Speech on behalf of Beth Armstrong - MFA Exhibition Opening, Rhodes Fine Art Department
1820s Settlers Monument, Grahamstown
27 February 2010
by Ashraf Jamal
In a recent piece for Art South Africa’s Bright Young Things I had the privilege of celebrating the art of Beth Armstrong. Not one to mince words, with an unwavering belief in Beth’s gifts, I wound up making the following claim:
Beth Armstrong’s current work marks a seismic crack-up in South African sculpture. Neither mortar nor figure, the staples of sculpture, Armstrong introduces not only a new philosophy of making and meaning in SA art, but its solution. Diagrammatic and volumetric, her metal works challenge the stolidity and essentiality of the 3D figure, and, so doing, broaches the crack-up of being which we, in South Africa, have been incapable of addressing effectively.
I know it’s a mouthful. Nevertheless I remain convinced not only of the singularity of Beth’s art, her steely autograph or signature as it were, but by what I feel to be her durability as an artist. This is a tough call and I by no means wish to burden an artist who, for the past six years, under the guidance of the director of sculpture, Maureen de Jager, has done such stellar work.
My own introduction to Beth’s work is relatively recent, going back to March 2009. I remember the first time I entered Beth’s studio and finally became bored by her beauty when I saw her work! Instantly I felt that I was in the midst of something unique and special. Over the past year I’ve had the pleasure of watching her vision evolve. Most strikingly, I noticed that what Beth was doing was a purge, or an elimination dance. Recall Duchamp’s work, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even…. Well, in Beth’s case she’s both the bride and bachelor, the object and subject of a stripping and a withering, the better to access the lean lucre of a pure vision. Here we find no additives, no accessorizing, not desire to explain the world. Rather, we, like the artist, find ourselves implicated in an ineffable, mysterious, evocative, dream-like, or gnomic vision.
For Beth the works evolved from a dream of a sea-horse, for her the alpha-male of the sea, who visited her bed nightly, rather like the erotic haunting in a Fuseli painting. No amount of reasoning could exorcize the demon-lover, and so Beth chose the next option: to deal with the problem by making art out of it. Serendipitously she would discover that the seahorse is the hippocampus, a term which equally referred to the structure of the brain. From that point Beth was able, through a series of deftly clinical moves, to weave a narrative which combined the dream-world, the cognitive realm, modes of orientation and radical conceptualism. This, in brief, is the sum of her thesis – Hippocampus: Seahorse; Brain-Structure; Spatial Map; Concept – an academic work as lean, as evocative and as calculatedly unresolved as her artworks.
Returning to my piece for Art South Africa, I concluded that:
In celebrating Armstrong’s work … MFA at Rhodes – my point is not to assert that she is the new order, but to remind the reader that we have come to the end of the fetish of order. Sculpture in all its forms will prevail, but our misperception of what it is must change. Armstrong invites this change and does so because of her conceptual rigour-yet-openness. To my knowledge no “bright young thing” has thus far addressed the Apollonian dead-end in sculpture; a dead-end that signals the failure of South African aesthetics. The reason for this failure lies in the fact that South African artists are rarely philosophers or abstract-expressionists, preferring common global sense or tedious literalness. That said, we are at a fresh point in art, one which the younger artists of this thankful recession will benefit from because, denied the dubious privilege a post-apartheid liberation, they are thrust into the abyss of contemporary uncertainty, compelled to make art without recourse to national trauma. Products of the trans-nation, they are, after Nicolas Bourriaud, compelled “[to invent] protocols of use for all existing modes of representation and all formal structures.” For “it is a matter of seizing all the codes of the culture, all forms of everyday life, the works of the global patrimony, and making them function. To learn how to use forms … is above all to know how to make them one’s own, to inhabit them.” This is what Beth Armstrong does, and why a toast is fitting.
Ashraf Jamal teaches Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes. He is the co-author of Art in South Africa: The Future Present (David Phillip/New Africa Books); co-editor of Indian Ocean Studies: Social, Cultural and Political Perspectives (Routledge); author of Predicaments of culture in South Africa (Unisa/Brill). His 2010 essays include “Jane Alexander: Hunger Artist”; “On the side of the angels: Art and the Contemporary”; “Africa’s Appendix: Superfluity and excess on a Southern Littoral”; “Lost Marsh: Scandalous Presence”; “Chimurenga: Communal Yard for Sick Minds.”