APERTURE
Elfriede Dreyer
‘Aperture’ is a term that belongs to photography and an optical system indicating an opening through which light travels. In the camera, ‘aperture’ is found in varying sizes and a wide aperture would result in an image that is in sharp focus where the camera is aimed at and the rest increasingly blurred the further it is away from the particular focus. The term ‘aperture’ is also used in other contexts such as astronomy where a telescope would have massive aperture and the photometric aperture around a star is like a kind of aura or circular band of light surrounding the star.
In this exhibition, Aperture, the term is used conceptually to reflect the subjective ‘opening’ through which the artist observes the world: it could mean looking with the sentimental eyes of observing damage to the environment through the effects of global warming or the eradication of a specific species; or with the eyes of a lover or a parent observing the physical or personality details of the loved one. James Elkins (2011), art critic and historian of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, observes that there are paintings that take a long time to ‘see’. He (Elkins 2010) mentions the real case of an elderly woman who came to see one of the Art Institute's Rembrandt paintings -- a curious picture of a young woman, leaning on the bottom half of a Dutch door -- three or four times a week during her lunch hour. “How long had she done that? I asked. She said, ‘I don't know. Decades.’ To be conservative, let's say she meant two decades, and let's say her lunch hour was one hour. That's 3,000 hours of looking. I think there are some works of art that take years to see, and some - like the painting of the weeping Virgin I … -- that require an entire lifetime of close looking and thinking.”
Very often looking at the same object, person or scenery over years means deriving new meaning or seeing it in a different light as one changes oneself. Frequently you cannot put in words what you see, experience or feel when looking at something. Elkins (2011) mentions the poet Keats who talked about “negative capability” which means the capacity “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Nonetheless, looking or gazing implies interaction or dialogue with that which is observed. The ‘wide lens’ of the artist implies selecting from the storehouse of the world, its artifice and natural dimensions, including human beings.
The trope of looking with the technological 'aid' of the aperture of the camera is used deliberately here as a kind of comment on human existence which has become almost unthinkable without the assistance of mechanical and reproductive tools. As Kai Lossgott comments in his artist's statement, the artist is almost like a scientist or a theologian, or maybe like an alchemist in looking at the world, reworking and representing the observed and creating objects and images that set up commentaries. Lossgott observes the plastics and other artificialities that have a life of its own by also being bio-degradable or reveals life cycles or stages of lifetime, such as decaying plastic bags found in a river. Yet, ironically, these non-natural materials have been given their lifetimes - mostly much longer than those of human beings - by human beings as the gods in earthling existence.
Nicola Grobler's work, Timbre, Treble and Tremor (2011), refers to the detrimental relationship that has developed between culture, nature and industry, a relationship that since the very first invention of tools was intended as good and beneficial to humankind. The industrious character of the squirrel is used as metaphor to simulate the essence of well-intended manufacturing and gizmo usage, enhanced by the imagery of the assiduous brooms. Further elaborated by the crushed amphibians in Runners and Risers (2011), victims of the condition of transitivity in urban streets, such imagery becomes a lament on the post-industrial turn that descended on humankind in full splendour never to go away again.
The notion of aperture is very evident in both Strijdom van der Merwe's and St John Fuller's works. Fuller's portrait multiples question and challenge the camera's core function of documentation and the capturing of the moment. The sitter is represented in a kind of cubist, multi-perspective lineage originating with Cézanne and taken further in Andy Warhol's gridded multiples, echoed in Van der Merwe's Fields of flowering hands or Wrapping 393 trees in red fabric where the repetitive act becomes a simulation of production processes and mechanical machine actions. Van der Merwe traces patterns and recurring motifs in the landscape to the point of the spectator almost hearing the rhythmic clicking and shifting of machinery although the image presented is the land. Narrowly enclosing the aperture of both his vision and his camera, Van der Merwe presents a symbiotic comment on the human condition in post-industrial existence.
As Elkins (2011) says, " ... looking is what visual art is all about, and looking is what artists do. In contemporary art there are hardly any boundaries left: art asks us to see, and acts of seeing are presented as art. ... Art cannot be explained without understanding looking, and looking cannot be understood without knowing about art."
Sources quoted
Elkins, J. 2010. How Long Does it Take To Look at a Painting? [O] Available: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-elkins/how-long-does-it-take-to-_b_779946.html Accessed on 4 August 2011.
Elkins, J. 2011. Looking at the Sky. Ice Halos: Divine Signals Or The Ultimate Art Installation? [O] Available: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-elkins/ice-halos-in-the-winter-s_b_807577.html Accessed on 4 August
