response to the Dystopian Aesthetic. MVA Dissertation. UNISA
The Abject resides where the sublime meets horror, evoking a deep-seated fear, a dread of the incomprehensible, and the uncanny. The viewer cannot help but be enthralled by the abject, it is a part of human nature: Kristeva’s (1982) concept of becoming corpse as ultimate abjection, corresponds to Burke’s (1844) philosophical enquiry into the sublime in that the sublime essentially evokes overwhelming feelings of dread and melancholy in its terrifying infinity (De Jager 2019:85).
The pandemic conjured up images of death, and destruction. In the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Bruegel the Elder and more recently David Wojnarowicz, these artists grappled with making sense not only of our finitude, but of death on a grand scale. Artists working during the pandemic turned to the abject as a means of trying to make sense of the horror of global loss. The selection refrains from literal masked (be they gas or surgical masks) depictions, instead artists who invoke the uncanny, the strange as symbol for these strange times, were invited to exhibit works which speaks to horror on a conceptual and symbolic level.
Source:
Kristeva, J. t. b. L. S. R. 1982. Powers of Horror. illustrated reprint ed. [Sl]: Columbia University Press.
De Jager, L. 2019. The Poesis of Decay: A Painter’s Response to the Dystopian Aesthetic. MVA Dissertation. UNISA